Elke spoke fluent
English with a slight German accent, was stereotypically blue-eyed
and seriously blond, and her dog was named Shalom, which means
peace in Hebrew. She could have been a poster child for the
phenomenon known as collective guilt, the emotion that compels
a significant number of individuals from all walks of life to
perform exceptional acts of kindness towards especially ethnically,
racially or religiously wronged groups. As a German, Elke experienced
deep horror and shame upon learning about what happened in her
homeland before she was born. Through her positive gestures
(reparations) extended to Jewish people only, she was de
facto assuming responsibility for Germany’s harsh
treatment of the Jews during the 1930s and 40s.
In The Question
of German Guilt, German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)
examines metaphysical or collective guilt from the perspective
of ascribing moral agency to all Germans who knew about but
did nothing to prevent the holocaust. He did not specifically
examine the legitimacy or authenticity of a future generation’s
guilt over atrocities committed in the past.
Why was it fashionable,
in especially the late 1960s and early 70s, for young Germans,
born after the war, to volunteer to work for free in Israel?
Why do many Whites go out of their way to help or be kind to
Black people? When rudely met with the smell of micturition
in one of our Metro (subway) stations, why am I ashamed that
the stink I didn't leave might dispose tourists to form a negative
opinion of my city?
In all three examples,
the phenomenon of collective guilt is at work, bidding the productively
moral individual to assume guilt for someone else’s crimes
and misdemeanors. But in choosing to act on what the conscience
bids, are we not conferring to guilt powers it doesn't have
or deserve?
The existentialist
will rationally demonstrate the absurdity of assuming guilt
for actions committed on someone else’s watch. With a
reductionist’s flourish, he’ll conclude: Before
I was born my father robbed the bank, therefore I’m
not guilty -- which answers to Descartes but shows itself
wholly inadequate to the irrepressible manifestation of the
guilt complex and its moral imperatives in the give and take
of daily life. Since its expression and operations are so widespread
and answer to so many historical situations, it’s perhaps
beside the point to inquire whether or not collective guilt
is legitimate or authentic. So let us concede to it a status
similar to the weather which is always there, in order to better
understand and manage it.
For better or worse,
we are rooted in the soil; our sense of self and self-worth
and reproductive prerogatives are primordially bound to the
concept of territory. We willingly gainsay the sacrifice of
‘good’ blood and the bloodletting of ‘the
other’ for the cause of territory. Every people’s
founding myth tells the story of a potentially annihilating
threat (variations on the biblical flood allegory) that is opposed
by a group of exceptional individuals who prevail over the threat,
thus earning the ‘unalienable’ right to invest themselves
in an inviolable territory.
Without place there
can be no beginning of anything other than the effort to define
a space for that beginning. Without place, there would have
been no flourishing of Persian or Aztec culture; their names
never would have been entered into the domain of speech. When
we speak of tribal, communal or national identity, we are referring
to specific events and hard won values that have been forged
in the crucible of place. The individual’s continuously
evolving sense of self emerges as a consequence of being raised
on a xenophobic diet of his culture’s founding narratives,
traditions, history, and great accomplishments in the arts,
science and medicine.
What German isn’t
proud to be associated with Bach, Dürer and Goethe? How
can Italians be asked not to sing the praises of the Renaissance
and Italy’s great engineering feats (roads, aqueducts,
churches)? But that is indeed what the existentialist is asking.
Since Elke didn’t write Bach’s fugues, she has no
right to take vicarious pride in them. By the same token, since
she wasn’t born until after the holocaust, she shouldn’t
wax guilty over it. But in point of fact she does, just as Whites
continue to assume guilt for their historical treatment of Blacks.
Which makes the issue of collective guilt one of internal consistency.
If I consciously decide to refuse or disassociate myself from
the ugly deeds of my country’s past, am I not obliged
to refuse its accomplishments? You can’t have it both
ways.
As none of us is
likely to find ourselves not rooting for our national sports
teams during international competition, the existentialist appeal
to ‘pure reason’ – that designates collective
guilt as the big feel-good lie we tell ourselves -- will have
no practical impact on real life. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre
(1905-80), who was unambiguously sympathetic to Jewish causes,
could not abide by the existentialist rationale in face of France’s
shameful collaboration with the Nazi’s during WW II.
Reduced to its purest
expression, the pride (and shame) we all viscerally experience
as it concerns our national identities is the inevitable outcome
of being born and raised in a particular place at a particular
time that can be no more refuted or denied than the decision
to breathe.
That we are inclined
to assume a quasi-proprietary relationship with our culture’s
positive past accomplishments speaks to the basic assumptions
that underlie human existence: that life is meaningful and purposeful,
and empirically demonstrable in the great chain of cause and
effect that links the events of the past to the present. The
modern-day bridge that proudly holds its arches high in the
sky owes its existence to the great inventions and discoveries
of yore, in metallurgy, physics, chemistry and engineering.
The bridge (the magnificent Jacques Cartier) that I embrace
every morning at the break of day is the sum and culmination
of millions of gestures, large and small, that allow it to stand
and endure as a presence in which I take pride for no other
reason than the common territory and ancestry I share with it.
No less than pride, collective guilt (shame) operates on the
presupposition that identity is the living issue of place and
the purposeful conjunction of time and time-honoured events.
Whatever can be
said about guilt, collective or otherwise, it is first and foremost
always experienced as something we wish to be relieved of. If
it fails to engender a movement away from itself in the form
of a self-effacing gesture, it goes to waste. X, wishing to
be relieved of his guilt concerning his people’s historic
mistreatment of Blacks, discovers there can be no relief in
the absence of real life, affirmative gestures. Affirmative
action is a first effect of collective guilt, and while at times
misplaced and punitive, the impulse is always correct in that
it recognizes that humans are not only capable of distinguishing
between right and wrong, but are transcendent and ennobled by
that distinction.
Given the increasing
interconnectivity of world culture and the erosion of traditional
borders and protective barriers, it is now possible to entertain
multiple identities as well as multiple guilts. Elke, from our
opening paragraph, can simultaneously identify as a German,
as a woman, and also citizen of the world, a fact that predicts
her collective guilt feelings will not only bid her to extend
kindnesses towards Jews, but to all the world’s people
who have been wronged by other human beings. We speak of such
a person as a humanitarian, for having assumed the burden of
the race. Perhaps this is what Nietzsche meant when he wrote:
“Tremendous self-examination, becoming conscious of oneself
not as individuals but as mankind.” (Will to Power)
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