Why we should feel guilty
We well-supplied people should feel guilty because we have more than people who are as deserving as we are. or maybe they are more deserving. Not only do we have more, but we do not intend to give very much of it away. Probably, nothing.
We white people should feel guilty because we are the beneficiaries of racial privilege. We white people have more power, more stuff, and more resources, and nicer lives than people of color have. Not only do we have a nicer life than people of color, but we would prefer that it stay that way.
We men should feel guilty because we males have more power, more money, more freedom of movement, and more fun than women have. Not only do we have better lives thanks to the sacrifices of women, but we want women to keep on doing what they have always done -- take care of us.
If you don't feel guilty about being a rich white male, or his fortunate wife, how did you manage to solve your guilt problem?
We white people should feel guilty because we are the beneficiaries of racial privilege. We white people have more power, more stuff, and more resources, and nicer lives than people of color have. Not only do we have a nicer life than people of color, but we would prefer that it stay that way.
We men should feel guilty because we males have more power, more money, more freedom of movement, and more fun than women have. Not only do we have better lives thanks to the sacrifices of women, but we want women to keep on doing what they have always done -- take care of us.
If you don't feel guilty about being a rich white male, or his fortunate wife, how did you manage to solve your guilt problem?
Comments (54)
Maybe I am living in the wrong place at the wrong time.I don't have more stuff than people of color. And I certainly hope that those that have less than me, whatever their color, on day can have as much as me. Just like I wish I had as much as those rich people do. I don't prefer that thing stay the way they are.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I don't feel guilty about being about being a rich white male, because I am not one. So I don't have a problem to solve.
Actually, I do not feel guilty for being a rich white male (rich, relative to dwellers in the suddenly famous shit holes of the world). However, casting guilt seems to be the intention of referencing white privilege, male privilege, first world wealth, etc. If I have white privileges, or male privileges, or both rolled up together, fine by me. But Billy Bragg says "Rights are merely privileges extended/if not enjoyed by one and all". Why would one not enjoy having privileges, earned or inherited? I don't have much wealth, though I do have a lot of "stuff" I would like to get rid of.
Perhaps I should send my old dusty books, old ratty clothes, and collection of screws, nails, and other odds and ends overseas. Or at least to a poor family in the near-by shit hole. I have quite a few plastic food containers, for instance, two plastic pink flamingos--surely one is enough. Would you like one of them? How about an interior door I retrieved from the alley? Need one? Once I get rid of the dusty books, I'll have some unused book cases. They're quite lovely -- still unpainted, after many years of use.
Quoting Posty McPostface
What's the point of what -- affirmative action or emotional reasoning?
So here: While it is true, that some whites and blacks are tied for last place at the bottom of the barrel, most Most black people are much, much poorer than most white people. The gap in wealth is not an accident. Whites were given tremendous wealth creating opportunities in the form of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) starting in the 1930s. The program was intended to assist white people and to do nothing for black people: it was written into the policies when Roosevelt created the program. Millions of Americans bought new homes with mortgages guaranteed by FHA. These homes have since appreciated several times over, plus inflation. A very affordable post WWII house selling for $8,000 in 1950 ($100,000 roughly in 2015 dollars) sold for $300,000 to $450,000) in 2016. That's a tremendous gain of wealth that can be used for advancing education and careers. White veterans also were eligible for college loans or grants. Blacks (and Mexicans, Aboriginals, and Asians) were systematically excluded.
Most black workers in the south (domestic workers and agricultural workers) were not even eligible for social security until quite a bit later.
Affirmative action is not robust enough to undo the damage of "dis-privileging" black people in these critical ways for 50 years. Reparations are in order, many people feel. Why? Because these programs were not an act of individual racism. There isn't much than can be done to pay people back for private racism. But the FHA was a federal program, not a private one. When the government does wrong, it should be corrected, and in this case, it means transferring wealth.
How do you feel about being asked to help scrape up the billions that would be coming to black people? I'm not baiting you. Were we to solve the problem, people would pay for the correction out of tax revenue. Lots of poeple would object, many for good reason. "I didn't benefit, why should I have to help pay?" "I didn't cause the problem, why should I have to pay?"
Is it? Has anyone in particular suggested that this is the intention, with respect to those who do make such mentions?
