Via Ezra Klein (again) Ross Douthat of The Atlantic grouses about liberal guilt
Its political consequences aside, is guilt an appropriate response to the sins of your ancestors (whether biological or ideological)? Or is it a character flaw – a form of self-congratulatory scrupulosity? I’m not sure what my answer would be, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that the latter argument “doesn’t actually make any sense.”
Personally? I think a way more positive, not to mention effective, way to deal with ancestor issues is to think how much electricity you could generate from spinning your ancestors in their graves.
Me? If I had to deal with ancestral guilt then even with a lot of laudable ancestors I might be crushed flat. My great-grandfather was one of the authors and promoters of Christian Fundamentalism. His brother wrote the screenplay “Birth of a Nation,” for D.W. Griffith, based on his best-selling novels about the Ku-Klux Klan’s battles against reconstruction. His sister ghost-wrote the first best-seller Presidential assassination conspiracy theory book. They were born into a slave-owning family. Their father, an active minister who joined the new-formed Southern Baptist church after the real Baptists repudiated slavery, was in his twenties when he married their already-pregnant 13-year-old mother! (Note: For all my family history I’ve inherited a 42-pound stack of books and a little more than a hundred dollars. I don’t think anyone else wants the books.)
Anyway, my alternative to liberal guilt to spin them hard enough to replace every coal-fired steam plant east of the Mississippi.
One hopes other people’s mileage varies from mine ancestor-wise but the point remains: you could mope around the way we did in the sixties and seventies, or you can get out there as a progressive activist and really make your ancestors ashamed of you!
Submitted by 2188 (not verified) on Tue, 2008-05-27 19:44.
agreed. it's too easy to just sit there and say "gosh, what my great-great-grandpappy and his peers did really stinked, and i'm awfully sorry about that," and not try and do something to make the world a slightly better place than their actions (or inaction, as the case may be) left it. wallowing in guilt or shame of past generations strikes me as crying over spilled milk. ok, so there's milk on the floor. acknowledging that fact won't change anything.* what are you going to DO about it?
*well, not much, that is to say. denial certainly doesn't help anything, and only serves to make the problem--whatever it is--worse.
[Right! There's a difference between feeling guilty and taking responsibility. And the trick is that taking responsibility doesn't mean you had to have wrong-doing ancestors -- it's recognizing there's something that needs doing and choosing to do something about it. Thanks, nekobawt. --fl]
Submitted by 2188 (not verified) on Wed, 2008-05-28 03:54.
What I most often hear, is that "I am not guilty or responsible".
[I'm afraid that's the attitude of too many men about sexual assault (she *made* me do it because we're such *animals*) and maybe (because of too much browbeating and fearmongering) not enough women. Thanks, Five. --fl]
Submitted by 2188 (not verified) on Wed, 2008-05-28 05:59.
"replace every coal-fired steam plant east of the Mississippi" - I'm glad you're doing your bit for the environment figleaf:)
It's the right way to go, to do something that counteracts what has been done before, but I'm not convinced it should be a complete alternative to guilt/responsibility. We have the benefit of modern education/communications and hindsight which our forebears didn't have. I'm not convinced I would have behaved any better than any of my ancestors during one of the plantations of Ireland for instance. So some guilt remains even though they would never,ever approve of me.
[I think nekobawt put it nicely that there's a difference between guilt (and all the effort to parse out and assign or evade it) and *taking responsibility.* Thanks, A! --fl]
Submitted by 2188 (not verified) on Wed, 2008-05-28 06:43.
I don't feel any guilt over the slave owning part of my line; I do feel some responsibility, not so much because of what they did, as because, for all that they took the Civil War as a grave misfortune (and it actually was, to them, as some of their family died in it), their privilege, relative to their ex-slaves, didn't all go away at the end of the war, and some of it benefits me to this day.
I like your alternative to liberal guilt, though.
Also, this information was enough for me to find your great-grandfather's name. Sort of unsettling, to see that connection between early fundamentalism and segregationism; I wonder whether it was general or just that particular segment of fundamentalism.
