To hang your head when you are not guilty is an immoral act.
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32 comments to Discussion Point XXXV |
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Yep, because it’s a cowardly lie.
WHO SEZ???
One may very well “hang one’s head” in disgust, frustration, disbelief – or any response.
But “immoral?”
RRS: I think Natalie was referring specifically to ‘hanging one’s head in shame’ – I hope that she will correct me if I’m wrong.
Even if interpreted as “hangs one head in shame”, I say no it is not immoral.
To say that would be to say that maryrdom is immoral. Martyrdom can be done for immoral reasons, but a powerful act like that should never be considered inherently moral or immoral.
This is one of those Ayn Rand themes that I believe she got right.
The power of the media to make people feel guilty over things they had nothing to do with or that they actually opposed has been so abused, especially in the Tucson shootings, that they are losing that power.
The good guys are getting an unearned bonus.
As an Officer of the Law once said,”Everyone is guilty of something”‘. Collectivist societies have developed that old saw by increasing legisiation to the point where anyone can be detained in the certain knowledge that they will have broken at least one of the laws of the land. (The grossly over-legislated EU is a good current case ) This is why so many people in Blair/Brown’s Britain scurried around with their heads down.
Tyler
“To say that would be to say that maryrdom is immoral.”
I disagree. You do not need to hang your head to be martyred. Indeed, I would expect martyrdom (in the Joan of Arc style, rather than the horrible hijacking of that word as it is now used in the context of self-chosen suicide murder) to be accompanied with pride – to hold your head high as others – usually bigots – punish you for your beliefs.
To be willing to stand by your beliefs without threatening others in the face of great adversity takes bravery – hanging one’s head is not a mark of bravery.
But …
I am inherently guilty because my white is “white”;
I am inherently guilty becuase I have a penis;
I am inherently guilty because I don’t like buggering my own sex;
I am inherently guilty because I nominally believe Christianity;
I am inherently guilty because I don’t hate America.
Words to live by, indeed.
Yes it is imoral.
Nor is it “martydom” – in the Christian (or any other) tradition a person should not be ashamed of dying for their faith.
And yes it is clear that Natalie means “hang your head in shame”.
To call for a “new age of civility” is a libel because it implies that the “incivility” (of one’s opponents) caused X bad thing to happen.
And it is a BLOOD LIBEL if X bad thing is murder.
It would be like Jews on being accused of the murder of “Little Hugh” (or whoever) saying “oh we are very sorry” and hanging their heads in shame WHEN THEY DID NOT KILL LITTLE HUGH.
In short the “Independent” (i.e. Putin pal financed) newspaper can go jump in the nearest lake.
What they demand is not peope being “civil” it is people being “servile”.
Barack Obama is life long far leftist whose personal friends (Bill Ayers, J. Wright and so on) were and are total scumbags. Terrorists and America hating (and West in general hating) MARXISTS.
And I am going to go right on pointing at some of the people Barack Obama appointed in 2009 (Van Jones, Frank Lloyd…) and ask WHY he appointed them if he does not share their ideology.
I am going to go right on saying such things – and anyone who says that my words inspired or incited someone (who DOES NOT share my political opinions anyway) to go shoot someone – IS A LYING PIECE OF SHIT.
Got that “Independent” and the rest of the MSM.
Really? So the morality of an act is determined by its powerfulness?
Alisa,
I think Tylers point is that Martyrdom can be either moral or immoral.
A Christian might hang their head for the crimes of their faith, when they personally didn’t carry out the crime. Is this immoral? Maybe they are right to feel some duplicity?
Would it be better to act for their faith to ensure it doesn’t happen again? Than to hang their head or is communal dissaproval powerful enough?
However, I think it would be immoral for a christian to hang their head for a crime that their faith did NOT commit. Which is what we are seeing at the moment. Well either immoral, cowardly or just ignorant.
It depends why you are hanging your head in shame.
If you feel shame because your actions or words are disapproved of by society, and this is sufficient to make you feel shame, then hanging your head in shame is not a lie. For the purposes of discussion I will assume that lying is immoral.
Of course, showing shame is seen by society as an acknowledgement of wrong doing. If what you are communicating by showing shame is that you did wrong, or that you believe that you did wrong, when in fact it was not wrong, or you do not believe that it was wrong, then showing shame is a lie, and thus immoral.
If you could find a way of getting across the message ‘I am very sorry that we don’t get on, and that we are having all this consternation, and I do feel responsible in part for causing it, by having an opinion different from yours, but that is not to say that you are right, because I believe that I am right, and that you are wrong’ then that would be ok.
Grumpy Old Man, I don’t know why you wrote that in the past tense.
It’s not clear to me that things have changed in the slightest under Call-me-Dave.
Actually, it is moral people who are most susceptible to manipulation through imaginary guilt – a very powerful tool in the hands of a skilled manipulator.
Immoral people don’t give a fuck. They don’t hang their heads even when they are guilty.
Whatever the morals or otherwise of the person hanging their head it is the false accusation and unjust atmosphere created that is the immoral act.
It is common for rape victims to feel guilt after the event but it is not an immoral act to feel guilt in this situation.
We must be careful not to overlook the initial wrong-doing of the false accusation when looking to blame people for not shouting back in the faces of their accusers.
Whatever the truth in a nasty accusation it still makes people feel bad.
It is the false accusers that should be feeling the wrath of vengence not the meek head hangers.
Rob
Dante’s eigth circle seems suitable punishment.
It is immoral but frequently understandable. We have all had to grovelling apologise for something we hadn’t done to avoid worse consequences.
