How to Make a Good Confession:The Case for Reparations

How to Make a Good Confession: The Case for Reparations      

When I was a child I was regularly sent to confession and I think I have learned a thing or two about confessing one’s sins and atoning for them. One thing I have noticed of people reared Waspishly is that they do not know how to make a good confession or to offer sincere penance. North Americans of the white persuasion have something to apologize and make amends for: their horrific treatment of African and indigenous peoples. They also have to reckon with the fact that they benefit structurally from a society built on the oppression of these two categories of people especially (though there are others). White people of a liberal or progressive persuasion want to make amends of course (or at least would like to be thought of as the kind of people who would want to make amends) though as far as I can tell they are making a complete hash of it. Maybe their overly secular education is to blame but white people attempting to apologize and make amends to black and indigenous people are creeping those people out. This, I am told, is called ‘white fragility’. This is the process by which progressive white ‘allies’ deal with their white racial anxiety by offloading emotional labor on their unfortunate black or indigenous friends. There is a barely concealed passive aggression in this badgering behavior and what I would note about this is that the process by which we are dealing with ‘white guilt’ is entirely wrong and obviously the creation of people who are neophytes in the area of confession and atonement. It is so constructed as to produce frustration and resentment which will in fact intensify racism rather than alleviate it. I will be brief, the way to make amends in ANY matter is to make a clean breast of it. The way to make amends is to vote for a politician who will pay reparations to the people we have harmed in a significant and public way.

Confession in its simplest form consists of contrition, confession and penance and each step is psychologically necessary for the feeling of release that follows the discharge of pent up guilt and shame. The genius of this system is that it is swift and peremptory. I have stolen a cookie and recognize the harm I have done (or, to be more accurate to the situation in question here, I have inherited a stolen cookie). I go to a priest and explicitly and consciously, without deception, evasion or excuse NAME what I have done. Once I have done this I receive absolution and perhaps some words of comfort and advice. After this I perform some act of restitution or penance that in however small a way restores the balance that my thoughtless or selfish action has upset and this is as necessary for myself as it is for the other. That is literally it. I do not wallow in guilt and self- pity. I do not torment myself with scruples or obsess negatively on the past. I return to my work and get on with it. According to the Christian myth the sins of the world were purged in less than a full afternoon and the truth is this is the only way they can be purged. It is (ultimately) the death of Christ that purges from sin (according to that tradition) yet here the theologians had another insight. They said that the 'benefits' of the passion were applied to individuals by the sacrament of penance and we have seen that from a psychological point of view (at least) this was EXACTLY correct. The ritual makes the thing real and effective and that is what we mean by a sacrament: a material sign that effects what it signifies. People who advance in the spiritual life may indeed engage in the rigorous and severe examination of conscience but this must be done with a guide for reasons that are crystal clear. Done improperly it produces a morose soul who falls victim to the sin of acedia (i.e. despair). What is more it can produce a secret masochistic enjoyment that the old spiritual writers called ‘morose delectation’ and we call wallowing in it. To avoid this, we should (ordinarily) engage only in the self-examination that is preparatory to doing something this something being to confess what we have done and do penance for it.

This procedure seems to me so sound and so well grounded in human psychology that I marvel that we, as a society, pursue the exact opposite course. What we seem to want is to produce self- consciousness thinking that self-consciousness equates with self-knowledge and self-knowledge with action (there are STILL so many good reasons to read Hamlet!). Part of liberating black or indigenous people involves reflecting on identity and we seem to have made the fallacious inference from this that curing white people of racism involves the same thing. We ask them to reflect on the meaning of their ‘whiteness’. We ask them to reflect on their privilege and the myriad ways in which racism affects their tiniest interactions in life and underwrites all their habits and attitudes. What is more, we expect them to do all this with the finesse and insight of a 17^th Century Jesuit. Any competent spiritual advisor will tell you INSTANTLY that this is the very road to ruin. This kind of scrupulousness grounds you completely in the ego and fixes you in narcissistic self-absorption. It puts you and your whiteness and your little white feelings at the center of the world. Instead of making a clean breast of things you sink deeper and deeper into a reflexive hell of anxiety and frustration where your unfortunate black or indigenous friends have to reassure you at every turn. What is more it leads to constant attempts at showy self- display to reassure others and even more so yourself that you are really ‘woke’ and indeed farther along the ‘woke’ curve than others. This will lead to anger, hatred and, in all probability, a fresh racist outburst. You will, like those who indulge in too much talk therapy, become addicted to the drama of the process (and the way it puts your own feelings front and center) and lose any sense of the goal.   

The solution though is simple. To confess and atone one must do something and that thing in this circumstance is to vote for politicians who will make actual concrete amends for the harms that have been done. The secret is, as it has always been, penance done right now and once done forgotten. This may be expensive. You may even have to NOT vote for your favorite conservative party which promises to lower your taxes. Unfortunately, that is how the confession game is played and the way it is done now seems transparently flawed. In fact, the way it is done now, by encouraging people to wallow in the spiritual vice of scrupulousness, seems calculated to evade and delay the appropriate reckoning. Do people we have victimized really have to wait around while we ’process’ the whole thing and straighten out our feelings? This reinforces the very privileging it is meant to challenge. So white people, for your own peace of mind, to discharge your own negative guilt feelings in the way that is natural and correct, please pony up. AND pony up collectively: collective guilt requires collective atonement. Trust me you will feel better.