White Privilege, White Guilt

 History often provides lessons for the present.  Herein are some snippets of Russian history that have sparked my thoughts about privilege and guilt.  (And, as an aside, this is just one reason why we need to read and understand history rather than cancel it).

I was recently reading about the Populist movement in Russia in the late 1800s in which students and others involved in the movement picked up and moved from Moscow and St. Petersburg to the countryside to live with the peasantry.

These young [Populists] were riddled with the guilt of privilege.  Many of them felt a personal guilt towards that class of serfs – the nannies and the servants – who had helped to bring them up in their families’ aristocratic mansions.  They sought to free themselves from their parents’ sinful world, whose riches had been purchased by the people’s sweat and blood, and set out for the village in a spirit of repentance to establish a ‘New Russia’ in which the noble and the peasant would be reunited in the nation’s spiritual rebirth.  By dedicating themselves to the people’s cause – to the liberation of the peasantry from poverty and ignorance and from the oppression of the gentry and the state – the students hoped to redeem their own sin:  that of being born into privilege.  (Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance, A Cultural History of Russia, 220)

One can’t help but see parallels to America today.  Today the woke Left has discovered the useful concept “White privilege” and demands that White individuals admit their privilege (which may or may not exist) and proclaim their guilt.  Their sin is that they may or may not have benefited from the status of Whites throughout history; their privilege may or may not have had some negative impact on non-Whites. 

The Left, using a selective reading of history, portrays this country as full of sin due to White Privilege.  The sins of the ancestors now fall to present day Whites.  This sin must be redeemed.

Sure, we hear words like reparations as a form of retribution for the sin, but what is this really about?  Is this White privilege/White guilt about concern for those who are not White, or is it really about furthering a socialist agenda while making oneself feel good?  Like the Russian Populists, are today’s White penitents, convinced that they should feel guilty, simply trying to “redeem their own sin”? 

The sin itself does not make sense.  Just as the Russian students were not complicit in their parents’ choice of a peasant nanny, today’s Whites were not complicit in any possible sins of their ancestors.  The Russian Populists were not guilty simply because they were born to aristocracy any more than today’s Whites are guilty simply for being born White. 

Yet, convinced they are sinners, both the Russian Populists and the woke Whites do penance.  This penance is done for absolution of the sinner – to remove the stain of the “sin” of privilege; it really in the end has nothing to do with non-White victim identity groups.   Those groups are created by the Left to make one group feel guilty and in need of absolution while furthering the Left’s power over other groups whom they have made dependent upon them and their promises of a better life.

Like the Left, the Russian Populists promised a better life.  They were going to liberate the peasants from their “poverty and ignorance.”  Ignorance is a significant word here.  It suggests that the Populists believed in some way that the peasants were less than their Populist saviors who believed it was their right or duty to do for the peasants what the Populists believed they could not do for themselves.    

Not unlike the many programs created for today’s minority victim groups, “a whole range of institutions” were set up to improve the Russian peasants’ welfare and to integrate them into national life.  The attitude towards these peasants was one of “paternal populism.”  The peasants, however, were angry with those socialist ideas and with those who were trying to take control over their lives.  They did not want to be patronized; the paternalism was offensive to them.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines paternalism as “the interference of a state or an individual with another person, against their will, and defended or motivated by a claim that the person interfered with will be better off or protected from harm.” 

The essence of paternalism is that one group is seen as “less than” another, as unable to exist without the paternal assistance.  While paternalistic handouts may be useful, they rectify nothing.  Paternalism does not provide the tools or education that would allow those being helped to actually improve their status and no longer need the paternalism and its welfare. 

For the past 50 years the Left’s paternalistic entitlement programs have kept the minorities they are allegedly designed to help in minority ghettos.  They have not made the minorities “better off,” nor have they “protected them from harm.” 

What this paternalism has done is keep the alleged victims right where they are – less than those who are their paternal keepers.  It intentionally creates an underclass that is dependent upon their paternal keepers.  This benefits only the Left which gains power by maintaining the dependence of this underclass.

As the Populist movement in Russia collapsed, it became clear that the idea of the peasants that the Populists had in their minds did not exist.  Placement into an identity group in no way correlates to actual understanding of that individual or his needs.  Indeed, one can never know another group better than the group knows itself.  To pretend to do so is to believe one is superior to another.

In large part due to their lack of actual understanding of the peasants as people, things did not go well for the Russian Populists.  Their movement ultimately failed.   However, the idealism of the movement remained, and Lenin used it to bolster his revolution not many years later.  And that certainly did not go well for the peasants!

Perhaps at least some of the White Privilege-Guilt is, like that of the Russian Populists, based on some idealistic belief in a better world.  I tend to think that it more likely results from the Left’s manipulation of basically good emotions.  Perhaps some of the “guilty” feel their unknown sins have been redeemed.  But in the end, it is the Left, not those labeled victims of the privileged, that actually benefits. 

The Left is creating and fomenting the divisiveness that any good Marxist knows is necessary to bring about socialism.  They are also creating the idealist fairy tale about how their progressivism will heal all.  

The victims having been determined and guilt having been proclaimed, the Left provides the way to assuage it:  support their paternalistic institutions and organizations that will “take care of” the victim group and your guilt will be redeemed.  In essence, give power to the Left and they will fix the problem.  The Left will anoint the woke as both redeemer and redeemed.   Of course, nothing goes unrewarded; the Left will expect gratitude in the form of power.

I’m not buying it.  The Left belies the supposed noble concern of its guilt based calls for more paternalism when it sees only useful groups rather than individuals and when it treats those groups as some underclass whose dependence is cultivated rather than as equal individual humans who are due respect. 

Even the most noble sounding cause must consider not just the cause but the actual and complex individuals whom it will affect.  Lenin’s motivations for socialism were for the most part based on idealistic beliefs.  The ideal did not become a reality because it failed to understand the effect that its “I know better than you what you need” attitude would have on real individuals and their spirit.

Failure to see people as more than some identity statistic demonstrates a lack of real compassion for those people as individual and equal human beings.  While useful in fomenting revolutionary change, identity groups are destructive to the lives of real people. 

Everyone in some way has been lucky through no fault of their own and in other ways unlucky through no fault of their own.  Experiencing something better than another in some area does not create some privilege-victim relationship.  The unfairness of life does not mandate victim status for some and guilty status for others.

The Russian Populists ultimately realized that “they were cut off from the actual peasants by a cultural, social and intellectual abyss that they could not hope to bridge.” They then accepted that within their many differences they were all Russians. 

So too are we all Americans.  The Left would divide us by placing us into competing groups.  The division benefits none but the Left.    

We can learn from history that concepts of privilege, guilt, and their cohort paternalism do not end well for the real people seen as needing the interference of a paternalistic savior.

Guilt that is real should be redeemed.  But guilt belongs to the one who actually committed the sin.  Sin and retribution are not group holdings.  Retribution for actual sin should not be some form of paternalism that only furthers the sin.  Do not let the Left’s need for paternalistic power interfere with our individual yet united humanity.