On Guilt

The Force Shaping Character, History, and Culture

John Carroll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429558474
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Guilt is the dark force behind haunting anxiety, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, life meaninglessness, and depression – a force to be kept in check. Yet guilt is equally our richest and most hidden resource, the essence of our humanness, and it drives us on to our highest achievements. Today, when individuals feel bad it is not usually because of something specific they have done. Rather, thundering around in the depths of their being is guilt: obscure, unconscious, yet irrepressible and ever-present. Where does it come from, what are its ways, and how might it be put to useful work?

This book explores the nature of guilt, shedding light on how the modern West came increasingly to understand it as 'the most terrible sickness'. It traces the psychological origins of guilt in each person's family, and demonstrates the historical rise of guilt in parallel with civilization. It examines the modern predicament: the difficulty of finding explanations for guilt in a secular, post-church society – and the possibility of relief from its curse, while channelling it into a fulfilling life. As such it will appeal to those with interests in sociology, psychology, psychiatry, cultural studies, cultural history, and anthropology.

1

The sense of guilt

Freud wrote his great reflection on psychology and life, Civilization and Its Discontents, late in his career, in 1929. The book pivots on his stated intention: ‘to represent the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the development of civilization and to show that the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt’.

In fact, Freud does not carry out his intention, but he does note that the peculiar relationship that guilt has to our consciousness is ‘as yet completely unexplained’. My aim, in On Guilt, is to make some modest progress along this obscure path.

The culture of the West has been shaped by guilt. From the crushing humiliation of Oedipus to the original sin of Christianity, and on to the depressive neuroses postulated by modern psychotherapy, there is a continuous, indelible thread. Individuals born into Western societies have lived under a shadow, driven by a hidden force.

New questions have emerged with the decline of Christianity. What happens when guilt gets out of hand? What hope is there for a people who experience increasing levels of guilt but who have lost faith in the beliefs that their ancestors used to explain why they felt bad; and to tell them what to do to ease their anxieties? What future, in other words, is there for a guilt-hounded people who have lost the culture that helped them to live, and are having trouble finding a viable replacement?

Once culture fails to connect individuals in a way that will allow guilt expression, to be worked through, and out, in the social arena, what can they do? Is it simply that guilt will be funnelled into meaningless obsessions and compulsions, or trapped inside, overwhelming its victim with depression?

Guilt is not merely the dark force to be kept in check – constrained and harnessed. It is our richest and most hidden resource, the essence of our humanness. The West’s Judeo-Christian culture has it that the constitutive act of the parents of the human race was disobedience, for which they were cast, guilt-ridden and ashamed, out of paradise. Their gain was self-consciousness and knowledge.

Indeed, Christian belief centred on the notion of ‘original sin’, right through its period of ascendancy, from Augustine in the fifth century to the Victorian era. Humans were regarded as fallen. Calvin wrote of original sin as a ‘hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature’. Christianity amplified the classical Greek tragic vision that posited guilt as dispositional – that is, lodged unyieldingly in human nature, constitutive of what it is to be human.

This book is about dispositional guilt. But it will diverge from the traditional Christian path, set by Adam’s curse of loading all humanity, and from the start, with culpability. The doctrine of ‘original sin’ is little more than a theological fiction. In what is to follow here, by contrast, guilt will appear as a psychological reality, not a religious abstraction, one that has increased relentlessly since the European Middle Ages, becoming deeply formative of modern human experience. The twenty-first century individual is born with a disposition pervaded by its grey cast.

With the waning of Christian belief, conjecture about guilt’s redemptive potential has also changed – no longer linked to Christ the Saviour. Dostoevsky believed that only the greatest sinners might become good – saints – and because of the enormity of suffering cast upon them by their guilt. Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote: ‘A sense of guilt is a person’s greatest asset.’

But the modern West has read guilt more and more as ‘the most terrible sickness’. Is this because the greatest asset has turned into a curse? To make progress, we shall need to understand the genesis of guilt, that is the historical circumstances under which it grows, and multiplies. We shall need to understand its roots in the family; how it is the young child starts to sense the presence of a dark stain shadowing its flickering identity. We shall need to understand guilt’s symptoms, the ways in which it manifests itself in individual behaviour, the fantasies it stimulates, and the varying cultural forms that develop to help people handle it.

We shall need to gain access to the foundations of culture – including religious beliefs, moral imperatives, and the shape of social institutions – to find out just how guilt fertilizes them.

The problem takes on daunting complexity in modern societies. The more guilt has been driven underground, the more elusive and corrosive have its workings become. Already, with Hamlet, the simple traditional moral world of Macbeth is left behind. Macbeth killed, felt guilt, and his guilt destroyed him.

