Brenton
Collective Guilt
December 3rd 2007 12:09
Even an Entire Subculture may be a Candidate for Collective Guilt
Who is responsible? The question that always gets thrown around. Who is responsible for this oil leak? For 9/11? For the hole in my underwear?
The question isn’t a gentle one. Usually the attribution of blame is designed to enable the big flashing arrow that can guide the lynch mob.
When we find out who’s to blame, we can choose the appropriate action to take against the individual responsible.
One complicating factor, is that of the concept of collective guilt.
Let’s have a look at the oil leak scenario. Chance is, there are a number of people whom we could find to pinpoint the blame on.
* The distributor of the material the ship was made from.
* The person responsible for checking the ship was in order.
* The person who failed to appoint a person to check the ship was in order.
* The Company Boss for not putting practices under the appropriate scrutiny.
When it comes to Companies though, the standard practice, and the practice supported by most Left wing activists, is of Collective Guilt. We charge a ‘company’ with pollution, or with a cover up or a scandal. The James Hardy corporation, not an individual, was charged with their use of asbestos, which caused many cases of mesothelioma.
Let’s look at the second example. September 11. Now we can look at blame on a number of levels, each level backed up by an assumption. I’m going to use this example to really deconstruct the levels to which the concept of blame is accepted or rejected by individuals, groups and institutions.
WHO: The Individual Terrorists.
WHY: Individuals are responsible for their own actions. These people had the option of joining a terrorist group or not, had a choice between obeying orders or not, and had a choice of whether the executed the plan or not.
WHO: Bin Laden.
WHY: Manipulators may be held responsible for their actions, especially as they tend to work towards a specific aim. This is how we can absolve Child Soldiers of their murders, and some junkies of the responsibility of their addiction. If you are manipulated into doing something, is it your fault, or your manipulators?
WHO: Al Quaidia.
WHY: Groups that represent larger schools of thought may be held accountable for their much wider impact. The Ku Klux Klan. The Teachers Union. The East India Trading Company. The Socialist Alliance. All of these are groups with a powerful underlying ideological framework determining their actions. Should then, we blame those individuals associated with them for their actions – or blame the larger entity for the influence of their ideological position.
WHO: Islam.
WHY: Radical Islam can be accredited widely with inspiring the actions of Bin Laden, and Al Quaidia in the justification of their actions, and the apparent nobleness of their goal.
WHO: American Foreign Policy.
WHY: If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, then every action is also a reaction. America has had a profoundly brutal and aggressive foreign policy for a long time. It is not like an attack on America could not have been expected for a considerably long time especially when one considers this was not the first attempted terrorist attack targeting the Twin Towers.
The thing about collective guilt is that is can cause too many problems or not enough. There’s no sense in blaming all Muslims for the actions of Islamic militants, or all Christians for the religious shooting of an abortionist. On the other hand though, a total rejection of the idea of collective blame would allow people acting under political or company orders to be used as ‘renegade individuals’ in order to absolve higher ranking persons of wrongdoing.
As most things are, the concept of collective guilt is by far more complicated than we would like to think. The real problem though is that some of us don’t want to think at all – and to ensure a fair world, we REALLY need to.
Image by Technochick used under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License.
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Yet that is vastly different from collective responsibility.
Or collectively deriving an undeserved advantage.