“It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?”
— Norm MacDonald.
History is never theory-neutral. This is especially obvious in the Derridean philosopher John D. Caputo’s contention that deconstruction, that favourite pastime of anxious perfervid sceptics, often involves merely repeating history differently. When we retrace various events and developments, history’s contingencies become so glaringly apparent that familiar tales are transformed. You don’t need fancy linguistic manoeuvres to deconstruct history, just point out those facts that most people leave out.
Such a retelling of history has started to take place recently, challenging the so-called post-war consensus. This has been happening in the West as a whole, but I’ve been especially aware of what this means in my homeland. It is my more immediate South African context that has helped me to appreciate two things in particular. The first is how necessary it is for the post-war consensus to be destroyed. Some forms of deconstruction are worth our time. The second, however, is the real possibility that what replaces this consensus can be worse or at least just as bad as the consensus has proven to be. Man cannot live on deconstruction alone.
Of course, the post-war consensus has been understood differently by different people. Such differences relate to interpretation, though, and don’t much contest the existence of such a consensus. To distil my take on this, I’d say that from before the Second World War, a certain openness imperative was already well established. After the war, the openness imperative ossified. It did not need to be sold or articulated as often because it became entirely implicit in how people thought of the West and their place in it. You didn’t need to say you were in favour of progress, for instance, because everyone was, or should have been, in favour of progress. The consensus meant, more or less, that the openness imperative became endemic in the plausibility structure of the Western mind.
Many boomerised and facebookified people today, many of whom are politicians operating on less than three brain cells at a time, still have a towering sense of optimism about the openness imperative. They are helped, no doubt, by the fact that so many around us intuitively feel that openness is a noble thing in itself. It is a compliment to call someone open-minded, for instance. They’re unprejudiced and willing to consider new ideas. In contrast, calling someone closed-minded is an insult. Such a person must be a bigot or a fascist.
But this intuitive connection between openness and social sanity has already been eroded, and the erosion is still ongoing. The Zeitgeist has been shifting for a while now, as you know. The metaphysical-phenomenological tide has been turning. Indiscriminate openness is more readily interpreted as evidence of nihilism and moral decay. People who stick to their principles—who out of sheer loyalty and fidelity fight for the good of their own families and communities—are starting to seem saner than people who take active steps towards helping their people and nations to commit suicide. It’s starting to look like openness and closedness depend on other values for their legitimacy.
Within the context of the openness imperative, history’s shape was nothing if not self-congratulatory. This should have sounded a warning. The story had a fair amount of historical backup, of course, and its mythification was helped by the fact that the chief villain in the story was a man so bad that his name is now more readily associated with evil than the name of the devil. Next to Hitler, almost anyone might be mistaken for being a good person, and any side that beat Hitler might easily be celebrated for being not just victorious but righteously victorious. How comforting it was to know that the goodies had put the baddies in their place. History became myth, and myth became incontestable fact.
To grasp the significance of this, it helps to know that myth tends to serve a particular function. As René Girard has shown, it primarily conceals what he calls the scapegoating mechanism or single-victim mechanism. In conditions of excessive collective conflict and rivalry, an urgent need for catharsis is generated. This invites everyone, still caught up in a contagion of collective imitation, to point all fingers at one victim—or, in some cases, a select group of victims. In theological terms, this mechanism is the essence of the Satanic, which I am also invoking here in its Girardian sense. Satan is pure rivalistic mimesis manifest in the crowd that resolves to enforce its unanimity by subtracting, even murdering, a scapegoat.
The fact that I am pointing out the nature of this myth is owed to the one grand narrative that reveals this scapegoating mechanism; namely, the story of the sentencing and execution of Jesus of Nazareth. As anthropologists like James George Frazer have noted, the story of dying and rising gods can be found everywhere, all over the world. The reason for this is that the scapegoating mechanism has proven to be profoundly effective. Being rid of the apparent source of the problem helps to create harmony among people united in their rage and thereafter united in their post-catharsis glow. And so, miraculously, the victim is soon perceived not only as the problem (the source of the disturbance) but as the saviour (the source of the peace). The victim is at once murdered and deified. In a word, the victim is rendered sacred.
