Collective Guilt

 A friend of mine was describing his hypothetical plans for a future political career. He informed me that if, in this role, he were ever called upon to give a speech denouncing the human rights violations of some foreign nation, he would try to do so in a way that avoided any taint of American self-righteousness. How would he do so? Well, he would be sure to condemn the United States's own violations—current and historic—in the same breath. He gave an example of the latter: the cultural genocide the U.S. government committed through the use of federal Indian boarding schools—the legacy of which the Interior Department recently discussed and acknowledged for the first time in a lengthy report. 

He said all of this; and then I immediately put my foot in my mouth. "Why would you need to apologize for that?" I asked. My point was not to deny a sense of historical responsibility. I could see why someone like me—a white man—might need to apologize for the crimes of my settler colonialist predecessors. But my friend's antecedents had come to the country by quite different means. What did he have to feel bad about? My friend said it sounded like I was implying he didn't belong in this country. I said, to the contrary, he has more right than I do, since his ancestors were not implicated in the crimes we were discussing, and besides, if there was one form of belonging no one should envy, it's surely collective guilt. 

My friend explained that he wasn't talking about guilt. He was talking about shame. One could share in a sense of collective shame without believing that it conferred guilt. Suppose someone joins a company. The very next day, they learn from the newspapers that the CEO of the company has been arrested for defrauding investors. No one could say that the new employee is guilty. They were only just hired. They were recruited without anyone mentioning the malfeasance happening at the company's highest reaches. But they still feel ashamed by the association. In the same way, all members of U.S. society can feel a sense of collective shame about the country's past misdeeds—without being themselves guilty of them. 

Okay, good point. He won that debate. But it implies a related question that is interesting in its own right. Suppose we accept that every U.S. resident can feel a sense of collective shame about the sins of the nation. Is there not also—layered on top of that—something that really is more accurately described as guilt—and that attaches specifically to white people in this country, more than others? I grant my friend's point that shame and guilt are different things, that is to say. Shame is a feeling, for one thing, whereas guilt, in the sense of a moral liability, the state of culpability for having committed a wrong, can attach to people whether they feel it or not. And are white people not, in some—however attenuated—way, guilty?

I don't of course believe that there is some way guilt can be passed down biologically, or inhere in people by virtue simply of birth. No theological concept of original sin is intended here, particularly since any belief in the possibility of collective guilt in this irremediable sense carries a dangerous corollary of collective punishment—a grave human rights violation. This is not what is intended here, nor by most people calling for reparations or similar remedial measures, despite the caricatures of the far right, who try to paint all such calls for racial justice as a form of so-called "reverse racism" or "racism against white people." 

My point is that even if there's no such thing as a collective guilt that has the power to attach itself to people irrespective of their own volition, there might still be a sense in which nearly all white people in this country—as individuals—partake through our daily choices of a shared guilt. And this might be true even if we were not directly involved ourselves in any historic acts of enslavement, dispossession, or cultural genocide against Black or Indigenous people. What would this guilt entail? One can imagine at least two possible sources. We will call them guilt by omission, and guilt by benefit.

In his novel The Sot-Weed Factor, John Barth puts both of these concepts of collective guilt into the mind of his protagonist Ebenezer—a seventeenth-century English colonist in Maryland, who is contemplating the wrongs his people have committed against enslaved Africans and dispossessed Native Americans. The first guilt stems from his failure to condemn the wrong perpetrated against both groups of people. This is the idea behind the phrase "silence is complicity": the notion that being aware of a wrong and failing to voice any opposition to it is a kind of endorsement of it. As Ebenezer  puts it, he could "affirm the guilt even of white men who, like himself, had condoned [the situation] merely in effect, by not protesting it[.]"

Suppose, however, that one does protest it. Suppose one marches and speaks out, etc. Does that absolve one of the guilt? Well, it may take care of source of guilt #1. But Ebenezer names another a few pages earlier. He belongs "to the class of exploiters," he admits to himself. "[A]s an educated gentleman of the western world he had shared in the fruits of his culture's power and must therefore share what guilt that power incurred." This is guilt #2: guilt by benefit. The fact is that white people in this society have certain advantages that come down to us because of past wrongdoing. We "share in the fruits" of earlier acts of dispossession and enslavement. And benefitting from a crime is itself a lesser sort of crime. 

This is also the species of collective guilt that Nathaniel Hawthorne was talking about in The House of the Seven Gables. The book, interestingly, is entirely about the concept of inherited guilt—specifically, the sort that could be bequeathed from one generation to the next by transferring the ill-gotten spoils of an earlier act of dispossession. 

Hawthorne was very caught up in the idea that coveting real estate, desiring to possess land once belonging to others, could be a source of evil. This is obviously something that has as much—if not more—resonance with today's concerns as it did with those of Hawthorne's day. Yet, in typical 19th century fashion, the idea that this might have something to do with Native American land claims is never raised to conscious awareness. Rather, the prior dispossession in the novel is the result of religious persecution (a major Hawthorne theme, given his own distant family connection to the Salem witch trials). Here, a Puritan benefits from bogus allegations of witchcraft against a Quaker who has a desirable plot of land.

But the connection of all this to the land claims of America's first inhabitants was also somewhere in Hawthorne's mind, at the time he was writing. A deed granted by compact with an Indian tribe, ostensibly extending the rights of the Pyncheon family to a substantial part of the state of Maine, plays a significant role in the plot, and Hawthorne uses it to underline the absurdity of presuming to possess inordinate tracts of land that are already inhabited by other people (though it is the white settlers of Maine Hawthorne there had in mind, not the Native Americans). And we can certainly read Hawthorne's novel as an allegory, if we choose, for our own contemporary concerns about white colonialists' dispossession of Native peoples.

