“The guilt didn’t just stay. It has evolved, even metastasized, into an increasingly powerful and pervasive element in the life of the modern West,” writes Wilfred McClay in his seminal essay “The Strange Persistence of Guilt.” This increase in guilt has taken place “even as the rich language formerly used to define it has withered and faded from discussion, and the means to limit its effects, let alone obtain relief from it, have become more and more elusive.”
One might think in an increasingly secular society that when God leaves, so does guilt. But the reality is the opposite. When God is gone, guilt has nowhere to go. He makes a pool. Like a patient with internal bleeding, there may be no signs that anything is wrong. But the danger remains.
Idealism and Identity Politics
As a fan of the great Russian novels (Dostoyevsky is my favorite, along with Tolstoy, Turgenev, and the more recent writers Solzhenitsyn and Vodolazkin), I’m working on Gary Saul Morson’s new book. Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter. This is Morson’s life’s work, the culmination of 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 rebel. His chapter on the idealist reminded me of some of the middle-aged and younger social justice activists in the United States today.
The “frustrated idealist”, Morson writes, feels unresolved guilt for untapped privilege. They see the world as divided into oppressed and oppressor categories, and while Russian literature focuses on economic and social class distinctions, today’s debates in the West focus more on race and gender. There is an outstanding debt that must be paid if we are to improve the conditions of the “ordinary people”, and yet we despair when it seems that nothing can be done to bring about a permanent solution.
The list of things that affluent people in the West have to feel guilty about keeps growing, points out Wilfred McClay. There is “colonialism, slavery, structural poverty, water pollution, deforestation.” No one is blameless. No one can be blameless, “for the demands upon an active consciousness are literally as endless as the capacity of an active imagination to supply them.” Part of today’s activism can be traced back to this burden of guilt, he writes, “the pervasive need to find innocence through moral exoneration and to somehow discharge one’s moral burden.” The only way to be innocent is to become a certified victim or identify with the victim in advocacy that will shift the moral burden of sin.
Reductive Anthropology
The problem with overly simplistic classifications is that justice and injustice do not fit neatly into categories. As said Alexander Solzhenitsynafter experiencing the horrors of the Gulag,
The line that separates good from evil does not pass through states, or classes, or political parties—but through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line changes. Within us it oscillates over the years. And even in hearts overwhelmed by evil, a small bridgehead of good remains.
George Yancey, professor of sociology at Baylor University, sounds a similar note, reminding readers of the distinctive Christian contribution to these debates: a biblical understanding of human dignity and depravity. Sin affects us all, and the historically oppressed can become oppressors if given the chance.
There is no one righteous
Returning to Morson’s Examination of Russian Literature, we find a common thread among idealists: an overly idealistic vision of ordinary people and their innocence—a vision that runs aground in reality when sinfulness and depravity appear among supposedly favored groups. Confronted with sin among the “innocent”, idealists retreat, but instead of rethinking their foolish support, they fall into a pit of “naval despair” due to their feelings of disgust at the impoverishment of the favored group and to themselves because they feel disappointment .
The end is not the establishment of justice but simply the ethos of justice. The guilt of unearned privileges is increasing, but now as the driving factor in the pursuit of justice, which leads to various spiritual and social ills. Advocates and activists end up adopting “any solution that promises psychological relief even if it does not help—or even positively harms—the victims on whose behalf they feel guilt” (145). Morson points to Levin, Tolstoy’s hero Anna Karenina, who says at one point in the novel, “The important thing for me is to feel that I am not guilty.” It is not the improvement of the poor peasant’s life that matters most, but the relief of the aristocrat’s guilty conscience.
Ugly end of idealism
If you walk down the path of disillusioned idealism, suffocated by guilt over immutable realities and intractable problems, you may experience something Dostoyevsky warned about: love turning into its opposite.
“Those concerned with motivating people to help others usually do not appreciate the risk of inducing guilt,” Morson writes. It’s a strategy that often fails. “Contrary to what we usually assume, guilt about injuries can make us even harder on them” (145). Morson explains,
We hate our victim precisely because he was the occasion of our tormented consciences and, in that sense, caused them. We must learn to forgive not only those who have wronged us but also those we have wronged. The danger of idealistic guilt and repentance-based politics is another lesson in Russian literature. . . . If an evil persists despite our efforts – as it always does – one can resort to unlimited violence against anyone perceived to support it. (146)
Guilt vs. Grace Seeking Justice
The problem with identity politics and any guilt-motivated recourse to justice is that the diagnosis is not deep enough, and neither are the solutions. The result is guilt-driven, a guilt-inducing show – everyone is enlisted in the grand drama of being on the “right side” of this or that group. Everyone plays a role.
But executive justice only takes us so far and often leads to more problems than it solves. As Christians, we must go deeper.
Our desire for justice is rooted in our being made in the image of a God of perfect justice. We seek justice not because we feel guilty, but because it has been bestowed upon us. We have awakened to the goodness of God’s creation and experienced his grace in redemption. Joy and gratitude free us to seek the good of others – their good, not our goodness. We are, in the words of Martin Luther, “As happy as happy because of Christ to whom so many benefits are given. and therefore it is work to serve God cheerfully and without thought of gain, with love that does not limit itself.’
Freed from sin and guilt, we are free to love not abstract “neighborhood” but real, flesh-and-blood neighbors. Not “humanity” but real human beings. We seek the benefit of others, not to appease our guilty conscience, but because we are the beneficiaries of divine grace.
No one is merely a sinner. No one is just a sufferer. Sin flattens us. Grace lifts us up.
Christianity transcends the frustrations of idealism and the reductive solutions of identity politics, offering a more substantial basis for solidarity and a more enduring motivation to seek justice in society. In a world of disillusionment, our pursuit of justice must bear witness not to the strange obsession of guilt but to the stronger power of grace.
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