I didn't solve it and I live with it, but I also don't consider myself "a rich white male".
There is a moral argument that suggest that most of us ought to feel guilty. If someone in front of us were in need, most of us would try to see what we could do to help, and if several people needed help as in a disaster, we and others would try to do whatever we could do to help. It would be the moral way to react to such calamities.
There are people around the world that urgently need help, and morally we ought to accept that these people are just as needy as those people in front of you, or near you. If you agree with this then it is your moral duty to try to assist them, to shell out money to assist them, to help them in some manner. (Peter Singer argument)
Most could give more, and it would be a moral thing to do, but many don't and therefore we remain guilty.
But... There has been systematic impoverishment of some people (not just blacks) and the systematic enrichment of others (not just whites) through law and government programs. Over time the differences in wealth between haves and have nots has become quite extreme. No one is guilty but everyone is responsible. I don't feel guilty, but I do feel some responsibility. I would hope many would feel responsible (which isn't the same as guilt or being a bad actor).
But there is some societal guilt or shame for being privileged. I remember this college event for a club I attended. We were all white. This one guy called someone who stole his backpack a "nigger". Everyone's response was to shame and then ostracize him. I was distressed by this. Yeah, white people aren't supposed to use the N word, but people make mistakes and it was in context of being angry at someone for a legitimate reason. We could have just corrected him and let it go at that instead of basically unfriending him on the spot.
Thinking back on that and other ways white people often act publically about other white people exhibiting racism, it makes me thing well-meaning people feel some shame and need to prove publically that they're not guilty of sins of their ancestors, or KKK demonstrators.
I'm less interested in the 'is' of guilt here than the apparent 'ought' of guilt: the idea that apparently, acknowledging privledge entails a normative injunction to feel guilty for that privledge. I've seen lots of the first, not so much the second, and I'm wondering who exactly is supposed to be making such a link?
This, by the way, is precisely the kind of statement that discussions of privilege are meant to highlight. There are some who don't have the 'privilege' of being 'not very interested in the cultural wars over race and gender', but because those 'wars' are not abstract theoretical arguments, but a life that one has to live. Such wars may concern them whether they would deign to concern themselves with them or not.
Thanks for that. Now I better understand the rising poverty rates of our millennial generation relative to well-off whites who benefitted from said distorted policies.
After the 2008 economic crisis, we seem to be living in a different landscape. There is a lot of fear around still, so the business environment isn't great, that's why things are more difficult now, both for employees and for entrepreneurs. Back before 2008, all you had to do was show up, and you were winning. Getting access to capital was so easy, it was a joke. Now everyone is struggling, and good luck getting access to capital on favourable terms that aren't meant to screw you.
By trying to help those who are less fortunate. Feeling guilty doesn't help anyone.
To do that, first I got to help myself no? ;)
No, you're not understanding. You need a mechanism which generates more than enough for yourself, then you can start helping others.
Elon Musk wants to get to Mars. To get to Mars, he had to find a way to generate the resources needed while investing them in rocket technology. That's why the NASA contracts.
I think it's important for whites who, like me, have benefited from good education and growing up in neghbourhoods that are not terrorised by gangs, to be aware of their white privilege. However, I think it's very unhelpful to assert that all white people have white privilege. Even if that's true, it is a heartless and tactically foolish thing to say about white people that are economically disadvantaged. Such thoughtless statements only help the cause of populists and white supremacists, enabling them to equate anti-racism with a lack of concern for disadvantaged whites. So, if one feels inclined to repeat the mantra 'Check your privilege', one should be very, very careful about whom one is saying it to. Their being white is nowhere near enough.
As to male privilege, I don't think that exists in the society in which I live. In many societies around the world, being male is an enormous privilege. But in the privileged, educated, progressive society in which I have the good fortune to live, I cannot see that it is any privilege at all. I am very privileged to live in such a society, but no more privileged than the women that also live in that society.
I don't understand white privilege to be about the fact that I have wealth and an education and come from an unbroken family. There is a correlation of those things with whiteness, but it is loose. There are plenty of whites that are poor or uneducated or from broken homes.
