Transcending Rigidity Part XIII: The Rise of Anxiety and the Return of Scapegoating
Brandon Cook
Comparison is the thief of joy.
— Theodore Roosevelt
In 2013, I watched the story of Justine Sacco unfold in real time. Before boarding a flight to South Africa, Sacco tweeted, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” When I read the tweet, I thought she was pointing out injustice by making an incisive, albeit inappropriate, joke. It would be much like a white woman in 1960s Alabama saying sarcastically, “I hope I don’t get pulled over…oh, wait: I’m white!” (I guess, unfortunately, I can replace “1960s Alabama” with “Many-Places-in-America Today”). As a joke, it is (in my opinion) in bad taste, satire or not, callous to the reality of AIDS. Nevertheless, the tweet, if in bad taste, was not racist—not how I read it, anyway. Rather, she was roasting racism itself, pointing out that a woman being free from privation due to her skin color speaks to something disturbing about our world. Later, Sacco said of the tweet, “To me it was so insane of a comment for anyone to make…I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was literal.”[1]
She mis-judged her audience. Rather than receiving it as satire and social commentary, she was lambasted. People were outraged (or, at least, “outraged”), either not recognizing the sardonic nature of her tweet or recognizing it but appalled at the chutzpah it took to make it. Or perhaps because we live in a culture in which the first to take offense gains leverage and power, whether there is real offense or not. As Sacco flew through the air, #hasjustinelandedyet began trending on Twitter, as well as tweets to the effect that “when this lady lands, her life is over.” They were right. Outrage is a contagion and spreads as such. Mobs are ruled by emotions, not reason nor thoughtfulness.[2] A day after she landed, she was fired from her job as a public relations executive (let not the irony be lost on you), her company having little choice but to dismiss her or become an object of abuse in their own right.
The mobs chanting for her downfall on social media did not care what Sacco meant; she had broken a social taboo. At some point, the outrage escalated from anger at an inappropriate joke to the worst possible caricatures of her intent, to the schadenfreude of watching someone else pay for a mistake. And, because of our brave new technological world, all of this unfolded in real, digital time, a truly twenty-first century phenomena. When a culture is chronically anxious and always over-stimulated and “plugged in,” such contagion easily spreads. When we find someone who has broken cultural rules, there is a huge emotional payoff—and the relief of our anxiety—in scapegoating them. In watching them topple and then feeling right, certain, righteous, and justified as they fall. After all, we would never do what they did. We are good and virtuous; we are not like those others. For a while, such thinking makes us feel less anxious. We have staved off, for the moment, our suspicion that perhaps we are not so virtuous.
Freedom from anxiety is a good thing. But how we deal with anxiety—how we get to that freedom—matters a great deal. Every life (not to mention every system, family, nation, marriage, and organization) carries anxiety, since life by its nature carries concerns. Everyone fears, longs, hopes, and worries about something. Furthermore, every system is, to some degree, an anxious system.[3] Since anxiety is just a part of life, societies must deal with it; that is, in large part, their function. But how do they deal with it? And how do they deal with it when anxiety reaches critical levels, as it has in America in 2020 (even before the Covid-19 pandemic and before, even, the election of Donald Trump). While studies prove the fact of rising anxiety, I can rely—and you probably can, too—on anecdotal evidence. In the last weeks I have had four separate conversations with people who said, “Everything feels like a powder keg waiting to explode” or “Things seem so polarized right now, I’ve never experienced this” or “Things are so anxious and it’s exhausting.” One person told me, “It used to be ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’ and now it’s ‘I’m right and you’re evil.’” Each noted, in their own way, the rise of anxiety in our culture. (Note: I wrote this paragraph before the events of January 2021 and the storming of the U.S. Capitol; you can imagine how elevated these sentiments might be in the aftermath.)
In this essay, I want to explore two means of dealing with anxiety. Since we are not handling anxiety well, on the whole, as a society, this is a critical exploration. The two means of dealing with anxiety are related. The first is the scapegoating ritual, an ancient practice, and the second is the rise of a morality defined by rule-keeping, a contemporary practice. At the end of the essay, we’ll see that these two phenomena are intimately related.
Mimetic Theory: Finding a Scapegoat
In his seminal book I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, René Girard describes how human societies function based on mimesis—that is, through imitation. Mimetic theory, in simplest terms, means that we learn what to desire, in part, by imitating what other people desire, as we compare ourselves to each other.[4] Thus, “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire. He turns to others in order to make up his mind; we desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”[5] For this reason, humans go through intense seasons of comparison and imitation (junior high school comes to mind.) And for this reason, fashion tends to run in uniform trends and spread from Coast to Coast. We want something, in part, because otherpeople want it or have it, as we rely on seeing what others desire to determine our own desires. We pattern our lives on ideal models and try to find examples that we can follow, giving rise to celebrity culture and people who are famous for being famous. This process of imitation often leads to rivalry, since we inevitably end up longing for the same objects of desire. A man will desire a woman, for example, not only because of an intrinsic attraction but because he knows she is desired by others. This dynamic sets up competition and potential violence across societies. Consider the Trojan War as an archetype: Helen serves as the object—the mimetic desire—over which a war is fought. Girard said that this mimetic impulse in fact provides the basis for all competition in human societies.
