A History Of Scapegoats: From Purification To Perpetual Guilt
With roots in ancient Judaism, the concept has traversed millennia to find its unhappy home in identity politics
Edmond Dantès, more famously known as the Count of Monte Cristo and the hero of the novel of the same name, is one of literature’s clearest examples of a scapegoat. Unfairly accused by jealous rivals of a crime he didn’t commit, he is condemned to life imprisoned in the horrible Chateau d’If.
The prison on Chateau d'If. Photo by Yann Droneaud/Flickr.
Edmond’s story, author Alexandre Dumas’s masterful exploration of vengeance and forgiveness, has become a well-loved masterpiece of Western literature. Generations of readers and aspiring authors have looked to it as a reminder of human nature’s flaws and the virtue of forgiveness.
But the idea of the scapegoat didn’t originate in 19th century France. Its roots, and those of forgiveness and atonement, are found in the Old Testament:
And Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins. And he shall put them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a man who is in readiness.
God’s instruction to Moses in Leviticus laid out the ritual the Israelites followed on every Day of Atonement.
This scapegoat—along with ancient Israel’s complex system of animal sacrifice—represented a beautiful idea of forgiveness. The animal being sent off into the wilderness, symbolically bearing a group of people’s transgressions, takes into itself evil’s consequences. Justice is still served, but through God’s forgiveness, it is redirected from the Israelites, a specific people group, to the scapegoat.
But why should we care about an obscure, esoteric, millennia-old religious practice? The scapegoat reveals an eternal truth about human nature that is still relevant: our individual imperfections require redemption. Human beings across different time periods and in wildly different cultures and nations have understood this conflict between good and evil, right and wrong, life and death.
The construction of the ancient Tabernacle, from “The Religious Denominations in the United States” by Joseph Belcher. Library of Congress/Public Domain/Flickr.
The idea of a scapegoat was carried into Christianity and became the faith’s central tenet. Christ is the perfect scapegoat for the transgressions of imperfect people. His once-and-for-all atonement took the place of Israel’s annual atonement ritual.
But how durable is the scapegoat as an idea? Would the ideas of transgression and atonement still resonate with the human experience in an “Age of Reason”? Fast forward nearly two thousand years after Christ’s birth and Enlightenment thought dominated European intellectual circles.
Much of Enlightenment philosophy, which began its ascendance in the 17th century, cast doubt on religious truths, such as the Biblical miracles. Such miracles seemed to violate Enlightenment trust in reason, logic, and the natural laws so central to the foundation of the Enlightenment. These thinkers trusted reason as the ultimate guide, believing that it could “perfect” human beings and create a sort of equality and earthly utopia, thereby obviating the need for a scapegoat to atone for human transgressions.
But abandoning the scapegoat was dangerous. Whereas ancient Israel sought peace with God, the Enlightenment sought worldly peace–and, as modernity shows us, those who seek to create utopias rarely care that the righteous road to perfection is paved with bodies.
The same Enlightenment that brought reasoned debate to Parisian salons also brought murderous, blood-crazed mobs to Parisian streets. The French Revolution’s violent chaos, enforced atheism, and radical attempt to force a utopia of “reason” on unwilling subjects marked the apogee of Enlightenment thought’s worst strands. The revolutionaries’ reign of terror drenched France in blood, showing what happens when humanity unmoors itself from justice and atonement.
Or fast forward to the 20th-century crimes of the Nazis and the Communists, where entire peoples were grouped together and held responsible for a myriad of social and economic problems. The totalitarians believed their genocides were justified to cleanse the sins of their wicked systems.
If the Enlightenment downplayed or ignored humanity’s flawed nature, today’s New Moral Order has completely disregarded it. We now live in the hope that the problematic oppressor will willingly become a scapegoat and cleanse the world of future inequality.
Joshua Mitchell writes in his book, American Awakening that
Identity politics is a political version of this cleansing, for groups rather than for individual persons. The scapegoat identity politics offers for a sacrifice is the white heterosexual man. If he is purged, its adherents imagine, the world itself, along with the remaining groups in it, will be cleansed of stain.
Reconciliation or retribution have been accepted solutions for conflict and inequality throughout human history. But identity politics’ hierarchical judgment no longer offers reconciliation. The sin is too deep, the cultural wound too wide. If you are a white, heterosexual man you are responsible for all the historical evils committed by white, heterosexual men. The fact that all groups at all times and places have committed grave sins against each other is ignored.
A protester outside the Minneapolis courthouse in 2021. Loria Shaull/Flickr.
This new ideology scapegoats and shames in order to cleanse the world of the white man’s sins. This scapegoat is a constant target of cathartic rage, reduced to perpetual apologizing and running on the atonement treadmill without ever receiving the true, lasting peace that comes from forgiveness. Their stain can never be washed out, only scrubbed repeatedly with the hope that it will look a bit more presentable.
This radioactive ideology stands to destroy everything Western civilization values. The French Revolution shows us what can happen when the concepts of sin and forgiveness are trampled. The New Moral Order hasn’t led to mass violence yet, but it still mercilessly cancels people for decades-old wrongs, ruthlessly suppresses free speech, and tears down heroes such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln without pausing to consider their achievements.
Our new scapegoat can never fully atone for the past’s sins. This perverted understanding of transgression and righteousness is a perpetual guillotine hanging over Western civilization. If white, heterosexual men built the West, then it too should be “canceled.” Its authors and scientists, poets and generals, artists and heroes, are stained and irredeemable. Their statues ought to come down, their stories should be hidden from the view of future generations, like so many counts of Monte Cristo. But if Western civilization is the scapegoat for the world’s imperfections, then what history will we reference, what science will we depend on, what art will inspire us, and what reconciliation and forgiveness will we know?