The Invisible Worm
"Ancients and Moderns in "The Name of the Rose
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4846544 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Carl A Rubino (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1985 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 54 |
| Publication date | 1985-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | SubStance (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3685051 |
| OpenAlex | W2316232634 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 1 |
It is a curious but incontrovertible fact of cultural history, common to other cultures as well as our own, that when human groups reach a new level of development, they find it necessary to distort and magnify the shortcomings of their previous mode of existence. The formation of what Thomas Kuhn has called new paradigms does not come cheap: it rises from revolutions that involve the denigration and destruction of the previous order. 1 As Rend Girard has argued in great detail, we rely on scapegoating to overcome the periodic cultural crises that mark our history.2 The immediate past is not merely a rose that has lost its bloom; it is a dark flower, a poisonous growth that will kill us unless we manage to destroy it first. The previous order must be characterized as absolutely evil, the very cause of all our present difficulties, the quintessential obstacle to our survival and progress. Girard takes pains to demonstrate that the scapegoat mechanism is intellectually dishonest and extremely dangerous. It is at most a provisional means for temporarily tricking ourselves out of a crisis; but crisis will come again, and we seem constrained to repeat
Aesthetics · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Order (exchange) · Political science · Scapegoat · Scapegoating · History · Law · Philosophy · Violence, Religion, and Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,1 |
| Citation span | 1996 - 2026 (31) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |