“Collective guilt” in reality is distributed, unassignable guilt

Attempts to assign guilt collectively reveal that unsatisfactory conditions had existed In society at large, which eventually led to undesirable consequences so severe that it seemed desirable to be able to blame them on someone or some group.

As the possible list of guilty people and groups suggested by Bernie Gunther [1] shows, there are usually plenty of potentially blame-worthy entities. But even relatively recent human history is sufficiently complex that simple answers are not valid answers, and simple solutions are quite unlikely to be possible.

Gunther was enumerating factors that led to Germany's launching of World War II, and the Nazi Holocaust. Those were unlikely to have happened if Hitler had not become Germany's leader.

Among the factors that led to Hitler were several after-effects of World War I: A national economy in ruins, massive unemployment, runaway inflation, ineffective government, competing political ideologies and groups and parties.

Those after-effects were more serious than they might have been if the victors of World War I had not behaved so vengefully. That behavior, in turn, stems in part from common features of humankind as well as from various aspects of the individual victor countries and the interactions among those countries. And some at least of all that is a consequence of the particular individuals who were in critical positions at critical times.

Given the range and nature of the many variables, no attempt seems conceivably feasible, to specify conditions that could have avoided World War I and its consequences.

Cats, dogs, and other mammals seem to be perfectly content indefinitely if they have sufficient food, shelter, and rest; contentment is interrupted, typically only seasonally, by the stresses associated with sexual reproduction.

Humans are also mammals, so those generalizations might be applicable also to them. Xenophobia with associated violence such as warfare may have originated in primates, though territoriality In other mammals could perhaps be classed as xenophobia.

At any rate, it is not obvious that humankind would or should be characterized by incessant violence — if only everyone had adequate food, shelter, and rest.

The incessant disagreements and violence are not directly or even chiefly about the availability of food, shelter, and rest: disagreements stem from religious or secular ideologies that presume to mandate particular beliefs and behavior. Those rules, guides, or laws do often imply that following them would ensure security, food, shelter, and rest for everyone; but different ideologies offer quite different and even incompatible or opposing prescriptions.

In theory, those differences and the resulting violence might be avoidable if everyone could agree to focus directly and only on the practical issues involved in providing everyone with sufficient food, shelter, and rest. However, human societies and human cultures change very slowly and non-linearly, despite occasional spectacular revolutions. But history teaches that changes are rarely permanent, being sometimes widely regarded as progressive, at other times widely regarded as retrogressive; and quite often one of those followed by the other.

“Perfect is the enemy of good”: Insisting on or demanding a complete final solution to some acknowledged societal problem can only be counterproductive. History shows that, on the other hand, small steps are possible and can accumulate over time to achieve something like the desired result.

For example, mass shootings are widely acknowledged to be undesirable and to be at all common only in the United States. The availability of firearms in the United States is also much greater than in other countries. Obviously, if there were no firearms there would be no mass shootings. However, all proposed measures for control of sales or ownership of guns are met by the response that this cannot solve the problem. But if the aim were specifically pronounced to be finding ways to decrease the probability of mass shootings, such objections would not be relevant and progress might be made.

Ignorance is also a pervasive problem In societal disputes. The understandable widespread calls for something to be done to prevent the continuing slaughter of innocent men, women, and children in the Middle East are in part the result of continuing real-time TV coverage. But such slaughter has occurred many times in the past, for example when the supposed “good guys” “carpet-bombed” Germany during World War II and exploded atomic bombs in Japan. The emotional pleas for effective action only serve to divert from recognizing the fundamental source of the slaughter: Two actors who are each determined to eliminate the other one totally, each of them also believing to have God on their side.

The respective territorial claims are also widely mis-represented, as when self-appointed supporters of “the Palestinian cause” describe Israel as a “colonizing” actor. In point of fact, two or three millennia ago that land was populated by people of whom the present-day Jews are more-or-less direct descendants; Islam did not even exist before the 8^th century, and the land in question was colonized by Arabs and the Ottoman Empire less than a millennium ago.

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[1] Collective guilt?
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/collective-guilt