I understand white privilege to be that I can sit on a bus or train, or walk down a street without having to wonder whether a stranger is going to start abusing me and accuse me of being a terrorist or stealing people's jobs or being a dole bludger simply because of my skin colour. From what I've read, white privilege in the US is also about not having to be afraid every time a police officer walks by, that they may search, arrest or shoot you.
In short, white privilege is the freedom from fearing mistreatment by strangers simply based on your skin colour. It has nothing to do with your education or your wealth. So it is true that poor, uneducated whites do have that white privilege. But, as I said above, I think it is stupid and damaging to make a point of that. Everybody has some privileges, but if their overall position is miserable, blaming them for not appreciating their few privileges is ridiculous.
Well said. I think these are important distinctions that are often obscured.
I think people generally attach a significance to the term "privilege" which carries with it certain (non-relative) connotations of positive advantage received through no effort of one's own. Things like not being pulled over by cops, or not being followed in a store, or not being denied the opportunity to rent an apartment solely because of the color of your skin seem like normal things rather than examples of the sort of concrete privileges--elite schools, financial independence due to family background, etc.--that some white people in our society are clearly the beneficiaries of.
I wish I could come up with a better analogy, but it'd almost be like telling a child who gets abused by his or her parents "only" once a month that they're privileged because there are other kids that get abused every single day. That may be true in a relative sense, but it still seems a bit insensitive to point it out. Furthermore, from a pragmatic standpoint "privilege" may not be the best word to describe such a state of affairs; it's a somewhat aggressive and even confrontational term, and this being so it often puts the one it's directed at on the defensive. It just seems like there's a better way of opening them up to the plight of those who obviously have it way worse than they do.
Anyhow, do you think it's possible to focus on combating racism and other forms of oppression against POC without also bringing white privilege into the discussion? I ask this in all sincerity since you seem to have a deep understanding of the issue and a judicious way of approaching it.
It obviously takes a great deal of magnanimity for those who've been subjected to constant affronts to their pride and dignity because of their race to pursue reconciliation over payback, and if I'm being totally honest I'd admit that I'd likely prefer the latter course if I were in their shoes. But I do think the conciliatory messages of certain black people through the years like, say, MLK or even Barack Obama, resonate much more with "average" white people than the more hostile and accusatory dialogue that's growing increasingly common in this day and age of identity politics.
White people for their (our) part need not feel guilty over being born white, but we should acknowledge the obvious--that black people have been and continue to be treated unjustly--and attempt to rectify the situation to the best of our abilities. That simple and honest acknowledgement may even open up an important space for connecting with the "other" in essential ways that transcend race.
IMO working to forward racial equality is a noble and extremely important goal, and how to best go about achieving this is something that should concern all thoughtful people. I definitely don't have the answers other than what tactics I think may work better (not perfectly) than ones currently practiced, at least given the goal of bettering racial relations. These are more emotional intuitions than anything else, and they may very well be misguided.
In his very good book, The Color of Law: How the Federal Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein makes a useful distinction:
Individual acts of discrimination can not be systematically redressed, all of the 1-on-1 discriminations, refusals to rent, refusals to hire, refusals to share schools, and so forth. What can and ought be redressed are programs of discrimination shaped and supported by law. The laws creating and policies governing the Federal Housing Administration (1935) extended and fixed in place a pattern of nearly complete racial segregation in housing.
The rules were explicit: blacks and whites are to be segregated through the power of guaranteeing home loans issued by lenders. The positive effect of this law is for whites (the home loan and wealth accumulation) and the negative effect of this law is for blacks -- consignment to over-priced second and third-rate housing, primarily rental, and minimal wealth accumulation.
So, it is proper to demand more than reconciliation for systematic housing discrimination, because it was a wrong carried out by government. The wrongs of housing segregation were far reaching, powerfully shaping education and health outcomes, and employment: positively for whites, negatively for blacks. The effects were of course general. There are many exceptions.
There is another book, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg which tells yet another story, While "white privilege" was enshrined in the Colonies as the bedrock of society, the privilege of race applied to only those with wealth and pedigree. Those without wealth and inherited status were viewed as riff-raff, not a whole lot better than slaves.
