Conference quark::human_relations-v1

1027.0. "Collective guilt - an essay" by HOTJOB::GROUNDS (Was Groucho a Marxist???) Wed Jun 27 1990 00:03

                            THE JOURNEY UP FROM GUILT
                                by George F. Will
                            Newsweek - June 18, 1990
        
        Some developments that may  seem as different as chalk and cheese
        actually are part of a single change:  The middle class has begun
        giving up guilt.  This moral  movement, still gathering strength,
        is apparent in such disparate phenomena as  California's  primary
        and the career of Margaret Thatcher.  And  to any American making
        the journey up from guilt, there must be an amusing obtuseness in
        this  headline  from  The  Chronicle of Higher Education:  
           RACIAL TENSIONS CONTINUE TO ERUPT IN CAMPUSES 
           DESPITE EFFORTS TO PROMOTE CULTURAL DIVERSITY
        
        "Despite"?  Try "because of".  A multitude of sins are committed,
        and excused, in the service of "diversity".  They include reverse
        discrimination,    quotas   and  other  "race    (or    sex    or
        sexual-preference)-conscious  remedies" used to advance political
        agendas of guilt-mongering groups.  Indoctrination, dolled  up as
        regular  college  classes,  is  tacked  into students to  nurture
        "sensitivity" to the feelings of this or that group.   Censorship
        of  speech  is  inflicted  to  enforce sensitivity to the various
        victims of "historical injustices".
        
        To the surprise of no sensible person and the shock of  academia,
        all  this has the predictable effect of rubbing raw the relations
        between  groups.    It  encourages  individuals  to  adopt  group
        identities and group  thinking.  And some campus tensions reflect
        the fact that many  people  are  now  resisting being conscripted
        into the role of the  guilty.    The rhetoric of collective guilt
        has worn out its welcome.
        
        Kenneth  Minogue,  a  British  pholopher,  believes    that   the
        repudiation  of  collective  guilt  marks  a  historic   cultural
        turning.    Collective guilt has long been a  familiar  idiom  of
        contemporary  politics.    Many  middle-class  people  have  been
        brought  to see  self-vilification  as  a  duty  and  a  sign  of
        cultivated sensitivity.  But  they  are  weary  of  being on what
        Minogue calls a moral treadmill,  unable  to  avoid guilt even by
        leading blameless lives because guilt arises from membership in a
        guilty  society.  They are encouraged to  suffer  a  debilitating
        sense of responsibility for all social ills.  This is, as Minogue
        says,  an irrationality that involves, among other fallacies, the
        idea that we can be omnipotent over all problems.
        
        A grievance  industry,  specializing  in  rituals  of  complaint,
        produces  a  pseudopolitics    of  foot  stamping.    Society  is
        retribalized    into    prickly,    irritable,     elbow-throwing
        "communities".  That term, says Minogue, is a misnomer, as in the
        phrase  "the  homosexual  community".  This  usage  implies  that
        communities are especilally homogeneous groups, defined in  terms
        of  a  single  trait.    Proliferating communities of  victimhood
        assert  their  own histories and value systems to go  with  their
        grievances.  They nominate pantheons of heroes (hence anthologies
        of "gay poets" and exhibits of "feminist artists").  Universities
        are balkanized by the  multiplication  of  black studies, women's
        studies,  homosexual  studies, and so  on.    These  "disiplines"
        (another misnomer:  they often are  exempt  from  discipline) are
        produced  by  the guilt-based politics of acquiring  the  coveted
        status of victim.
        
        New   doctrines  are  minted  to  multiply  society's  collective
        transgressions, and  victim  groups, retroactively.  For example,
        Minogue  says, radical  feminism  licenses  an  academic  cottage
        industry devoted to reading history as a record of men's injuries
        to women.  Any modern  state,  says Minogue, can be analyzed (and
        delegitimized)  as  a  product  of  historic    injustices,  each
        demanding reparations.  Such demands dominate political  agendas;
        they  are  psychological  taxes  levied  by  professional victims
        against  nonvictims  who  have  inherited  guilt.  Politics, says
        Minogue, becomes  a  melodrama  about  the redemption of a sinful
        society, particularly the middle class.
        
        But  today  important   voices  dissent  from  the  doctrines  of
        collective guilt.  Thatcher  denounces the "bourgeois guilt" that
        people are pressured to feel  because  they  are  better off than
        some others.  Thatcherism is, among  other  things, a doctrine of
        psychological liberation from pangs of conscience about  material
        accomplishments.    Inculcation  of such pangs has been  high  on
        socialism's agenda.  Minogue believes another woman played a part
        in  emancipating  the  West  from  the  culture of guilt:   Jeane
        Kirkpatrick  talked  back to the United Nations, that diffuser of
        gaseous guilt, Reagan and Thatcher signaled wholesome impatrience
        withd ersatz guilt  by  withdrawing  from the United Nations most
        egregious guilt factory, UNESCO.
        
