I read an article in the Spring 2008 Inquiring Mind about a guy who was experiencing a great deal of anguish, supposedly over some bad things he’d done as a teenager. He and his therapist devised an elaborate ritual to absolve him of his guilt, and as I was thinking about this ritual, it seemed to me like a new-age version of confession: forgive me father for I have sinned; say 15 Hail Mary’s. In AA, I made a list of everyone I had harmed and made amends to them all. In Judaism they have Yom Kippur, and I suppose every religion has some kind of ritual to absolve us of our guilt for having “sinned.”
One way of looking at all these guilt trips is that they are ways of reinforcing the importance of social responsibility: human beings must be taught to conform to standards of good behavior, and punishment for deviance has been one of the preferred means of promoting this conformity, reinforced by the emotion of guilt. Society couldn’t function without a certain minimum of adherence to the rules, and social living is necessary for human survival. Guilt is a product of social evolution.
Guilt is not fun—that’s how it works. If you want to discourage bad behavior, make someone feel really shitty. Then, when they’ve admitted what a rotten human being they are, make them go through some ritual that “absolves them of their guilt,” and they feel hugely relieved. A very effective process, and most of us had it applied to us at a very young age—we’re stamped.
If you’ve been with me for a while, you’ll know my argument against the rationale underlying guilt: guilt reinforces the idea that there is some entity that’s in charge of your brain, running the show, making those decisions to be good or bad, and that entity is the self—you. The truth—as some Buddhists have been maintaining for millennia, and as logic and neuroscience have repeatedly demonstrated—is that there’s no one up there who’s in control of your thinking, any more than there’s anyone in control of your digestion.
How this translates into behavior is that decisions about whether to do the good thing or the bad thing arise out of the history of an organism with a given set of capabilities, evolving in a particular environment. This process is analogous to any other natural process: put a taco in your digestive system, and it’s fate will depend on the inherent ability of your enzymes, etc. to process it, given their history of previous injuries.
It’s possible that human beings are wired for guilt—other primates exhibit similar symptoms—but certainly, some of us have been burdened with a history that accentuates whatever built-in tendencies we might have had. I think that some societies, some religions, and some parents, have found ways to encourage good behavior without the extensive use of guilt. I think it’s possible to minimize the trauma of becoming a well-socialized human being—without religious overtones or rituals—although I don’t have any personal experience to point to.
My only experience is in dealing with the personal aftermath of a full-blown, guilt-motivated up-bringing. I went through the rituals of AA, and found some relief in that, but it wasn’t totally effective, and it uses a religious, or quasi-religious, rationale that I find intellectually unsatisfying.
I think it’s possible to use the process I’ve outlined here, of unraveling the science of our behavior, to understand the use of guilt as a social conditioning mechanism, and thereby to lessen our distress. The discomfort I feel over “bad” behavior is not the result of “my” decisions—it is the playing out of an evolutionary process with no one in charge.
But understanding the problems does not always, in itself, solve the problem. Sometimes, understanding only points the way to a possible solution. If a decision should arise to lose weight, that decision, in itself, will not make the pounds disappear: the decision-making version of myself must find ways of making itself the dominant version in eating situations where other versions of myself usually have control. The same is true of guilt: the neural complex that understands must find a way to re-program other neural complexes that have been instantiated by thousands of previous experiences—it ain’t easy.
I was thinking about the guilt issue this morning as I was waiting for my coffee to drip, and at the same time I was, as usual, watering the few plants that need it every day, when I came to one that I had been neglecting. Some of it’s leaves had turned yellow, and—irony of ironies—I found myself feeling guilty for my “sin”! I had to laugh at the stubbornness of my conditioning, and my failure to spot the beginning of what Marvin Minsky calls an “emotion cascade.” My strategy of staying alert for the onset of such cascades had broken down.
There was an old Zen master who used to call out to himself every morning:
“Master!”
“Yes!” he would answer.
“Stay alert!”
“Yes! Yes!”
“Don’t be fooled by anyone!”
The question is, who was calling out to whom? I’ll give you a clue: they both live in the same brain. Many of the ones who might very well try to fool them live there, too.
Stay alert!
Young Daisy Consoling Sibling