Spreading the guilt

Have you noticed how the public square will occasionally seize on a word or phrase and worry it like a puppy with a squeaky toy? After years of gnawing, pawing, shaking, stretching, and squeezing, the phrase becomes a shapeless pulp that’s lost its edge. Some examples: “the war on 0000,” “the wrong side of history,” “inappropriate” (rather than just plain bad). Political candidates and news commentators grow these phrases by the bushel. Some of them are just clichés, but others reveal more than we realize about contemporary thought patterns and underlying assumptions. Take for example a word that has come in for a more severe cultural mauling than most, and the word is … culture.

My dictionary lists eight meanings (with sub-headings), touching on definitions as wide apart as intellectual training and animal husbandry. The broadest use of culture refers to “the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought.” Very useful, to be able to comprise all this in a single word. But culture is a victim of definition creep when social mavens stretch it to cover anything they don’t like. The implication is almost always negative: “culture of fear,” “culture of death,” “Culture of Shut up,” “Culture of Booze-shmooze” (thanks for that one, Google), and so on.

By assigning blame to a culture, the writer and the magazine avoided the burden of seeing justice done.

Here’s another one: the Woe-is-us culture. You heard it here first.

In his classic work, Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud wondered where guilt came from, and why it persisted in a civilized society—or why it was, in fact, a mark of civilized societies. Primitives, so far as he knew, rubbed along well enough without it, but “the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.” Regret for wrongdoing was only part of it; the more complex the society, the more simple guilt was driven underground until it mutated into something far from simple—hard to understand and harder still to dislodge.

Is the “culture of 0000” phraseology one of the many faces of guilt? It seems the more equitable and “fair” Americans become, the more we wring our hands over supposed cultural unfairness. The only solution ever put forward is some kind of government action, like a law. Three decades of hand-wringing have produced a torrent of laws, along with the inevitable regulations, that don’t seem to fix the problem at all. We still have our gun cultures, hate cultures, rape cultures.

The “rape culture” tag is worth a closer look because, unlike some of the other miasmas of American society, this unlovely phrase refers to a particular form of violence directed at a particular segment of the population: women. The University of Virginia scandal that broke just before Christmas (see “The Use and Abuse of Stories,” Jan. 10) exposed the weaknesses of the “culture” meme. In that case, Rolling Stone published an exposé of sexual assault on college campuses, featuring a horrific fraternity gang rape at UVA that turned out to be almost certainly untrue.

The ink was barely dry on the story before red flags went down: Not only did the victim refuse to name names and press charges (understandable, if the names and charges were imaginary), but the writer and the magazine never called for prosecution of the heinous crime they were reporting. The particulars of the case didn’t really matter; the target of the article was the supposed “campus rape culture,” not any actual perpetrators. By assigning blame to a culture, the writer and the magazine avoided the burden of seeing justice done, meanwhile casting suspicion on all college men.

What purpose could this possibly serve? Culture, as an indictment, spreads the guilt, but also the responsibility. Accusing a “culture” acknowledges that we live in a moral universe, but absolves us of having to do anything about moral wrongs (except in the voting booth). By pointing fingers at the culture, we accuse and forgive simultaneously. Civilization is no longer merely discontented; it’s schizophrenic. Freud should see us now.

Email jcheaney@wng.org