Idealism, Identity Politics, and Guilt That Won’t Go Away
By Trevin Wax, TGC.
“Guilt has not merely lingered. It has grown, even metastasized, into an ever more powerful and pervasive element in the life of the contemporary West,” writes Wilfred McClay in his seminal essay “The Strange Persistence of Guilt.” This growth of guilt has taken place “even as the rich language formerly used to define it has withered and faded from discourse, and the means of containing its effects, let alone obtaining relief from it, have become ever more elusive.”
One might think in an increasingly secular society that when God goes away, so does guilt. But the reality is the reverse. When God goes, guilt has nowhere to go. It pools. Like a patient with internal bleeding, there may be no signs anything is amiss. But the danger remains.
Idealism and Identity Politics
As a fan of long Russian novels (Dostoevsky is my favorite, alongside Tolstoy, Turgenev, and the more recent writers Solzhenitsyn and Vodolazkin), I’ve been working my way through Gary Saul Morson’s new book Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter. This is Morson’s lifework, the capstone after decades of teaching Russian literature, hours of study and wisdom now distilled into a textbook.
Early on, Morson describes three types you often find in Russian literature: the wanderer, the idealist, and the revolutionary. His chapter on the idealist reminded me of some of the middle-aged and younger activists for social justice in the United States today.
The “disappointed idealist,” Morson writes, feels unresolved guilt for unmerited privilege. They see the world as divided up into categories of oppressed and oppressor, and while Russian literature focuses on economic and social class distinctions, today’s debates in the West focus more on race and gender. There’s an outstanding debt that must be paid if we’re to improve the conditions of “the common people,” and yet we despair when it seems nothing can be done to bring a lasting solution.
The list of things for affluent people in the West to feel guilty about is ever-growing, Wilfred McClay points out. There’s “colonialism, slavery, structural poverty, water pollution, deforestation.” No one is blameless. No one can be blameless, “for the demands on an active conscience are literally as endless as an active imagination’s ability to conjure them.” Some of today’s activism can be traced back to this weight of guilt, he writes, “the pervasive need to find innocence through moral absolution and somehow discharge one’s moral burden.” The only way to be innocent is to obtain the status of a certified victim or to identify with the victim in advocacy that will shift the moral burden of sin.
Reductionist Anthropology
The problem with overly simplistic classifications is that righteousness and unrighteousness don’t sit neatly in categories.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
