In past stories I have talked about the natural drive of mankind to discover new frontiers. According to Bruce Chatwin, mankind was born out of a sea shell with a cry. ‘I am’ shouted the first nomad as he began his journey out of Africa. As light cannot exist without darkness, there is another powerful drive to mankind, and it is guilt.
Guilt is truly proteiform and multidimensional. To the wandering nomad guilt would be akin to asking why instead of where. Perhaps it is guilt, which decided so many nomads to establish themselves and enjoy productive life in a city of men.
When Sartre wrote his ‘Roads of Freedom’ redemption came as ultimate reward to social responsibility. Mathieu is guilty because he did not join the international brigades in the Spanish civil war. He is guilty for the pregnancy of his mate. And his death in that village tower on fire, shooting Germans in a senseless battle as France is routed, is but a Pyrrhic victory and bonfire of all his vanities.
Guilt is truly sweetest poison, and as such most dangerous and ambiguous. Religions have been built out of guilt. What is ecology but a branch on the tree of guilt? There is even a continent for guilt, and it is named Africa.
The sweetness of guilt is distilled to the soul drop after drop. Like a nectar collected by industrious bees guilt is part of ourselves, giving us fortitude in defeat and compassion in victory. It is sweet because mankind has been established on the principle of fairness and social justice.
Experiments have shown that chimps would collaborate even if the final reward is unfair. One chimp will always benefit so much more from the community’s efforts. Mankind is different. No collaboration will be working without a fair redistribution of the reward.
Ambiguity of guilt is thriving on collective versus individual guilt. How can a German youth of today feel guilty for the concentration camps? Is there a guilt bred in the bone? No, but culture as collective instrumentation of guilt can lead to extraordinary individual repression.
Soviets shot millionaires on the principle of it. No millionaire is innocent, and it is certainly true. Charity is flourishing worldwide, and business have been established to advise millionaires on the best way to dilute their guilt.
But this charity of the super rich is not guilt anymore, as society has evolved into considering that tribute to the general welfare a contribution to social responsibility. Caesar used to distribute the wealth he collected from the trade of slaves and looting of Gaul. There is no guilt or redemption in the charity of the super rich, but vanity restored on its altar.
A recent study by ‘the Economist’ newspaper concluded on the sex appeal associated with trading guilt for charity. Females of the chimps are attracted to dominant males with grand display of generosity. It is a promise of better living conditions to sustaining a new breed of chimps.
How individual guilt does lead to social redemption is magnified in world literature.
Stephen Crane wrote the definitive classic of American literature with ‘the Red Badge of Courage’. My very first book in English it was. How I admired the description of true courage in battle! And yet guilt is everywhere. Guilt of fleeing the enemy. Guilt of the dramatic return to his unit after the battle, fully expecting to be shot, and lo! His comrades welcome him as hero.
The heroic deed is hollow, says Stephen Crane, when it is founded on guilt. As the battle is over, lying corpses are mingled in anonymity of death. True heroism is born out of generosity and dedication, not guilt.
As someone I loved was about to die, days became hell, and nights were white with fright of upcoming crisis. Guilt of failing to heal, to comfort and even to hold tight to a body, which was disintegrating in my arms, was so great that I worked day and night, toiling like a devil in the furnace of a volcano.
Everyone congratulated me on the incredible achievements of 3,000 hours of work in ten months of agony. No tree was big enough to fall prey to my chain saw. No trench deep enough for conducting water to fishing pond. My work erased years of abandon and restored a domain to its virginal beauty.
But in my heart I knew that the crushing agony of sleep when you fully expect to hear the cry of the loved one, dying downstairs, was the true engine of that heroism. So, Mr Crane, there is no glory in courage, but despair. True courage is when you have everything to lose, hope, happiness and love. And guilt has no place there.
Guilt is indeed proteiform and multidimensional! Sweetest poison, and yet instrumental to great deeds, it can be distilled and assimilated into higher forms of compassion and understanding.
True monsters are those without guilt. They have the magic touch of transforming evil deeds in deeds of necessity. They describe themselves as victims. We call them beasts, but it is wrong, as a beast is answering to territorial claim and survival imperatives. They are human beings untouched by guilt, human black holes absorbing energy of living things in the void of their souls.
My own father is living proof of a human being totally untouched by guilt. There is not a thing which he has not corrupted. And yet he defines himself with incredible persuasive power as a victim. There is not a book he had not plundered to extract argumentation for his total lack of humanity.
True monsters are also those with higher expectations like artists who want to shape the world according to their own ego. The great conquerors are men without guilt. Great scientists have found redemption in research and knowledge, but where is the understanding? They analyse guilt with a microscope and find nothing worth considering.
Science without human understanding and compassion is evil.
Guilt can shape nations, as well. Consider Germany. Where can you find a people so hesitant of waving a national flag, but in a football stadium? And yet, the true guilt should be where the evil is, not in nationalism, but in the scriptures and contracts of well-known world companies, who designed, built and even insured ovens in death camps. ‘The true king is the scribe’ wrote Robespierre, grand master in terror. You can trust him on that statement.
America is the only nation in the world to have used the atomic bomb on human beings, outside the testing purpose of ‘toy soldiers’. No other nation has been so far in the search and destroy operative planning and execution of human beings. Guilt has been diluted and redistributed to the people of America, pound after pound, but the engineering power has been left untouched. Stacks of papers, reports and computers hum day after day, night after night, in that establishment known as the Pentagon. It is amusing that the Pentagon was first designed as a centre for archives.
Archives are the sedimentation of human guilt. Consider the archives of the Vatican. There are the reports of Inquisition. Stories so horrible they are kept out of reach. Think of women whose breasts have been burnt with white hot toenails.
Speaking of torture there is a continent, Africa, where tectonic forces are directed at human beings, nature and culture. Africa is the altar of guilt. Culturally the victim of colonialism, Africa has a population and nature devastated by our economic policies.
Dawn of mankind has now become the nightmare of Darwin.