Let us read the Pyncheons, therefore, as an analogue to white settlers in this country, and to all the white people since then who have received privileges, advantages, and benefits handed down to us over the centuries because of their prior acts of dispossession and genocide. In what way are the Pyncheons all guilty? Granted that the original Pyncheon committed a terrible wrong (one that echoes in the experience of totalitarian societies in the twentieth century) by falsely denouncing a neighbor and using this bogus charge as an excuse to expropriate his land. Can he pass this sin on to his children by sheer heredity alone? Surely not—for that is to "punish the innocent along with the wicked" and is unworthy of any divine justice. 

But the younger Pyncheons do inherit the house and land that their ancestor wrongfully stole from the Maule family; and yet they do not give it back. And this could be a guilt in itself. Writes Hawthorne: "we are left to dispose of the awful query, whether each inheritor of the property—conscious of wrong, and failing to rectify it—did not commit anew the great guilt of his ancestor, and incur all its original responsibilities." Hawthorne's answer, implicitly, is yes; and here we are led back once again to the form of collective guilt #2: guilt by benefit. If we know that we have an unjust claim to something, and we don't give it back to the one with justice on their side, then even verbal protestations of the iniquity of the original act of dispossession do not absolve us of the sin of continuing to benefit from its spoils.

Notice, now, that by this definition, the collective guilt is not irremediable. Someone could, in theory, rid themselves of it by a proportionate act of self-dispossession. A Pyncheon could reach out to a contemporary Maule and sign over the house and land to their name; likewise, a white person could give up some of their property to the descendants of dispossessed or enslaved people (reparations, in short). The guilt does not inhere in people simply by virtue of being white, or of being a Pyncheon—rather, it comes from the fact of benefitting from prior injustice—and so it could theoretically be wiped out if people were willing to give up those benefits, or forswear a right to pass them on to their descendants in turn. 

The problem is that people very seldom do this. I certainly haven't. In Hawthorne's tale, he relates that one Pyncheon—a wealthy and eccentric bachelor—takes a few tentative steps toward doing so. He contemplates bequeathing the house with the seven gables to the Maules—to whom it rightfully ought to belong, even after the passage of many generations—rather than to his own relatives. But, Hawthorne observes, "there is no one thing which men so rarely do, whatever the provocation or inducement, as to bequeath patrimonial property away from their own blood." Obeying this pattern, the bachelor changes course at the last moment, and wills the ill-gotten gains to a nephew. 

In Hawthorne's tale—which he acknowledges up front to be a romance, and thus not bound by any obligation to be true to "real life"—the solution comes through a very-19th century arrangement of Providential circumstances that ensure that all the good characters end up happy and rich after all, and all the bad ones are punished. In an ending that ultimately fails to convince [spoiler warning here], the problem of the Maules' just claim to the property—and the fact that we nonetheless have grown to like some of the younger Pyncheons and don't want to see them driven out of house and home—is resolved by the hackneyed device of marriage between the two feuding clans. Maules and Pycheons are united in wedlock and therefore get rich together, and everybody wins. 

(Well—everybody good, that is. The evil people, and those outside of the main stream of the action, are duly punished or destroyed as the narrative demands. There is even a distant cousin who conveniently dies at sea, at just the right moment, forfeiting vast properties that would otherwise have been in his name, and delivering them over to our main characters instead.) 

Is there some way in which there could be a happy ending for the United States along similar lines? Can the crimes of the past be wiped out in a way that would make the loss minimal and the benefit mutual? I'm not enough of an optimist to find Hawthorne's solution to his novel's story anything but pat. You can't just count on the workings of Providence to deliver a solution that spares all the people we care about from any hardship. But I also disbelieve in zero sum and scarcity-based theories of human wellbeing. A rectification of a prior wrong doesn't have to result in the total deprivation of the people who have distantly benefitted from it, at least not in ways that wouldn't ultimately redound to their long-term benefit as well.

It seems to me that financial reparations would be such a mutually-beneficial solution. I can't see how they would be anything but ultimately beneficial for everyone in U.S. society. They might have to be paid for through higher progressive taxation (or lower levels of spending on other things in which we presently over-invest anyway). But precisely the same kind of investment of taxpayer resources was made in white families less than a century ago—through various New Deal programs from which Black Americans were often excluded in practice. Was the result of these government expenditures a net loss for anyone? Surely not: education levels rose, the economy expanded. 

An investment of the same resources in the families of people descended from enslaved Africans and the country's first inhabitants is not only morally incumbent, given their historic exclusion from these programs and the legacy of prior wrongs—it would also redound to everyone's benefit in the same way that the original New Deal and Great Society programs did: expanded access to higher education, economic growth, homeownership, etc. 

I believe that collective guilt, while real, is ultimately reducible by a process of analysis to the guilt of individuals—in this case, countless individual choices to either not protest injustice or to not forswear the benefits of that injustice. And being something that is tied ultimately to individual volition—even when it is the sum of the individual volitions of large aggregates of people—collective guilt can therefore be absolved by deliberate acts. Our country has yet to wipe out the ledger of its own historic liabilities, to be sure—but it could. And none would be the worse off for it. We can have our happy ending too. And no distant cousin need die in a shipwreck for us to get there either.