I’d argue that guilt is also a perfectly functional and appropriate emotion in much milder cases. In fact, I’d argue that guilt is often an instrument of self-discovery, telling you a new thing about parts of yourself which other people may have praised to the skies – and praised rightly. Take the very bad night experienced in February 1976, not long before he died, by the eighty-eight-year-old Field Marshal Montgomery. His housekeeper, alarmed, rang an old friend who had been one of his battalion commanders, and when the friend came over and asked what the matter was, Montgomery said, ‘I’ve got to go to meet God, and explain all those men I killed at Alamein.’ Now, please push to one side for the moment the questions of whether there is a God, and whether dead people go to meet him, and concentrate instead on the source of the general’s disquiet. It was being generated by his biography, not by his theology. Remarkably, it was a piece of guilt arising on the ground of one of his great military virtues.
Montgomery had had flaws all right, as a general. He was monstrously vain, he antagonised almost everyone he ever had to deal with as an equal, and sometimes his plans miscarried spectacularly, as at Arnhem. But he didn’t, ever, waste his soldiers’ lives. When it came to killing the enemy he was naturally less scrupulous, but even there he was immune to the Napoleonic, or Hitlerian, or Stalinesque fondness for grandiose bloodletting. He was a spectacularly good general for a democracy having an emergency, because he knew how to turn heterogeneous conscripted citizens into effective components of an army, and then, having done that, went on treating them as precious and valuable. He knew this about himself; he was proud of it; and until this very late moment in his life, he had been morally comfortable with himself as a result. At the second battle of El Alamein in October–November 1942, his strategy had been as frugal as the situation allowed. The Eighth Army, to whose command he had just been promoted, was only half-trained by his standards and could not yet be counted on for a battle of manoeuvre, which, in any case, was what the opposing Afrika Korps excelled at. So, since he had the superiority in troops and armour, he settled on a battle of attrition, with his own soldiers advancing through minefields to engage the enemy within their defensive positions. He did not waste lives, but he spent them. His victory cost 13,500 casualties (dead and wounded combined) among 220,000 Allied soldiers on the battlefield. Alamein was bloody, but it was parsimoniously bloody compared to the all-hours slaughterhouse operating at Stalingrad at the same time, or to any of the frontal assaults masterminded by British generals in the trenches of the First World War, where Montgomery had been as a young officer. Above all, his strategy worked. The lives he sacrificed, he sacrificed to a purpose.
So what had he noticed now that he should feel guilty about? Nothing could be more presumptuous than speculating about other people’s consciences, but I’ll do it anyway. My guess would be that he had started thinking, in the small hours of his bad night, about the individual fates of the individual bodies of those he had sent forward through the mines, and about how little the purposefulness of the advance must have helped, when the sand suddenly heaved up from beneath and an expanding ball of force tore away legs, arms, eyes, faces. My guess would be, in other words, that though the necessities of the battle remained the same, he had stopped seeing necessity as a complete justification. He had noticed that no matter how few soldiers his strategy killed, and no matter how many more would have been killed if a less careful strategist had been in charge, and no matter how essential it was that somebody be in charge – nevertheless, the deaths he caused had been absolute in their significance for those who had done the dying. Generals have to think statistically, judging four deaths to be better than five, but people don’t die statistically, they die in ones, and for each person the loss is complete and incomparable. It is the erasure of the entire sum of things, the obliteration of the whole world. It doesn’t make it better to know that your death is part of a smaller statistic.
Beyond the technical skills of generalship, and the ethics of generalship, there was this other consideration. Beyond the truth that war organises murders to serve the greater good, there was the truth that the murders were still murder. You could do what must be done, and do it as well as possible, and it would still be the case that locally, body by body, the consequences were cruel and sad, and left the fabric of the world tattered and bloodstreaked where an individual postman failed to go home to Carmarthen, or a tall schoolteacher was wept over in Adelaide. I think Bernard Montgomery was frightened, in February 1976, because he had understood that even necessary actions could contribute to the miserable sum of HPtFtU. I also think that (if I’m right in my presumptuous guess) his fear was very much to his credit. He had made a real discovery in finding this new thing to worry about, at the very end of his life. His fear, that night, was a sign of something in him growing, at almost the last possible moment: an old brown general putting out a fresh green shoot. His biography doesn’t record what his friend said to him in return. We just have to hope that it reassured him.
Suppose, though, that the friend had tried to ease his fear by telling him he was imagining things. Would that have helped? No, surely not. If you tell somebody that, as a decent person, they cannot have done anything questionable, you may mean to be nice, but you are in reality denying them sympathy. You are refusing to go to them where they are, you are declining to join them in the emotion they are finding painful. Somebody who is accusing herself or himself of something may well be mistaken, factually or morally, in that particular instance; but not because they are incapable of wrongdoing. No one is incapable of wrongdoing, and we have to be allowed our capacity for HPtFtU if we are to have our full stature. Taking the things people do wrong seriously is part of taking them seriously. It’s part of letting their actions have weight. It’s part of letting their actions be actions rather than just indifferent shopping choices; of letting their lives tell a life-story, with consequences, and losses, and gains, rather than just being a flurry of events. It’s part of letting them be real enough to be worth loving, rather than just attractive or glamorous or pretty or charismatic or cool.
