What's Wrong with Liberal Guilt?
I was very pleased to see this Ron Rosenbaum column, as I’ve made a pretty similar argument with friends — I mean, would you rather people be incredibly stoked about the massacre of American Indians, or America’s history of enslavement and official racism? As Rosenbaum puts it,
Guilt is good, people! The only people who don’t suffer guilt are sociopaths and serial killers. Guilt means you have a conscience. You have self-awareness, you have—in the case of America’s history of racism—historical awareness. Just because things have gotten better in the present doesn’t mean we can erase racism from our past or ignore its enduring legacy.
Yet I think Rosenbaum misunderstands why conservatives have a problem with some forms of liberal guilt.
Shouldn’t conservatives feel guilty about slavery and racism and the consequences thereof, or must they disdain such feelings, however moral, because they are associated with liberals? Do they choose their moral priorities because of their popularity among others? That doesn’t seem like a conservative way of thinking about moral values. It sounds like a form of relativism. It’s the kind of thinking that treats values as a brand identity. Guilt over racism is not part of the conservative brand identity. The more shame if that be the case.
Rosenbaum goes on to wonder whether some lingering trace of Freudianism is behind conservatives’ anti-guilt posture. I think it has more to do with Pascal Bruckner’s The Tears of the White Man argument. Compassion can too easily turn into contempt. Guilt is appropriate — but how does guilt determine the lens through which we view our fellow citizens and fellow human beings? Are we more inclined to forgive certain abuses?
Remember when Hillary Clinton mentioned Zimbabwe when talking about her decision to remain the the nomination fight? This was obviously insane. Clearly she wasn’t trying to subliminally connect Barack Obama to, uh, Robert Mugabe. Even the Clintons aren’t that low or crazy.
But as it turns out, I know a strangely large number of Zimbabweans, most of them well-intentioned white anti-Zionist Third Worldist left-wingers, and I was reminded of the fact that Mugabe was once one of the most progressive, celebrated leaders in Africa. Believe it or not, Zimbabwe was once a model of racial reconciliation and good government in the region. At the same time, the press in Zimbabwe was very wary of criticizing Mugabe’s creeping authoritarianism, even before the clampdown on press freedoms. This wariness was inspired in no small part by a species of liberal guilt. There are those who believe that there is a similar danger in South Africa, which is why I am rooting for South Africa’s populist left — I want the trade unions to break with the ANC so the country can finally develop a truly competitive multiparty democracy.
The thing is, liberal guilt is in some sense admirable for an individual. Insofar as it warps and undermines our ability to evaluate political leaders as responsible agents, and our ability to evaluate members of historically disadvantaged communities as equals who deserve respect and equal treatment, it becomes self-defeating.
I don’t believe in white liberal guilt. I believe in white liberal status seeking.
I’ve never met a liberal who personally feels guilty about racial discrimination in generations past. I’ve met lots of liberals who feel morally superior over other whites, past and present, because of their proclaimed racial sensitivity.
See Stuff White People Like for similar examples.
— Steve Sailer · May 25, 01:35 AM · #
Do you think Ron Rosenbaum personally feels guilty about all his Rosenbaum ancestors who owned slaves in Alabama and fought the Indians in the Dakotas?
But Ron Rosebaum sure feels personally proud that he has a “conscience,” “self-awareness,” and “historical awareness.”
— Steve Sailer · May 25, 02:26 AM · #
The thing is, liberal guilt is in some sense admirable for an individual. Insofar as it warps and undermines our ability to evaluate political leaders as responsible agents, and our ability to evaluate members of historically disadvantaged communities as equals who deserve respect and equal treatment, it becomes self-defeating.
Like many people whose beliefs are, in their heart, purely academic, you deeply underestimate the real, physical threat that is still posed by the reactionary forces of the world, a threat against any and all thinking people. Matthew Shephard wasn’t killed by liberal guilt, black men aren’t dragged behind pickup trucks by liberal guilt, liberal guilt never called me wog and chased me out of a train station. But then, actual reactionary violence, like the actual loss of life and property that is decried by “well-intentioned white anti-Zionist Third Worldist left-wingers”, tends to cramp the style of someone who is meticulously crafting an identity based on “quirky” right-wing attacks on those naive leftists.
