Maha Shaikh

Ayoung man who has lived with different kinds of disadvantage all his life is elevated to a position of  influence and privilege. In this position he is exposed to consistent, merciless attack, until there is no way back. It ends in death. Summarised like this, it has an almost archetypal quality. The proverbial Martian observer would very likely catalogue it with the rituals of sacrificial scapegoating chronicled in many pre-modern societies – the outsider selected for both sacred dignity and ritual humiliation so that some existing order can be consolidated by an act of collective violence. One of the many things we ought to be reflecting on in the wake of the shocking and tragic events leading to the death of Jason Arday is the nature of the shaming rituals of modern culture, the careful gradation of verbal violence from judicious headshaking through to unbridled, annihilating, joyous venom. The philosopher Bruno Latour wrote that “we have never been modern”; it is sometimes alarmingly clear that we have never been “secular”. We still repeat the ceremonies of public humiliation and cathartic sacrificial violence. A debased media culture and the fever-ridden jungle of online comment are just another iteration of habits deeply rooted in human society-building. We should not deceive ourselves into thinking that we have outgrown any of this. On the contrary. The mechanisms of scapegoating are all around us – and are not confined to the political right. Well-meaning efforts to offset the myth of the scapegoat can easily end up colluding with the process. As has so often been pointed out, tokenism sets people up to fail. Unless change is systemic, thought through, and unless it is intelligent about risk, emotional cost and the specific vulnerabilities of individuals, it is simply sucked into the magnetic field of the sacrificial drama: exalt or highlight the victim, then punish and expel. Rowan Williams: The shaming of Jason Arday newstatesman.com/politics/so…