Indeed, we compete for the same jobs, for partners, for degrees, for careers. Ultimately, this competition creates anxiety in the form of envy, jealousy, and comparison. And this anxiety can escalate into what Girard called “the scapegoat mechanism.” The scapegoat is a random victim who becomes the focus of the growing anxiety generated from rivalry and conflict. If a scapegoat can be found that rivals can agree to blame, anxiety can be expelled through punishment of this scapegoat. It does not matter if the scapegoat is guilty or not; if he/she is believed to be guilty, the scapegoating mechanism—the punishment of or expulsion of the scapegoat from the community—can successfully “carry away” a society’s anxiety and sense of guilt. (One might think of the story of Jonah and the sailors who wanted to get rid of the source of impurity and curse in their midst.) The scapegoating mechanism was, in ancient societies, a means of controlling violence that could otherwise escalate. Sometimes the victim was a human; later, animal sacrifice supplanted human sacrifice.
Mimetic theory, thus, helps make sense of the ubiquity of scapegoating rituals throughout early human history, across diverse cultures. The Ancient Athenians, for example, in spring or early summer at the festival of the Thargelia, scapegoated a man and woman considered particularly unattractive. The two were feasted, paraded, beaten, and either driven out of the city or stoned to death. The expulsion of the hideous served to relieve anxiety, perhaps because ridding a group of the externally unattractive quiets the sense or suspicion of internal, individual hideousness. In Israelite society, we read of a similar scapegoating ritual involving not humans but an actual goat: “[The High Priest Aaron] is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites—all their sins—and put them on the goat’s head. He shall send the goat away into the wilderness in the care of someone appointed for the task.”[6]
Later, as societies developed, structures were put in place to deal with anxiety in alternate ways, such as through evolving religious or legal structures which could deal with anxiety and curb violence without resorting to a literal scapegoat ritual (though humans have remained, up until now, quite eager to find some scapegoat to “other”, the blame of which continues to relieve anxiety.) What seems a bizarre ritual to our modern ears begins to make sense when we see it as a mechanism for reducing anxiety and conflict.
The Rise of Anxiety
With its insights into the dynamics of competitive desire across human cultures, mimetic theory also provides perspective on how groups develop social norms in order to act uniformly within societies. Through such norms behavior which threatens group cohesion is abolished. For developing societies, establishing norms and taboos is critical, since group cohesion is often necessary not only for cultural development but for physical survival. Societies, then, invariably set group identity up against a seen or unseen “other,” such that group identity can be baselined and maintained. Social belonging is most easily attained by comparing a “we” versus a “them.” Scapegoating functions on basis of comparison. We construct identities and compare ourselves to others: I am a man, a woman, a Christian, an atheist, a progressive, a liberal, a conservative. Then, we find some “other” who is “bad” so that we can, by comparison, secure our belief that we are good. And by aligning with a community that shares our view(s), while bolstering our sense of goodness, we can relieve our anxiety.
Mimesis establishes a drive towards sameness and inclusion rather than being the “other” or the “outsider” or “the guilty one.” As we desire the same things and shun the same things, our society coheres. So, for example, the ancient Israelites did not mix certain fabrics or eat certain foods, not because there was anything inherently immoral about such behavior, but because this is what the “others”—the Canaanites and the Philistines—did.