But this is difficult and uncomfortable, unless someone has done something so spectacularly repulsive that they can be safely banished to the separated domain of wickedness where the serial killers and the child molesters champ and dribble. We find it hard to acknowledge the seriousness of ordinary screw-ups, because we get very worried by the idea that we might be judging people, ‘judgemental’ being another Bad Word of our time – or ‘sitting in judgement’ on them, which draws the instant mental picture of us being raised above them, on some kind of courtroom throne, gazing down with a brow like thunder. And isn’t this what religion famously encourages people to do? To judge, to criticise, to carp, to find fault? Well, no. (Though lots of religious people do carp, criticise, judge, find fault. See above, under: HPtFtU. I may, ahem, be a little inclined to fault-finding myself.) Ironically enough, the taboo about being ‘judgemental’ wasn’t formed in our culture in reaction to religion; it isn’t part of the great journey into the secular light on which A. C. Grayling is leading us, tossing his miraculously bouffant locks. It is, itself, a little piece of inherited Christianity, a specifically Christian prohibition which has turned proverbial and floated free of its context, origins all forgotten, until we imagine that it means we shouldn’t even think in terms of good and bad. Originally, what it meant was that we shouldn’t think of good and bad in terms of laws, or in terms of a courtroom procedure which would find people guilty or not guilty.
In fact, this is the crucial* point at which Christianity parts company with the other two monotheisms. Unlike the oldest ( Judaism) and the youngest (Islam) of the one-god religions, the middle sibling isn’t interested in coming up with a set of sustainable rules for living by. Jewish laws of behaviour and Muslim laws of behaviour may be demanding to keep at times, but they can be kept. That’s the point of them, that’s what they’re for. Eating kosher or halal can involve juggling with sau
cepans and reading the sides of packets carefully, but it isn’t privation. Getting up for the dawn prayer can be a pain, but it won’t leave you short of sleep, if you go to bed at a sensible hour. Refraining from work on Shabbat is tricky, if you define ‘work’ to include all household chores, and it takes some organisation, but not an impossible degree of organisation. Wiggle-room is kindly built in to the rules, so that you can cope if your water main bursts on Shabbat, or if you’re travelling and there really is no way of telling the direction to pray in. Nothing crazy or superhuman is required of you. The idea is to have a set of laws like a wearable coat, a coat that everyone can put on if they are willing to make the effort. In Judaism and Islam, you don’t have to be a saint to know that you are managing to be an adequately good woman, an adequately good man. Islam and Judaism accomplish this livability, this wearability, this sustainability, by paying more attention to what people do than to what they feel about it. They’re religions of orthopraxy, right doing, not orthodoxy, right thinking or teaching. Do the right actions, and you can be hissing and spitting inside, or bored senseless, or going through the motions to please your family, and it still counts. Virtue has still been achieved. The result is in some ways a lot more moderate, a lot more stable than Christianity; and it can be very humane too, with plentiful opportunities for the unvirtuous or ex-virtuous to rejoin virtue’s ranks. But it does, indeed, produce a judged picture of the world. It produces a moralised landscape in which the good people can be told from the bad people; in which all human actions can be split into two categories, pure or impure, clean or dirty, permitted or forbidden, kosher or trayf, halal or haram.
* Pun intended. Sorry.
Christianity does something different. It makes frankly impossible demands. Instead of asking for specific actions, it offers general but lunatic principles. It thinks you should give your possessions away, refuse to defend yourself, love strangers as much as your family, behave as if there’s no tomorrow. These principles do not amount to a sustainable programme. They deliberately ignore the question of how they could possibly be maintained. They ask you to manifest in your ordinary life a drastically uncalculating, unprotected generosity. And that’s not all. Christianity also makes what you mean by your behaviour all-important. You could pauperise yourself, get slapped silly without fighting back, care for lepers and laugh all day long in the face of futures markets, and it still wouldn’t count, if you did it for the wrong reasons. Not only is Christianity insanely perfectionist in its few positive recommendations, it’s also insanely perfectionist about motive. It won’t accept generosity performed for the sake of self-interest as generosity. It says that unless altruism is altuism all the way down, it doesn’t count as altruism at all.