Hamlet is quintessentially modern, in that his guilt is embedded in his character. Before he has done anything, he is guilt-hounded, and thereby paralysed from doing what he has to do; paralysed by anxieties the cause of which he has no inkling. The play Hamlet is driven by one question: why such an insightful man cannot do what he has to do, why he is reduced to the impotence of endless talk:

That I, the son of the dear murdered,

Prompted to my revenge by Heaven, and Hell,

Must (like a whore) unpack my heart with words.

The answer is guilt. But, for us, this answer is unsatisfactory, for guilt itself has become elusive. Where does it come from, how does it operate, and in what ways may release from its hold be won? The modern West has taken Hamlet to be Shakespeare’s greatest play, and largely because it focusses on the problem that most concerns it; that it senses lies right at the heart of its own moral predicament. One of our tasks in the work ahead will be to understand Hamlet’s guilt.

In nineteenth-century literature, no character could match Raskolnikov in being taken as the ‘man of his time’, the character that somehow embodied the problems of the age. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment opens with Raskolnikov bed-ridden, lethargic, withdrawn, irritable, and lacking any interest or passion. His symptoms are those of acute depression. We are given no explanation for this depression.

The first clue lies in the renewed life he gains as he starts to plan the murder of an old woman. The second clue lies in he himself engineering his own incrimination, suggesting his need to be caught, and punished. The third clue lies in the joy with which he looks forward to his sentence, in the expectation that it will redeem him, and he shall emerge saved.

Crime and Punishment, like Hamlet, is about guilt. The parallel is accentuated by Raskolnikov lamenting: ‘I talk too much because I do nothing’. Raskolnikov is paralysed by a guilt he cannot understand. It drives him to commit a crime in order to be punished, hoping that the punishment will release him from the cloud of amorphous, free-floating anxiety that encloses him. That he is misguided in his strategy does not change the essence of the novel, that it is about a guilt-hounded individual in search of a cultural form to guide action that might give him release from his torment.

No writer more fascinated the twentieth century than Kafka. It is a commonplace that Kafka’s driving obsession was guilt. His most typical character is Joseph K. in The Trial, who, driven by guilt, goes in search of a crime that he suspects he must have committed – where else could his guilt have come from? His case is a variant on that of Raskolnikov. K. too seeks to atone for the guilt that hounds him, but in order to be able to atone he must find out what he has done. This he cannot do, for his guilt is dispositional, indicated in the novel by K. discovering, once he becomes involved with the Law (interdiction, trial, condemnation, and punishment), that in fact ‘everything belongs to the Court’.

Kafka provides many metaphors and parables to describe the plight of the guilt-hounded individual. Gregor Samsa, in Metamorphosis, cares for his family (and especially his father) in a way that reduces them to impotent dependants; his resulting guilt turns him into a repulsive beetle. Only when he dies, does the family regain its dignity.

Raban, in Wedding Preparations in the Country, is tired and hypochondriac; he would rather lie at home in bed than attend his own wedding. The worthless individual in A Message from the Emperor spends his entire life dreaming of the message that will never reach him.

Kafka is the writer who has gone the furthest towards understanding the workings of modern, unconscious guilt. We shall rely on his work a good deal. At the same time, he raises the greatest challenge, by suggesting just how deeply infested is the disposition of the modern individual with guilt, and how difficult it is to gain access to its workings. We are in the position of Joseph K., who cannot get access to the proceedings of his own trial, and has to rely on obscure hints.

American literature is pervaded by the guilt theme. A golden thread runs right through its finest representatives, but it does not invariably read guilt as pathological. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great novel, The Scarlet Letter, explores the relationship between guilt, emanating from the sin of adultery, and passion. The most evocative of Hawthorne’s short stories, such as The Minister’s Black Veil, dwell upon what happens when guilt is an essential part of disposition – how does the person live?

After Hawthorne, there is Moby Dick – we shall have to return to what Melville called his ‘wicked book’, a guilt allegory focussed on a life-long wrestling with the monster of the personal deep. The guilt-strain in American literature is continued in the twentieth century, most notably by William Faulkner. His novel, Absalom, Absalom! unfolds as the story about the tragic consequences in guilt and retribution that follow from a father refusing to recognize his son.

In everyday life today, we see guilt writ everywhere. Mothers are judged badly if they feed their children junk food; dress them carelessly; fail to develop their skills; and don’t spend enough time with them. The same women are made guilty for not pampering their own skin, neglecting their body shape; for teeth that are not pearly white, for a house that is not spic and span; and even for being too rushed and tired, for not being happier. The stock tactic used by advertisements is to raise guilt anxiety, then soothe it – the higher the pitch of anxiety, the more effective the ad. Teenagers are haunted by insecurity, rooted in guilt over failure – fearing themselves stupid, clumsy, and ugly. There is environmental guilt over eating meat, wasting natural resources, and, at the extreme, finding the whole human race evil – culpable for the degradation of the good earth, and its plants and animals.

