scapegoating and discourse

Also in the latest edition of First Things, Rene Girard gives an interview in which he discusses his new book on 19th century war-monger Carl von Clausewitz.  Finding that contemporary societal conflicts are founded in our increasing (but obscured) societal homogeneity, he claims that

When differences are suppressed, conflicts become rationally insoluble. If and when they are solved, they are solved by something that has nothing to do with rational argument: by a process that the people concerned do not understand and even do not perceive. They are solved by what we call a scapegoat process.

Similarly, Alastair MacIntyre has also noted the contemporary recourse to an emotive style of discourse; in moral theory and political discourse alike, 20th and 21st century Westerners have increasingly fallen back upon the language of grievance and of protest.  Declining to specify a rational moral framework (because we no longer actually have any such framework in common), we instead claim either individual or group rights which, we assert, have been violated.  When a designated party is (following Girard’s reasoning) brought to ‘justice’, ‘peace’ is restored, even though this party more often than not had little to do with the conflict at hand – wars being the most potent example of this irrational impulse at work (e. g., Iraq).

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