So far, so thrillingly impractical. But now notice the consequence of having an ideal of behaviour not sized for human lives: everyone fails. Really everyone. No one only means well, no one means well all the time. Looked at from this perspective, human beings all exhibit different varieties of fuck-up. And suddenly in its utter lack of realism Christianity becomes very realistic indeed, intelligently resigned to our vast array of imperfections, and much more interested in what we can do to live with them than in laws designed to keep them segregated. Christianity maintains no register of clean and unclean. It doesn’t believe in the possibility of clean, just as it doesn’t believe that laws can ever be fully adequate, or that goodness can reliably be achieved by following an instruction book. The moral landscape Christianity sees – well, it’s essentially as described by Leonard Cohen. All due apologies offered to Mr Golden Voice, who I’m sure thought he was satirising religion in ‘Anthem’, and offering an atheistical Jewish Buddhist’s alternative to sanctimonious certainty. But instead ‘Anthem’ works, if you’re a Christian, as sympathetic reportage of our rueful orthodoxies. We do try to ring the bells that still can ring, though much of the carillon is corroded, or lost to metal fatigue, or otherwise spoiled. We do forget our perfect offering – tell ourselves to forget it, since perfection is forever unavailable. We do entirely agree that there’s a crack in everything. (That’s how the light gets in? Oh yes; that most of all.) The vision is of an intrinsically imperfect cosmos, hairlined through and through with flaws, chipped and battered and patched.
So of all things, Christianity isn’t supposed to be about gathering up the good people (shiny! happy! squeaky clean!) and excluding the bad people (frightening! alien! repulsive!) for the very simple reason that there aren’t any good people. Not that can be securely designated as such. It can’t be about circling the wagons of virtue out in the suburbs and keeping the unruly inner city at bay. This, I realise, goes flat contrary to the present predominant image of it as something existing in prissy, fastidious little enclaves, far from life’s messier zones and inclined to get all ‘judgemental’ about them. Again, of course there are Christians like that: see under HPtFtU. The religion certainly can slip into being a club or a cosy affinity group or a wall against the world. But it isn’t supposed to be. What it’s supposed to be is a league of the guilty. Not all guilty of the same things, or in the same way, or to the same degree, but enough for us to recognise each other. For HPtFtU, after all, isn’t a list of prohibited actions you can avoid.* Fucking things up is too sensitive to our intentions to be defined that way. The very same action may be a secret kindness, an indifferent bit of trivia, or a royally destructive contribution to the ruination of something delicate and precious, all depending on what we mean by it. (There are remarks that end marriages, and very often what makes them so decisively poisonous is that they’re chosen to seem perfectly innocent and ordinary when uttered in public, no big deal, deniable, yet touch deliberately on a pain which only intimacy could know.) What we have to rely on, to tell whether something is part of HPtFtU or not, is more like a family resemblance. We define it by our familiarity with examples, we name it as what the examples have in common, as if we were defining ‘yellowness’ as the thing that a JCB shares with a mustard pot. In the same way, we come to see, HPtFtU is what flying a plane into a skyscraper has in common with persecuting the fat kid with zits. It’s what doing crystal meth has in common with having an affair with someone you don’t even like. It’s what a murder (not a pop-culture play murder but a real murder, committed by delivering one too many kicks to the head in a pissed fight at closing time) has in common with telling a story at a dinner party at the expense of an absent mutual friend, a story which you know will cause pain when it gets back to them but which you tell anyway, because it’s just very, very funny. Little, large, venial, deadly, in hot blood or in cold blood, done actively or allowed to happen through negligence – there’s a look the instances of HPtFtU have in common, elusive to summarise but unmistakeable when seen: a certain self-pleasing smirk. Christianity wants us to know the look when we see it in a mirror, and to know it too when we see it reflected in other people. Christians are supposed to understand that the family resemblance makes us family even with the nastiest and most frightening of our brothers and sisters: a different kind of continuum. We’re supposed to do our fallible, failing best to perceive the other bad people as kin.
* Even the neatly-arranged Seven Deadlies, product of medieval Christianity at its most legalistic, couldn’t be exhaustive, or be used as more than a field guide to some of HPtFtU’s major varieties.
Which all sounds, oh, a little too resolved. A little too neat. Not neat in the sense that a ranked gradation of the world by virtue would be, but neat in the sense that I’ve fast-forwarded, here, through the pain of self-discovery and the discomfort of mutual recognition to get to the equanimity that can lie on the other side. It really can; there really is a rueful, unanguished comfort to be had over there, through and beyond. But I’ve got way ahead of myself. First you have to go through; and while you do, while you’re struggling with the first raw realisation of the degree to which you’ve fucked (things) up, in one of the louder or quieter crises of adult life, there is no resolution to be had, no comfy
scheme of order to hold on to. The essence of the experience I’m trying to talk about in this chapter is that it’s chaotic. You stop making sense to yourself. You find that you aren’t what you thought you were, but something much more multiple and mysterious and self-subverting, and this discovery doesn’t propel you to a new understanding of things, it propels you into a state where you don’t understand anything at all. Unable to believe the comfortable things you used to believe about yourself, you entertain a sequence of changing caricatures as your self-image. By turns your reflection in the mirror of your imagination nonsensically grins, scowls, howls, yawns, gazes back inert as a lump of putty: decomposes into pixels that have forgotten the reason for their mutual attachment. Here is a description of the state from a Hebrew poem 2,600 years old: ‘I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.’ And here is a description by John Bunyan in the 1660s: ‘Thus did I wind, and twine, and shrink, under the burden that was upon me; which burden also did so oppress me that I could neither stand, nor go, nor lie, either at rest or quiet.’ And here is a description by the psychologist William James in 1902: ‘The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn.’
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