Maggie's Farm

I think it was in Annie Hall. Alvy Singer is putting together a lobster dinner for his date with Annie - the famous lobster scene. She reads from the paper about the serial killer striking again, and he replies "I was nowhere near there."

My point is not to comment on Jewish guilt. Almost every religion and ethnic group with which I am familiar thinks they have the worst case of guilt. (Not sure about Islam. Do they feel guilty if they fail to kill an infidel?)

My point is to comment on neurotic guilt vs. healthy, normal guilt. Woody Allen's line is funny because it touches the neurotically guilty place in all of us. Normal people with sturdy consciences commonly have a slice of neurotic guilt in their personalities, unfortunately. It is usually a guilt about  bad thoughts, bad impulses, destructive tendencies, ugly selfish conniving, envy, cruelty, etc., or about minor, easily forgiveable moral slips. Oftentimes, such thoughts and impulses are out of our awareness, but the key is that, with neurotic guilt, one hasn't really done much to feel guilty about.

Healthy, wholesome guilt occurs to those with strong consciences when they truly cross a major line which is engraved in their hearts. It is painful, and should be painful. The warning and the punishment is self-administered, as it should be. A non-neurotic sense of guilt is, in my opinion, a matter of the spirit and not so much a matter of psychology. Everyone has stupidly or carelessly screwed up, if they have lived long enough, but a pattern of wrong-doing without appropriate self-punishment bespeaks a spiritual void as well as a non-functioning conscience. (We call that pride, or self-love, or narcissism, or sociopathy.)

Sometimes I wonder whether liberals wear guilt as a badge of pride. It is known to occur in AA meetings, where sometimes folks believe that the lower into tatoo-land they have gone, the more authority they can claim. Silly, and perversely narcissitic.

The subject comes up after reading Shelby Steele's instantly-famous essay, which basically rips apart "liberal guilt" and shows it to be the neurotic foolishness that it is.

(The subject of guilt also fits with Wednesday's post on "feelings," ...and it also comes up after reading today's post on the World Council of Churches, which contains an appalling display of public self-congratulatory hystrionic hand-wringing - so self-congratulatory, in fact, that I tend to doubt its sincerity and wonder whether it is a pseudo-humble, pseudo-contrite form of political statement. Ostentatious contrition is sometimes just the flip side of spiritual pride. If you read the whole piece at Touchstone, you will see that it's a living satire, like Woody Allen's line. I can say that, as an American citizen, I am pretty much guilt-free as far as I know, but as an individual, I am morally imperfect, and thus disconnected from God's loving but inscrutable will, despite my aspirations.)

Steele demonstrates that the undercurrent of irrational guilt in our culture, nurtured by a generation of America-haters devoted to highlighting historical imperfections and ignoring historical sources of national pride, has weakened our spine, our confidence, our common sense - and our freedom to pursue our self-interest. This is very similar to what neurotic guilt can do to an individual.

Here is short list of things about which almost all of us can say "I was nowhere near there": slavery, racial discrimination, genocide, destroying the planet, oppressing helpless people, imposing our religion on others, imperialism, evil intentions, raping and killing women and children. "Collective guilt"? Let's forget that notion: caring for our own souls is a big enough job, and a life-time job. I have no idea how preachers do what they do...

Discrimination against individuals I do not like or approve of? You bet. Always. Capitalism? Wonderful - gives everyone freedom to pursue their own path as they see fit.

There are another ten pages in this, but this is enough for now.

Image: Woody and Keaton in Annie Hall.

An afterthought: Christ set a high standard - impossibly high - in His most famous preaching, in His commentary on the Ten Commandments in the  Sermon on the Mount. Among many other things, He came close to equating evil thought with evil action, thus making all humans sinners, for sure. But Christians accept that, just as they accept the need for supernatural salvation. That is another spiritual matter, and not a psychological one.

As a psychiatrist, and a Christian, I deal with these two realities, sometimes with difficulty. Life is not meant to be easy, despite what the French want to think. "I never promised you a rose garden."