Guilt and Innocence

conscious and unconscious

It is universally true, I believe, that a politician cannot admit he was wrong. Nor, I suspect, can a manager in a corporate organization or government bureaucracy.

In a bureaucracy, according to Theodore Dalrymple, the key skill is knowing how to fix the blame.

When something goes wrong, the search is not for explanation or remedy, but for the lowest person in the hierarchy to whom blame can plausibly be fixed.

I think that aligns with René Girard’s theory that the sacrifice of the scapegoat is the means by which we humans resolve a divisive conflict.

We see this in the current Middle East crisis. If you back the Jews, the Hamas-led Gazans are, at least, led by the nose by Hamas. If you are a progressive wokey, then Palestinians are victims and Israelis are white oppressors. There are the innocents, and there are the scapegoats.

We Americans look back on World War II as the good war, when we single-handedly banished German fascism and Japanese aggression from the face of the Earth.

But whatabout the indiscriminate bombing of German cities and the firebombing of Tokyo and the two A-bombs? And whatabout the punitive Treaty of Versailles that humiliated and impoverished Germany, not to mention the Sykes-Picot Agreement that carved up the Ottoman Empire in 1916 and created the Palestine Mandate that started the current mess in the Middle East.

Never mind. We are innocent; those other guys are guilty. Our leaders are heroes; the other guys’ leaders are criminals.

But if you dig into any political narrative you find that the question of the bad guys and the good guys is not as clear as you were carefully taught.

And that is why the remarks of 1976 Senate candidate S.I. Hayakawa are so remarkable:

We should keep the Panama Canal. After all, we stole it fair and square.

Perhaps only an expert in semantics could have the effrontery to face the truth.

Or a philosopher.

It is interesting to me that Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden are represented as complete innocents. But then Eve was tempted by the snake and ate of the Tree of Knowledge. And God said, OK that’s it; you get out of here and go to work in the fields.

And notice that Judaism and Christianity focus on human guilt and the need to confess our sins and ask for forgiveness.

As a reader of Jung I would say that this is all about the borderland between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, not to mention the border between Order and Chaos. According to Jung, the same symbols recur again and again in religion: snakes, trees, sun and moon, holes in the ground, death and rebirth. Think of it all as a battle between the conscious and the unconscious.

And of course politics is the same, reacting instinctively to the threat of the enemy. Only, of course, as we are conscious beings we need to rationalize our actions. And thus it makes sense that, when war is upon us we regress to the pre-conscious world where we don’t think about fighting the enemy; we just do it. Only, as conscious beings, we need to rationalize our innocence, just as humans rationalized the state of Adam and Eve in their innocence at the birth of consciousness.

Notice how the innocence paradigm infects everything in our modern world. For the Palestinians, their innocence is proved by Israeli guilt. For the Jews, antisemitism and pogroms prove their innocence. For our rulers their virtue is proved by their valiant defense of the rights of oppressed victims.

It is interesting that the left, which grew out of a new world view superceding Christianity, has replaced the Christian culture of sin and guilt and redemption with a secular religion of oppressor guilt and victim innocence, and the way to redemption is by fighting for justice for the oppressed.

How do we make sense of all this? Good question.