[I'm guessing segregation was pretty pervasive and not strictly related to fundamentalism. That was an era, remember, when almost *everybody* in major cultural areas was segregated into their Little Italy's and Chinatowns as well as this sides and that sides of the tracks. It's just that because of charisma and religious connections my ancestors were in a position to help *steer* how that went. Thanks, Lynn. --fl]
Submitted by 2188 (not verified) on Wed, 2008-05-28 09:22.
I'm really enjoying these recent political posts.
I presumably have slaveholders in my lineage, too, based on the fact that most people with my last name are black. (I'm as pale as you can be without actually emitting light.) On my mom's side, my great-great-grandfather belonged to a Junker family in East Prussia - part of that crew of petty noblemen who revived serfdom after it was pretty much gone elsewhere.
Lucky for them, they can't be googled like your ancestors, figleaf. Holy moly, they managed to be on the wrong side of just about everything, didn't they? And they did it prominently enough that you can find them all over the web today! So yeah, keep on spinning them.
Which I actually think is what *responsibility* (as opposed to guilt) is all about. Guilt usually dead-ends in paralysis. Best case, guilt might spur us to keep thinking, but more often it becomes a substitute for doing anything real. Responsibility is forward-looking and demands that we take action.
Oh, and I would *love* to see that stack of books.
[Actually one of the *other* sisters wound up the first woman doctor in the South it's not *all* a blotched record... though come to think about it that's true only if you don't believe anything her brothers and other sister preached so... So good thing it really is about looking forward and spinning those who need to be spun. Thanks, Sungold. --fl]
Submitted by 2188 (not verified) on Wed, 2008-05-28 13:54.
A very brave post, figleaf, and an insightful one.
Guilt is not a solid foundation for activism, for the same reason that guilt is a poor reason to continue a marriage or friendship. When we try to exonerate guilt, our actions are designed to relieve us of a painful emotion. The welfare of the person we are helping is secondary at best. Guilt-edged activism like guilt-edged giving should be treated with suspicion.
But I also wonder if we would have acted any differently from our ancestors. In a society with far less mobility than ours and with severe punishments for speaking or acting against the accepted norms, the only way our forebears could have protested against what they saw as injustice (if they even perceived it to be injustice) would be to leave home and break away from their extended families. For those without wealth, there was no safety net. The frequent monetary crises and the lack of welfare programs meant that a farm laborer or factory worker spent most of the day keeping a few paces ahead of poverty. I do not think our "enlightened" status is due to an innate moral superiority, but simply because we were born at a different point in history.
[We all act inside parameters defined by the morals we grow up with, so yeah, chances are we might be down with, say, miscegenation laws but passionate about animal welfare (as one of my ancestors was.) One reason to study history, though, is not so much to avoid repeating it but to at least learn from mistakes we might have otherwise made ourselves. Thanks, Kochanie. --fl]
Submitted by 2188 (not verified) on Wed, 2008-05-28 16:45.
I have no idea who my ancestors are, beyond my grandparents, and I barely knew any of them. Nor has the families of anyone I have ever known been relevant to our relationship. It just doesn't seem very useful or important. Who cares if someone's great-great-great-grandparents kept slaves? You have 32 of them, and that was a normal thing at the time, so for a lot of people it would be astounding if they *didn't* have any slaveholders in their ancestry. Same with many other things. Fix the current issues (whether they be personal or societal), look to the past if knowing the origin of those issues is useful, but it's pointless to be guilty or even concerned about the actions of people who are now dead.
For perspective, there are still people in Japan today who discriminate against those discovered to be burakumin - people whose ancestors did jobs that were considered "unclean". Even if they have only one or two ancestors several generations removed. There are even private investigators whose main job is to uncover peoples' ancestries. How is that useful or helpful, exactly? That's the kind of thing that happens when people take guilt-by-ancestry too seriously.
["How is that useful or helpful, exactly?" It's a good point -- there's no escaping that if it's ok to research one's ancestors for laudable examples one must necessarily be saying there's shame in having bad ones... and if so then... yeah. I actually focus on my bad ancestors more than the good (another great-great-grandfather was a passionately anti-slavery activist and personal ally of Fredrick Douglass) but it's still a good point that there's a "dark side" to that Force. Thanks, Nightfall. --fl]