        Crime  rates:    Dianne  Feinstein  won  California's  Democratic
        gubernatorial primary, propelled by her  stand  -  horrifying  to
        guilt-drenched  liberal  Democrats  -  in  favor    of    capital
        punishment.  She is, whether she knows  it  or not, a third woman
        advancing,  and advancing because of, the repudiations of  guilt,
        the subject of punishemnet cuts to the quick of  any  policy.  It
        touches  people's  confidence  in  the  justice  of  their social
        arrangements and  the  correctness  of  the  doctrine of personal
        responsibility for behavior.    Support for capital punishment is
        shorthand for this sentiment:    Crime  is not caused by society;
        culpability    resides   in  guilty  individuals    not    flawed
        institutions.
        
        In the 1960s America's prison population declined from 212,000 to
        under 200,000, although crime rates rose.   By  1975  the  prison
        population had risen to nearly 240,000, but crime rates had risen
        much faster.  Then because of altered attitudes of  thousands  of
        decision makers  in  the  criminal-justice system, reflecting the
        civic culture, the  prison  population began to rise rapidly.  It
        rose to 315,000 in  1980  and  to  more  than 600,000 today, even
        though the rise in crime was slower in the dozen years after 1976
        than in the dozen years before.    It  tripled  in  part  because
        cultural  liberalism  was  waning.  America felt  more  confident
        about  punishing  because  it  felt less collective guilt  for  a
        crime.
        
        Freudian social theory holds that guilt produces civic virtue  by
        inhibiting  the  pursuit  of  private  interests, the rhetoric of
        "compassion" that fueled the growth of swollen welfare states was
        partly a product  of  the  culture  of guilt.  Then in the 1970s,
        from the Third World (one vast victim, according to "progressive"
        guilt instructors), came the oil  shocks  that disrupted economic
        growth  and  demonstrated  that  welfare-state  entitlements    -
        codified compassion - grow more surely than  the  economies  that
        must pay for them.  This provoked Western  publics  to reconsider
        where   to  draw  the  line  demarcating  social  and  individual
        reponsibilities.    This,  too,  is  part of growing up from  the
        politics of guilt.
        
        
        

    What utter crap!
    
    But thanks for that.  It was fun to read illogical histrionics
    served up as analysis.  The writer has a future (or past?) in 
    comedy:-)
    
    Liam
    

    I don't find it "crap" at all.  There's a lot to what Will says, though
    I don't side with his position completely.  I think he is right on the
    mark about why the tensions have increased so much lately, and in
    saying a lot of people are trapped by the notion of collective guilt.
    
    I think when reading George Will (or any of a number of columnists),
    one needs to keep in mind that they deliberately write in an
    "outrageous" fashion in order to get you to at least start to think
    about the issues.
    
    					Steve

    re: .1
    
    .0 Is NOT crap.  Try living on a college campus now.
    
    Shawn Fessler  Tufts U. class of 1991
    
    

    
    when did George Will become a Libertarian .. ?

    I had forgotten that I put this article in here.  Since that time,
    I heard Shelby Steele on MacNeil Lehrer say some things that sounded
    like he would (more or less) concur with some of Will's thinking.
    
    In a recent issue of U.S. News, I read that Ben Hooks (NAACP) is
    worried that too many young blacks have forgotten how to find their
    own boot straps.  Evidently there is concern about side effects
    of affirmative action.
    
    /rng

    I have to agree with .0

    Feeling guilty for something you cannot change is stupid.
    
    Trying to make someone feel guilty for something their ancestors did is
    evil manipulative exploitation.  
    
    But _pretending_ to feel guilty because you think society expects you
    to -  I'm sorry, I'm speechless - that is dumber than dumb! and
    dishonest to boot.
    
    When one of my fellow honkies says s/he feels guilty for the
    enslavement of blacks in past centuries, I lose my patience.
    
    Thomas Sowell has made the following points which I find convincing -
    
    	Holding blacks to lower standards than whites in our colleges is an
    effective means of discrimination and guaranteeing a racist society. 
    It gives blacks a degree that is recognizable as second-class.  Blacks
    need to be challenged more than whites to give them the inner resources
    to deal with the bigotry that still exists.
    
    I kind of think that we need someone like Clarence Thomas in the
    Supreme Court to detect gross miscarriages of justice in the name
    of liberal guilt salving.
    
    Dick