Scapegoating the holy fool

Reading to expose the scapegoat mechanism

Some people are so foolish that they are holy.

They are foolish in the eyes of those around them because they:

(a) don’t paper over the fact that all our cultures are built on violence; at the same time as they

(b) refuse to follow all the “rules” out there that repay violence with violence.

They are holy because they are, by definition, set apart from their culture, and because their very foolishness is felt as a critique of the violent culture around them.

Jesus was foolish as he read out his Beatitudes and confirmed God’s blessing for the peacemakers, and for those on the abject fringes of society- the “poor in spirit”. Gandhi was foolish for keeping the Beatitudes in his back pocket as he framed his mode of peaceful resistance. Martin Luther King Jr was foolish for having a dream. Bishop Desmond Tutu was foolish as he made a safe space for people to share their story with their oppressors. Nelson Mandela was foolish for forgiving his jail wardens.

These people are foolish in the eyes of God, too, and in a good way. These saints serve a holy purpose:

God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are (1 Corinthians 1: 27-28).

These saints, these holy fools, are liable to be scapegoated by the rest of us. This is because their very life heaps coals of shame onto those around them, those who skirt the truth of their violent past. Society deals with the shame of its violent past by scapegoating the foolish, the poor in spirit, those that don’t buy into its grandiose cultural myth-making.

Jesus refused to paper over the violent history of his culture, describing a blood trail that went back in time to the original “foundational” murder, the murder of Abel by his brother Cain:

Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of innocent Abel to the blood of Zechari′ah the son of Barachi′ah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly, I say to you, all this will come upon this generation (Matthew 23: 34-36).

The philosopher René Girard (1923-2015) details our human need for a “scapegoating mechanism”, and how this has played out in religions across many cultures. Girard reminds us how intensely religious leaders sought to scapegoat Jesus. It is ironic that when the religious leaders begin to breathe their murderous intent towards Jesus, they had “recourse to violence, to expel the truth about violence” (Violence and the Sacred, 166). Jesus’ murder reveals to everyone the truth about the human tendency to scapegoat people with violence. This is how the truth “came upon this generation”.

Image: Cain Slays Abel. 12th-13th century mosaic, Cathedral of the Assumption, Monreale, Sicily

The Gospels let us know that Jesus was a holy fool who understood from the start that he would be a scapegoat, who understood that saving the world would involve submitting to the violence of his oppressors. Girard assets that Jesus exposed the scapegoat mechanism at play since Cain and Abel. Jesus’ murder is Abel’s blood crying from the ground.

In our contemporary society, we may not torture or kill the holy fool. (Or we may, as Yulia Navalny reminds us). But there are different forms of public ostracism at play, even in our “civilized” and “non-violent” societies.

Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu are sanctified now in the public imagination, but I remember that in my formative years in the eighties they were mocked and labelled as foolish and/or extremist, on the television and in lounge room conversations.

Girard notes that:

In the modern world out everyday, much diluted forms of social ostracism are generally based on ridicule.. We need only think of those social categories and individuals that provide the victims in scapegoat rites – vagabonds, beggars, cripples – to recognize that derision of one form or another plays a large part in the negative feelings that find expression in the course of the ritual sacrifice and that are finally purified and purged by it (Violence and the Sacred, 268).

My reading of contemporary literature hints to me that there is some “recuperation” of the holy fool. Not as a source of veneration or worship. But as a literary trope that an author might use to prize open the violent truth at the core of our human existence. To reveal to us how intent we are on obscuring humanity’s violent truth and distracting ourselves from it. To show us our eternal drive to banish the holy fool to the wilderness and to sometimes to push them off our cultural cliff.

The Anthill (Julianne Pachico, 2019) is a novel that grapples with Columbia and its history of political violence. The novel describes Lina’s return to Columbia, her childhood home, and her reconnection with childhood friend Matty, who now runs “The Anthill”, a day-care refuge for the street kids of Medellín. Lina fails to recognise Matty when she first arrives in Columbia. Readers are cued to understand that Lina’s childhood recollections have obscured Matty’s real-life face — the face of a scapegoat returned from the wilderness.

Lina runs a “leadership club” for some of the street kids at the Anthill, and in one of their meetings she directs the students to illustrate the story about the Grasshopper and the Ant. In a “democratic” impulse, Lina asks her students to decide together on the ending to the story.

In Aesop’s fable the Grasshopper character plays its cheerful music, rubbing its legs together, and enjoys itself while the Ant busies itself preparing for the winter. The ancient fable suggests that the Ant refuses to help the Grasshopper when the winter comes. However, contemporary retellings often show more sympathy for the Grasshopper, the ant community showing hospitality once Grasshopper has learnt a lesson about the value of hard work.

The leadership club’s illustration of the fable’s final scene shows Girard’s scapegoat mechanism at play in a violent, childish hand:

On the page, the grasshopper lies dead. Headless, liquid spurting from the stump. Red like the blood Lina left on Rebecca’s page all those weeks ago. She touches the scribbles, like she wants to wipe them away. The ants carry machine guns. They march in straight lines, surrounding the corpse (The Anthill, 234).

Lina’s leadership club illustrates how conflict is dealt with in their culture: the authoritarian purge of people on the fringes of their society. The ants’ work ethic and dedication to a common cause, driven by the fear of winter scarcity, is transferred to another common cause: the murder of an “immoral” enemy, the music-loving Grasshopper.

The Anthill describes a scene where the young versions of Lina and Matty make their own childish illustration – forming faces on their plate from rice and beans – as they listen to Lina’s relatives in the loungeroom discuss the growing military violence:

That’s all the paramilitaries were doing – cleaning the city up, washing it clean. For something to be clean, you needed someone to remove the garbage. The guerillas, the gays, the communist street children gathering cardboard. Medellín needed to be treated the same way you’d treat an anthill: pour water over it until all the filth is washed away, sweeping the undesirables of this country where they belong, out of sight and mind (217).

It's no divine accident, I believe, that Jesus was mocked for hanging out with the “filth” (“sinners”), and that the religious leaders called him a “glutton and drunkard” for enjoying their company. The people on the abject edges of society, the poor and the disabled, are the very people that Jesus will invite to his own ultimate feast. Jesus lets us know about his intentions in a story, the Parable of the Great Banquet. In Jesus’ story, the “filth” is not washed away, rather it is gathered together in order to receive a divine hospitality, and to live without fear of winter scarcity. Jesus is the holy fool who exposes our human filthiness, our propensity to kill the poor in spirit.

And now, to now – how does our society deal with the holy fools who expose our filthiness? With an urge to purge, to “purify” society? Or with an urge toward a divine hospitality? I am reading and thinking, feasting on literature in order to understand. And realising that Jesus understood from Genesis, from humanity’s beginning.