RACIAL TENSIONS CONTINUE TO ERUPT ON CAMPUSES
DESPITE EFFORTS TO PROMOTE CULTURAL DIVERSITY
“Despite”? Try “because of.” A multitude of sins are committed, and excused, in the service of “diversity.” They include reverse discrimination, quotas and other “race (or sex or sexual-preference)-conscious remedies” used to advance political agendas of guilt-mongering groups. Indoctrination, dolled up as regular college classes, is tacked into students to nurture “sensitivity” to the feelings of this or that group. Censorship of speech is inflicted to enforce sensitivity to the various victims of “historical injustices.”
To the surprise of no sensible person, and the shock of academia, all this has the predictable effect of rubbing raw the relations between groups. It encourages individuals to adopt group identities and group thinking. And some campus tensions reflect the fact that many people are now resisting being conscripted into the role of the guilty. The rhetoric of collective guilt has worn out its welcome.
Kenneth Minogue, a British philosopher, believes that the repudiation of collective guilt marks a historic cultural turning. Collective guilt has long been a familiar idiom of contemporary politics. Many middle-class people have been brought to see self-vilification as a duty and a sign of cultivated sensitivity. But they are weary of being on what Minogue calls a moral treadmill, unable to avoid guilt even by leading blameless lives because guilt arises from membership in a guilty society. They are encouraged to suffer a debilitating sense of responsibility for all social ills. This is, as Minogue says, an irrationality that involves, among other fallacies, the idea that we can be omnipotent over all problems.
A grievance industry, specializing in rituals of complaint, produces a pseudopolitics of foot stamping. Society is retribalized into prickly, irritable, elbow-throwing :“communities.” That term, says Minogue, is a misnomer, as in the phrase “the homosexual community.” This usage implies that communities are especially homogeneous groups, defined in terms of a single trait. Proliferating communities of victimhood assert their own histories and value systems to go with their grievances. They nominate pantheons of heroes (hence anthologies of “gay poets” and exhibits of “feminist artists”). Universities are balkanized by the multiplication of black studies, women’s studies, homosexual studies, and so on. These “disciplines” (another misnomer: they often are exempt from discipline) are produced by the guilt-based politics of acquiring the coveted status of victim.
New doctrines are minted to multiply society’s collective transgressions, and victim groups, retroactively. For example, Minogue says, radical feminism licenses an academic cottage industry devoted to reading history as a record of men’s injuries to women. Any modern state, says Minogue, can be analyzed (and delegitimized) as a product of historic injustices, each demanding reparations. Such demands dominate political agendas; they are psychological taxes levied by professional victims against nonvictims who have inherited guilt. Politics, says Minogue, becomes a melodrama about the redemption of a sinful society, particularly the middle class.
But today important voices dissent from the doctrines of collective guilt. Thatcher denounces the “bourgeois guilt” that people are pressured to feel because they are better off than some others. Thatcherism is, among other things, a doctrine of psychological liberation from pangs of conscience about material accomplishments. Inculcation of such pangs has been high on socialism’s agenda. Minogue believes another woman played a part in emancipating the West from the culture of guilt: Jeane Kirkpatrick talked back to the United Nations, that diffuser of gaseous guilt. Reagan and Thatcher signaled wholesome impatience with ersatz guilt by withdrawing from the United Nations’ most egregious guilt factory, UNESCO.
Crime rates: Dianne Feinstein won California’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, propelled by her stand–horrifying to guilt-drenched liberal Democrats–in favor of capital punishment. She is, whether she knows it or not, a third woman advancing, and advancing because of, the repudiation of guilt. The subject of punishment cuts to the quick of any policy. It touches people’s confidence in the justice of their social arrangements and the correctness of the doctrine of personal responsibility for behavior. Support for capital punishment is shorthand for this sentiment: Crime is not caused by society; culpability resides in guilty individuals, not flawed institutions.
In the 1960s America’s prison population declined from 212,000 to under 200,000, although crime rates rose. By 1975 the prison population had risen to nearly 240,000, but crime rates had risen much faster. Then because of altered attitudes of thousands of decision makers in the criminal justice system, reflecting the civic culture, the prison population began to rise rapidly. It rose to 315,000 in 1980 and to more than 600,000 today, even though the rise in crime was slower in the dozen years after 1976 than in the dozen years before. It tripled in part because cultural liberalism was waning. America felt more confident about punishing because it felt less collective guilt for crime.
Freudian social theory holds that guilt produces civic virtue by inhibiting the pursuit of private interests. The rhetoric of “compassion” that fueled the growth of swollen welfare states was partly a product of the culture of guilt. Then in the 1970s, from the Third World (one vast victim according to “progressive” guilt instructors), came the oil shocks that disrupted economic growth and demonstrated that welfare-state entitlements–codified compassion–grow more surely than the economies that must pay for them. This provoked Western publics to reconsider where to draw the line demarcating social and individual responsibilities. This, too, is part of growing up from the politics of guilt.