Frazer thought the Gospel narrative was yet one more of these. What he missed was that the narration of the story of Jesus’s execution differs from the pattern we find in myth. In myth, the victim is seen as guilty—he is the enemy of everyone. In the gospel story, the victim is innocent. He is not the cause of chaos. And, as NT Wright has demonstrated in his remarkable study, The Resurrection of the Son of God, his resurrection is not merely psychological or metaphorical but literal. His response to those who participated in the mimetic contagion that ensured his unjust death is not to accuse and blame and seek vengeance, for it is Satan who is the accuser and vengeance-seeker, but to forgive.
Nevertheless, the reality is that not everyone internalises this. Even Christians struggle to address and suppress the human tendency to be pulled along in the demonic current of the mass. The escalation of imitation and the ultimate act of scapegoating is a pattern confirmed throughout history and explained by Girardian anthropology. The same formula of unanimity minus one will be found again, and again, and again, in all areas of human life—in gossip, cancellation, and, yes, even murder.
Just in case you think the last thing, actual killing, is uncommon in our time, just look at the degree of consensus we need to support the murder of unborn children and the euthanising of the infirm and unwanted. We have own own myths to conceal the fact that what we are doing is precisely what the ancients did. Our myths are more clinical, masked by different rituals overseen by a priestly class of liberal bureaucrats. We use ‘facts’ and ‘reasons’ and ‘technological progress’ to hide our violence from ourselves. We are nice. We don’t need saving anymore, because look at how lovely the world looks now that our violence has been thoroughly buried in the basements of our institutions.
I mention this because most forms of consensus rely on some or other scapegoating process or some process of ritual killing. This has undoubtedly been true for establishing the post-war consensus. The mythification of history has hidden this. It was the very mechanism at play behind Hitler’s transformation from a man into the chief devil—in fact, from a man into the devil’s substitute. The post-war consensus has been a mimetic consensus. The ‘rising god’ in this particular instance was a god we have given various names: liberalism is one name; progress is another; openness and globalisation, and the World Economic Forum are others. What rose as Hitler became the new devil is a multifaceted salvation structure rooted in yet another manifestation of the violent sacred.
Allow me to stress here that I am by no means intending to imply that Hitler was guiltless. Such a claim would be at odds with everything we know about the man. No amount of deconstruction can save him from his own words and actions. That said, he paid not only for his guilt but also for the gargantuan guilt of everyone else. At a certain distance, because his scapegoating worked so well, it started to look like he alone was at fault—and all of Germany along with him, insofar as its citizens carried out his will.
But, again, we’re increasingly seeing various contestations concerning the precise nature and shape of what happened, and amid such contestations are indications that perhaps the common reduction of World War Two to being a fight between goodies and baddies and that one Extremely Bad Guy in particular is mythical in the precise sense I’ve outlined already. It is mythical because it has enshrined a belief that no deal with the devil was struck to ensure the demise of the devil. But this was not true. Even the most generous interpretations of the events of the war result in a shocking realisation. To use the words of Jesus, Satan was employed to cast out Satan—sheer mimetic violence, in other words, ensnared the very people who wanted to drive out mimetic violence.
As the story is now becoming far more widely manifest, the West has its fair share of dirty little secrets, and no amount of Hitler-blaming can conceal this fact. Yes, Hitler was at fault. But he alone was not at fault. His devilry was mirrored by many of his opponents. As convenient as it may be to insist that we are so good because Hitler was so bad, it is also fair to recognise the obvious truth: good and evil co-exist within all of us. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory. Hitler did terrible things, but to pick just one thing, the USA dropping the worst bomb ever invented twice on Japan is hardly a morally neutral act—in fact, this is the very thing that Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film Oppenheimer ended up showing rather brilliantly. The amount of myth-making to make that egregious act seem like no biggie was pretty overt. At the end of the film, although it is not spelt out, the implication is that the very mindset needed to destroy the entire world was reified and rendered ongoing by the planning and making and dropping of those bombs.
The open liberal society’s tendency to sketch everything even vaguely conservative as fascist has largely been an attempt to keep the myth intact. And yet the endless finger-pointing has, in recent years, stopped drawing attention to what is being pointed at and has started to draw much more attention to the finger-pointers. What terrible guilt have they been trying to conceal? What sins have they been projecting onto the so-called fascists? What are we all hiding from?
