Sunday, May 24, 2020

Collective guilt

One objection to original sin is that it seems unfair to be blamed for something we didn't do. Sometimes that spills over into a parallel objection to vicarious atonement and penal substitution. I've discussed these objections from various angles over the years. But here's another consideration. 

Many cultures take collective guilt for granted. One people-group will continue to b lame another people-group for what that group or a particular representative of that group did in the past. For instance, when Ali lost the battle for succession after Muhammad died, that fomented a blood feud which continues right up to our own time. 

Likewise, the Greek Orthodox have never forgiven Roman Catholics for the Fourth Crusade. By the same token, it wouldn't surprise me if many Chinese and Koreans still hold a historical grudge against wars of aggression that Japan used to wage against her neighbors. I'm sure we could give example after example. 

Now my point is not that I think this in itself justifies the principle of collective guilt. I'd also add that collective guilt is not a general principle in scripture. The examples of Adam and Jesus are exceptional. 

My point, rather, is that whether or not collective guilt seems to be unfair is culturally-variable. In many cultures there's a powerful sense of solidarity between members of the same people-group which extends from the present into past generations, living and dead.  

And that raises the question of which is right. Is the sense of unfairness that some people feel a legitimate moral intuition or is it just the product of social conditioning in their particular culture? When two different cultures have competing sensibilities on this issue, what's the tiebreaker? 

This is why I'm inclined to be both a moral skeptic and a moral realism. That's a consistent position because moral skepticism concerns moral epistemology while moral realism concerns moral ontology. There are moral facts, but how well do we access them?

The question is the extent to which I should trust my moral intuitions. If I was born in a different culture, I might well have some radically different moral intuitions. This is one reason we need divine revelation: to reaffirm true moral intuitions and disaffirm false moral intuitions. 

1 comment:

  1. `twas years ago I read a book by N. T. Wright where he pointed out that one of the conundrums of the contemporary age is that secular philosophies have abandoned any concept of original sin but, more and more, have been eager to embrace and take seriously the idea of collective guilt. Without any covenantal context in which, Israel for instance as God's people, can be found guilty, there aren't really any options on the table for dealing with collective guilt by way of expiation or atonement was one of Wright's implications.

    There are ways of doing that but those ways tend to be offered by those who have nominated themselves as having intermediary or priestly roles on topics. In music and the liberal arts cultural appropriation has been increasingly defined as a kind of artistic sin that can be defined by a clergy of artists and activists who wield definitions of group sanctity and group guilt based on what often amount to ethnic matters. That such scripts are generally beholden to precisely the kind of Romantic era post-German Idealist scripts of authenticity and legitimacy that have come under fire when deployed on behalf of the Western European canon is something I've been mulling over for years.

    Another area in which collective guilt is presumed has to do with anthropogenic climate change in progressive politics. We are all collectively guilty because of what the cultural systems do in terms of fossil fuel economies regardless of whether or not any one person's carbon footprint might be considered damaging. It's not unheard of in the Bible for prophetic warnings that given enough sin the land itself would vomit up sinful peoples, which may be why someone like Ed Simon wants to invoke biblical precedents of divine judgment for sin in ecological terms at precisely the moment he thinks Western culture has become so secularized as to lack the benefits of biblical categories of divine judgment for national or cultural level sins, it's just that he's clearly anchored such a plea to environmental rather than other issues.

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