These sorts of norms may seem arbitrary to us, but such purity codes are actually community-building codes; they help hold the tribe together.[7] Even prohibitions which appear arbitrary become moral prohibitions and take on moral character. As moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt says, in most places, the social order is a moral order.[8] Indeed, for most of human history in most places, social norms are moral norms. In many parts of the world, for example, marrying whomever your parents tell you to marry—which may seem to 21st century Westerners as social-meddling—is a moral concern, since social stability is a moral matter. The good person listens to their parents and thereby preserves social order. They are seen and rewarded, in turn, for acting morally. Traditionally, then, social context has told us what is moral (that is, what is most beneficial for the group according to its dominant narrative of meaning) and therefore what is good and virtuous. Morality, in this sense, is whatever restrains the ego so that society can function harmoniously. Classical Greek philosophy—certainly in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—focused on the individual and in some sense created the eventual basis for Western individualism, but they never did so at the expense of the community.[9]Indeed, each was concerned with the function of virtue in creating a just, harmonious society within the polis, not with individualism as its own end. Morality has always been most concerned with—at least up until our contemporary, post-Enlightenment Western world—“whatever works” for social functioning.[10]
This group-oriented, socio-centric approach now has stiff competition, namely in the hyper-individualism of Western liberalism ascendant since the Enlightenment. We are far less quick than our forebears to consider morality in the context of social or group dynamics over and above our “expressive individualism”—that is, our emotivist focus on what “works” for me as an individual.[11] As Alasdair MacIntyre writes, “Both [the ancient polis and the Medieval kingdom] are conceived as communities in which men in company pursue the human good and not merely as—what the modern liberal state takes itself to be—providing the arena in which each individual seeks his or her own private good.”[12] Or, again quoting Haidt: “Only recently has our social order become organized around the individual expression of individual freedom; [individuality] has only recently eclipsed the socio-centric approach.”[13]
There is a great tension, then, between our human need for a group morality and our Western, philosophical insistence on rampant individualism. And this tension leads to great anxiety. We need group cohesion, but we have been raised or inculcated to prefer an individualism that cuts against the restraints of group membership. Furthermore, this individualism has transformed our very notion of “freedom.” In classic thought, both Greek and Christian, freedom required the imposition of self-restraint in order to develop the virtues. Virtue, in fact, until the modern era, centered around the necessity of self-restraint, and liberty meant “freedom from enslavement to our appetites.”[14] Freedom from our baser passions enables us to live a life of harmony and justice, heeding the angels of our better nature. As James Deneen writes, “Liberty [classically-speaking] is the learned capacity to govern one’s self using hybrid higher faculties of reason and spirit through the cultivation of virtue. The condition of doing as one wants is defined in this premodern view as one of slavery in which we are driven by our basest appetites to act against our better nature.”[15] How different: now our modern notion of freedom is exactly the opposite: namely, to do whatever the hell one wants.[16]
In fact, the idea of self-restraint is not only downplayed in liberal, democratic societies; it is seen as oppressive.[17] The idea of “conquering self” feels like an archaic ideal from a failed age, reminiscent of an oppressive aristocracy or legalistic Mother Church. Indeed, in the new notions of “freedom”, post-Enlightenment, the classical notion of “self-restraint” is seen as an impediment to individual self-expression. Our contemporary notion is that to be free of any shackling impediment to self-expression is virtue. In such a milieu, any social pressure to align or restrain becomes an act of violence against one's personal will.
I recently read a sentence which wonderfully captured this contemporary notion of freedom: “The key to happiness [is] freedom of choice where each individual would be able to choose what kind of lifestyle they want with no legal or other repercussions and enforced dogmas of any kind.”[18] It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? It’s also completely untenable and neglects the reality that communities must have norms and that social cohesion is critical for human satisfaction and joy. It’s these bonds that tie us together and make life meaningful. While there can be oppressive bonds, of course (which is why, no doubt, the above quote resonates) the notion that happiness can be centered only or even primarily in our unrestrained self-expression is a complete re-writing and undoing of centuries of moral practice—not just in the West but around the world. As Richard Rohr says, “The modern and postmodern world is the first period of history where a large number of people have been allowed to take their private lives and identities seriously. This marks a wonderful movement into individuation, but there is also a diminishment and fragility if that is all we have.”[19] In our society, the individual has become all and the individual’s ability to choose has become the most transcendent good. Our focus is on the expression of the individual, not the community. And our notion of freedom is now centered in our own self-expression. This represents a major change in moral structure.
This re-ordering of virtue is, as Deneen argues in Why Liberalism Failed, liberalism’s fatal flaw. Our insistence on hyper-individualism and freedom as the satisfaction of our appetites leaves us dissatisfied and adrift.[20] Thus, anxiety rises as we have no meaningful narratives about life and no social cohesion by which to share those narratives.[21] Which raises a question: since we can no longer turn to scapegoating rituals to quell our anxiety, and since our grand narratives (religious, scientific, et al) have failed…what do we turn to?
After Virtue: The Rise of Rule-Based “Morality”
Not only do we need a moral framework that tells us that we belong, we need one in which we can know that we are good, moral people. We are, as Jonathan Haidt elucidates in The Righteous Mind, wired for righteousness; that is, we are hard-wired to convince ourselves of our own moral goodness. But in the absence of a classical notion of virtue (freedom from our baser passions in order to pursue a given end), we need an alternative moral framework to prove our goodness. This can be largely achieved in contemporary society through a moral framework centered around rule-keeping. Indeed, we now have a moral framework largely driven by rules and rule-keeping.
