Fractional Guilt
Some things should never be amortized for convenience
What would you do if your house burned?
Assuming you are (hopefully) unharmed, you would call your insurance company. You don’t likely have $600,000 in the bank for a rebuild, and you’ve paid your monthly premium with the full expectation that you are covered - but your $225 monthly payment alone would take 200 years to cover the full amount. The reality is you are being subsidized by a risk pool of tens of thousands of others paying premiums to a company who invests them, taking off enough to cover car leases and greens fees for their agents, leaving the rest to help make people like you whole.
Risk spreading lessens your burden by making other people share your liability - spreading risk to the point where no one person will experience a catastrophic outcome. We agree to this because human beings are risk-adverse creatures by evolution, and hedging against future risk is an attractive proposition.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, we decided to apply the concept to our politics.
Many tragic and unspeakable things have been done in service to a policy or a program – acts committed by people deputized by authorities and institutions with the authority to do them. Terrible things have been done to people with names, faces and individual lives by people with names, faces and individual lives.
We must also admit that one cannot reconcile the past without acknowledging it. But while societal recognition may be an integral part of reconciliation, it has also become a means of fractionalizing and amortizing guilt. It makes us forget that individuals were the agents of these decisions and acts.
Declaring something as a societal failing may (rightly) force us all to acknowledge wrongs committed in our name, but it all too often works like guilt insurance – where your semi-frequent incantations or errant posts act serve as a secular recitation of a dozen Hail Marys and counting of rosary beads.
That is why we live in a country where awareness and acknowledgment of the historical treatment of Indigenous peoples has never been higher, yet many of those same peoples continue to live in third world conditions, with poor educational and employment opportunities, with tap water dangerous to human health. It is also why people who beat the drum the loudest about the dangers of man-made climate change are often among the most profligate of carbon emitters, with many recently jetting to a fortnight of conferencing in Dubai – like the insurance agents who take their commission from the premiums we pay in order to finance their condos and golf trips to Myrtle Beach.
This is not to say that collective awareness and procedural reforms are not needed. A system that allows such abuses of power and of individuals is one in need of safeguards against future acts. But the “society is broken” position was meant to work in tandem with individual guilt, not as a substitute for it. The idea was for society to accept its share of the liability, while the individual takes what rightfully belongs to them. Instead, we give absolution to the individual – or ignore them – and throw all of their actions against the buying power of the risk pool.
Collectivizing guilt means fractionalizing it, and fractionalizing it means trivializing it. If we sentenced a convicted murderer to 15 years in prison but then decided that it was “society’s fault” - a collective responsibility - then every Canadian could walk into a jail cell, stand there for about 14 seconds, then walk out completely expunged of guilt – including the perpetrator.
This is the most pernicious effect of this fractionalized ownership of guilt. It grants penance at an unbelievably small price. When you discount absolution so deeply, you also discount the shame. It explains why our society can simultaneously be both overbearing and hectoring and still remain morally ambivalent. We pay almost nothing for the moral lesson, and we got our money’s worth.
I can tell you that I know of two houses owned by the same family – one on a main street and another a couple of blocks away on a short and narrow street. During the summer where many resolved that celebrating Canada Day was de rigueur, the former address was quiet and empty, save for an orange t-shirt hung on an outside railing. The latter address, however, had many people – music and a steady flow of people bringing coolers full of refreshments. The t-shirt would appear to have been the visible secular rosary that enabled the celebration away from prying eyes and free from guilt.
And that is the crux of the problem.
A system of fractional guilt has given us the worst of all possible outcomes – problems that don’t get fixed, people who act like those problems were fixed because they did their performative act, and a managerial class that takes their cut from the top because they ‘coordinated’ the awareness of the issue. The first group gets angrier over the inaction, the second doubles down with the platitudes, while the third continues to cash in their commissions.
What may be worse is the false sense of absolution, and the arrogance that accompanies it. My father started his life at age 12, living in a warehouse of the moving company he worked for, saving his meal allowances and sleeping in the truck on long hauls until he had the money to rent a room in a boarding house. I know his story and his struggles – and I know things that I would never write – but I can tell you I have been lectured to about “the plight of the homeless” by people from well-heeled neighbourhoods who use their experience of bundling up their MEC sleeping bag in front of a campus library for 24 hours as bona fides for superior knowledge.
To be fair, the performative nature of fractional guilt may have some marginal value in heightening “awareness”, but awareness is not action. It is the advertising campaign to promote the tangible thing. But when there is no tangible thing, what are we promoting? An experience? Do we fully understand the suffering of soldiers during the American Civil War by dressing up in period attire on a Saturday afternoon, firing some blanks in a city park, then buggering off to the IHOP for a stack of pancakes? Maybe, but I suspect that LARPing can only take you so far.
While there is an obvious attraction to this system of fractional guilt for those who have done wrong or committed injustices – the deeply discounted absolution for pennies on the dollar – nothing changes. Issues don’t get resolved, and wrongs don’t get righted in a way that is measurable or meaningful.
James Boswell, in his 1791 biography The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D, offers the following quote based on his conversations with the man:
"The only way that religious truth can be established is by martyrdom... There is no other way of ascertaining the truth, but by persecution on the one hand and by enduring it on the other. "
Beyond the dramatic, there is some import to our times – that a belief worth holding is one worth fighting for. That means an individual commitment, and individual risk. It means, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb often refers to as “skin in the game.”
In the end, the attraction of fractional guilt may be too overpowering – it gives absolution on the cheap and it profits the interlocutors. Those are formidable incentives. But we should not delude ourselves that it changes anything in a way that gives satisfaction to the aggrieved, or true resolution to those who have done the wrong.