Published on Monday, August 2, 2004 by the Sydney Morning Herald / Australia Karen Armstrong
On Yom Kippur in ancient Jerusalem, two goats were selected and brought to the front of the temple. One, chosen by lot, was consecrated to God and sacrificed. The other was dedicated to a mysterious figure, Azazel.
The high priest laid his hands on the head of this second goat, confessed the sins of Israel, and drove it out into the desert, the haunt of demons. The community was purified by symbolically projecting its misdeeds on to a substitute, which was then expelled from the city to the "other side".
It was, perhaps, a primitive way of dealing with communal guilt, but this ritual gave us the word "scapegoat", to describe somebody who is punished for the sins of others. We needed this term, because when something goes wrong human beings have a deep-rooted compulsion to find somebody - preferably somebody else - to blame.
There was widespread disappointment, for example, that the September 11 commission apportioned responsibility for the catastrophe so widely and did not name and shame an individual.
It would have been very satisfying to offload our fear and rage on to a single culprit, make him bear the burden of our pain, vilify him and drive him into the political wilderness. The trouble with this type of projection is that it makes all too easy to ignore our own culpability.
he worrying growth of childhood obesity, for example, has been laid at the door of advertisers which promote unhealthy food.
Certainly advertising has a case to answer, but even more at fault are parents who feed their children fatty, calorific food and fail to ensure they get enough exercise. And while cigarette manufacturers must take some responsibility for smoking-related diseases, so must those who persist in a habit known to be lethal. We may not make a ceremony of it these days, but there is still a lot of scapegoating about.
The scapegoat ritual was not unique to Israel. When Bronze Age Greek cities were threatened by plague, famine, invasion or internal dissension, they would sometimes project their fear and loathing on to a pharmakos, a sacrificial victim, often a foreigner or a repulsive person. He was adorned with garlands, paraded through the streets, whipped, driven out of town, and possibly burnt alive. He had become a polluted object, who epitomized everything the community feared.
Some scholars have explained the pharmakos in terms of depth psychology. The scapegoat represents parts of the "shadow side" of the personality, which the conscious self finds difficult to accept and feels compelled to destroy.
This may explain why George Bush and Tony Blair seemed obsessed with Saddam Hussein after September 11, 2001, even though he had no clear links with al-Qaeda or the destruction of the World Trade Center.
Saddam was an obvious pharmakos because he was undoubtedly a cruel, repulsive and polluting presence. But for many years he had been the protege of Britain and the United States, which armed him and looked the other way when he gassed the Kurds.
Saddam became an unwelcome reminder of aspects of Western foreign policy that were becoming embarrassing, because our support of such rulers in the Middle East has contributed to our present predicament. Saddam was our demonic alter ego and we needed to purify ourselves from this contamination, cast him out of the family of nations, and demonstrate that he was now our polar opposite.
The scapegoat ritual is rooted in a profoundly dualistic worldview. It makes it clear that while the pharmakos is doomed, all those who stand with the community are safe and pure. As Bush put it: "He who is not with us is against us."
The belief that Saddam's Iraq was somehow beyond the pale probably contributed to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by British and American troops. The invasion of Iraq did not bring the catharsis sought by our politicians.
Instead of feeling purified by the removal of Saddam, many people in Europe and the US feel polluted by the war and its aftermath. It has not increased our security, but made us more vulnerable to terrorist attack. But instead of learning from the mistakes of the past, it seems that Iran is about to become the new scapegoat in the war on terrorism.
In the West we take pride in our secular rationalism and yet at present we seem caught up in patterns of thought and feeling that are as primitive as those of the terrorists who attack us.
If we are to survive the present crisis, we must abandon the scapegoat ethos, which is becoming a habit at home and abroad, does not encourage self-criticism and allows us to project many of our own failings on to others.
Karen Armstrong is the author of The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (HarperCollins).
