While advocating voting based on skin pigment, Ron Rosenbaum champions the phenomenon of liberal guilt:
Since when has guilt become shameful? Since when is shame shameful when it’s shame about a four-centuries-long historical crime? Not one of us is a slave owner today, segregation is no longer enshrined in law, and there are fewer overt racists than before, but if we want to praise America’s virtues, we have to concede – and feel guilty about – America’s sins, else we praise a false god, a golden calf, a whited sepulcher, a Potemkin village of virtue…
Goodness, a moral crescendo is upon us. Someone fetch a towel. It’s heartening to know that there are among us some whose moral insights are so keen they entitle those so endowed to dictate how the rest of us should – must – feel.
Guilt is good, people!
Well, that rather depends on what a person is feeling guilty about, or pretending to feel guilty about.
The only people who don’t suffer guilt are sociopaths and serial killers.
Actually, while individuals described as sociopaths are generally unrestrained by empathy, some have been known to be moved by quite improbable, often ludicrous, things. Simulating feelings purely for effect is another common marker of sociopathy, and it’s possibly worth noting that such people also tend to be grandiose, narcissistic and insufferably self-righteous.
Guilt means you have a conscience. You have self-awareness, you have – in the case of America’s history of racism – historical awareness… Critics of Obama supporters who use the phrase “guilty liberal” or “liberal guilt” in a condescending, above-it-all manner suggest there’s something weak about feeling guilt.
There is a non sequitur here, one that’s repeated several times. An awareness of history – say, regarding slavery – doesn’t in itself necessitate feelings of any particular kind. It isn’t clear, to me, why a person should feel profoundly responsible for the actions of complete strangers who lived centuries earlier. Unless, of course, one subscribes to notions of some collective, genealogical guilt, with its infinite regress and connotations of collective punishment.
This particular critic of liberal guilt would argue that such claims and protestations aren’t “weak” as such, insofar as they require a great deal of effort to maintain. (For instance, saying “we have to… feel guilty about America’s sins” – followed by the words “a false god, a golden calf, a whited sepulcher, a Potemkin village of virtue” – isn’t an easy thing to do while keeping a straight face. Though the effort isn’t necessarily deserving of applause.) What irks isn’t feebleness, but incoherence and dishonesty. To publicly rend one’s garments over some vicarious, borrowed sin is not to affirm conscience or poignant human feeling, but to parody those things and to indulge in emotional pantomime and moral masturbation. Rather like this:
But was slavery not immoral? Was not the century of institutionalised racism and segregation that followed the end of slavery a perpetuation of “flawed values” that the nation should feel an enduring guilt over? Should we abolish the history and memory of slavery and racism just because they’re no longer legally institutionalised?
Again, note the car crash of non sequitur. I’ll paraphrase for clarity:
Slavery was immoral. It was abolished. Therefore we must still feel guilt, or pretend to – all of us, indefinitely and forever. And those who don’t pretend to feel this way are abolishing history.
Assertions of this kind are, very often, for the benefit of a sympathetic audience and thus, ultimately, for the benefit of the performer. As I’ve argued before, saying, very loudly, “it’s all my fault” is only a notch and a half away from saying “it’s all about me.” Rosenbaum goes on to claim,
People who lack guilt also lack humility.
Well, people who affect guilt and presume to tell others that they too should pretend such things are, in my experience, the really arrogant sons-of-bitches. That’s my objection to the nasty little vanity called “liberal guilt”.
Avoid feeling guilty; make a donation.
Like saying “social justice” instead of “redistribution” or “higher taxes”…
Well, yes, it’s part of the same fudge. Despite being used several times, the term “social justice” is never actually defined. But who could possibly oppose whatever “social justice” is? Surely only good-hearted people use terms like “social justice”? I mean, one couldn’t easily defend something called “social injustice”. Of course, if instead of “social justice” you say “redistribution” or “higher taxes” or “taking money from people who work hard and giving it to other people, some of whom don’t” – well, then you’ll probably get a more critical response.
When I hear the word(s) social justice I reach for my…………………. heavily thumbed copy of “Kapital”
There’s quite a lot of self-admiration going on here too, though, along with a lot of incredibly vacuous over-generalization about putative ‘liberals’ – a kind of liberal that’s never existed on land or sea. Liberals are for one thing simply assumed to be coterminous with and universally uncritical of the US Democratic party, but that’s utter nonsense. Yet the nonsense goes (self-admiringly?) unchallenged.
To return to the earlier point about cultivating shame and cultural self-loathing…
“A teenage motorist was told to remove an England flag from his car by a police officer because it could be offensive to immigrants.”
http://www.thisiswiltshire.co.uk/news/headlines/display.var.2288512.0.motorist_told_flag_could_be_racist.php
One might dismiss such stories as aberrations, and indicative of nothing much, except for the fact that they do keep cropping up:
“A black dustman has been banned from wearing a St George’s Cross bandana because council officials say it could be regarded as racist. Matthew Carter, 35, who was born in Barbados, used the headgear to keep his dreadlocks out of the way while he was on his rounds in Burnley, Lancs. He had done so for seven months before his photograph appeared in a local newspaper. A number of local people complained, and his superiors called him. ‘I received a verbal warning,’ Mr Carter said yesterday. ‘They told me the St George’s Cross was not allowed to be seen on any clothing we wear because it could be considered offensive and racist.’”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/21/ncross121.xml
Smugness and self-admiration? I guess that when one’s culture is defamed one is not allowed to defend it, much less point out that there’s much to admire about the West.
“a kind of liberal that’s never existed on land or sea.”
I remember the chants of “hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go” and so on. But you’re right in a sense: Those voices emanated not from dry land but from Cloud Cuckoo Land.