Romans

[degringolade]

 

New European Painting / Luc Tuymans/ The Radiance of Attention

I refuse to become the bitter and angry men that so many of my friends have become.  The world’s end is not nigh and I have a very low chance of starving to death.  I know what I can control and what I cannot.  I can’t for a moment imagine that there is really anything more to life than this.  Twenty years from now my friends and I will probably be pushing up daisies.  All of the issues that have estranged me from long-term friends will be history at that point and part of the conflicting mass of opinions and half told-stories that comprise that academic field..  

I want to write about what is happening now without rancor.  Most everyone wants to demonize and scapegoat someone.  Trump is the current favorite of the comfortable chattering classes that attempt to monetize their privilege and current wealth for an even better tomorrow.  I really think that his new media empire will do well, not because of the completely average quality of his thought, with a near equal proportion of bad ideas and good ideas, but rather, I foresee him having a “Two Minutes with the Donald” everyday around 5:00 so that the Bobo’s can gather and have a fresh reason for their two minute hate.  I prefer not to participate.  

The anger in the air is palpable.  Everybody gotta hate somebody.  This is/has been noticed by the six corporations that own the US media and rather than being appalled, they saw a market opportunity stoking that fire and Trump was super convenient timing.  

Nope, I am advising those few souls who pass by to put their fists down and look at themselves.  By participating in the hatred you make your less.

Per Girard (An Excerpt from René Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001], chapter twelve, “Scapegoat,”)

When human groups divide and become fragmented, during a period of malaise and conflicts, they may come to a point where they are reconciled again at the expense of a victim. Observers nowadays realize without difficulty, unless they belong to the persecuting group, that this victim is not really responsible for what he or she is accused of doing. The accusing group, however, views the victim as guilty, by virtue of a contagion similar to what we find in scapegoat rituals. The members of this group accuse their “scapegoat” with great fervor and sincerity. More often than not some incident, whether fantastic or trivial, has triggered a wave of opinion against this victim, a mild version of mimetic snowballing and the victim mechanism.

Metaphorical recourse to this ritual expression, “scapegoating,” is often arbitrary in practice, but it rests on a logic that makes sense within its own frame of reference. The similarities are great between phenomena of attenuated expulsion that we observe every day in our world and ancient scapegoat rituals, as well as countless other rituals of the same sort — so great that they must be real. When we suspect people around us of giving in to the temptation of scapegoating, we denounce them indignantly. We ferociously denounce the scapegoating of which our neighbors are guilty, but we are unable to do without our own substitute victims. We all try to tell ourselves that we have only legitimate grudges and justified hatreds, but our feeling of innocence is more fragile than our ancestors’.

We could use our insight discreetly with our neighbors, not humiliating those we catch in the very act of expelling a scapegoat. But more frequently we turn our knowledge into a weapon, a means not only of perpetuating old conflicts but of raising them to a new level of cunning, which the very existence of this knowledge and its propagation in the whole society demand. In short, we integrate the central concern of Judaism and Christianity into our systems of self-defense. Instead of criticizing ourselves, we use our knowledge in bad faith, turning it against others. Indeed, we practice a hunt for scapegoats to the second degree, a hunt for hunters of scapegoats. Our society’s obligatory compassion authorizes new forms of cruelty.

St. Paul vividly summarizes this double bind in which we find ourselves in his letter to the Romans: “You have no excuse, O man . . . when you judge another, for in judging you judge yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same thing” (2:1). If condemning the sinner is to do the same thing we reprove in him, in both cases the sin in question is nothing else than condemning our neighbor.