Guilt and the arc of the moral universe

There’s A Crack in Everything- That’s How the Light Gets In In May 2020, in the midst of our Covid plague, as I sheltered in place in front of my television screen, I observed the televised murder of a black man by a white policeman charged with serving and protecting the public. I could not believe what I was seeing with my own eyes. Of course, I had been cognizant of the injustices that seemed intrinsic to the status quo, but in my day to day existence I tended to dismiss them with a “yes, but...” Yet something in the experience of watching George Floyd being murdered by “the law” on national television broke through, and left me with an “Oh my God, what have we done” reaction to not only what we were doing to African Americans, but what the “American we” had done to the native Americans who had lived here for thousands of years before us. Over the past few years the word “woke” has achieved currency as an awareness of a crack in the American myth of liberty and justice for all and the recognition that our country was built on a foundation of racism that remains embedded in our structure. Of late, the term has become invested (some might say infected) with the intense affects stirred up by the culture wars that characterize contemporary American life. As a psychoanalyst, I love the term. The idea of achieving awareness of something that had heretofore been out of reach reminds me of another word, insight, that's been part of our psychoanalytic culture from its earliest days. Insight can help us make sense of our inner lives and give shape to the way we live them. Similarly, “wokeness” can help us make sense of our history and holds the potential to shape it according to what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” Of course that requires us to face our demons, the painful truth of our origins as perpetrators of slavery and genocide, and the ways in which we perpetuate racial “othering” in our society. It's a perfect word to describe the experience I had watching the horror of the George Floyd murder. The “I” who speaks through this paper is a Jewish American male born in the post World War 2 baby boom, looking backwards and forward at the universe with a sense of heightened awareness. For me, the most painful aspect of this awakening has been the guilt that comes with recognizing the degree to which I've benefitted from a status quo that pulls like an undertow, away from the pole of justice toward the other side of the moral universe. When I first encountered the line “the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality,” (attributed to Dante, but actually a paraphrase from the mouth of John F. Kennedy) I thought that “crisis” referred to external events. But now I began to think of “moral crisis” as a state of mind. It's an awareness of the gap between who one is and who one aspires to be. In much of our day to day life, this gap is out of our awareness. Otherwise, it would be hard to go on. Now that some light had forced its way in, I wondered what to do with the guilt I was feeling and how long it would be before I turned the light off. I began to wonder how my own moral psychology reflected processes in our society at large. That, I think, is how I decided to write this paper. In the process of writing, I learned that in my own attempt to turn rumination into productive thinking I was grappling with the psychological problem of being what social theorist Michael Rothberg (2019) calls an “implicated subject,” who cannot escape responsibility for engaging with the iniquities that have provided me with so many benefits. My ideas occur in the context of current work being done by relational psychoanalysts who are attempting to provide a bridge between the social/ethical position of the “implicated subject” and the psychological position of relational analysts with respect to the inevitability of enactments and the search for ways to create spaces for repair. I will have more to say about this later, but want to highlight at the outset the excellent volume of essays assembled by Kabasakalkian-Mckay and David Mark (2022). While I do not consider myself a member of the “relational school,” the expansion of understanding and possibility by relational analysts (Jessica Benjamin in particular) has obvious relevance to my own explorations in this paper. Despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary, I do believe there is something about being human that inclines us toward wanting to be better people. The existence of a moral compass extends far back into our prehistory (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021, pp 208–209), shaping and shaped by the psychological experience particular to one's own particular lifetime. Consider these words from a sermon delivered by abolitionist minister Theodore Parker in 1853: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.” In 1968, Parker's words were incorporated by Martin Luther King, Jr. into a speech entitled “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” Years later, Barack Obama, America's first black president, had them sewn into his oval office rug after achieving the highest office in the land. Yet for every movement in the direction of justice, the arc has indeed reversed itself. The war for justice that followed Parker's remarks within a decade was followed by retrograde movement as the South turned to Jim Crow laws within another decade. Within a week of echoing Parker's remarks, King was assassinated. Barack Obama's promise of hope and change was followed by a sharp turn toward nativist forces that have shaped our current political landscape in ways eerily and frighteningly reminiscent of pre -World War II Germany. Too often, these days, I get an eerie feeling that I'm looking at the world through the eyes of my grandparents. On both sides of my family, they watched their Eastern European world devolving into chaos and made the leap into what they hoped would be a better life in a better place for themselves, their and the times I say to myself this is what it have been like for them. is history The idea that history is one that and about this is a I think I'm to say that of the past few years have to more a few of us the feeling as “the past is not a a to a I have wondered to what an this feeling is part of and my own those that I after at the and of life by my I into the us that we more with those who us. 