Note that scapegoating has a unifying function. Even the collective murder of Jesus involves a clear collusion not only between the Jewish religious and political class but also a more subtle collusion of the Jewish political leaders and Rome. The gospel story spends most of its time focusing on the former, but the latter is ultimately made explicit. Well, in the case of the post-war consensus, the collusion solidified by the scapegoating of Hitler and Germany was between the liberal West and its leaders and the communists, under the leadership of someone perhaps even more villainous than Hitler, namely, Stalin.
Given this alliance, it’s not difficult to see why communism has tended to get a free pass while fascism has tended to become the chief signifier of deviance. It’s a mild insult to call someone a commie. The same isn’t true, despite the dilution of the terms, if you call someone a fascist or a Nazi. Communists, like liberals, were also the enemies of Hitler. And libs and commies have, in one way or another, tended to have each other’s backs—supporting their collective aim to obliterate personhood and nationhood in the name of some higher abstraction. Importantly, libs and commies have both benefited hugely from the openness imperative. Their scapegoats have been numerous.
The sometimes amorphous, often shifting nature of the transnational consensus has kept it alive for longer than many would have expected. At times, it has drawn more on Marxian thinking. At other times, it has been more Freudian. Later, it became more Freudo-Marxist, then more postmodern, and so on, as it has shifted its attention from imprisoning enemies in Gulags to marching through institutions, slowly but steadily working to convince everyone that this was all for progress. It has been hard to attack at times because this particularly monstrous, shadowy consensus—utterly demonic in its nebulousness—has been endlessly maleable, prone to showing a sweet face when accused of harbouring resentment. The post-war consensus has been a trickster from the beginning, equivocal and difficult to pin down.
But watch: this equivocal, nihilistic consensus is failing. And with it, the myth that Hitler could replace the devil as the archetypal image of evil has started to crumble. Here is where the warning must ring in our ears. For in times of chaos and uncertainty, Girard warns us, we are most tempted to give in to a mimetic crisis—a crisis of undifferentiation that would create yet another rendition of the single-victim mechanism.
Note something about the nature of Satan. Speaking ontologically, Satan has no being. He is entirely mimetic, like the two sides of a rivalistic war, endlessly imitating the other side in its desire for vengeance against the other, endlessly establishing chaos, then calming chaos by casting himself out. Satan is, to put it in almost materialist terms, the murderous mob—the turbulent mimetic mob that wants to quench its thirst for violence by driving itself out. Satan is endlessly opposed to himself. “He was a liar and a murderer from the beginning,” as Jesus noted.
As the post-war consensus disintegrates, the temptation has been to think that identity is a good in itself; that it can be autonomously achieved. But of course, identity depends on difference, as much as difference depends upon identity. Without being careful, people are prone to base their identities on yet another scapegoat. On the surface, this may seem like redemption, but to give in to the lie is to be ensnared in the same allegiance to the Satanic—Satan dressed in different garb but driven by the same envious, resentful, mimetic spirit. This doesn’t mean having a tribe is wrong. It means, rather, that the horizontal aspects of a tribe (mimicry of each other) need to be kept in tension with a genuine verticality (mimicry of the divine). True identity is cruciform, like the imitatio Christi—the imitation of the One who renounces all mimetic rivalry. If you die to self, you get to gain your life.
We are seeing, and will continue to see, many attempts to reintroduce the scapegoating mechanism as we suffer narrative disintegration. Cancellation of one kind will continue to be replaced by another kind. Scapegoating will continue until morale improves, although I sense it won’t improve while it continues. Some group or individual will be targeted, this week or next week or the week after, as people attempt to re-establish a new consensus. After all, Scapegoating has always provided a shortcut to identity and group unity. If you don’t know what you stand for, at least you can know who you stand against. And yet, here’s the crucial thing about this attempt to build identity on a void created by the newly obliterated scapegoat: it will not last long enough to grant stability. And that is precisely the peril of our time. What will replace the consensus when the dissensus has deconstructed the myth we took as true? After all, man cannot live on deconstruction alone.