Here are some sketchy notes, from memory, on what we talked about at the discussion.
The idea for the discussion came from my reading of a Rand-influenced book, "Guilt, Blame, and Politics", by Allan Levite. (Thanks for recommending the book, miss_breeziness ). We did talk about the way racial guilt and wealth guilt influence liberal politics. But a lot of the discussion focused on personal feelings of guilt, where they come from, and what to do about them.
There was wide initial agreement that the biggest source of free-floating unearned guilt is... altruism. (No surprise in a Rand-influenced discussion group.) Since no one can survive and be a perfect altruist, altruist premises always leave you feeling guilty.
The guilt/shame distinction was drawn along social lines, where guilt is more of an internalized judgment and shame is more of a reaction to the idea or fact of being found out by other people.
We drew a distinction between guilt in the objective sense, (yes, I stole the cookies), vs. guilt in the emotional sense (I feel bad about stealing the cookies).
We talked about types of atonement or restitution. Some talk of "pay it forward" atonement - as in the movie, "Amazing Grace," where a former slave ship captain went on to campaign against the slave trade. (He couldn't make restitution to the slaves who had died on board his ships, but he could try to stop the practice.)
We talked about forgiveness vs. acceptance. You often hear that forgiving others is something you do for yourself, so you don't make your own mind troubled by the process of nursing a grudge. But if someone you know continually lies to you, and hasn't apologized sincerely and tried to stop, it seems like all you can do is accept that they're a liar. It doesn't seem like it falls within the normal model of forgiveness. We also talked a bit about self-forgiveness, which, on its face, is a paradoxical concept.
We talked about survivor guilt, about the way guilt can lurk below the surface of consciousness, abut whether there was an evolutionary component to our capacity to feel guilt. We batted the nature/nurture question around. Are some more naturally inclined to feel guilt? How big a role does culture play? Which religious upbringing makes you feel guiltier - Judaism or Catholicism? We talked about the paradox that Objectivism holds guiltlessness as an ideal, but that Objectivists themselves sometimes are wracked with guilt that they can't live up to the ideal - some can even feel guilty about feeling too guilty!
Guilt seems to have a productive use - it makes you feel bad about things you did wrong so you stop doing them! But it is out of control in our culture, and needs to be hemmed in on a more reasonable basis.
Guilt
makes self-esteem wilt.
1 comment:
Thank you for the notes, John.
I have noticed that in the discussion of Pride in the essay THE OBJECTIVIST ETHICS Rand writes:
One achieves [moral perfection] by . . . never accepting an unearned guilt and never earning any, or, if one has earned it, never leaving it uncorrected.
It seems she is saying that although one had a moral failing in one's past actions, one could return to a state of moral perfection in one's character and rightly regain self-esteem.
Some years ago, I mentioned to Marsha that forgiveness was not a concept I had any use for. Since then realized that that was an exaggeration.
A few years ago, I had an unexpected, spontaneous experience of forgiveness. This was a singular situation. There had been a kind of wrong towards me (and my brother) by my Mom. A usual problem of the race: She had ended up favoring her first child, our sister. She loved us all, and that was clear to us, but still. Well, Mom died. At the funeral, I was the first to go up to the casket in the procession at the end of the service. I looked at her face, quite unexpectedly I forgave her, felt a relief, bent and kissed her forehead. That wound has remained healed.
Right, though, about the living. No sense for forgiveness without recognition of the wrong by the perceived offender.
Stephen
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