It’s all your fault!

Scapegoat

A History of Blaming Other People

by Charlie Campbell

Duckworth Overlook

In July 1840, the island of St. Kilda was hit with a torrential storm that killed many of the island’s fishermen.

Several days later, a bird washed up on shore. Called a Great Auk, the flightless, still-breathing bird was a rare sight on the island. Given the coincidence of its sudden appearance with their recent brush with disaster, it was decided that the bird must have been responsible for the island’s misfortune.

The Great Auk was therefore “put on trial, charged with being a witch and found guilty.” It was returned to the shoreline and stoned to death.

“Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People” — a title that could be amended to include “. . . and Birds and Animals and Other Silly Things” — is 191 pages long, and virtually every page is filled with such ridiculous, brainless episodes from humanity’s past that it’s hard to come away from it with anything but contempt for our species.

Campbell writes that the instinct to mislay blame for both unexplainable misfortune and our own misdeeds and bad judgments is as old as history itself.

“In the beginning, there was blame. Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the serpent, and we’ve been hard at it ever since,” writes Campbell, who refers to blame as “our original sin,” and notes that “one thing we will not do under any circumstances is accept ourselves as we are.”

Scapegoating began in early civilizations as a way to “remove sin from the community,” as it was commonly believed that “sin was a definite entity that could be transferred from being to being, or object, and that wrongdoing could be washed away.”

In ancient Babylon, they would take a human scapegoat — usually a condemned criminal — march him out of the city and kill him “to signal the beginning of a new year.” We have the ball drop, they had the head chop.

The notion of killing people to absolve others of their sins was shockingly common. In Albania, an insane slave was held in chains for a year, “anointed with oils, then speared to death. The sins of the people were then transferred to his corpse.” In Athens, if tragedy struck, two outcasts kept for just this purpose were burdened with the sins of the populace, then stoned to death — “one on behalf of the women, and one on behalf of the men.”

But these scapegoats had it relatively easy. The Greeks of Asia Minor employed “dwarves and the deformed” as their sinful doppelgangers, as they were “beaten ritually on the genitals to the sound of flute music, then burned to death.”

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