From the colonies to the present, the bifurcation of whites into "quality people" and "riff raff" (my term, not Isenberg's) has continued. Most white people were wage earners under pretty unfavorable circumstances until only recently. While many white working class people did achieve a reasonably stable, prosperous life by working class standards, they weren't so well off that they could expect to rise very far in society.
It wasn't until the post WWII boom that unionized, working class white people were able to achieve a solid upgrade. Some of that was thanks to programs like the FHA, VA, National Defense Education Loans and so on. In the last 30 to 40 years, however, the economic circumstances of white working class people (the majority of white people) have receded.
Yes, it's fair to mention Donald Trump at this point -- who benefitted from white dissatisfaction and disenchantment with the status quo. But Trump didn't win by a landslide.
So, structuring a payback program for blacks who were pretty thoroughly shafted in the 20th century (never mind having been enslaved up until the middle of the preceding century) must avoid also shafting white working class people who were not the prime movers (and in many cases, not even the beneficiaries) of the federal housing program.
Could you post evidence in support of this? I can't find any information online on it.
I assume you are referring to National Defense Education loans. Sorry.
I am afraid my composition was sloppy. It was the FHA loans (and VA housing benefits) that were restricted to whites. I don't know that various groups were systematically excluded from the National Defense education grants. At the time, before and for a while after WWII, discrimination in college admissions was rife. Jews were subject to quota ceilings -- some colleges would only admit a certain number, like the Ivy League schools. Blacks with the cash to pay for college would have run into a brick wall at many admissions offices in 1950. Not all, but at most of them. Hispanics and asians would have had similar experiences, depending where they lived.
Remember, in 1950, non-discrimination laws were a ways into the future.
If you are referencing housing discrimination, I don't have a list of web sites available. Most of the information I have is from The Color of Law and a second book, When Affirmative Action Was White, both recently published.
http://www.bostonfairhousing.org/timeline/1934-1968-FHA-Redlining.html
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/10/19/498536077/interactive-redlining-map-zooms-in-on-americas-history-of-discrimination
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/upshot/how-redlinings-racist-effects-lasted-for-decades.html?_r=0
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/05/racism_in_real_estate_landlords_redlining_housing_values_and_discrimination.html
https://www.americanbar.org/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/human_rights_vol36_2009/fall2009/residential_segregation_after_the_fair_housing_act.html
This is a really useful link to examine housing assessments in the late 1930s-40s. Lots of maps of cities showing what was considered (at the time) good, stable, declining, and "hazardous for loaning mortgages" neighborhoods.
Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago: Beryl Satter, Picador, 2010.
Beryl Satter's father was involved in an effort to help black people resist and defend themselves from being ripped off by the post WWII Chicago real estate industry. It was a valorous but loosing battle, but the book provides a lot of up-close and personal stories about dispossession rather than stats and maps.
Who says? Who is to judge?
The article links to this book, Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City [Baltimore] by Antero Pietila. Haven't read it, but it looks like a good read.
I've focussed a lot of my attention on Chicago, just because segregation was so much more massive there than it was in Minneapolis, which I am more familiar with, and because Chicago's housing segregation and racial history is better documented. Chicago's problems are just much more spectacular than those of fly-over states. Baltimore looks like a good city to study too, with plenty of archival material available.
One of the interesting bits in the red zoning maps in Boston was the reference to "cosmopolitan populations" a code word for undesirable ethnics from Europe. I don't know why they used that term, because in the same paragraph they would state "Jewish infiltration a threat". Or black infiltration, poor infiltration, welfare infiltration.
Click bait phrasing. People can, should, or may feel guilty for personal behavior. I don't think people should feel guilty for governmental or corporate policies they had nothing to do with and wouldn't have been able to affect, unless they were in charge of policy making, which most people are not.
People shouldn't feel guilty for being the beneficiaries of bad policies--up to a point. Folks are not personally responsible for being white, in the majority (70 years ago whites were a larger majority in the US), or that their government gave them benefits it didn't give other people. We can at least be aware of the difference made by either getting the benefit or not getting the benefit. Blacks didn't get the FHA benefit, and it consigned them to poverty which white folks who got the benefit were not consigned to.
We can also be aware that not all whites received the benefit. When the FHA was in full swing, one had to have enough income to afford to buy a house, even an FHA mortgaged house. Lots of white workers with families could not afford to buy a new house, even at favorable terms. Large scale developments of mass produced housing were not built everywhere. They were generally built adjacent to large urban areas, and not in rural areas. In the 1950s far more people still lived in small towns and rural areas than they do now.
