Plagues and sacrifice

Sacrifices and witch hunts, for Girard, originate in the same process: resolving crises through “all against one” mob violence. Faced with a catastrophe, archaic societies assigned blame for the disaster to a designated scapegoat, whom they killed or expelled. Although brutal, this method was, in its way, effective: It enabled the release of social pressures and the restoration of peace. Eventually, what Girard called the “scapegoat mechanism” was formalized into rituals that could achieve similar ends, usually with less overt brutality. Scapegoating has a poor reputation today, but we can still understand its appeal: Consider how organizations will often select a “fall guy” to take the blame for a collective mistake.

But how could sacrificial scapegoating cure a plague? Girard argued that in premodern times, contagious diseases were not seen as distinct from the social breakdowns that followed in their wake. People did not know how to treat the disease, but the resolution of its associated strife might look like a cure. This is not such a strange idea. Recall that in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many asserted that the “culture war” was now a thing of the past. Those making this claim were assuming that medical crises and cultural conflicts are separate matters. As we now know, that assumption was wrong: The virus exacerbated existing culture war antagonisms (over race and policing, for instance) while initiating new ones over shutdowns and masks. In ancient societies as in our own, a plague is hard to extricate from its social, cultural, and economic fallout. Resolving these broader ills becomes just as important as curing the disease.

All of this might lead us to expect the theme of sacrifice to emerge during a pandemic, and it did. But it did so in a way that underlines the anti-sacrificial presuppositions of our culture. Shortly after local shutdowns began, President Trump and some of his supporters began to assert that the economic consequences of the shutdowns would be worse than the virus itself. His opponents instantly framed the demand to reopen the economy as a call for “human sacrifice.” The obvious premise was that since we all view human sacrifice as a moral travesty, accusing our enemies of advocating it will discredit them.

The sacrificial theme cropped up again when, just as the virus and its attendant conflicts reached their peak, attention shifted abruptly to the death of George Floyd. In some respects, the response to Floyd’s death echoed the violent remedies to plagues found in myth and legend. The world was instantaneously transfixed by the spectacle of a man’s killing, and as if by magic, the pandemic receded into the background. Multitudes ignored public-health restrictions and flooded the streets in protest. We might even view the looting and arson that followed as a continuation of the sacrificial moment, a “burnt offering” consummating the carnivalesque suspension of norms.

Floyd’s death, like ancient sacrifices, enabled not the overcoming of the plague itself but a redirection of collective attention away from some of the plague’s effects. Curiously, it achieved this because of the anti-sacrificial biases of our culture. Girard argued that social conflict could only be resolved through sacrifice if everyone accepted the victim’s guilt, which allowed them to transfer responsibility for communal ills onto the scapegoat. Conversely, most everyone accepted Floyd’s blamelessness. What brought people together was outrage at an unjust killing, not celebration of a just one.

But if the potency of sacrifice depends on the public accepting it as just, it cannot generate enduring consensus in a world where sacrifice is regarded with suspicion and where negative polarization usually prevents the collective from agreeing on anything. After the brief moment of unity that followed Floyd’s death, divisions have reemerged stronger than ever. If anything, the protests have permitted a reset to “normal” variants of partisan antagonism. This incomplete resolution has prompted further attempts at sacrifice. This is one way to look at the recently intensified cycles of “cancellation,” in which taboo violators are symbolically expelled from the community. But polarization again places limits on the efficacy of these expulsions. The cancelers may be able to fortify the unity of their partisan grouping, but they are unable to address social problems that lie outside of their institutional purview. This deadlock does not end the cycle, however. Precisely because the expulsion of these victims does not end the crises for which they are held responsible, ever more victims must be offered up.

The centrality of social media to our politics ensures that these cycles will continue. Sacrificial scapegoating, Girard tells us, derives from “mimetic snowballing”: the contagious spread of violent emotions through a crowd that has assembled against a chosen victim. The modern world has various tools for discrediting and forestalling scapegoating. For instance, our legal system, with its presumption of innocence and suite of formal protections for those accused of crimes, is a brake against the mob dynamics on which scapegoating feeds.

But in online spaces, mimetic contagion spreads rapidly, inducing a sense of a crisis that seems to require instant resolution. Inevitably, we gravitate toward sacrificial solutions. Righteous outrage at the victimization of innocents reveals our collective aversion to scapegoating. But ironically, just this sort of mass indignation fuels pile-ons and cancellations, ensuring that the sacrificial spectacles will persist.

Geoff Shullenberger is a writer and academic. He blogs at outsidertheory.com. Follow him on Twitter: @daily_barbarian.