By rule, I mean a moral precept prescribed as a normative behavior, but of a very specific type. “Don’t kill anyone” is of course a moral precept accepted and deeply felt by all (except psychopaths). Thus, it is a moral rule and also a universal law. But it’s not universal laws of this sort—Ten Commandment type rules, we might call them—by which we judge each other since they provide little difference of opinion and, thus, little room for comparison. We might say that it’s only a rule, as opposed to a law, if it’s not a universal; that is, rules are matters of debate. They are social mores not universally accepted. “Don’t say the n-word unless you are black” is a moral rule generally accepted across American society; nevertheless, it is not universally accepted nor deeply felt by all (some conservatives question why black people can use the word and, on the farther right, there are some non-blacks who do use the word). Such rules, as opposed to universally accepted laws, provide a basis for moral comparison and thus an opportunity (1) to be included in the group which abides by the rule while also (2) proving that we are good, virtuous people.
Examples of contemporary moral rule-keeping debates include:
· White privilege/systemic racism is a core societal issue versus “white privilege/systemic racism” is overblown or doesn’t exist
· The patriarchy is at the root of much societal harm versus “patriarchy” is misconstrued
· The use of gendered versus non-gendered language
People on both sides of these issues are fully convinced that they are the moral rule-keepers and that not only is their perspective correct but that the rules ensuing from their views are the right moral rules. Increasingly, issues both political and sociological are polarized such that opposing perspectives are made into moral rules by which we can prove our moral goodness. During the Covid-19 pandemic, I have heard the accusation that mask-wearers are “sheep” while people who don’t wear masks are selfish and evil. Between such polarized conclusions, conversation is seldom possible, and indeed in such a matrix conversation is not the goal. Conversation is shunned in favor of the psychology of competition between two competing teams. As Jonathan Haidt says, “When people all share values, all share morals, they become a team.”[22] These “teams” are almost always aligned with a conservative bias on one hand and a progressive bias on the other. As a society we are largely no longer concerned with the interplay of conservative and progressive values—which are both needed in a healthy, functioning society—but with how such values can be put in competition.
Our contemporary debate, then, is not like the moral debate we might find across history in various times and nations, a battle between conservative and progressive impulses held together by a common will. Increasingly, the focus of our debate is not to provide consensus but rather the competition by which we can make comparisons to one another. To do this, we need moral rules. And we need rules precisely because we lack an agreed-on moral framework and therefore are looking for some means by which we can adjudicate and demonstrate our goodness. Said differently: our rule-keeping is created in the absence of any moral framework; we now construct our frameworks, often individually, in the absence of a broader societal narrative.
Societally, we generally no longer believe (with a nod to Nietzsche and Camus) that there is a telos or any grand narrative that makes life meaningful. We no longer have stories that give us a unified notion of virtue and thus our moral rules no longer flow from any united grand narrative. The Medieval “divine right of Kings” flowed from the narrative of an ordered universe with a Divine God at the top. Now we believe the universe is chaotic and random. The chivalric code of knights centered on the ideals of abnegation, flowing from the Christian narrative of humility and sacrifice. Now we believe such narratives and values impede our expressive individualism. Our rules do not flow from any grand narrative, and yet we still attempt to use our values to establish a uniform morality in order to create the social cohesions we so badly lack. But they cannot become universal laws and must remain only rules, deeply debatable and often arbitrary and ambiguous in their application. Further, we divide into teams which become pre-eminent over any grander commitment (to narrative or to nation, for example). This is, in part, why we see such polarization and anxiety across our nation, as individuals take refuge in their preferred political archetype—conservative or progressive—in order to make of it a new grand narrative. Our liberal societies are now not so much focused on the good but on the right. And, more specifically, who is right.
The resulting rule-keeping, to be effective, must be dogmatic. Rule-keeping for the religiously rigid has always been dogmatic (“don’t drink, don’t chew, don’t run with girls who do”), since rule-keeping is how you demonstrate you are righteous and part of the tribe. But religion is far from the only domain for dogmatic rule-keeping. We see it on both the left and the right, politically speaking. Political discourse is often no such thing—not thoughtful conversation, certainly; more often, it is an automatic and thus unthinking response to “the other side,” a reflexive insistence on the rules of team red or team blue. Similarly, we have not the time to think about Justine Sacco’s tweet. We just intuit that she has broken some rule and that we are to be appalled at the violation. Context does not matter, the rule does. We are on the lookout for anyone who may have broken a rule. As Alasdair MacIntyre writes, “judgment has an indispensable role in the life of the virtuous man which it does not and could not have in, for example, the life of the merely law-abiding or rule-abiding man.”[23]
Such unthinking dogmatism is the opposite of thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness requires a consideration of time and place. Indeed, virtue, according to Aristotle, was the practice of “the right thing in the right time in the right place.” This lack of thoughtfulness is the symptom of our era’s great sickness. As Rowan Williams writes, “We suffer from a loss of patience with argument, real mutual persuasion; a loss of the idea that by mutual persuasion and careful argument we might have our minds enlarged to receive more of the truth.”[24]Patience and careful argumentation is the domain of the thoughtful. Rule-keeping does not require any such thought.
Moral rule-keeping, in fact, does not necessarily demand inner virtue, at all. In a rule-keeping moral system, the primary goal, ultimately, it is to be right. Is to beat the competition. The inner cultivation of virtue need not factor in at all. And if the goal is to win a competition, it is sufficient to have a semblance or simulacra of virtue rather than virtue deeply internalized.[25] It is enough to determine who’s good and who’s bad (we are always in the “good” crowd, of course), to win the competition. We may know “the things you cannot say” and “the lines you must not cross,” but knowing the pitfalls to avoid does not mean that you are becoming good. Nevertheless, in a rule-keeping moral culture, it is enough to follow the rules or, at least, be seen to follow them. Goodness is no longer a telos, an endpoint we aspire to as the end point of a unified human life; alignment to social mores—the rules of our team—will suffice as goodness.
Rule-Keeping and The Rise of Hypocrisy-Hunting
The competitive aspect to rule-keeping means that calling out the hypocrisy of others is one of the best ways to “win,” all while safe-guarding our own sense of rightness. Rule-keeping, thus, constantly has us calling out the “sins” of others while ignoring any shortcoming in ourselves or our “team.” To admit weakness, in fact, becomes synonymous with defeat. It is no surprise than that calling out hypocrisy has become part and parcel of our modern moral culture.[26] And in a rule-keeping culture, hypocrisy abounds. After all, anytime someone abides by a rule that is not deeply felt in order to appear righteous, this is hypocrisy. Rule-keeping easily devolves into mere appearance-keeping, since rules may be kept out of fear of being seen breaking and losing social status rather than out of internalized moral conviction. On the left, this leads to political correctness, which is often rightly (pardon the pun) lampooned. When rule-keeping becomes an attempt to out-imitate and out-rival another in the desire to appear moral, there is much to lampoon. In such a scenario, rule-keeping collapses on itself: everybody is simply trying not to get caught. Perception is ultimate and intention is negligible. I have been in many conversations about race where sincere white people were afraid to say anything for fear of saying the wrong thing. There can be no real conversation when people are too worried about breaking a moral rule, even if they are genuinely or sincerely confused (as opposed to being negligent or of ill-will). And many of our societal matters of debate are truly complex. An issue we will explore further below.
A corollary to hypocrisy hunting is loud insistence that you are right. Inner harmony can be simulated by external demonstration, often in the call to “cancel” another. The need to vigorously confirm our righteousness has given rise to what is popularly called “cancel culture.” Let me say that certainly some people need to be cancelled—that is, have their platform removed. But often, platforms are removed simply because an offended party wants to be right and is not willing to consider an opposing point of view.[27]
This reveals the need for yet another layer of consideration and discovery: in a rule-keeping competition, thinking (in the form of patient, thoughtful conversation that Rowan Williams had in mind) is in some sense, entirely beside the point. There is no need to investigate our own view—or its flaws or limitations—too deeply, if at all. In fact, in a competition, this is exactly what you do not want to do. Thoughtfulness is not required, while vigorous attack is (as 99% of political ads demonstrate.) We are a culture intoxicated with the entertainment value of a good zinger rather than the fruit of steady thoughtfulness.[28] Since our competing tribes (again, largely divided by progressive and conservative biases) are focused on our rules and the absurdity of “the other’s” view, we can easily ignore any dissonance within our own view. “The other side is bad” is all we need to say, as creatively or, if that fails, repetitively as we can.
And now we begin to see that these two "tribes" are not as different as they believe themselves to be. Sure, the content of professed beliefs on left and right may be different (although, as Thomas Cahoone points out, in historical terms we have never been so unified; we are almost uniformly pro-limited government, pro-some form of government regulation, anti-aristocratic, anti-theocracy, anti-fascist, anti-communist, and on and on).[29] But the way these beliefs are held is nearly identical on left and right, including radical group identification and allegiance to tribal norms and expectations which become and are taken as moral rules.
