A few assorted, ill-organised thoughts on the virtue of guilt

Left to right: Professor Robert Cummings Neville, Mr Fitzwilliam George Alexander Darcy (as played by Colin Firth) and Mr Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

Recently I’ve been giving some thought to the nature of guilt, specifically the variant common among those in the American political centre-left. Sadly, the ‘guilty liberal’ has become a figure widely pilloried and scorned, even in circles friendly to the poor blighter’s own views. He is a caricature, this ‘guilty liberal’: this bourgeois, college-educated, bespectacled white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (or Unitarian) male with his late-generation Toyota Prius hatchback sporting a rainbow plethora of pithy bumperstickers deployed to the service of every good cause he can think of, who fastidiously recycles and eats local meat and greens (arugula, natch) from his local farmers’ market, who perhaps owns DVD copies of Princess Mononoke, An Inconvenient Truth and WALL·E (complete with environment-friendly packaging), who reads Borg, Zinn and perhaps Hobsbawm for fun, who gives to New York Times-approved charities and maybe wears L.L. Bean, Northern Sun-brand apparel (reading ‘Feminist Chicks Dig Me’ or something similar) and knockoff sneakers on his daily walk / jog (better than driving). But what has he done to be so mocked, this wretch at whom no one laughs harder than he himself when Jon Stewart (perhaps the only television the poor cretin watches) mocks him to his face from the screen of his green MacBook? It is a riddle. And perhaps he is worth a few good laughs. But guilt, itself – this is an interesting phenomenon, and not a new one. As my training is in religion and philosophy, perhaps that is the perspective from which I should best examine it.

The Christian understanding of sin is not too far away from the crux of this matter – that we all inherit a nature or at least an environment through which we are capable of doing terrible evil to each other and to the world around us, that humanity is created from clay, imperfect, short-sighted, rebellious and... guilty, and yet often of the wrong things. Humanity covers up its nakedness and its disobedience not just with fig leaves but with excuses. It has been confronted with prophets and a Saviour who dragged out into the light the worst in it, loved it anyway and tried to heal it – and it returned the favour by abandoning, betraying, persecuting, humiliating and killing them. Our own Gospel speaks to us, the scribes, the rich young men and the Pharisees, collaborators with the dominant Empire of our time, and (to use the delightfully censorious language of evangelical Christianity) convicts us of our sin. As Robert Neville, former dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University put it:

I am not a lawbreaker, violent, systematically deceitful or intentionally wicked (at least in big things); the personal sins I enumerate and confess that harm family, friends and institutions come from ordinary selfishness, self-deception, weakness, cowardice and perversity. All in all, not too good but also not too bad, because I was born into a loving and competent family, was well-educated, lucked into a miraculous marriage, have found a few deep friends, have held good jobs, have been either too young or too old to go to the wars of my time and have lived in a relatively stable and wealthy society with high culture to whose wealth and culture my family has had access. Precisely because of this modest but genuine goodness, I stand before God blood-guilty.

Neville goes on, marvellous process theologian that he is, to explain that his very physical being, socially-embedded, is built upon a predatory economic system which has been sustained by an environment which is still being despoiled and labour which is still being exploited, and perpetuated through wars waged in the national interest. When he says ‘blood-guilty’, he means it in the fullest of literal and allegorical senses – though one may not be guilty on a personal level, in terms of how one votes or the choices one makes in life, his ability to make those choices, the very foundations of his physical and mental existence were forged in this sin. It captures the imagination, in a sense that is perhaps narcissistic, and it can lead one easily to despair – deepening and thickening that sin as one wades into a veritable demonic quagmire of recrimination and self-reproach. Yet this is precisely where one doesn’t want to be and precisely where one cannot linger: the Gospel we receive as Christians is there to inspire rather than send one wailing and gnashing his teeth into the outer darkness at these realisations.

Perhaps the truly comical thing about the guilty liberal is how he bemoans his own uselessness and his own wastefulness as he begins to scratch the surface of these realisations, how, perhaps, he hides behind the quotes plastered on his Facebook page in order to divest himself of any real kind of accountability for what is done daily on his account. And yet, it is precisely his awareness of his own sin (paradoxically, thanks once again to his old Danish friend Søren – as he continues to refer to himself in the third-person, annoying all of his friends and gentle readers) that empowers him to ask the questions of how he can begin to choose to make himself accountable, before God and before his community, through the saving example of Christ.

Perhaps, dialectically, the distinction ought to be made between these related movements: the one which brings one to despair and the one which, breaking one down, brings one to question, to transform in a new understanding. The former, that which led Adam and Eve to cover themselves and to lie to themselves, to lose paradise in their despair, must by rights be called ‘shame’. But if ‘shame’ is the former, then the latter must be styled ‘guilt’. If I may be allowed one more 19th-century European conceit, though he declared himself ‘ashamed’ of his own feelings after being rejected by Elizabeth Bennet, it was not shame that led Mr Darcy to his reform, to his transformation into the gentleman Lizzy believed him incapable of being. It was guilt that broke down his pride, guilt that led him to set straight his past with Wickham before it destroyed the Bennet honour, guilt that led him to atone for interfering with his friend Bingley’s love-life by nudging him back into Jane Bennet’s arms. But all this without expectation of Lizzy’s returning his affections, only with the expectation of choosing to be the kind of man of whom Lizzy would approve.

But, this is enough existential musing for one night. I’d best quit before I start to lose real sleep over it.

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