Post-Prandial Philosophy

4. The Theory of Scapegoats

"Alas, how easily things go wrong!" says Dr. George MacDonald. And all

the world over, when things do go wrong, the natural and instinctive

desire of the human animal is--to find a scapegoat. When the great

French nation in the lump embarks its capital in a hopeless scheme for

cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Panama, and then finds out too

late that Nature has imposed insuperable barriers to its completion on

the projected scale--what does the great French nation do, in its

collective wisdom, but turn round at once to rend the directors? It

cries, "A Mazas!" just as in '71 it cried "Bazaine la lanterne!" I

don't mean to say the directors don't deserve all they have got or ever

will get, and perhaps more also; I don't mean to deny corruption

extraordinary in many high places; as a rule the worst that anybody

alleges about anything is only a part of what might easily be alleged if

we were all in the secret. Which of us, indeed, would 'scape whipping?

But what I do mean is, that we should never have heard of Reinach or

Herz, of the corruption and peculation, at all if things had gone well.

It is the crash that brought them out. The nation wants a scapegoat.

"Ain't nobody to be whopped for this 'ere?" asked Mr. Sam Weller on a

critical occasion. The question embodies the universal impulse of

humanity.

Tracing the feeling back to its origin, it seems due to this: minds of

the lower order can never see anything go wrong without experiencing a

certain sense of resentment; and resentment, by its very nature, desires

to vent itself upon some living and sentient creature, by preference a

fellow human being. When the child, running too fast, falls and hurts

itself, it gets instantly angry. "Naughty ground to hurt baby!" says the

nurse: "Baby hit it and hurt it." And baby promptly hits it back, with

vicious little fist, feeling every desire to revenge itself. By-and-by,

when baby grows older and learns that the ground can't feel to speak of,

he wants to put the blame upon somebody else, in order to have an object

to expend his rage upon. "You pushed me down!" he says to his playmate,

and straightway proceeds to punch his playmate's head for it--not

because he really believes the playmate did it, but because he feels he

_must_ have some outlet for his resentment. When once resentment is

roused, it will expend its force on anything that turns up handy, as the

man who has quarrelled with his wife about a question of a bonnet, will

kick his dog for trying to follow him to the club as he leaves her.

The mob, enraged at the death of C***, meets Cinna the poet in the

streets of Rome. "Your name, sir?" inquires the Third Citizen. "Truly,

my name is Cinna," says the unsuspecting author. "Tear him to pieces!"

cries the mob; "he's a conspirator!" "I am Cinna the poet," pleads the

unhappy man; "I am not Cinna the conspirator!" But the mob does not heed

such delicate distinctions at such a moment. "Tear him for his bad

verses!" it cries impartially. "Tear him for his bad verses!"

Whatever sort of misfortune falls upon persons of the lower order of

intelligence is always met in the same spirit. Especially is this the

case with the deaths of relatives. Fools who have lost a friend

invariably blame somebody for his fatal illness. To hear many people

talk, you would suppose they were unaware of the familiar proposition

that all men are mortal (including women); you might imagine they

thought an ordinary human constitution was calculated to survive nine

hundred and ninety-nine years unless some evil-disposed person or

persons took the trouble beforehand to waylay and destroy it. "My poor

father was eighty-seven when he died; and he would have been alive still

if it weren't for that nasty Mrs. Jones: she put him into a pair of damp

sheets." Or, "My husband would never have caught the cold that killed

him, if that horrid man Brown hadn't kept him waiting so long in the

carriage at the street corner." The doctor has to bear the brunt of most

such complaints; indeed, it is calculated by an eminent statistician

(who desires his name to remain unpublished) that eighty-three per cent.

of the deaths in Great Britain might easily have been averted if the

patient had only been treated in various distinct ways by all the

members of his family, and if that foolish Dr. Squills hadn't so grossly

mistaken and mistreated his malady.

The fact is, the death is regarded as a misfortune, and somebody must be

blamed for it. Heaven has provided scapegoats. The doctor and the

hostile female members of the family are always there--laid on, as it

were, for the express purpose.

With us in modern Europe, resentment in such cases seldom goes further

than vague verbal outbursts of temper. We accuse Mrs. Jones of

misdemeanours with damp sheets; but we don't get so far as to accuse her

of tricks with strychnine. In the Middle Ages, however, the pursuit of

the scapegoat ran a vast deal further. When any great one died--a Black

Prince or a Dauphin--it was always assumed on all hands that he must

have been poisoned. True, poisoning may then have been a trifle more

frequent; certainly the means of detecting it were far less advanced

than in the days of Tidy and Lauder Brunton. Still, people must often

have died natural deaths even in the Middle Ages--though nobody believed

it. All the world began to speculate what Jane Shore could have poisoned

them. A little earlier, again, it was not the poisoner that was looked

for, but his predecessor, the sorcerer. Whoever fell ill, somebody had

bewitched him. Were the cattle diseased? Then search for the evil eye.

Did the cows yield no milk? Some neighbour, doubtless, knew the reason

only too well, and could be forced to confess it by liberal use of the

thumb-screw and the ducking-stool. No misfortune was regarded as due to

natural causes; for in their philosophy there were no such things as

natural causes at all; whatever ill-luck came, somebody had contrived

it; so you had always your scapegoat ready to hand to punish. The

Athenians, indeed, kept a small collection of public scapegoats always

in stock, waiting to be sacrificed at a moment's notice.

More even than that. Go one step further back, and you will find that

man in his early stages has no conception of such a thing as natural

death in any form. He doesn't really know that the human organism is

wound up like a clock to run at best for so many years, or months, or

hours, and that even if nothing unexpected happens to cut short its

course prematurely, it can only run out its allotted period. Within his

own experience, almost all the deaths that occur are violent deaths, and

have been brought about by human agency or by the attacks of wild

beasts. There you have a cause with whose action and operation the

savage is personally familiar; and it is the only one he believes in.

Even old age is in his eyes no direct cause of death; for when his

relations grow old, he considerately clubs them, to put them out of

their misery. When, therefore, he sees his neighbour struck down before

his face by some invisible power, and writhing with pain as though

unseen snakes and tigers were rending him, what should he naturally

conclude save that demon or witch or wizard is at work? and if he cares

about the matter at all, what should he do save endeavour to find the

culprit out and inflict condign punishment? In savage states, whenever

anything untoward happens to the king or chief, it is the business of

the witch-finder to disclose the wrong-doer; and sooner or later, you

may be sure, "somebody gets whopped for it." Whopping in Dahomey means

wholesale decapitation.

Now, is it not a direct survival from this primitive state of mind that

entails upon us all the desire to find a scapegoat? Our ancestors really

believed there was always somebody to blame--man, witch, or spirit--if

only you could find him; and though we ourselves have mostly got beyond

that stage, yet the habit it engendered in our race remains ingrained in

the nervous system, so that none but a few of the naturally highest and

most civilised dispositions have really outgrown it. Most people still

think there is somebody to blame for every human misfortune. "Who fills

the butcher's shops with large blue flies?" asked the poet of the

Regency. He set it down to "the Corsican ogre." For the Tory Englishmen

of the present day it is Mr. Gladstone who is most often and most

popularly envisaged as the author of all evil. For the Pope, it is the

Freemasons. There are just a few men here and there in the world who can

see that when misfortunes come, circumstances, or nature, or (hardest of

all) we ourselves have brought them. The common human instinct is still

to get into a rage, and look round to discover whether there's any other

fellow standing about unobserved, whose head we can safely undertake to

punch for it.

"It's all the fault of those confounded paid agitators."