So, lots of whites were not beneficiaries and it affected them in ways similar to the ways it affected blacks -- it was a big missed opportunity.
No - Who says who is or is not 'deserving'.
In which case your guilt is completely self generated both internally and externally.
I think the only solution to to the wall that stands between is to simply make a sincere nod, look them in the eye, and move forward into our future. Of course, when it comes to being a female, you should probably take their hand as well (being a female myself) ;). With time, the wall will break down, and allow the past to be set aside.
As I manage restaurants, I once had a boss tell me, "Managing change in a single restaurant is like driving a speed boat, but managing change in an area of 12 restaurants is like the slow turn of a whole battleship." Considering the change of an entire society, I believe this to be relevant.
Neurological studies by people like Tangney have since shown considerable empirical support for such a distinction. In fact, in Shame and Guilt (2002) the authors sum up their results from meta analysis of dozens of psychological tests quite bluntly: "The pattern is pretty clear-cut: guilt is good; shame is bad"
We should no feel shame for the actions of our ancestors because they were not our fault, but if we have excess while others suffer (regardless of the reason), guilt is an entirely appropriate response to doing nothing about that.
I'm wondering how else guilt gets generated.
Linda Radzik wrote an excellent book called 'Making amends' about collective atonement. One case study she analyses is that of the Magdalene Laundries for 'fallen women' in Ireland that treated women discarded by their families like something close to slaves: to what extent are (a) present volunteers and members of the charities that ran the laundries responsible for doing something about the charities' past actions; and (b) Church members in Ireland responsible?
It's worth remembering that for every direct transgressor there are many who turn a blind eye, or who are complicit in minor but meaningful ways. Herein lie shades of responsibility.
I'm not offering any kind of neat answer. I've been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates about slavery: he believes there has to be a collective reckoning in the USA, avowing that slavery was wrong and setting up explicit large funds to redress that wrong, because the harm done in the past still afflicts descendants of the harmed - and benefits descendants of the harmers - in the present. None of my business, I'm a Brit, but I'm interested in the principles at stake. But I heartily agree with BC, we've got to be clear, if we start engaging in any kind of collective breast-beating about such issues, that, for instance, other disempowered people had no chance of a say about many past moral wrongs.
You're right, but it doesn't take many iterations of the consequences before mapping exactly who is complicit and to what extent becomes incredibly difficult.
We can say with a high degree of certainty that Western civilisations as a whole have benefitted from the oppression of slaves and colonies, but to say that any individual has benefitted more than they have suffered simply by virtue of their birth is practically impossible.
More importantly though, I think the concept of reparation payments undermines what I hold to be an important virtue of social responsibility. If we make the claim that one group are responsible for the suffering of another by virtue of an historical linked we can establish, then we must also accept the converse; some other group is not responsible for helping to alleviate the suffering of those in their community (because no culpability can be demonstrated). That is not an ethical statement to which I hold.
I agree that tracing the consequences of slavery up to 1864, and then since 1865 is inordinately complex. In addition, there was more than one system of oppression operating throughout the period of slavery There was in the colonial period, a system of white-worker indenture which was often a short-term slavery; there was a system of share-cropping (mostly in the former confederate states) that was a no-win game for either white or black sharecroppers. Capitalist operations were always somewhat exploitative, but some times grossly exploited their workers, black and white together. We can't leave out the American Indian who was subjected to genocidal policies, or Chinese railroad workers who were very cruelly exploited.
The basic principle of redress should not be "your ancestors were slaves" (or severely disadvantaged in some other way) but rather, "you have been disadvantaged in this present time". Let's call "the present" the last X number of years. Let's say "since the end of World War II", or 70 years (give or take...) Seventy years takes in government policy which benefitted, or harmed, the young people of the late '40s and '50s, and the one or two generations since. Segregation of schools was ruled unconstitutional in 1954, but since then multiple solutions to redress educational inequality have been subverted. Cuts and restrictions in the social safety net that existed in 1970, for instance, have made life more precarious for poor people of all races.