You’re doing just what you suppose you’re critiquing; the right wing insists on spending all of its time repeating the “yes, but” over and over and over again, but never has time for the “yes”. I find it funny that conservatives constantly bring up Hitler when it pleases their political sensibilities; it’s conservatives who find any mention of racism or discrimination beyond the pale. Who can stand against eugenics and ethnic cleansing, when conservatives condemn absolutely any claim of racism at all a mere vehicle for self-aggrandizement?
I’ve never met a liberal who personally feels guilty about racial discrimination in generations past. I’ve met lots of liberals who feel morally superior over other whites, past and present, because of their proclaimed racial sensitivity.
This is, of course, a way to leverage a critique of a position without actually making a critique. Is racism bad? Yes. Do you do everything you can to undermine opposition to racism? Yes. Everything else is chatter. For a man who likes to create a pseudo-scientific personae, you spend an awful lot of time avoiding the actual issue.
— Lifafa Das · May 25, 02:26 AM · #
One problem with Rosenbaum’s argument: he doesn’t leave any room for someone who grasps that historical oppression matters — that it sometimes even confers an obligation on the present generation to right past wrongs — but who also thinks it is nonsense to feel guilt for some sin committed prior to one’s birth.
Reihan asks whether his critics would rather that people felt awesome about the massacre of American Indians. Well no, of course not — but the options available to us aren’t “feels guilt for Trail of Tears” and “thinks Trail of Tears was awesome.”
The best critics of Rosenbaum will find it perfectly sensible that people are horror struck, outraged, spurred to action, etc. by past atrocities… but find it irrational that some feel guilt about them though they didn’t exist when they happened.
And while there isn’t anything particularly destructive about irrational guilt now and again, what is destructive is establishing the norm that a racial or ethnic or religious group is in any way responsible for atrocities committed by other people whose only similarity is that they happen to share the skin color, ancestry or religion.
— conor friedersdorf · May 25, 07:24 AM · #
I think your well-intentioned Zimbabwean friends are wrong about Mugabe and that their perspective is perhaps not a sign of liberal guilt.
From the very start of Mugabe’s regime there was authoritarianism. In 1980 he signed a deal with North Korea that invited them to train a special brigade of the army to deal with internal dissidents, basically the ZAPU. Even then Mugabe and his colleagues were declaring ZAPU ‘the enemy’. And preparing for the showdown that started in 1982. Fighters from Zipra, ZAPU’s armed wing, were removed from the army and declared dissidents.
They based themselves in Matabeleland and, in 1982, Mugabe told Parliament that ‘some of the measures we shall take are measures that will be extra-legal. An eye for an eye and an ear for an ear may not be adequate in our circumstances. We might very well demand two ears for one ear and two eyes for one eye.’
Mugabe’s Korean trained brigade (5 Brigade) were sent to Matabeleland North in January 1983 where they beat and murdered civilians and used arson as a weapon. Villagers were forsed to sing songs in Shona while dancing on mass-graves. Within six weeks of the start of this 2000 civilians were killed. Mugabe, in Matabeleland said ‘don’t cry if your relatives get killed in the process…Where men and women provide food for the dissdents, when we get there we eradicate them’.
By 1984 the campaign had moved to Matabeleland South (already the location of a drought) and Mugabe’s government effectively nationalised the relief effort and used food as a weapon. One Brigade 5 officer described it in this way ‘first you will eat your chickens, then your goats, then your cattle, then your donkeys. Then you will eat your children and finally you will eat the dissidents.’
Meanwhile the Central Intelligence Organisation, Mugabe’s secret police, were spiriting people away to army camps all over the country. In the 1985 election Mugabe sent his Youth Brigades (modelled on China’s Red Guard) and threatened Matabeleland again: ‘where will we be tomorrow? Is it war or is it peace tomorrow? Let the people of Matabeleland answer this question.’ By 1987 ZAPU was merged with ZANU-PF.
He started threatening and intimidating the whites in the mid-to-late 80s but didn’t really get going until the late 90s. All through the 80s the west desperately wanted Zimbabwe to work – $900 million aid in the first year of independence and the unofficial deal made by Mugabe with whites was if they stayed out of politics he’d let them keep some of their economic power.
