A Post On Guilt For Its Cultured Despisers

Some centuries ago, a German 'Romantic' (in the technical and not (quite) the Romeo-and-Juliet sense of the term; to see the precise difference, go to 'Romanticism' at www.wikepedia.org) called F. D. E. Schleiermacher wrote a book called Speeches on Religion for its Cultured Despisers, a sort of back-handed compliment (!) for his friends who felt that religion was an outdated bag of superstititions. Hell no!, don't worry, I am not going to throw at you any more of that religion nonsense out here; instead, I shall give you, in keeping with the spirit of the times we live in, a fully secularised 'theory' of Guilt that we can all be comfortable (?) with.

So what is Guilt? Guilt is the element of perversion built into both the personal and the structural dimensions of our existence as a consequence of which we are never able to attain the full conditions which we think will maximally promote and foster human flourishing.

Let me unpack that rather condensed statement. Our motives, desires, and wishes are immensely complex and are never quite transparent to ourselves so that the possibilities of self-deception are never far from the horizon. What that implies in turn is that we are always in the dubious position of simultaneously being 'sinners' and being 'sinned'-against (though we would usually like to believe that we are only the latter). The same timid office clerk who is shouted at by his obnoxious superiors in the local town office goes home drunk in the evening and shouts at his wife and his little children; the same leader of the ethnic community who claims that his group is being oppressed by the surrounding majority exercises a brutal hegemony over its members; the same woman who underwent physical, mental, and emotional torture at the hands of her mother-in-law now viciously pours out her internalised misery onto her daughter-in-law, and so on and on ... Nobody, in short, is absolutely free from guilt which encompasses all human beings in a vast sea of mutual responsibility in the face of one another.

Whether it is the dehumanizing and the depersonalising atrocities brought about by environmental degradation, international warfare, globalised deprivations, racial/gender discrimination, or political repression, we are all being slowly caught up in ever-widening reciprocal circles of implication, and we cannot simply pretend not to be within them. This means that we are never purely Spectators or purely Victims but are both at the same time, so that we are all enclosed in gigantic webs of collective guilt because of our failings before one another. Those who suffer from racial prejudice in a British inner city are Victims with respect to the majority white population, but they are also Spectators with respect to the starving children in Ethiopia; members of the Indian urban elite are (arguably) Victims of the forces unleashed through globalisation but they are also (arguably) Spectators of the desolation that these forces have left behind in their wake on the rural economy.

What is all of this meant to do though, this tedious insistence that none of us can claim to be able to come out of these patterns of human tragedy with untarnished hands and unblemished consciences? Firstly, it is a deliberate affirmation intended to heckle those who would like to congratulate themselves with the belief that they have somehow managed to reach the sanitised towers without any soiled clothes and muddy shoes. Those who deceive themselves into thinking that they are cosily ensconsced in a transcendent Archimedean point located far above the grim, bloody, and messy realities of history must be brought down to the earth, and shown how their ethereal existence is made possible through the horrific levels of human costs that do not show up on the digitalised screens of their speculators and their investors in 'human resources'.

Secondly, on the other hand, although it is not an invitation to throw up our hands in despair, nor an excuse for inaction in the face of the gross levels of deprivation and injustice that we see around us, it is also a reminder that we must move through the killing-fields of this world with fear and trembling, never knowing what new injustices we ourselves might be unwittingly, unknowingly, and unwantingly perpetrating on precisely those people whose distress we are trying to relieve, and whose conditions we are attempting to be ameliorate.

Thirdly, and finally, it is to stress how the virtue of Hope must always go with us as our protective-shield if we are to genuinely immerse ourselves in relationships of costly and painful solidarity with those who are suffering from various types of injustices, both personal and structural. We must remain alive to the possibility that there exists forms of wickedness and malevolence that no amount of human good-will can set right, and no acts of heroic solidarity can wipe out from this earth. And this is where that much-abused word 'God' comes in : we must continue to Hope, even in the midst of all the ambiguities of our existence, that there exists a Power that has the capacity of drawing us upwards by plumbing the infernal depths of human perversion and healing the brokenness that has radically corrupted the human heart. If we are religious, we shall give the name 'God' to this Power; if we are atheistic, we shall claim that this Power is identical with ourselves; what we cannot do, however, is to go into the living hell that this world is without being gifted with suprabundant resources of Hope.