Many of the bad things that happened to people int he last 70 years have happened through the action of the State, or through the acquiescence of the state. After 1954, many parents in the south decided they would take their children from public schools and place them in new private schools created for the purpose of avoiding school desegregation. The state may not have instigated these moves, but it validated this effort to subvert integration. Individuals may have disapproved of welfare programs, but The State, of course, provided the social safety net, and it was the state that moved to reduce it.
There are actions that were harmful to some communities, but were not carried out by the state. The owners of industries which moved from one part of the country to another, then moved from this country to other countries to reduce labor costs are responsible for job losses in the communities they abandoned. The state was not directly responsible.
Individuals, whether workers or industrial magnates, will have to make their own amends. The state, however, has a collective responsibility, and can be collectively compelled to make structural amends.
There are two government agency acronyms that are most relevant: Housing (FHA) and Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) cover the areas where Government can be held most responsible. Bluntly discriminatory housing policies, acquiescence to subverting efforts equalize education for all children, and the general area of health and welfare.
There is no likelihood in the foreseeable future that the government will do a damn thing about redressing systemic wrongs, but that's what we should be working for, and the sooner the fewer new wrongs will be done.
You are just beating yourself up, for no reason.
There was an article on the Magdalene Laundries in the New York Times today; what to do about one of the laundry buildings--tear it down or make a memorial?
First, one would need to ascertain that wrong had been committed, and who were the beneficiaries and victims. This is an evidentiary procedure involving investigation and analysis. In many cases where there has been systemic wrongs done, this isn't all that difficult but it could be a lengthy process. It is in the evidentiary proceedings that the unpleasant truth is revealed.
Institutions that were responsible at the time for the wrongs done need to be investigated to determine which of them still exist. Again this is a fairly straight forward procedures. The order that operated the Magdalene Laundries may still exist, and whether it does or not, the Church of which the order was a part still exists -- but that needs to be defined.
The resources of the responsible agents or their successors have to be assessed. Then a court, probably, or a office established by the courts, would have to establish the degree of liability. Finally, a payout of some kind (either in a radical change of the organization or a liquidation of its assets) can be executed.
In the various priest-abuse cases in the United States, all this has been carried out in adversarial court proceedings. What has happened in several dioceses is that the settlement has liquidated a good share of the church's assets, sending the church into bankruptcy. If the hierarchy of the church was morally bankrupt, then financial bankruptcy seems reasonable
One of the reasons for adversarial litigation is that parts of the church will vigorously resist being classed as a liable property. For instance, a Catholic owned hospital in the diocese might enter into the litigation to protect itself from the court's decrees.
It has not been an altogether satisfactory result, in my opinion. The institution itself doesn't seem to have be sufficiently chastened. During the long proceedings in the Minneapolis Saint Paul Archdiocese, the church was very persistent in its resistance -- continuing to obfuscate, cover up, and so forth. That behavior became part of the overall case. One archbishop was replaced, only to find that the replacement also had problems of covering up, and so forth
I would guess wading into the Irish Catholic Church's behavior would be similarly complicated by layers of resistance and deceit. And this would go for other organizations too, whether it was Magdalene Laundries, Apple, Microsoft, government agencies, and so forth. Problems are always stacked up several layers deep.
Investigation and Litigation isn't going to have the same cathartic results that a Truth and Reconciliation procedure will. Something that combines both? Not sure here. We know that the courts can extract substantial penalties and benefits for victims but it isn't in a position to reform the church.
Just one case among many possible cases of systemic wrongs.
You have an admirable, but I think misplaced, faith in the ability of 'Truth and Reconciliation' procedures. They work well enough in places like Northern Ireland with regards to the violence there, and probably with slavery, but that's not because they have some kind of cathartic power, it's because the whole of society has moved on, no-one sees slavery as OK any more, most people in Northern Ireland are tired of the fighting.
The moral authority of the Catholic Church is severely eroded, but is still very strong, particularly within the communities where the atrocities took place. The 2009 report of the Irish Governement into Catholic child abuse concluded not only that rape and molestation were "endemic" in Irish Catholic church-run industrial schools and orphanages, but that the government and local community leaders were reluctant to act against them.
In 2011, abbot of Glenstal Abbey said Ireland had become "a concentration camp where [the Church] could control everything. ... And the control was really all about sex. ... It's not difficult to understand how the whole system became riddled with what we now call a scandal but in fact was a complete culture."
The Parkinson report, highlighted the way in which teachings about sin directly lead to victims being reluctant to speak out about abuse, has the Church altered it's teaching about sin? - no.
The Higgins and Macabe report highlighted the way in which teachings about papal infallibility and the moral authority of the priesthood allowed abusers to continue their abuse. Have the Church retreated from it's position about moral authority? - no.
Truth and reconciliation only works when society is already willing to accept the truth anyway.
I agree, it's a tough call. A class I did last autumn usefully compared South Africa with Argentina - Truth and reconciliation, led by Desmond Tutu, on the one hand...Bring transgressors to justice, which is what's happening in Argentina. It feels like different States and institutions have to go through different rituals. Tutu's heavy emphasis on forgiveness left some South Africans feeling that there had not been enough retribution for wrong-doing; some Argentines feel reconciliation is made too difficult when punishment is the order of the day.
As for the Catholic Church and its institutions, in Ireland the successive abuse scandals have been followed by a related but different sort of crisis: hardly anyone wants to become a priest. A couple of friends have told me that their local churches are becoming run basically by laypeople. There just aren't enough new vocations to go round even the dwindling number of believers. Interesting to see where it leads.
It's pretty much the same situation in the U.S., though these downward trends in both lay participation in church and vocations began before the numerous priest abuse scandals began. The Catholic Church is in better shape here than in the UK -- not sure what it's condition in Ireland is. But the priest shortage is very bad to severe.
Vocations began to fall in the 1960s because many priests, nuns, and monks simply could not stand to continue living the kind of life that professed religious were living. It wasn't about sex; it was that the cost/benefit balance of religious life tipped in favor of secular life. The orders' rules for living were too antiquated, too rigid. The lives of the professed were too constricted by the weight of their hierarchy.
Priests found that the life available to them when they weren't working was either dry, empty, and lonely -- life in a rectory with several dissatisfied middle aged to older single men just wasn't healthy, or it involved having a sometimes not very surreptitious sex and social life outside of the church.
What precisely caused many millions of Christian laity to depart the church are varied, of course. A long thread could be devoted to the matter. Well, I quit going to church in the 1960s; it wasn't a crisis of faith; I just didn't find... whatever it was. I am a member of a church now -- first time in many years -- for reasons that have little to do with "religion". It's pretty much just someplace to go, mix with a few people, do stuff with others, that sort of thing. If I didn't live directly across the street, most likely I wouldn't be there at all.
See this is why Truth and Reconciliation won't work with regards to the Catholic Church's history of abuse. With slavery, apartheid, even sectarian violence we can look not just at what happened, but why it happened (the really important 'truth') so we can prevent it from happening again. This is essentially the difference between the satisfactory resolution of an atrocity and a cover-up.
People want to see the perpetrators of the atrocities brought to justice, but by and large there have been no calls for those responsible for allowing them to commit such acts to be punished similarly. With regards to the institutions, people are largely just calling for something to be done to stop it from happening again.
The trouble is, religion seems immunised from criticism in this regard, we can't have a truth and reconciliation process if one of the possible 'truths' has been ruled out before we even start. If we look into what it is about religious institutions that allows these things to happen (in order to stop it from happening again) then we have to allow that some tenet or belief within that religion might be the cause. If we rule that possibility out before the investigation has even started then no-one is going to have any faith in the process.
In the UK Carillion has just gone pants up, leaving 20,000 people without a job and thousands of subcontractors without payment putting further jobs at risk.
The directors of Carillion, however, have managed to protect their bonuses and pensions, despite leaving debts of £1.6 billion.
150 years ago, all the directors would have ended up in debtors prison until their debts were paid.
In Brighton, austerity measures have caused the deaths of 17 rough sleepers, this winter.
Victorians values for the poor, Zimbabwean values for the rich.
The way I see it, experience is a fundamentally individual thing. The individual is the ultimate minority. When you look to assign me guilt, pity, or whatever, look at my actual circumstances and not traits that are statistically correlated with my appearance. That's how to avoid making enemies out of allies in the quest for a better world.