What Should I Do?
We are obliged without exception to understand clearly the question of our guilt, and to draw the conclusions.
One day, when Rahi was about 2, I took him to Hamburg train station to watch the trains. As we were walking back to the U-Bahn, we saw a homeless man sitting in the middle of the main concourse. The man was clearly in great distress. He was writhing and grimacing, his spit flying everywhere, and he was making noises of great pain and anger.
Being a responsible adult, I tried to pretend he did not exist and hurried Rahi past him. And as we hurried, Rahi asked me in his broken 2 year old German what was wrong with that man. I don’t know, I said. Let’s go home.
But instead of carrying on, Rahi turned and walked back towards the man on the floor. Standing in front of him, he turned to me and cried out, clearly in some distress himself: Papa! Helfen! Papa! Helfen! So I gave the man some money, bought him something to eat and drink, and then Rahi allowed me to take him home.
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I have been thinking a lot about that moment recently.
You see, the world does not appear to be in a good way right now. You don’t need me to tell you that, but I’ll say it anyway.
Wars, genocide, dead babies and tortured kids. Immense suffering, suffering beyond description or imagination.
And I walk by and hurry past and try to get home.
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In 1946, the German psychologist and philosopher Karl Jaspers delivered a series of lectures to his students in Heidelberg. In these lectures, Jaspers grapples with the problem that confronted many Germans in 1946, the problem he calls “the guilt question”: What is my responsibility for the awful evil of the Holocaust?
“The temptation to evade this question is obvious,” says Jaspers, but “we Germans are indeed obliged without exception to understand clearly the question of our guilt, and to draw the conclusions.”
Why are Germans obliged to do this? Well, according to Jaspers, “our own life, in distress and dependence, can have no dignity except by truthfulness toward ourselves. The guilt question is more than a question put to us by others, it is one we put to ourselves. The way we answer it will be decisive for our present approach to the world and ourselves.”
I think we - many of us, and certainly me - are in a similar position today. We are obliged to understand clearly the question of our guilt and to draw the conclusions.
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Let me be clear about something - I am not interested in guilt as self-flagellation. To me, this is just another form of self-indulgence. I am interested in guilt as a ground for action. I want to understand how I am guilty because I hope that will help me understand what I need to do in response.
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When I walked past that spittle-flecked and pee-stained tramp in Hamburg, my guilt was easy to see. There was a human being in pain. I owed him a human response. And instead of giving him a human response, I tried to ignore him.
Fine. But it starts getting a lot trickier when the human suffering is long-range and where the causal chain seems to have nothing to do with me and where I also seem to have no way of helping the humans who are suffering.
For example: what on earth am I supposed to do about the bombs falling in Gaza? About the civil war in Sudan? About the starving billions spread across the world?
And then introduce the fact that I already have duties and responsibilities to people: above all, my family, and then spreading out in ever-increasing concentric circles, the people I love and the people who have valid claims on me.
What am I supposed to do? How do I juggle these things? What does doing the right thing even mean here?
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This is the bit where I’m supposed to answer the question, or at least to offer something illuminating about it.
Sorry. I've got nothing.
All I have is a conviction that this is an urgent and important question. Ignoring the world is no longer a sustainable option for me.
This is progress, that I feel and see this so clearly. But I can’t stop here. I need answers!
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I would really like to think about this question with people who also take it seriously - in life, not as theory.
I want this question to begin affecting what I do, not just what I think and feel.
I would like to talk to other people who want the same thing.
And the magic of the world is that sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can just do things.
I’m lucky.
So: who fancies let’s say 4 sessions of trying to figure this out together? I’m happy to moderate and facilitate and structure and all the rest of it, but clearly, I’m coming to this thing as a fellow seeker. I won’t have answers.
What I’m suggesting, I guess, is that we do what Jaspers did in 1946: confront clearly the question of our guilt, and draw the conclusions.
If you’re in, email me. If enough people are in (and enough is a very small number, if the people who are in are animated by the genuine and sincere desire to grapple with this), I’ll sort out the logistics.