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want to we we psychoanalysts in this and our is so made a to from the universe in which had and to it with the with the was remains a of as we have to the degree to which in its and that we it on But one of his was to the psychological of and it in his thinking about and society at large. into on his Jewish the day of the with a way of from an in so that one can at one's moral and them in a way It's a from there to and of in and on of and and and his own to understand how guilt the moral universe. the of his life on the and his of the of guilt left with about the of the of and the of history as a between and While his hope that out the his is one of an the of the moral universe in the years of his life. 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the word, our sense of as is we are with our who is as a relational idea for is that the of requires the recognition of our own this our to a from to When we as analysts the inevitability of the we into their them them of course, we into their processes with the of our are to get in like to here that with all we can do as for many of our there be to the of in the through in the of these can be in the experience of and the of long to a degree of and that could not be the of the with As is a encountered to help with of the most and for and is the recognition of the we and the we by that we have the to is by at what we have done to through to is the position as by one made by an for an for many of us much of our that in what called the In the not my In the that the contemporary it is to these ideas about and as many of us have in our it more to on to the idea that guilt be the position that to be society. this could our own psychoanalytic and experience be there a way that we as psychoanalysts could help to a social that us our to help us our eyes long to make that would us toward the to our eyes out to so that we can of the between who we are and what we to ideas about have In his the for an to to a was the foundation of our for the that the of the moral universe. a here is that our society to as a to provide for to as part of the process of and and Mark make a that the current work being done on enactments by relational psychoanalysts a for and in the world our and for processes that might create that from which we can the position that calls and Benjamin calls and In Benjamin the moral of this in of The which of relational and social the for the of of and the that to be the for the experience we might the we experience that can we to the of responsibility for our and for the of the who is to as we our and the position of the on of our the to as we analysts to face in our there are places in the world to be to face itself. and South to mind. is an of the in our in this of have provided a of the moral universe that us to with all the we can and are attempting to in are in a national about and that we can them. as the and John of I think our psychoanalytic as those I've have there can be can be a that a to be an that to be a we have to be made In paper a for (2019) a of how the recognition of guilt to in work with in a a in which the of the a of that for the of that these had that had been and in which was an “implicated ideas from and how psychoanalytic understanding might be at the in the of recognizing and the that had been and the for potential In a more I think we can make a by an and a that a recognition of guilt and the it as of the arc of the moral universe that we to toward would be a to do In I have to the relevance of psychoanalytic ideas about guilt to the and we face in the In the we can the guilt that comes with our responsibility for the iniquities that we create and the is and we are to the arc away from as to responsibility for our has a with the we face in our to create a society. As and the of this more we can As and we to the by our and their In this guilt is by the search for to The to responsibility the to of toward toward the that in the way of to it a our to guilt in a way to create As we do have some ideas about how to in a In our work with we have the to a sense of responsibility for our as as our so we can help our the guilt and responsibility to work toward a society. as the work of the relational we can help by our own and that place in a social context we are “implicated our of to work the we can a of ways to from my is that we psychoanalysts maintain our on the of guilt and in human psychological life. to a part of our psychoanalytic we are to our eyes and in the light through the we see all us

Aesthetics · Art · Criminology · Culture of the United States · Economic Justice · Mythology · Political science · Racism · Sociology · Status quo · Classics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Political Philosophy and Ethics

• The Implicated Subject

  Michael Rothberg•The Implicated Subject•2020

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• Beyond Doer and Done To

  Open Access•Jessica Benjamin•The Psychoanalytic Quarterly•2004

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• Guilt

  Paul Heelas, J M Carroll et al.•Man•1986

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