If we turn to the two great modern psychologists who chose to work in genres other than fiction, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, we find the same guilt preoccupation. Freud not only saw guilt as the key to understanding human consciousness, he read guilt as increasing in proportion to the advance of civilization – one of the main themes of this book. Nietzsche’s most systematic psychological work, The Genealogy of Morals, takes as its central theme the role of guilt in the development of civilization. Nietzsche writes of guilt as ‘the most terrible sickness that has ever raged in man’.

It is starting to look as if the entire life of modern Western societies – what people do, what they believe, and the institutions they build – can only be understood once it is recognized that guilt courses through the main arteries of the social body, both as life-blood and poison.

Here is our brief. However, we have a very long past, as individuals and societies. Slow change, through generation after generation, has led us to become who we are today. We shall need to scrutinize this past, and become familiar with its more important moments. We shall need to examine, and with some care, universal examples of what individuals under the sway of guilt do, and why.

This will not be an orthodox sociology, such as one might carry out on power, status, or class. We are not dealing with one of the columns of social structure. What is at issue is humanity’s sixth sense, the hidden force that commands what to do, and what not to do, that divides the world into good and evil, that takes individuals out of the vanity of being concerned with their selves, and makes them human.

Guilt is also a messenger from the past, lodged from birth in the bedrock of individual being, one which fatefully influences the future. Guilt is, at one and the same time, a psychological, a moral, and a metaphysical phenomenon. We shall need to ensure we don’t muddle these three domains.

We may well arrive at the point that the vital generative core and virtue of civilization is the sense of guilt. The question of guilt arises in everyone, and it demands an answer.

PART 1

What is guilt?

2

Definitions

Guilt is a type of anxiety. It is the anxiety triggered by the fear of conscience, before an act has been committed. It is also the anxiety triggered by an enraged conscience, following an action. This anxiety is the psychological result of individuals turning their own aggression back against themselves, usually directed by their conscience. Guilt is, in psychological terms, the anxiety that results from internalized aggression. Individuals who felt no inhibition in acting out all their aggressive feelings would feel no guilt. But they would not be human.

Moral guilt and dispositional guilt

Moral guilt covers the traditional or common sense interpretation of the concept ‘guilt’. It is tied directly with a breach of morality, and associated with a fairly simple sequence of events. A person acts, or contemplates action. The act contravenes their conscience – their sense of what they ought and ought not to do. Aggressive feelings are then turned back against the self, self-punishing feelings. These aggressive feelings may themselves have been a part of the action and been repressed; they may alternatively be part of the general energy that is involved in living; they may, finally, have been aroused after the act in question by quite different circumstances, but nevertheless are exploited by the conscience with respect to the first act.

Aggression turned against the self in this fashion creates the anxiety that I shall term ‘moral guilt’. All anxiety provokes defences, or attempts to lessen it. Moral guilt normally stimulates a need to repair, or make up, in order to remove the threat of retaliation, or to win back lost love; and to ease the punishing pressure of guilt within the individual self.

Macbeth is a case-study in moral guilt. Before he meets the three witches, Macbeth has contemplated murdering the king, but feels guilty. The prophecy of the witches that he will become king stirs his conscience: he becomes distracted with fear. Later, when he thinks further on the projected crime, he goes through the moral arguments against it: the king is his kinsman and his lord, he is a guest in Macbeth’s castle, and he has ruled with great humility and virtue. Indeed, Macbeth is so moved by his conscience that he decides not to go ahead with the murder.

Macbeth does go ahead, urged on by his wife. His guilt is extreme when he returns with bloody hands. Almost demented, he recalls a voice he heard crying: ‘Macbeth shall sleep no more.’ He is appalled by what he has done, wishing King Duncan alive again.

Repentance and remorse are only the first symptoms of Macbeth’s moral guilt. At times during the play, the strain disturbs his wits, as when he sees the ghost of the murdered Banquo, his old friend. He is unnerved and rules in a state of agitation, over-reacting to possible threats to his authority. His guilt undermines the qualities of courage and cool-headedness that had made him a great soldier, and, in the end, destroys his kingship. Only when all is lost, and in a kind of way he has atoned for his sins...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. The sense of guilt
• PART 1: What is guilt?
• PART 2: The cultural history of guilt
• Bibliography
• Index