"America, Europe, The Pope And De Tocqueville"

By Sigmund, Carl and Alfred @ Sigmund, Carl & Alfred:

Neo-neocon has what is (on second reading — we can be slow that way) a very sublime post. In The Guilt of Europe Survives, she comments on a Shrinkwrapped series of posts, in which he discusses Europe and the Jews. Neo makes the following observation

.... I don't think the desire is for the Jews to disappear, exactly. But I think the desire is to prove the Jews to be as guilty as the Europeans were, and thus to absolve the Europeans of guilt for participating in and cooperating with the Holocaust in such great numbers. And if the Jews and/or Israelis should happen to disappear as a side-effect of the present-day attitude of the Europeans, then so be it.

This can be seen in the eagerness with which explicit and frequent comparisons are made between Jews — especially Israelis — and Nazis. And, in a separate but related phenomenon, I think it's at least partly behind the comparison of Bush to Hitler. If the Israelis/Jews (and American Presidents) are as bad as the Nazis and their European collaborators, this serves a double function: first, it norms Europe's behavior during WWII ("see, there's nothing special about the guilt of Europeans, move along now"); and second, it can even be seen as justifying the Holocaust, as well ("Jews are evil, so it was okay for us to cooperate in attempting to destroy them").

Then she makes a rather interesting connection:

One other thing about guilt and Europe. There is some connection between guilt and religion. No, it's not at all necessary to believe in religion to feel guilt. But guilt is an emotion specifically addressed by religion: when it is appropriate for a person to feel it, and the various ways for which it can be atoned. It's beyond the scope of this particular post to go into the manner in which different religions answer these questions; but suffice to say it's one of the major tasks of religion to try to give people a way to assess guilt, and then to expiate it.

Europe has become far less religious in recent decades, and perhaps the loss of this mechanism for dealing with guilt is another reason the emotion has to be so strongly deflected there. What remains as a tool for dealing with guilt is the somewhat secular religion of psychiatry and psychology....

Neo speaks of the real connection between God and guilt. We would add that there is another connection — that between hubris and humility. Post war Europe it seems, has chosen to displace one with the other.

In their search for redemption, many post war Europeans have decided that a false hubris of moral superiority is the necessary next step in the process of emerging in a decidedly Christ-like resurrection of morality that might remove the stain of European complicity of one of mankind's great crimes. They must abandon their past, erase it altogether because in fact, that is easier than dealing with it. In fact, erasing or rewriting that past is a 'two for one deal.' There is no past to deal with and at the same time, Europeans can assume a moral superiority over American cousins....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/04/06 08:01:56 AM
Categorized as More Than Blogworthy.