No humility without humiliation, no guilt without Philip Rieff

by Helen

I assume that you all miss Poulos as much as the Worthies do, and, since it’s our job to make things easier on you, I can either glue on some "big honkin' Elvoid sideburns" or start talking about Philip Rieff. I’m pretty sure it’s better for everyone if I pick the second.

The third volume of Sacred Order/Social Order picks up where the second left off: trying to make you feel guilty. A noble pursuit, to be sure, and I'm with Rieff in his disgust for moderns who believe that "anything transgressive is creative" (and all creativity transgressive), but his enthusiasm for guilt is undermined by the fact that he's so proud of his capacity for it.

It's easy to see that Rieff wants enlightened conservatives to wear their guilt like a merit badge; what's hard to understand is how someone could be so jazzed about guilt and yet so down on dishonor. Anyone who thinks that our collective shamelessness is as much of a problem as our jones for transgression will read this paragraph and cringe:

Think of what it is to be totally humiliated. It is a positive absence of respect, a lowering, some sixth hour so complete in its inferior treatment of those made superior by it that the one resistance still possible at such a time, the possibility that remains, to defend your self-respect, the utopia of all resistances, is suicide. When life becomes impossible, yet unconstrained by the utopian possibility of death, then the experience of being lowered is best seen through therapies of survival. Here is the alternative utopian possibility, not survival in itself but the guiltlessness that may develop best through therapies of survival. If such therapies succeed, then a survivor would be in the position of knowing perfectly well what he ought not to have done and yet having done it.

We are all familiar with the kind of humiliation that comes from desperation--Chunk doing the Truffle Shuffle, say--and it's certainly contemptible whether the thing you're desperate for is social acceptance or physical survival, but there's no reason to think that everyone who is willing to suffer humiliation (in other words, anyone who is humble) is so craven. Some of them are even saints.

As bad as it is when guilt disappears, it's worse when guilt becomes self-congratulatory, something that dishonor can never be. Maybe the difference is that Rieff grew up on John Profumo while we grew up on Bill Clinton. For turning a person towards shame culture rather over guilt culture, there's nothing like seeing a strutting politician ask his constituents to be proud of his willingness to publicly overshare.

Comments

[Joules]

Oh, good! I wondered if I was the only one thinking my pursuits are frivolous when I wake up in the morning after reading myself to sleep with "Triumph of the Therapeutic".

[Dan]

Rieff wants us to become a credal society, at least per "Charisma", but sociologists have little to no capacity for forming creeds (hence his reference to survival). The paragraph you quote does not place Rieff's desire for guilt within the context of a faith/guilt order, which is the social channel through which a creed bestows upon individuals the conviction of guilt necessary to sustain social life.

I wish Rieff had seen the connection between Luther and creedlessness, and how the rejection of a lawgiving Christ is the rejection of a creedal Christ (this is my hypothesis, anyway).

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