It wasn’t white liberal guilt that kept people silent about Mugabe’s campaign against a part of Zimbabwe it was a desire to keep their own comfort and economic power. He was progressive in Shona areas and he was celebrated but that was because the international community didn’t want to know (liberal guilt, possibly, but the 80s weren’t a high-tide for liberalism in either the American or the British governments) and the more economically powerful whites in Zimbabwe had too much to lose, perhaps they just didn’t what one branch of their government’s decade long enemy was doing to the other.
— Shaun · May 25, 10:56 AM · #
I feel terrible about what those other people did! About what I do not so much. C.S. Lewis described this as indulging “in the popular vice of detraction without restraint” while feeling “all the time that you are practicing contrition”.
— Carter · May 25, 07:07 PM · #
It always struck me that the people who are most apt to promote white racial guilt are also the ones who are most apt to go into an apoplectic fit at the suggestion that whites should feel white racial pride. But really, what’s the difference between feeling shame for an atrocity you didn’t commit and feeling pride for an achievement that isn’t yours?
— Marc · May 25, 10:44 PM · #
I feel pride for the Revolution, for Normandy, for the Civil Rights Act, to be a part of what I believe to be a great country. Maybe I should not feel pride for my country; it was formed, and all those things happened, long before I was born. But I do. So why should a feeling of shame for the internment of the Japanese or the Trail of Tears be impossible? They were committed by the same government and institutions that I was brought up to revere.
An honest reckoning of your country’s history and role requires that you account for affronts, accomplishments, and mistakes. But people tend to focus on whatever reinforces their bias. Nationalist Japanese, of any age, talk about the atomic bombs and the prewar encirclement of Japan, but not the Rape of Nanking. People indifferent to the gap in living conditions between blacks and whites will focus on Tawana Bradley or OJ Simpson, but not <a href=“http://www.popline.org/docs/0022/199060.html”>the impact of discrimination on minorities</a>. People who think American foreign policy is bent on world domination with disregard of human rights view the bombing of Serbia through the prism of Guatemala, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the installment of the Shah, and Pinochet’s coup in Chile.
“People indifferent to the wage gap” consists of many, many voters and decision-makers, whereas “people who like to blame America first” consists of a few powerless academics.
Guilt itself, like pride, is useless and even dangerous unless it spurs responsible, empirical, results-oriented policy.
— Elvis Elvisberg · May 26, 03:12 PM · #
“And while there isn’t anything particularly destructive about irrational guilt now and again, what is destructive is establishing the norm that a racial or ethnic or religious group is in any way responsible for atrocities committed by other people whose only similarity is that they happen to share the skin color, ancestry or religion.”
This is the kind of Old World thinking that you see in Europe, the Middle East, etc. It is what keeps neighbors hating each other because of something that happened in 12 AD. It’s a style of thinking that should have no place in the US.
— lindsey · May 26, 05:04 PM · #
Agree with Conor and Mark. I am actually, to my certain knowledge, directly descended from at least one slave-owner (of German Mennonite extraction, of all things). I’ve seen the papers. I don’t feel the least bit of pride over this factoid, and don’t whip it out at cocktail parties, obviously, but I sure as hell don’t feel any shame over it. For a hundred personal failings and transgressions I can think of, for sure, but not for my ancestor’s. If Rosenbaum, a Manhattan Jew, wants to feel guilty on my behalf, he’s welcome to it, though I can’t imagine why he’d bother.
— ERM · May 26, 05:06 PM · #
Let me put it another way: my somewhat more distant ancestors on my father’s side used to round up people, including children, and burn them alive in wicker cages. My mother’s kin-folk sacked the Roman Empire and precipitated a Dark Age, which I frankly think has 250 years of chattel slavery beat. Being embarrassingly ill-versed in the history of the subcontinent, I don’t know what misdeeds Reihan’s people have perpetrated, but the foibles of Rosenbaum’s tribe are well publicized. When need we leave behind the twinge of guilt over these matters? Or have we already? And about human bondage in the Americas?
The essential character of humanity is bad. Our efforts are far better dedicated to developing a philosophy of the present to mitigate or avoid the atrocities of the future, than to lashing outselves on the back for past failings and whipping up resentment. The last danger is particularly acute in a country where the People are being constantly replenished (for the better, I hasten to add) by new arrivals, Rosenbaums and Salams, who nevertheless seem to the rest of us to have left their own blood-guilts at the shore, while not quite forgetting those of those of us earlier landed. We notice this.
