It comes up again and again. It surfaces in thousands of
articles, dramas, speeches, sermons; in millions of conversations and prayers:
we are responsible; we are guilty.
The West carries a presumption of guilt. Whence comes this
presumption? I was speaking to a committed Christian just recently and he
assured me that the doctrine of Original Sin is alive and well within the body
of Christ – His church. He even described it as the “guilty gene” as something
intrinsic to our nature.
Christianity has made a virtue out of thinking ill of
oneself; it has taught us to see ourselves first and foremost as sinners who
have the opportunity to find redemption through Jesus. This teaching has
engendered a widespread inclination in Christian civilisation to see the
acknowledgement of guilt and sin as the foundation of morality: to be moral is
to be aware of one’s fallen state; the more moral you are the more you are
aware of your failings.
There is a way out. The Christian can acknowledge his
inherent sinfulness, seek repentance, and seek salvation through the sacrifice
of Jesus. It’s a mind-boggling doctrine but there is a way.
The idea that we are fundamentally sinful and guilty has
been part of our culture for at least 2000 years. Are we to suppose that it has
left no impression? Surely not. I see it surfacing again and again. In
conversations with the politically correct and well-meaning it breathes like an
undying assumption.
One facet of political correctness is the notion that we owe
a debt to certain groups of people: those who can be seen as the victims of
past and present imperialism.
In a peculiar twist of reasoning we are deemed responsible,
guilty, of things done by our ancient forebears long before we were born. This
guilt is not personal, it is collective. We all share it and yet it belongs to
no-one in particular. There is no way to finally redeem oneself from this
guilt; it is simply there as an ever-present legacy of the past. We are guilty
by virtue of our membership of one group rather than another, regardless of our
personal conduct. Conversely, those belonging to victim groups are wholly
innocent and cannot be held accountable for anything. They are pure victims and
to suggest otherwise is oppressive.
We see this tendency expressed in the never-ending apologising
of the West, in the obligations felt towards the Third World, even towards that
nest of imperial vipers known as the “Muslim World”. In fact this nest of
vipers has learned how to play on this tendency very skilfully.
There is no escape from this guilt or its obligations
because it is collective and impersonal.
We have been taught to examine our behaviour from an early
age and some of this is a healthy form of taking responsibility for our
actions. This is quite different to the impersonal guilt of the collective.
The tendency to attribute guilt to the “we” often has the
effect of absolving the “they” or the “other” of any guilt or responsibility.
To suggest “they” bear any responsibility would be to undermine their status as
pure victims.
We saw an example of this recently when the odious George
Galloway said in the British Parliament that we were to blame for British Muslims going to fight for ISIS
because we had not been good enough to
them. Unfortunately this way of
thinking, even if not articulated so clearly, is very prevalent in the West, particularly on the Left.
This phenomenon is sometimes given the label “white guilt”. This
is indeed an aspect of it. However, the prefix “white” implies a mainly racial
dimension as if it applies to the treatment of non-white peoples. The
phenomenon is actually far more general than this and underlies the sense of
obligation towards any group that can be defined as “other” or “not we”.
Repentance is a major theme in Western culture. Within
Christianity repentance is a key element of salvation. Indeed, one can see in
psychological terms that there can be little possibility of personal change
unless there is a willingness to acknowledge where one has previously gone
wrong. Through repentance we achieve forgiveness in the sight of God. God loves
a repentant sinner most of all.
But in the collectivised guilt of the politically correct
how is one to repent? No personal wrong has been done to any particular person
so reconciliation cannot be sought there. Repentance thus tends to take the
form of taking the side of the “other” of showing solidarity with the right
victim groups or of doing endless penance through endless accommodation. By
identifying with “pure victims” guilt-ridden westerners can associate
themselves with their guiltlessness.
The “Palestinians” spring immediately to mind in this
context because they have been elevated to the world’s pre-eminent victim group
and all that this implies: unaccountability and guiltlessness. Those Westerners
who are fully signed up to the collective guilt paradigm enjoy any opportunity
to share in the “suffering” of the Palestinians. An especially egregious
example of this solidarity was shown in the placards bearing the slogans “We
are all Hezbollah” and “We are all Hamas”.
One approach to explaining the psychology of this behaviour
is to acknowledge the primacy of emotion in the mind. Jonathan Haidt describes
the reasoning part of the mind as a rider on a much larger animal mind which he
likens to an elephant. The elephant represents all the automated responses of
the mind: urges, feelings, snap judgements, pre-conscious perceptions and so on
which provide so much psychological momentum.
The reasoning part of the mind can forward plan and guide to
some extent but the elephant, in any given moment, has generally already
decided which way to turn and takes the rider with him. The reasoning mind then
provides the rational justification for moving in that direction, of adopting
that stance. What this means is that we will find explanations for our
behaviour that match the feeling-state we have.
If our feeling-state has a large measure of guilt, as many
Westerners do, we will provide explanations which are consonant with that
guilt. As Westerners many of us are riders of guilt-ridden elephants. We are
experts at finding justifications for these guilty feelings. They have become
tenacious aspects of our “nature” and culture.
The guilty feelings are there as primary mental facts. The
rational mind has to account for them and does so by means of thinking up spurious
notions of collective guilt.