The result is that societal issues never get fully addressed or discussed and therefore go unremedied. Consider: someone committed to using non-gendered pronouns may see their position as the only moral position without accounting for the difficulty of widespread use of non-gendered pronouns. Or transgender advocates may ignore broader societal issues such as how gender is determined for athletic events and who can compete in girls’ and women’s sports. At the same time, those rejecting the use of non-gendered pronouns may see their view as the moral one while failing to account for the very real phenomena of trans-gendered individuals and the need for a thoughtful, compassionate societal response.[30]
Let us sum up this Russian doll of phenomenon resultant from a rule-keeping culture—a lack of thoughtfulness, a commitment to calling out hypocrisy, the rise of political correctness and cancel culture, and a lack of self-critique of our own political views—by saying that morality driven by rule-keeping suffers a unique blindness. The true purpose of rule-keeping is hidden from those that are captured by it. Moral-rule keeping often creates the feeling that it’s about being good, virtuous people, when its deeper and actual purpose—quelling our anxiety by convincing us that we are the good ones—remains hidden. This is the failure of morality by rule-keeping. Rule-keeping is an idol which always demands more sacrifice: ever greater levels of virtue signaling, outrage, hypocrisy hunting, and blindness to our own weaknesses. All the while, we may be blind to the fact that we are blind at all.
The Failure of Rules
Rules used to enforce a moral system easily degenerate. Rather than providing us with a new moral code by which to enjoy social cohesion and proof that we are good, moral people, the rules become tools by which we segregate into tribes which demands the exclusion of an “other.” Such exclusion provides a sense of belonging, since we are not on the outside with those non-rule-keepers, and with a sense of righteousness, since we are not like “them.” Once this gambit is accepted, we come to need the polarization of our society since it always gives us an “other” against which to vent our anxiety. “Every Republican who voted for Trump is evil.” “Those godless, baby-killing Democrats who want to destroy America.” Note that the subtle, though now rapid, increase in use of incensed rhetoric becomes unstoppable as our frameworks and worldviews are polarized against each other. In the past, it was possible to have secondary and tertiary points of disagreement while remaining in conversation, but since every point of disagreement is now a part of the moral matrix of group rule-keeping, every minor point of disagreement can become a hill worth dying on—or at least an opportunity to berate the other side on Twitter. This dynamic applies to conservatives and progressives alike. A poll released before the 2020 U.S. Presidential election found that in both parties, over 70% of respondents believed that "If the wrong candidate wins this election, America will not recover."[31]This response is indicative of a certainty which reveals how deeply we have come to need an “other” to despise to prove our own rightness and certainty. We no longer need a broader society, in fact; we just need our tribe.[32]
We do not recognize what is happening, as the blindness intrinsic in a rule-keeping morality begins to take our own sight. We insist that red or blue or progressive or conservative is right and that others are not only wrong but evil.[33] We need not investigate the flaws in our own views too deeply. We come to believe any news source that backs up our point of view is authentic, while everything else is “fake news.” Since we now have the technology—via the internet and highly-niched news service which we can align with and thereby confirm our every opinion—we can be “right.”[34] And we form tribes that do not require our thoughtfulness but only our allegiance. Then complex matters of disagreement become the simplistic basis for demonization and exclusion, as we militarize our opinions to demonstrate how the “other” is bad and wrong. This either/or thinking effects everything we come to do. It affects the way we see others. It means we are always looking for a scapegoat.
Which brings us back to Justine Sacco.
Justine Sacco became a scapegoat, an object to be sacrificed to relieve of us our own cultural anxiety. I said that mimetic theory and morality by rule-keeping were deeply related, and no doubt by now it is clear why. Rule-keeping morality, now ascendant in the U.S., is mimetic theory par excellence. Rule-keeping is the comparison method which constantly demands an “other” to be found and scapegoated. The ancient scapegoating mechanism and contemporary rule-keeping are mechanisms for the same thing, namely, the relief of our anxiety. The scapegoat mechanism is re-emerging, and the volatility of social media is its greatest catalyst.
Sacco was not unvirtuous, yet she broke a societal rule. As the scapegoat mechanism continues, we will come to need a new scapegoat almost every day, until at some point the entire sacrificial system will collapse under its own weight.
The Descent into Violence
And what results when the system collapses? Let us remember that scapegoating is, ultimately, an expression of violence done to an other.
Most Americans were aghast at the storming of the U.S. capitol in January 2021 and the loss of life that ensued. But we should not be surprised. Mimetic contagion, the rise of anxiety, and the adoption of the scapegoating mechanism always leads to a proliferation of violence across society. And while the events at the capitol can be seen as a reaction on the right, the left is not immune to the violence intrinsic in a scapegoating culture. In fact, comparison and rule-keeping as a catalyst to mimetic contagion often proliferates on the left over and above the right. Despite our culture’s supposed allegiance to the creed of “tolerance,” a progressive value of the left, we are often anything but tolerant. Or, more accurately, we are tolerant only within our own moral frameworks. As we look to the future, as things stand, we should expect the rise of scapegoating to lead, inexorably, to increased violence across our society.