— ERM · May 26, 05:28 PM · #
I am shocked, shocked, that Steve Sailer doesn’t understand the notion of having a conscience.
— Mike · May 26, 11:41 PM · #
Elvis, when you say you feel pride for Normandy etc., don’t you really mean you feel proud OF the United States? It seems odd to me to feel personal pride for something you had nothing to do with. And similarly, it makes perfect sense to feel ashamed of the US for its history of slavery, but a great deal less sense to feel personal guilt over it.
— Alex · May 27, 01:34 AM · #
Seriously, Elvis, we’re supposed to feel sorry for the bombing of Serbia; the country whose 1987 Academy of Arts & Science report, laid out the particular strategies that Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic undertook. Guatemala, has always had a turbulent internal history; google Estrada Cabrera in the late 19th century, or Ubico in the early part of the 20th; where there was precious American involvement in the regime. The Iranian
bourgeosie’s last minute action against Mossadegh’s foolist nationalizations; with some support from us. Do you realize that those same groups were opposed to the Shah for similar reasons. The Gulf of Tonkin deception is more on point; but it does not vitiate the NVA’s pushback against Operation 40. Pinochet, was a similar situation to the Shah.
— narciso · May 27, 01:45 AM · #
i don’t like rosenbaum’s column because i think embracing the word “guilt” is problematic. it lends itself too easily to facile refutation as seen above: “guilty? i wasn’t even born!” as a liberal i don’t feel guilty. but i do feel a certain amount of moral responsibility under my own reading of the social contract, which is a different thing. for example, i support affirmative action policies not out of “guilt” but out of a knowledge of the deep and grievous wounds of history and our society’s need to heal them in order to be healthy and not riven with dysfunction and resentment. that might mean that in some particular job-interview situation, i’m going to be at a disadvantage because of being a white male. that’s ok. i know enough history to know that on the whole, being born a white american male with college-educated is a pretty good roll of the dice and i oughta be able to take care of myself.
none of this has to do with “guilt,” but it does have to do with my willing participation in a society that until very recently — within the living memory of a lot of americans — bestowed huge unearned advantages on people who looked like me, the vestiges of which i have continued to benefit from and my white male children will too. and those benefits were bought to some degree at the expense of the deliberate disenfranchisement of other people. i didn’t do that and i don’t feel “guilty” about it, but i do recognize it and understand it and i feel some moral responsibility to help ameliorate it to some degree. some people don’t feel that responsibility, or feel it and resent it, or just run from it altogether, which are all choices people can make. but for me the key word is responsibility, not guilt.
— white man · May 27, 04:01 AM · #
Ron Rosenbaum wants you to know that if he personally had any ancestors who owned slaves or fought Indians, then he, personally, would feel just awful about it, and you should too.
— Steve Sailer · May 27, 06:28 AM · #
Everyone is getting hung up on the word guilt here. In an important way Rosenbaum (and hated liberals in general) use guilt as a stand-in for concern and desire to correct injustice. This is a serious mistake. What is seen as a willingness to feel guilt is really a willingness to take responsibility for the state of things.
So why the hatred and bile against this feeling from the right. To some extent its an extension of 90’s Clinton hatred — just because Bill Clinton bit his lip and acted guilty, the right decided the sum total of the liberal position is false. In part its due to head-in-the-sand types like Bill Kristol who urge “let’s not and say we did” to calls for a dialog on race. Kristol doesn’t see racism as relevant in 21st century America, so it doesn’t exist. I am being generous here — for all I know he does see it and just doesn’t want to deal with it. If I may borrow a line from one of the fine contributors to today’s discussion — “Is racism bad? Yes. Do you do everything you can to undermine opposition to racism? Yes.” This is the stock conservative position on most issues affecting us today, and frankly, its the main reason for the re-ascendancy of liberalism. The conservative movement’s essential negativity has created a vacuum of refusal — refusal to deal with the realities of the world we find ourselves in. Getting hung up on the word guilt is just more of the same.— not guily liberal white guy · May 27, 10:31 PM · #