The Black Ram
The Black Ram names a single social operation that has run for five thousand years: a community under strain transfers the whole weight of its fear onto one chosen victim, expels that victim, and takes the calm that follows as proof the victim was guilty.
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About This Book
A crowd screaming for a man's death in a Paris courtyard, a village burning a neighbor to explain a dead child, a priesthood driving a goat into the desert with the sins of a whole people on its back. These are the same act in different centuries, run by one machine that predates writing and works still. A community under real strain cannot bear that its trouble comes from inside itself, or from a cause too large to see, so it loads the whole weight onto one marked victim and drives that victim out. The relief is genuine, which is why the community learns nothing from it, and why it reaches for the machine again when the next hard season arrives.
The Black Ram follows the figure from the ram gods of the Egyptian Nile through the two goats of the Hebrew Day of Atonement, one killed and one sent into the wilderness carrying what no one else would carry. It moves through the Greek scapegoat driven out with stones, the medieval Devil, the tortured confession of the Knights Templar, the witch fires that consumed whole villages and their children, and the show trials and genocides of the last hundred years. David Boles takes the French thinker René Girard as his spine, and Girard's claim is blunt: a violence with no acceptable target will always find a surrogate one. The book tests that claim against five thousand years of evidence and a dozen civilizations, and the shape holds in every one.
Boles declines the two endings the material invites, the one that leaves the reader afraid of the mob and the one that treats the machine as destiny. The book closes on the people who jammed it with their own hands: Émile Zola, who named the lie in a national newspaper and helped free an innocent man; the Salem judge who stood in a meetinghouse and had his guilt read aloud over his bowed head; the priest who understood that torture makes anyone confess and wrote the book that helped end the burnings. Because the machine runs on human choice, which is the whole of its power, it also breaks on human choice. What it offers instead is the one defense that has ever worked against the ceremony: to know it for what it is while there is still time to refuse it.
The Two Goats
The word itself was minted by a translator. On the holiest day of the Hebrew year, two goats were chosen. One was killed. Over the head of the second, the high priest confessed the sins of the whole people, and the animal was led out into the wilderness to a place the text calls Azazel, carrying away what no one would carry themselves. When William Tyndale put the passage into English in 1530, he needed a word for the goat that departs, and he built one from two others. He called it the scapegoat. The rite was meant as mercy, a way to move a people's guilt out of the camp without another human death, and that mercy is the strange root of a machine that would later burn cities.
One Machine, Many Masks
The method is to set the cases side by side until the single shape under them becomes impossible to miss. A Greek city in plague feeds a beggar at public expense, parades him through the streets, and drives him past the walls with stones so he carries the sickness out on his body. Medieval France, deep in debt to the Knights Templar, tortures out of them a confession that they kneel to a goat-headed idol that never existed, and burns their last master on an island in the Seine. A German bishopric sends nine hundred of its own into the fire across a few years, until the majority of the burned are children. Different costumes, different centuries, one operation: a marked victim, a frightened crowd, and the calm after the expulsion that the crowd reads as proof.
The Ones Who Turned
Every account we have of a witch panic exists because someone, in the end, decided the whole thing had been madness and wrote it down. That is the hinge the last part of the book turns on. The scapegoat rite is old and strong, and its history could be read as a verdict that the crowd always wins, which the record does not bear out, because the record is full of people who stepped out of the mob and planted themselves in front of the chosen victim: the judge who repented his verdict, the witness who named the accusers to their faces, the writer who spent his own freedom to clear an innocent name. The machine needs participants, and a participant can refuse, and that refusal is what the closing chapters set out to prove is still possible.
Table of Contents
Front Matter: Copyright · Dedication · Epigraphs · Contents
Opening: Introduction: The Animal We Blame · A Note on Method
The Chapters: One. The Soul and the Sun · Two. The Color of the Dead · Three. The Substitute · Four. The Inversion · Five. The Slur · Six. The Panic · Seven. The Stone · Eight. The Enemy at the Gate
Coda: What the Cast-Out Can Still Do
End Matter: Acknowledgements · A Note on Sources · Bibliography · Glossary · Questions for Discussion · About the Author · Also by David Boles
The Epigraphs
“And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.”
Leviticus 16:22 (King James Version).
“When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim.”
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred.
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago.
A Note on the Free PDF
A book about how a frightened people turns on the wrong target should let anyone read it and weigh the argument against the cases it names, so the full text is free. The reading edition is a formatted PDF with embedded fonts and a clickable, page-numbered table of contents, one hundred eighty pages at six by nine inches, set for screen reading, home printing, or the archive. The whole book is here, front matter through the sources. Download it, read it, and measure the claim against the record it rests on.
Dedication
For Janna,
and for everyone a frightened world ever needed to cast out.
Author Interview
Further Reading
The Animal at the Edge of Town (Prairie Voice) · My Language Is Not English: A Deaf Educator Answers J.B. Mitchell (Boles Blogs) · The United States of Cowardice: Why We Cling to Authoritarianism (Boles Blogs) · Freedom Swims in Ink and Drowns in Dust (Boles Blogs) · About David Boles