Is there a way out? Moral discourse, as opposed to moral rule-keeping, of course requires engagement with an opposing point of view. But discourse is increasingly scarce in an anxious society which has learned to deal with anxiety by scapegoating an “other.” Yet our salvation—at the risk of using such a weighty term—lies specifically in learning to re-engage in discourse with curiosity and thoughtfulness. In the next essays, we will begin mapping a course to just such an engagement.
[1] See ‘Justine Sacco, the PR exec who was fired from IAC for her tweets, has landed back at IAC’s Match Group’ in Vox. 1/19/18 https://www.vox.com/2018/1/19/16911074/justine-sacco-iac-match-group-return-tweet
[Accessed 1/3/21]. Sacco’s full comment: “To me it was so insane of a comment for anyone to make….I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was literal….Unfortunately, I am not a character on ‘South Park’ or a comedian, so I had no business commenting on the epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on a public platform...To put it simply, I wasn’t trying to raise awareness of AIDS or piss off the world or ruin my life. Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world. I was making fun of that bubble.”
[2] “A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal, which is the reason why the ethical attitude of large organizations is always doubtful. The psychology of a large crowd inevitably sinks to the level of mob psychology. If, therefore, I have a so-called collective experience as a member of a group, it takes place on a lower level of consciousness than if I had the experience by myself alone.” Jung, C.G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press. 1969. Page 125.
[3] See Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix by Edwin Friedman. Church Publishing. New York, NY. 2017.
[4] Another Frenchman, Jean Jacques-Rousseau, had previously noted how his contemporary society, as opposed to humans in a supposed “state of nature,” function based on competition and comparison.
[5] René Girard qtd. in “Generative Scapegoating” by Robert G. Hammerton-Kelly, ed. Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, Stanford University Press. 1988. p. 122
[6] Leviticus 16:21. New International Version.
[7] Often the more austere the group social expectations are (that is, the requirements for belonging), the more cohesive the bond towards one’s own tribe and, therefore, the greater the fear of exclusion. This simultaneously produces a more deeply embedded suspicion and judgment of those outside of one’s group. Behavior solidifying tribal membership takes on moral character, as do its social prohibitions.
[8] Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Vintage. February, 2013. Page 20.
[9] In Aristotle, for example, one could only become moral and virtuous in relationship to a community which included both intimate friends and a larger polis.
[10] There is an old Arab Bedouin saying: “I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world. That is jungle law.” (Nafisa Haji) This view of the world and of morality, rooted in kinship, in which group identity is the primary means of knowing who you are, puts the individual’s happiness second. Only in our post-Industrial Revolution, post-Enlightenment world have these kinship structures been supplanted and has the individual’s happiness been placed before group membership and kinship bonds.
[11] Deneen, James. Why Liberalism Failed. Yale University Press. January 2018. Page 122. For more on emotivist culture, see ‘Essay VII’ in this series.
[12] MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. University of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame, IN. March, 2007. Page 172. See also page 195: “For liberal individualism, a community is simply an arena in which individuals each pursue their own self-chosen conception of the good life, and political institutions exist to provide that degree of order which makes such self-determined activity possible.”
[13] Jonathan Haidt in an interview with Jonathan Sacks. Morality in the 21st Century Podcast. “Episode 8: Jonathan Haidt.” September 3, 2018. Consider also this comment from MacIntyre: “Hence we lack, as [the ancient Greeks] did not, any in public, generally shared communal mode either representing political conflict or for putting our politics to the philosophical question.” (MacIntyre, 138) In ancient Athens, in other words (and contra our world), morality was—far from being individualistic—very much socio-centric.
[14] Consider Isaiah Berlin’s two notions of freedom: “negative liberty” is the absence of constraints. “Positive liberty,” on the other hand, means realizing one’s purpose and potential and involves, therefore, far more than freedom from constraint.
[15] Deneen, 113.
[16] As Deneen puts it: liberty is now “the agent’s ability to do whatever he likes…Modern theory defines liberty as the greatest possible pursuit and satisfaction of the appetites, while government is a conventional and unnatural obstacle to this pursuit. [Ancient theory understood] liberty to be achieved only through virtuous self-government.” Page 48.
[17] Hegel had noted, after the French Revolution, that the notion of freedom championed in the Revolution was incomplete. Its notion of self was atomic, individual, and nothing but negation. That is, the ideals of the Revolution and, specifically, its notion of liberty would create a self who sees the world as limiting its soul’s freedom and thus, in the words of Lawrence Cahoone, “can only deal with the outside world by trying to destroy it.” See The Modern Political Tradition: Hobbes to Habermas by Lawrence Cahoone. ‘Lecture 13: Civil Society Constant, Hegel, Tocqueville.’ The Great Courses. May 2014.
