Tagged: collective guilt

Our Cross to Bear

Conclusions on Shared Human Responsibility (Communal Guilt Part 7 of 7)

We as a society are busy pointing out crises. Some pending disasters merely threaten to destroy individuals, while others threaten communities or even our species. Yet, we often seem disinclined to take action. The reasons include disagreements about which crises are real, which ones are critical, and how to best approach them. We should be not only resolving present crises but discerning their source and how to prevent future ones.

In the preceding weeks’ meditations on the nature of collective guilt and shared human responsibility, a number of general principles are evident.

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The Air We Breathe

The Environment and Shared Human Responsibility (Communal Guilt Part 6 of 7)

The polar caps are melting. Extreme weather events occur with greater frequency. Air quality has reached abysmal levels in major urban areas worldwide. Global consumption vastly outstrips the replenishment of natural resources. Many individuals respond to these realities with denial, cynicism, and a sense of futility. Rather than defining terms and demonstrating premises, this post will take these facts as givens; those seeking to contest them had best look elsewhere.

As urgently as any current crisis and with great clarity, the state of the environment demonstrates both the at times collective nature of guilt and the shared nature of human responsibility. In fact, to a greater extent than other issues explored thus far in this series, the environment illustrates with particular clarity a general principle governing guilt and responsibility: distribution is uneven. While guilt and responsibility may transcend individuals, some individuals are implicated more directly and fully than others.

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A Threat to One of Us is a Threat to All of Us

Genocide and Shared Human Responsibility (Communal Guilt Part 4 of 7)

Few of humanity’s transgressions seem as weighty as genocide. The average American high school student knows this, if they have paid any attention at all. Some see Schindler’s List or excerpts of The Holocaust miniseries. Many read Night, The Diary of Anne Frank, or Maus. The Holocaust looms large.

A focus on the Holocaust risks endowing it with a sense of uniqueness. Yes, it was unique in its scale, intensity, and efficiency; but genocides had happened before and they have continued to happen since. We must not teach with depth at the expense of breadth, lest students falsely assume that genocide is either a phenomenon of the past or will remain perpetually someone else’s problem.

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Your People Are My People

Race, Racism, and Shared Human Responsibility (Communal Guilt Part 3 of 7)

“What are you?” sometimes strangers and new acquaintances ask me, whether obliquely or directly. I have come to learn that this is short-hand for “What race/ethnicity box(es) do you check?” The racial categories on current U.S. census forms are more complex than they ever have been, yet they remain simplistic. (See a helpful article here. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/03/14/u-s-census-looking-at-big-changes-in-how-it-asks-about-race-and-ethnicity/ ) “Black, African-American, or Negro” stands in contrast to the deceptively straightforward appearing “White.” Citizens of Asian ancestry have six boxes to possibly check, along with an “Other Asian” fill-in blank. By contrast, Arab- and Persian-Americans have no obvious option (“Other”? “White”?), leading to controversy within their respective communities (http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/04/01/census.check.it.right.campaign/ ).

The history leading up to these designations is serpentine and rife with contradictions (whether to count “Latino” as a race or as something else, for example). Until relatively recently, the forms also required respondents to check one box and one box only, implying that racial categories are mutually exclusive, in fact a long-standing attitude in the U.S. and elsewhere, especially regarding the purity of whiteness.

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Unoriginal Sin

The Conceptual Foundations of Shared Human Responsibility (Communal Guilt Part 2 of 7)

Non-individualistic understandings of guilt are fundamental to both Judaism and Christianity. This is part of what makes both religions as counter-cultural today as they ever have been. Yet often the worldviews of particular Jewish and Christian individuals are more defined by their respective cultures than by the religions they profess to embrace. For many, it is not evident that we should be our sisters’ and brothers’ keepers.

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Concepts of Collective Guilt

The Benefits and Limits (Communal Guilt Part 1 of 7)

We in the West often fail to think in terms of “we.” Individualism has defined the post-Enlightenment European experience and, perhaps to an even greater extent, the U.S. American experience. By “individualism” I mean a pervasive perspective of the world in which personal autonomy is the ultimate good; each individual can and should define for themselves what is right and even what is true, every woman for herself, every man for himself.

There is so little middle ground in American political life in large measure not merely because of seemingly irreconcilable positions but because of a shared commitment to individualism. The moral individualism on the Left stands in a perpetual stand-off with the socio-economic individualism of the Right.

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