PARTISAN REVIEW
525
lack of guilt, whether universal, private, inauthentic, or whatever
you want to call it, really becomes a disease to a society.
LIFTON:
I agree with you. It's the "normal" people - the people
who have more effective blockage or numbing processes against guilt
or breakdown, and are in high places - who are going to do us in.
But about Vietnam, there's an open question here.
If
one asks: how
can so many people do so much slaughter without feeling so much
guilt; we have some data that shows how a series of factors in Vietnam
make it an atrocity-producing situation in which one feels inwardly
impelled to join. Much of it involves mourning and loss of buddies
without definable cause, but I have a feelin g from evidence now
coming out that it isn't that pat. Murray Polner's study, for instance,
finds that everybody who has been in Vietnam - the hawks, those
who are in between (the haunted, as he calls them ), and the doves –
feels that there's something strange and not quite acceptable about
this war. There's a great potential for guilt. My feeling is that these
people are not going to escape guilt in Vietnam, and tha t they are
not escaping it in coming back.
It
may come out in indirect ways, in
a lot of violence, or in severe numbing and withdrawal which blocks
that emergence of those guilt feelings. And the real question, if you
can speak on a large sca'le, is how much can begin to be articulated
of what national leadership encouraged.
RICHARD SENNETT:
You seem to be making collective guilt into
a kind of moral awareness. What bothers me about that is tha t col–
lective guilt is a very potent political tool, and it seems we're coming to a
battleground in politics where the middle class is on every side subjected
to a demand that it feel guilty about something. There's almost a
glorification of guiltmess in what you 're saying. But after all, it's mean–
ingless for the Blacks to have whites say "I 'm sorry we've hurt you."
Nothing changes socially.
LIFTON:
You're focusing the whole political spectrum, all of poli–
tical action, around guilt: and moreover, what you're describing here
is what I call self-lacerating guilt. It's the sort of
mea culpa
which is
self-imposed and goes nowhere.
SENNETT:
Then maybe I don't understand what you mean by
self-activating.
LIFTON:
That becomes crucial, because what I mean by that is
precisely that moral sensitivity you' re referring to, that goes beyond
that moment when one group accuses another in some sort of ambi–
tious or destructive or self-destructiye way and that other group re–
ceives tha t guilt in an equally destru c ti\'e ,,·ay. That is ultimately
patronizing and not forward movin.g.
In
contrast, \\·hat I'm calling
animating guilt is energizing, but a lways has a vision beyond the guilt.
If
I'm in a situation with Blacks or another ethnic group or Indians.
and my sensitivity to what America has done to them is ;)n issue,
I
would want it to be there, ideally. I'd want to understand that whole
history of which I'm a part.
In
that sense, the guilt relation to the past
is really necessary. This is an insight of Freud, incidentally, about the
emotions of the past energizing the future. Here,
rill
saying it about
guilt as well.
