Scapegoating During the Pandemic

Detail of East Window, Lincoln Cathedral, England — Wikimedia Commons.

As COVID-19 rips its way through the social and economic fabric of countries far and wide, the blame-game follows close behind. The virus exposes a deep-seated human need to accuse a person or group as the cause of all the upheaval and devastation. Furthermore, the finger-pointers seem intent on meting out their own notions of appropriate punishment on the supposed perpetrators.

The Chinese are easy targets since the latest coronavirus purportedly emerged there. The Trump administration seized the opportunity by making unsubstantiated claims that a Chinese-manufactured super-virus escaped from their Wuhan lab. Now there’s talk of the federal government seeking legal damages. In turn, after first blaming the Italians, the Chinese implicated the U.S., claiming American army personnel brought the virus to Wuhan. The World Health Organization has also taken its blows from conservative U.S. politicians looking for a convenient scapegoat.

Within our own borders, the Democrats have had a field day blaming the Republican-led administration for not taking the threat seriously enough and then offering a bungled and tardy response. Refusing to be implicated, Present Trump and his backers shifted the blame to a “broken health-care system” they claim to have inherited from the previous Democratic administration. Whatever merit any of these charges may hold, they all represent a repetition of the contentious squabbling that has characterized American politics for far too long.

More bizarre are the internal conspiracy theories gaining traction among citizen groups that imagine evil forces lurking behind the scenes. Bill Gates has been accused of preplanning and causing the pandemic as a diabolical remedy for global overpopulation, deviously scheming to rake in gazillions by injecting trackers along with a vaccine the whole world will need.

Bandwagons of the disgruntled offer standing room only.

Playing the blame game

The desire to lay blame during a crisis has a long and cruel history. Various historic manifestations reveal a common pattern: Persons or groups previously deemed threatening to the majority, or those in power, are thrust into the role of culprit, justifying an assault on them. Invariably, minorities, immigrants, foreign nationals (e.g., Asian-Americans), social misfits, and sometimes elites end up the victims — each a form of social outlier.

14th century European Jews were blamed for the Bubonic Plague, and again targeted by Nazis during the economic travails that stymied Germany following WWI. By 1941, a decade of Nazi persecution of Jews erupted into Hitler’s hideous and demented campaign of mass extermination. Although primarily targeting Jews, anyone considered a threat to the ideology of Aryan supremacy was marked for eradication. That included Romani (Gypsies), homosexuals, Slavs, the mentally challenged, and a wide array of political and religious dissidents.

Social, political, and economic upheaval always foment waves of retribution. Long-suffering from poverty and land shortages, in 1994 Rwanda’s Hutu majority began slaughtering that country’s power-wielding Tutsi minority, who then returned the favor until the nation roiled in an epic bloodbath. Today, China targets minority Muslims in its northwestern provinces, while India, Iran, and North Korea have long supported, or been complicit in, the persecution and murder of Christians and other minority religions. One can also make a case that the recent spate of African American deaths at the hands of police and vigilantism in America is a form of scapegoating linked to the country’s general angst and upheaval caused by the pandemic.

The Scapegoat

In his groundbreaking book, The Scapegoat, 20th-century social science philosopher René Girard detailed the way societies everywhere have used scapegoats as a collective means of directing violence outside the main social group. By vilifying one person or group for symbolic “sacrifice,” an innate tendency toward violent reactions during times of social stress can be channeled away from the larger society. Redirecting violent impulses toward defenseless targets is, for Gerard, a survival mechanism gone awry.

The classic case of scapegoating Gerard examined was the wide-spread persecution of European Jewry during the Bubonic Plague of the Middle Ages. Pogroms against Jews were not only meant to punish the accused, but to cleanse the so-called Christian majority of the scapegoats’ “polluting” influence thought to be responsible for the destruction. Beneath that factitious belief lay deep-seated resentment toward the cultural differences and economic prosperity characterizing Jewish minority populations in parts of Europe at the time.

The Black Death merely unearthed pre-existing animosity and discrimination. Girard drew inspiration for his scapegoating thesis from the Israelite sacrificial system described in the sixteenth chapter of the Book of Leviticus. There, two goats were involved. One was sacrificed on the altar of the Tabernacle for the sins of the people, and the other led outside the camp to be freed — symbolically bearing away from the Hebrew nation the sins that had been paid for through the death of the sacrificed animal.

Need for control

Few would take issue with Gerard’s notion that scapegoating is a sadly misdirected attempt by society to gain some control over what might appear to be uncontrollable circumstances. If someone else can be blamed and punished for threatening events, folks seem to feel better…or think they do. They gain a sense that something concrete and immediate can be done to counter an imposing threat, cruel though it may be for the victims.

As previously mentioned, scapegoating also provides a chance for various factions of society to settle old scores. The violence-laced protests currently engulfing our nation are part of the same pattern. Those with a bone to pick are conveniently resourcing their pre-existing hostility toward others, reshaping it into the causative agent of the crisis at hand. Racial and religious minorities, elites, and political dissidents are being forced into the role of society’s sacrificial victims. The trouble-du-jour is laid upon them like sin on a sacrificial lamb, and punishment meted out in a fruitless effort to restore control to those who feel they’ve lost it. The process is really nothing new.

Humans have long sacrificed one another in hopes of overcoming life’s vagaries and threats.

Just as the Jews of 14th century Europe were viewed as an economic and religious menace to the “Christian” masses, the Chinese today are considered an economic and political threat to America’s self-conferred position of world leader. Similarly, Bill Gates represents America’s wealthy elite at a time when people are losing their livelihoods and life savings. Like Marie Antoinette, the guillotined aristocratic scapegoat of the French Revolution, Gates symbolizes affluence and security at a time when those commodities seem to be slipping further and further from the hands of working-class Americans. And people of color in America now find themselves implicated in new and disturbing ways.

Fear and discontent are scapegoating’s fertile breeding grounds.

Going deeper

But there is an even deeper level to scapegoating that social science is ill-equipped to explore. It lies in a realm rarely visited and often discounted by various scholars and researchers: the spiritual landscape of the human heart. Scapegoating inevitably involves the projection of one’s own dark side onto social outsiders and old enemies. Accusations leveled against individuals and groups almost always stem from the biases, bigotries, and spiritual bankruptcy of the accusers.

Humans have the unfortunate proclivity to see in others what we hate in ourselves…and then mindlessly act upon it.

Rather than deal with the evil that dwells within, many choose to export it onto perceived threats, conveniently side-stepping their own internal plagues. Gerard recognized that spiritual depravity lay behind all forms of scapegoating. An “unlikely Christian,” his solution was for humankind to realize that through the sacrifice of Jesus — “the Lamb of God slain for the sins of the world (John 1:29)” — there no longer exists any need for further scapegoating. Gerard understood that the self-victimization and self-sacrifice of history’s only “spotless lamb” once and for all removed any spurious justification for sacrificial victims.

It is obvious that Gerard’s message has been widely ignored. Its truth has not been effectively shared from one marauding generation to the next. His is a lesson each of us must first grasp and then steadfastly implement whenever we feel the need to blame others for the dire circumstances we encounter — when the real problem lies deeply rooted in the unregenerate recesses of our own hearts.

As COVID-19 continues its rampage, there is absolutely no legitimate reason that hatred and vengeance need to spread along with it. Regardless of color or station in life, every American bears a responsibility to help stem enmity’s destructive tide. To the degree that we can gain the upper hand on our own virulent impulses to blame, vilify, and punish others, we will find the capacity to overcome this pandemic and every succeeding crisis we face, whether as individuals, a nation, or as grateful members of the larger human family.