Appeasement empowers villains.
RW,
Particularly like the way false accusers are seen as a disease on society and are therefore afflicted with various diseases for all eternity.
How complicated moral relativism makes the world hey……
Rob, I think you may be right, and I didn’t read Tyler’s comment carefully enough.
To your other point: to me a feeling of collective responsibility seems to imply a feeling of personal responsibility by extension. In other words, if a member of a group feels responsible for the actions of his fellow members, from his subjective point of view he in effect is guilty of their misdeeds. Natalie said ‘when you are not guilty’, and I take that to mean from a subjective POV – otherwise the question makes no sense. So yes, I also think it would be immoral for a christian to hang their head for a crime that their faith did NOT commit.
No, unless to raise your head in pride at something you had no part in is also immoral. Short of an actual false claim of responsibility, I don’t think it is.
Good reasons for hanging your head in shame when you are not guilty of whatever damned thing happened include:
– that you were minded to be similarly guilty yourself, but now you have seen the thing you repent of it;
– that you are only innocent by accident, and know it might have just as easily been your fault as the proven culprit’s;
– that you are niggled by a suspicion that it might not have happened, had you only been kinder or wiser in some way nobody else could ever be entitled to demand of you;
– that somebody else’s similar littleness seems implicated, and reminds you too much of your own;
– that you are not even in your own mind responsible either by deed or analogy, and yet: the culprit was your fellow in some fellowship you value, and for that fellowship’s sake you hang your head.
Some may decry that last as collectivist tripe, well fit for stupid games of Group Guilt to paralyze the unwary with; and I will agree this is sometimes true. But I will also add that sometimes, they really are hanging Danny Deever in the morning.
Bad reasons for hanging your head are swiftly dealt with: you are doing it for personal advantage or comfort, and against your actual morality. Or, worse, you have no morality of your own that cannot be instantly ‘corrected’ by a frown from crowd or priest or king. Or, worst of all, you are looking for reasons to hang your head, because it is all about you, and therefore it is imperative for you to be the Chief of Sinners.
I have a comment waiting in the smite dungeon where I take Rob’s point about Tyler’s comment.
Gray: all that collectivist tripe actually implies that the person hanging their head in shame is, in fact, feeling guilty. Natalie’s premise is the opposite situation.
Your last para is bang on though.
Alisa: I distinguish between the circumstances under which one ought to feel guilty because of something, and the circumstances under which one is really guilty – as per Natalie’s most literal sense – of something, even if it is something you have a right to be guilty of.
(I might almost mirror my earlier set of propositions with regard to showing pride at something wonderful, too.)
What I may reproach myself for is one thing. What somebody else may fairly reproach me for is quite another. I wonder now if the real crux of Natalie’s question doesn’t lie in the strait between them: Scylla and Charybdis with a vengeance!
Where you have done something you know is rotten, and some scab-picker is reproaching you over it with neither sense nor justice – do you dive down into the Great Suck of self-justification, or let the spiteful heads take bites of you as you hasten past?
There’s not much good on either side of that, but I think the classical approach of steering grimly past the bitching is often the lesser evil.
Gray, would you please read my now-unsmited comment above, and see if it changes your last one in any way?
Rob,
Christianity holds individuals are responsible for their own acts.
Individuals may have committed foul acts in the name of Christianity, but Christianity, a belief system, has never committed any act; there is no mechanism by which it could. After all, only individuals can act, whether that be solely or jointly.
A Christian may be appalled at the actions of another, but there is no basis to feel shame at their actions. That is just collectivist nonsense.
Alisa: somewhat. I disagree with the broad notion of responsibility-by-extension, however.
I can feel guilt only about something for which I am really, by my own code if nobody else’s, responsible.
I can otherwise feel shame on behalf of a friend, or a compatriot or whatever, whilst indignantly rejecting guilt – because something we shared, and proudly for my part, has been shown up that little bit worse than before. I am answerable to nobody for it, but it is there. It is the painful flipside of esprit de corps, which is of course not nonsense at all.
Nonetheless, I don’t understand mere shame as stemming from shared responsibility. My acts and omissions are one thing: those of my associates are quite another.
Does that draw my division usefully?
So… should a Christian hang their head for a crime their faith did not in any sense commit? No – unless, being a Christian, they feel an urge to hang their head in their capacity as a human being instead. At any rate, their non-Christian neighbours especially should not prod them about it, nor even let them hang their head overlong.
Gray, so basically you are saying that guilt is not necessarily a precursor for shame? Well, I agree in general, with some caveats. Still, I don’t think that Natalie had any of this in mind, as her question seemed pretty straight-forward: she was talking about actual guilt, and I injected the word ‘shame’ with only that in mind as well.
I don’t know about morality, but hanging your head when innocent surely indicates a lack of guts.
Alisa: I think the two are somewhat connected, not least by how other people react to them and may confuse them. I was looking at shame in the context of your responsibility-by-extension. I couldn’t call it guilt in that case, because when extension is all there is, I see neither responsibility nor guilt for the bearing.
Shame, yes – if there was pride before, or will be after.
I can’t articulate much more of my sense of this, even to myself, so I probably ought to knock off about now. As to Natalie’s original question, though, if it’s to be interpreted in your very strict sense, then it practically answers itself, and even your original six words were only needed as subtitle. But if more than rhetorical, it strikes quite deep, I think: deeper than I’d reckoned, and more interesting. Thank you for helping me nail down in words some of what I only had previously by instinct.
Gray, I get your point and I agree.
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