0 comment Monday, December 1, 2014 | admin
...the liberal world, at least.
Here is David Thompson on the Ron Rosenbaum Slate article praising white guilt. I've read a lot of commentary on the Slate piece, and this piece by Thompson is possibly the best. Read it all; it's to the point. But be warned of some annoying liberal posturing in the comments following.
David's piece is called Phantom Guilt, Revisited.
I like the phrase 'phantom guilt'. I like how Thompson seems to perceive the obvious falsity of the displays of guilt on the part of many of the liberal handwringers:
To publicly rend one�s garments over some vicarious, borrowed sin is not to affirm conscience or poignant human feeling, but to parody those things and to indulge in emotional pantomime and moral masturbation. Rather like this:
But was slavery not immoral? Was not the century of institutionalised racism and segregation that followed the end of slavery a perpetuation of "flawed values" that the nation should feel an enduring guilt over? Should we abolish the history and memory of slavery and racism just because they're no longer legally institutionalised?
Again, note the car crash of non sequitur. I�ll paraphrase for clarity:
Slavery was immoral. It was abolished. Therefore we must still feel guilt, or pretend to � all of us, indefinitely and forever. And those who don�t pretend to feel this way are abolishing history.
Assertions of this kind are, very often, for the benefit of a sympathetic audience and thus, ultimately, for the benefit of the performer. As I�ve argued before, saying, very loudly, "it�s all my fault" is only a notch and a half away from saying "it�s all about me."
I think there is a lot of truth in his observation that what liberals display is not real guilt, but a simulation thereof, a mimicry of guilt.
I've written a lot here about liberal guilt, but when we really think about it, liberals do not feel guilt because they presume that they are, by virtue of their superior liberal sensitivity, free of the guilt they try to induce among their less liberal racial brethren. They are, as I've said, like the Pharisee praying loudly to thank God that he is not like other men -- not a sinner. They are good at finding motes in others' eyes while ignoring the beam in their own eyes.
Guilt -- just as Leona Helmsley supposedly said about taxes -- is for the 'little people', one's inferiors.
Liberals see themselves as the moral aristocracy of the world; they pride themselves on their superior consciences, but somehow their consciences only find the sins of others.
As for that comment section, notice the liberal woman slapping down someone for saying that whites abolished slavery -- whites must not get credit for that; whites did NOT stop slavery, she says, only SOME whites did.
So unless all whites equally contributed to ending slavery, they deserve no credit. Yet oddly, all whites are made to carry the blame for what some did. And I don't mean slave-owners vs. virtuous abolitionists, or Southerners vs. saintly Northerners, or even rich, evil whites vs. poor, noble whites. I mean primarily today's whites being asked to pay, endlessly, for what whites (some, all, whoever) did hundreds of years ago.
At some point we will have to deal with the issue of slavery, over whether the slavery as practiced here in this country was the greatest ever human evil, comparable perhaps only to Hitler's crimes according to most people. This subject seems to be used as the ultimate weapon against us; we have no rejoinder except the rather liberal one of saying ''but...but we abolished it; don't we deserve praise for that?"
This guilt game will go on and on until we find some way to break this cycle, and that will not be easy.
Doing so will require a lot of re-thinking on our part, and a general determination to find some new way to look at the guilt-producing historic episodes that are being used against us so successfully. We can only say 'mea culpa' so many times.
Here is David Thompson on the Ron Rosenbaum Slate article praising white guilt. I've read a lot of commentary on the Slate piece, and this piece by Thompson is possibly the best. Read it all; it's to the point. But be warned of some annoying liberal posturing in the comments following.
David's piece is called Phantom Guilt, Revisited.
I like the phrase 'phantom guilt'. I like how Thompson seems to perceive the obvious falsity of the displays of guilt on the part of many of the liberal handwringers:
To publicly rend one�s garments over some vicarious, borrowed sin is not to affirm conscience or poignant human feeling, but to parody those things and to indulge in emotional pantomime and moral masturbation. Rather like this:
But was slavery not immoral? Was not the century of institutionalised racism and segregation that followed the end of slavery a perpetuation of "flawed values" that the nation should feel an enduring guilt over? Should we abolish the history and memory of slavery and racism just because they're no longer legally institutionalised?
Again, note the car crash of non sequitur. I�ll paraphrase for clarity:
Slavery was immoral. It was abolished. Therefore we must still feel guilt, or pretend to � all of us, indefinitely and forever. And those who don�t pretend to feel this way are abolishing history.
Assertions of this kind are, very often, for the benefit of a sympathetic audience and thus, ultimately, for the benefit of the performer. As I�ve argued before, saying, very loudly, "it�s all my fault" is only a notch and a half away from saying "it�s all about me."
I think there is a lot of truth in his observation that what liberals display is not real guilt, but a simulation thereof, a mimicry of guilt.
I've written a lot here about liberal guilt, but when we really think about it, liberals do not feel guilt because they presume that they are, by virtue of their superior liberal sensitivity, free of the guilt they try to induce among their less liberal racial brethren. They are, as I've said, like the Pharisee praying loudly to thank God that he is not like other men -- not a sinner. They are good at finding motes in others' eyes while ignoring the beam in their own eyes.
Guilt -- just as Leona Helmsley supposedly said about taxes -- is for the 'little people', one's inferiors.
Liberals see themselves as the moral aristocracy of the world; they pride themselves on their superior consciences, but somehow their consciences only find the sins of others.
As for that comment section, notice the liberal woman slapping down someone for saying that whites abolished slavery -- whites must not get credit for that; whites did NOT stop slavery, she says, only SOME whites did.
So unless all whites equally contributed to ending slavery, they deserve no credit. Yet oddly, all whites are made to carry the blame for what some did. And I don't mean slave-owners vs. virtuous abolitionists, or Southerners vs. saintly Northerners, or even rich, evil whites vs. poor, noble whites. I mean primarily today's whites being asked to pay, endlessly, for what whites (some, all, whoever) did hundreds of years ago.
At some point we will have to deal with the issue of slavery, over whether the slavery as practiced here in this country was the greatest ever human evil, comparable perhaps only to Hitler's crimes according to most people. This subject seems to be used as the ultimate weapon against us; we have no rejoinder except the rather liberal one of saying ''but...but we abolished it; don't we deserve praise for that?"
This guilt game will go on and on until we find some way to break this cycle, and that will not be easy.
Doing so will require a lot of re-thinking on our part, and a general determination to find some new way to look at the guilt-producing historic episodes that are being used against us so successfully. We can only say 'mea culpa' so many times.
Labels: American History, Hypocrisy, Liberalism, Political Correctness, Racial Guilt, White Guilt