Chapter 25 of Matthew's Gospel famously closes with the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats:
"When the Son of Man comes in triumph, and all the holy angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. Before him all the nations will be gathered, and he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats." [25: 31-2]
This distinguishing between two types of creature - be it farmyard beast or human being - is something that Christians, as obsessive moral dichotomists, love to do. But it's made a little trickier to divide into the good and the evil when dealing with black sheep and scapegoats.
For which of these deserves to be saved on the Day of Judgement and which is worthy of damnation; the one who (allegedly) brings shame upon his family, or the one who is burdened with sin by the family in order to take it away?
Some amongst the faithful will doubtless insist there is very little (if any) real difference between these two things - that they are effectively synonymous. Thus we should probably just kill 'em all and let God worry about the finer details: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius, as Arnaud Amalric famously put it.
For which of these deserves to be saved on the Day of Judgement and which is worthy of damnation; the one who (allegedly) brings shame upon his family, or the one who is burdened with sin by the family in order to take it away?
Some amongst the faithful will doubtless insist there is very little (if any) real difference between these two things - that they are effectively synonymous. Thus we should probably just kill 'em all and let God worry about the finer details: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius, as Arnaud Amalric famously put it.
Indeed, even some psychologists - who should know better - argue that the black sheep and scapegoat are one and the same animal (or at any rate two sides of the same archetypal coin). But I don't think so. For whilst many individuals who bring disgrace and cause disharmony within a group due to their wilful and sometimes perverse deviation from the accepted norms and values of that group are often scapegoated, not all scapegoats have dark wool.
And, further, as I indicate above, the scapegoat performs a crucial role within the group. For by accepting the blame for all wrongdoing as their own, they absolve the others of guilt and allow them to unite in innocence. That's not so true of the black sheep who often seeks to expose collective hypocrisy and make others feel bad about themselves as group members.
That said, in the long term groups also need their rebellious, decadent, and stand-out individuals who challenge perceived ideas and conventions; otherwise they really do become subject to flock behaviour - which is fine for real sheep, but not so desirable for men and women.
D. H. Lawrence, for example, describes the human flock in which oppressive conformity and insulated completeness is the rule, as the enemy and the abomination. It is, he says, not the leopard or brightly burning tiger - and not the black sheep or overweening individual - whom we should fear, but the masses of fluffy white sheep who bully and compel in the name of Love and Oneness.
And, further, as I indicate above, the scapegoat performs a crucial role within the group. For by accepting the blame for all wrongdoing as their own, they absolve the others of guilt and allow them to unite in innocence. That's not so true of the black sheep who often seeks to expose collective hypocrisy and make others feel bad about themselves as group members.
That said, in the long term groups also need their rebellious, decadent, and stand-out individuals who challenge perceived ideas and conventions; otherwise they really do become subject to flock behaviour - which is fine for real sheep, but not so desirable for men and women.
D. H. Lawrence, for example, describes the human flock in which oppressive conformity and insulated completeness is the rule, as the enemy and the abomination. It is, he says, not the leopard or brightly burning tiger - and not the black sheep or overweening individual - whom we should fear, but the masses of fluffy white sheep who bully and compel in the name of Love and Oneness.
See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
In The Scapegoat Complex (Inner City Books, 1986), Sylvia Brinton Piera identifies the ‘black sheep’ within a family as one who, on ‘aesthetico-emotional grounds [...] feels aberrant, set apart, tabooed’ – a phenomenon, citing Erich Neumann, she locates archetypally within the ‘magic-matriarchal’ level of psychic life and its associated interstices of ‘primary guilt’. (p.15). Just as abused children are sometimes told they are being violated because they are special, or complaining about a relative allows family members to avoid intra- and inter-psychic conflict closer to home, one could say that such a black (or blackened) animal is in a state of ambivalent internal exile within the family constellation, like the Ugly Duckling who had to grow up and spread his wings to realise that he had become a swan. (As Maria Tatar writes of her reading of the Hans Christian Anderson fable, his aesthetic dignity and superiority were given from the beginning – he was, in effect, merely living an alienated life (like the proverbial 'duck out of water') at the hostile beaks of all who hated him for his secret nobility. All along, he just needed to get away.) One may think as well of Derrida's resuscitation of the Greek pharmakon (both 'remedy' and 'poison'), whose paradoxical duality was carried by its ritually flagellated victims who were driven out of the polis to their 'therapeutic' deaths. For example, in the miracle of Apollonius, the beggar is identified as the demon causing the plague (the source of the poison) whose lynching also restores the harmony of Ephesus.
ReplyDeleteThe formidable anthropologist and cultural theorist René Girard has done more than anyone to drag the ancient Jewish scapegoat bleating and whimpering out of Leviticus into a libidinally saturated post-psychological age. In his monumental studies Violence and The Sacred (1972/1977) and The Scapegoat (1982/1986), drawing on the writings of the 20C critic Kenneth Burke, Girard debunks the idea that our desires are autonomous or even authentically our own in favour of an analysis of desire as ‘mimetic’, i.e. essentially imitative. Ultimately, for Girard, desire is properly understood as metaphysical, insofar as it is organised by triangulated fantasies encoding subjects, objects and intermediary ‘models’ (be they our role models, romantic competitors or fellow fanatics - for no desire happens in isolation). Naturally, however, mimetic desire also encodes mimetic rivalry, which is why and when Girard’s conception of the scapegoating mechanism becomes operative - to control and ‘atone’ violence as it is unbearably excited through the contagion of desire. Whether it's Jews or gays, witches or Islamicists, history teaches us that the mechanism is gloomily indispensable, and only the targets change.
Christ’s resurrection, in extolling his radical innocence, exposes the fraudulence of the mechanism, or what Girard calls ‘the illusion of persecution’, thereby instantiating the sacred through a kind of divine reversal. (The Ancients always secretly knew that the crucifixion was an act of immeasurable corruption, however the scribes and Pharisees dressed it up as an expiatory necessity.) This is the meaning of the Nazarene's redemption of desire, whose collision with Greek paganism drove Nietzsche mad.
And so the logic of the West's war on terror, of course, is precisely mimetic of the language of Islamic terrorism, in which both parties fail to recognise their indebtedness to each other's persecutory violence. In the modern age, it is the secret complicity of the scapegoater and the scapegoat that is poetically pointed up by Baudelaire’s infamous aside: 'Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère ...'. But, of course, this requires a fine salvific irony borne of both spleen and ideal. (To misquote Heidegger, what else are poets for?)
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