“Guilt has not merely lingered. It has grown, even metastasized, into an ever more powerful and pervasive element in the life of the contemporary West,” writes Wilfred McClay in his seminal essay “The Strange Persistence of Guilt.” This growth of guilt has taken place “even as the rich language formerly used to define it has withered and faded from discourse, and the means of containing its effects, let alone obtaining relief from it, have become ever more elusive.”
One might think in an increasingly secular society that when God goes away, so does guilt. But the reality is the reverse. When God goes, guilt has nowhere to go. It pools. Like a patient with internal bleeding, there may be no signs anything is amiss. But the danger remains.
Idealism and Identity Politics
As a fan of long Russian novels (Dostoevsky is my favorite, alongside Tolstoy, Turgenev, and the more recent writers Solzhenitsyn and Vodolazkin), I’ve been working my way through Gary Saul Morson’s new book Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter. This is Morson’s lifework, the capstone after decades of teaching Russian literature, hours of study and wisdom now distilled into a textbook.
Early on, Morson describes three types you often find in Russian literature: the wanderer, the idealist, and the revolutionary. His chapter on the idealist reminded me of some of the middle-aged and younger activists for social justice in the United States today.
The “disappointed idealist,” Morson writes, feels unresolved guilt for unmerited privilege. They see the world as divided up into categories of oppressed and oppressor, and while Russian literature focuses on economic and social class distinctions, today’s debates in the West focus more on race and gender. There’s an outstanding debt that must be paid if we’re to improve the conditions of “the common people,” and yet we despair when it seems nothing can be done to bring a lasting solution.
The list of things for affluent people in the West to feel guilty about is ever-growing, Wilfred McClay points out. There’s “colonialism, slavery, structural poverty, water pollution, deforestation.” No one is blameless. No one can be blameless, “for the demands on an active conscience are literally as endless as an active imagination’s ability to conjure them.” Some of today’s activism can be traced back to this weight of guilt, he writes, “the pervasive need to find innocence through moral absolution and somehow discharge one’s moral burden.” The only way to be innocent is to obtain the status of a certified victim or to identify with the victim in advocacy that will shift the moral burden of sin.
Reductionist Anthropology
The problem with overly simplistic classifications is that righteousness and unrighteousness don’t sit neatly in categories. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, after experiencing the horrors of the Gulag,
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
George Yancey, professor of sociology at Baylor University, sounds a similar note, reminding readers of the distinctively Christian contribution to these discussions: a biblical understanding of human dignity and depravity. Sin affects us all, and the historically oppressed can become the oppressor, if given the chance.
There Is None Righteous
Returning to Morson’s examination of Russian literature, we find a common thread among idealists: an overly idealistic vision of the common people and their innocence—a vision that runs into the rocks of reality when sinfulness and depravity show up among the groups who are supposed to be favored. Confronted by sin among the “innocent,” the idealists recoil, but instead of rethinking their unthinking support, they descend into a pit of “nauseating despair” due to their feelings of disgust toward the depravity of the favored group and toward themselves for feeling disappointed.
The end isn’t the enactment of justice but merely the ethos of justice. Guilt for unmerited privilege increases but now as the motivating factor for pursuing justice, which leads to various spiritual and social ills. Advocates and activists wind up adopting “whatever solution promises psychological relief even if it does not help—or even positively harms—the victims on whose behalf guilt is felt” (145). Morson points to Levin, the hero of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, who says at one point in the novel, “The important thing for me is to feel that I’m not guilty.” It’s not bettering the lives of poor peasants that matters most but alleviating the guilty conscience of the aristocrat.
Ugly End of Idealism
If you walk all the way down the road of disappointing idealism, wracked with guilt over unchangeable realities and intractable problems, you may experience something Dostoevsky warned about: love being transformed into its opposite.
“Those interested in motivating people to help others do not usually appreciate the danger of inducing guilt,” Morson writes. It’s a strategy that often backfires. “Contrary to what we usually assume, guilt for having injured people can make us even crueler to them” (145). Morson explains,
We hate our victim precisely because he has been the occasion of our suffering pangs of conscience, and, in that sense, causing them. We must learn to forgive not only those who have wronged us but also those we have wronged. The danger of idealistic guilt, and of politics based on repentance, is another lesson of Russian literature. . . . If some evil persists despite our efforts—as it always does—one may resort to unlimited violence against anyone seen as sustaining it. (146)
Guilt vs. Grace in Seeking Justice
The problem with identity politics and any appeal to justice motivated by guilt is that the diagnosis doesn’t go deep enough, and neither do the solutions. The result is guilt-driven, a guilt-inducing performance—everyone is conscripted into the great drama of being on “the right side” of this or that group. Everyone acts the part.
But performative justice only takes us so far and often leads to more problems than it solves. As Christians, we must go deeper.
Our desire for justice is rooted in our being made in the image of a God of perfect justice. We pursue justice not because we feel guilty but because we’ve been graced. We’ve awakened to the goodness of God’s creation and we’ve experienced his grace in redemption. Joy and gratitude free us to seek the good of others—their good, not our goodness. We are, in the words of Martin Luther, “both joyful and happy because of Christ in whom are so many benefits are conferred on him; and therefore it is the occupation to serve God joyfully and without thought of gain, in love that is not constrained.”
Set free from sin and guilt, we’re set free to love not the abstract “neighborhood” but real flesh-and-blood neighbors. Not “humanity” but real human beings. We pursue the benefit of others, not to assuage our guilty conscience but because we’re the beneficiaries of divine grace.
No one is merely a sinner. No one is merely a sufferer. Sin levels us. Grace lifts us.
Christianity goes beyond the disappointments of idealism and the reductionist solutions of identity politics, offering a more substantial basis for solidarity and a more enduring motivation for seeking justice in society. In a world of disappointment, our pursuit of justice should testify not to the strange persistence of guilt but to the stronger power of grace.
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