After spending the majority of the book exploring how the Bible "flips the script" on the cycle of violence and scapegoating, transferring sympathy from the overpowering crowd to the overpowered victim, in the last few chapters Girard notes how our era fully embraces the love of victims. He's not just talking about the political correctness of the 80's and 90's (he wrote in 1999), but about a couple centuries of expanded rights and liberation. He fully acknowledges that much expressed concern for rights is more rhetoric than action, but that doesn't change the fact that the rhetoric has power in modern culture.
One particularly noteworthy point in our era of cancellation and Twitter mobs is that even when we fall into the habit of scapegoating that Christianity tried (and failed) to expunge, it's common to scapegoat people for being bigots who scapegoated someone else. Hell, just the fact that I felt it important to add the parenthetical about Christianity failing at its task shows how much this era is obsessed with sin and failing. I cannot quote every awesome point in chapters 12-14, but a choice few:
On scapegoating in the name of concern for victims:
We ferociously denounce the scapegoating of which our neighbors are guilty, but we are unable to do without our own substitute victims. We all try to tell ourselves that we have only legitimate grudges and justified hatreds, but our feeling of innocence is more fragile than our ancestors'....Indeed, we practice a hunt for scapegoats to the second degree, a hunt for hunters of scapegoats. Our society's obligatory compassion authorizes new forms of cruelty. (pg. 158)
On modern society:
The idea of a society alien to violence goes back clearly to the preaching of Jesus, to his announcement of the kingdom of God. This ideal does not diminish to the extent that Christianity recedes; to the contrary, its intensity increases. The concern for victims has become a paradoxical competition of mimetic rivalries, of opponents continually trying to outbid one another.
The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors. And our neighbors do the same. They always think first about victims for whom they hold us responsible. (pg. 164)
Indeed. The beam in our own eye and the mote in our neighbor's eye.
But that quote on page 164 also exposes the weakness of the book: He doesn't offer much explanation for WHY our increasingly secular society is even more victim-obsessed. He offers a few points about global culture, and the fact that as we strip away the supernatural the most important part of Christian heritage we don't have to let go of is concern for victims. He talks about how Nietzsche recognized this central concern of Christianity, how the Nazis ran with it, and how the rest of the world recoiled in (mostly sincere) horror. On one level we needn't be surprised that people recoiled from the Nazis in horror. On the other hand, look at how many empire-builders of the past are regarded in the modern era with, if not full adoration, at least grudging respect.
Some of it is surely that their victims are dead but their lines on the map remain, and the Nazis are still in living memory. But horror of the Nazis cannot explain every facet of our victim focus. Girard is a grand systematizer, an intellectual with a Big Idea. He needs everything to fit into that paradigm. I offer for consideration an economic and technological fact: Machinery changes so many social arrangements.
Women are less constrained by their (on average) smaller size and muscles, and slavery is even less profitable when control of machines is more important than control of human muscles. (But let's not forget that workers able to exercise freedom have always had certain productivity advantages, advantages that ruling classes had to squelch in the interests of their individual power rather than collective prosperity.)
In this era of liberation, concern for victims is inevitable and important. Scales are being rebalanced. And so in this era the loving, victim-cherishing aspect of Christianity (in culture and heritage if not always in explicitly professed belief) will prevail over the submission to a Lord and Father in heaven.
In short, Girard takes his theory a bit too far. He tries to make it everything instead of a significant piece of the puzzle.
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