[18] ‘These Unusual Sexual Practices Will Set You Free’ by Claire Divino in Medium.com, 9/14/20 https://medium.com/sexography/these-social-norms-will-set-you-free-7ebf7f22e01f [Accessed 2/5/21] David Brooks summarizes and critiques this notion of freedom: “When you look back on it from the vantage of 2020, moral freedom, like the other dominant values of the time, contained within it a core assumption: If everybody does their own thing, then everything will work out for everybody. If everybody pursues their own economic self-interest, then the economy will thrive for all. If everybody chooses their own family style, then children will prosper. If each individual chooses his or her own moral code, then people will still feel solidarity with one another and be decent to one another. This was an ideology of maximum freedom and minimum sacrifice.” See ‘America is Having a Moral Convulsion’ by David Brooks in The Atlantic. 10/5/20
[Accessed 1/21/21] As a side note, this political ideal of maximum individual freedom has an economic concomitant: Adam Smith had posited that consuming more than you need was a moral good, forming an economic corollary to “expressive individualism.”
[19] Rohr, Richard. “My Story” in Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation. January 25th, 2021.
[20] See footnote 14. Alexis de Tocqueville saw democracy itself as an atomizing, individualizing order driving people into isolation and outside previous social structures, bonds, and institutions.
[21] Which, it should be noted, creates a vacuum which may be filled by atrocious narratives, such as—an example from our contemporary world—white supremacy.
[22] Haidt, Jonathan. “The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives,” Ted Talk. https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_liberals_and_conservatives/transcript?language=en#t-187811 [Accessed 2/12/21] Haidt goes on to say that such engagement within the psychology of competition “shuts down open-minded thinking.”
[23] MacIntyre, 154.
[24] Williams Rowan. Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life. Eerdmans. 2016. Pages 24-25. We are witnessing the opposite of what Kant called enlarged thought, the consideration of another or, in this case, the thought of another.
[25] In classical notions of virtue, virtue could only be communicated externally if it was enjoyed internally. “The activity achieved and the activity enjoyed are one and the same state.” (MacIntyre, 197). In a rule-keeping morality, no such internalization is necessary. In a rule-keeping morality, no such internalization may be possible.
[26] Consider the rise of the “canned apology” or what we might call the paint-by-numbers apology (“I’m very sorry to all I offended, this does not represent who I am,” et cetera). The apology, in an attempt to prove we are not hypocrites, has come to take on a formal structure which undercuts sincerity. At the same time, such apologies are never good enough for the crowd which senses the insincerity undergirding what has essentially become a society-wide rite or ritual, even if the person apologizing is genuinely remorseful.
[27] This can be a function of Girard’s scapegoating mechanism: collectively arguing for the silencing of another functions as a scapegoating mechanism.
[28] As Neil Postman continually warned.
[29] Cahoone, ‘Lecture 36: Why Political Philosophy Matters.’
[30] The debate over personal pronouns, in particular, is a flashpoint in contemporary moral rule-keeping debates, no doubt because it is connected to sex and sexuality which connects to our deepest desire for love and acceptance. The debate was perhaps made most prominent by psychologist Jordan’s Peterson’s refusal to use non-gendered pronouns (on the grounds that codification of speech under the law is a slippery slope towards totalitarianism). To use non-gendered pronouns is, to some, a deeply felt moral end and thus a societal rule that should be instantiated. To others, like Peterson, resistance to the legislation of such speech is a moral end (though on a personal level, they may have no issue with using non-gendered pronouns in individual relationships). Thus, moral debate is deeply charged and moral incommensurability—the inability to confidently compare moral ends (or even recognize that there are moral ends in competition)—is rife.
[31] From the Braver Angels YouGov Poll, October 22-23, 2020. https://braverangels.org/yougov-poll-results-2/
[32] Philosophically speaking, once our notion of freedom is merely Berlin’s “negative freedom”—that is, freedom from restraint—then we are free to get our way and have our unchallenged opinions or processes go painfully awry. To have our view challenged comes to feel like a violation of our freedom.
[33] To say we are inclined towards dehumanizing “the other” does not mean that all moral issues are incommensurable or that all moral views are equal. There was great debate about civil rights in America in the 1960s but only a bigot would now say that MLK and the Civil Rights movements were not moral goods. There often is a “right side to history.” The point of this essay is rather that most of our societal debates require a synthesis of discourse from both left and right.
[34] "[Social media platforms] plainly encourage the vices most dangerous to a free society. They drive us to speak without listening, to approach others confrontationally rather than graciously, to spread conspiracies and rumours, to dismiss and ignore what we would rather not hear, to make the private public, to oversimplify a complex world, to react to one another much too quickly and curtly. They eat away at our capacity for patient toleration, our decorum, our forbearance, our restraint." Levin, Yuval. A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream. Basic Books. 2020.