I am not going to review the film 12 Years a Slave here; writers far more accomplished than I can do so with more insight and vigour. It is an essential film, though. Watching it is akin to a religious experience, I think - it has a great purging power, a sense of witness, pain and revelation linked in the same way that the more ecstatic monastic orders presumably sought after with self-flagellation and fasting. There is indeed a scene, near the end, of flagellation so horrible to watch that I realised I was actively choking down a full scream, something I have never before felt in any artistic medium. What was I screaming for? Did I feel implicated in some way in that violence?
As the Civil War drew to its conclusion, Lincoln ended his Inaugural Address with what has struck me as a chilling premonition:
"...if God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
Every drop drawn by the lash. As it happened, the war was indeed over, and although Lincoln's own blood would be drawn within the month, added to the great lake already spilt in recompense, it was the last time Americans would go to war with each other over the issue. But the wealth of America was not sunk, and the blood drawn by the lash was not yet repaid. The sins of the father have been inherited by the children, and to this day the shadow of slavery hangs over America, suffocating that ever-hopeful nation with the dreadful knowledge of a debt as yet unpaid, and forever unpayable.
On my recent trip to America, I learned that my ancestry includes genuine Virginian slave-owners. I forgot that, possibly deliberately, during the film. I remembered at the end, and with horror remembered the name of those ancestors, the Eppes - not so far from Michael Fassbender's psychotic Epps in the film. I doubt we are related, though it is possible. Does it matter?
Does it matter? And there you have it. This is what I want to talk about, because I've wanted to talk about guilt for a while now. There are doubtless many sins committed by my antecedents. I am not culpable for them. I will feel no guilt for things I did not do. Yet the discussion about 12 Years a Slave, wherever it is reviewed online, always jumps immediately, inevitably to that one word - guilt. Right-wingers are absolutely convinced that the only reason this film could be made is to induce that great slur, "liberal guilt", in its viewers. But I don't understand what they mean. How could we feel guilty for something we did not do? Is it not they who must feel guilty to bring this idea up, because it doesn't make any sense. The frequency and voracity with which the concept is repeated - look on just about any online review and people underneath will be accusing the filmmakers of it, while demanding that a film be made about the white slave trade - means there is a strong sense that white people might engage in self-hatred about the sins of colonialism and general domination. I as a liberal do not, yet these are the words for some reason put into my mouth.
Bernard Williams famously distinguished between shame and guilt. Guilt, he said, was the condition of being aware that something one had done was inadequate, not up to the ideal picture of oneself. But shame was far worse because it was the sense of who you are being bad, corrupted or useless. This distinction is essential when we talk about liberal guilt. "Liberal Guilt", if it exists at all, is neither shame nor guilt. I am not involved in slavery or colonialism and never have been. Nor do I feel too much guilt at profiting from an inherently imbalanced global economic system that stems from colonialism: only by existing as a hermit could any human being not contribute in some way to someone's oppression; the only question is of degree. Nor does the fact of my race or my family change who I am, because while I share elements of genetic code with the slaveowners, nothing in that is integral to owning slaves or, in the case of my direct patrilinear descent, administrating India. We need another word, then, one that is neither shame nor guilt, for what a liberal white English male feels when he looks at a world shaped in his image on the back of violence, cruelty and racist oppression.
I'll have to leave that one to the philosophers. The fact is that we have not adequately dealt with the concept of inheritance in our society. One can be extremely uncomfortable with what one has inherited without feeling implicated in the crimes of that inheritance. Identity in a pluralistic late-capitalist liberal democracy is an incredibly fraught and complex subject, far more so than the cheap reduction to liberal guilt and self loathing allows. When Lupita Nyong'o is whipped on screen, I identify with her to the extent that I have to stop myself echoing her cry of pain. Do I also identify with the man holding the whip, the man who shares the name of my ancestor? Can both form a part of my identity? The film tells us that our freedom is dependent only on the good graces of our fellow man. If tomorrow all those with hazel eyes were declared to be subhuman I could lose everything and be a slave for the rest of my life. And all my descendants who inherited my eye colour, even should another great war be fought to free them, would have that iris pigment as their prime defining identity forever, whether they cared about it or not. Perhaps I screamed because but for the grace of God I am Patsey as much as I am Epps.
Aeschylus talked of the "strife in the blood", the wound in the family that could only be cured by the children of the family. He is potent, but wrong; we feel there is something morally important about our genes when there is not. I carry nothing from my ancestors but their physical looks, and their sins are not my sins. I am extraordinarily lucky to be white and male and straight, and the reasons for this luck have been bought by military dominance and patriarchal oppresion for many hundreds of years. But I will not disown the luck because of it. Rather, I choose to remain aware of it. And the reason that we must keep making works of art like 12 Years a Slave is not to reinforce liberal guilt but to overcome it. When you view the degradations of the past, so close to you that you know that few generations ago that was you standing there with a whip, when you view them without fear or denial, then you can lift your head and say quietly I am not those men. And after wading through the blood and the filth of the truth about how you came to be where you are, after staring deep into the abyss, you might just come out beaming on the other side.
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