Markets, Guilt and Race
Second Part of a series of essays on the logics of settler-colonialism in the US
Interaction among free, independent and equal men had one crucial advantage over the theory of paternal authority. Liberal contractual relations diffused guilt; no one could be held responsible for the condition of anyone else. Since the Indians were to be forced from their homes, it was particularly important to avoid the burden of guilt. The language of the marketplace accomplished this purpose. (Rogin 1975, 212).
I made the claim last time about markets serving an exculpatory function, or in different terms serving as a kind of washing-machine for the bloody violence associated with American settler-colonialism. As Michael Rogin points out, the major figures behind “Indian Removal” during the Jacksonian era were not only aware of the moral implications of their actions, those implications caused them great distress. Jackson, Cass, Tipton, Van Buren and the others publicly acknowledged that the eyes of the world and future generations were on them, and that they would be judged for their actions on behalf of the nation.
This is of course the problem of pollution, the cultural/religious awareness of the stain left when one engages in the uprooting/extirpation of a people, and even worse, genocide. Pollution-as-problem is in the so-called West foundationally old; an awareness of it goes back at least to the Oedipal cycle (which in turn invokes an even deeper and older set of cultural memories). In that tragic context, the economy of absolution always referred both in origin and redemption to the visible and material world. Pollution in the end referred to an act that caused a collective stain: the stain came from a real, material, resolutely non-allegorical presence of human blood. Once murderous violence was unleashed, once the transgression of norms happened, the logic of pollution would then unfold entirely independent of human desire or intention. The powerful thing about fate in this context is the fact that one can have bloody hands and “not know it” (although of course the deeper point is that the knowledge is there, albeit in repressed form).
Why am I talking here about what anthropologists call a “shame culture”? In the first place, it is to point out that when the policymakers of the Jacksonian era publicly acknowledged their collective guilt, they did so in part by invoking these ideas. As readers of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles and so on, this context would have weighed heavily on them; they wouldn’t have the protective veil of ignorance that today’s leaders have.1 And yet at the same time such older “pagan” interpretations of moral structure and human agency would have been filtered through the lens of a more pressing and powerful Puritan/radical Protestant reinterpretation. Which is to say that they would have understood (intuitively rather than expressly) the transformation from a shame culture to a guilt culture.
When I say that markets serve an exculpatory function, then, it may be necessary to add that the unfolding of absolution requires many intermediate steps or changes/alterations in structure: there are formal similarities with the older framework, but the kind of “diffusion” process Rogin discusses positively requires a guilt culture to be firmly in place. This is necessary first of all because the move from shame to guilt allegorizes the stain of pollution: what was once real and material becomes metaphorical in the concept of sin. Christian sin can in fact have a worldly dimension, but thanks to Paul all the important action happens inwardly: the individual can carry out a violent, transgressive act but the site where the real rebellion (and salvation) takes place is in the human will. This elevation of the will means that the question of intention becomes primary, which in turn means that the economy of absolution turns or hinges on the transformation of the “inner man.”2 If one doesn’t in fact intend to do harm to others — if one even wills a transformative process that is terrifying and which in the end produces suffering and death — the tenor of moral judgment changes. If one merely introduces a process that is in fact “natural,” or even comprehensively and historically both “beneficial” and even necessary, well then the question of leaving a lasting stain gets resolved.
Note however that in the passage quoted above, Rogin says that “the language of the market achieved” the purpose of diffusing guilt. Diffusion isn’t complete erasure, forgiveness, and so on. The market here doesn’t blot-out the stain of blood, it doesn’t wash bloody hands, it merely weakens the transgression by reconceptualizing the agent as something impersonal: an “invisible hand,” “nature,” “progress” and so on. The “language of the marketplace … pictured Indians as at once the victims of mechanized and fragmented social processes for which no one was to blame, and at the same time free to choose their own fate” (212). This paradox must sound eerily and painfully familiar, since it also describes our own condition in the contemporary world. Expropriation is not a one-off, but something that must be constantly reiterated and generationally reproduced. We’re looking at its original violence here, which was covered by a form of ideology that has only become intensified since Jackson’s time: once social engineers and political policy makers understood that markets could make human lives inhumanly miserable and at the same time force the objects of that transformation to blame themselves for their misery, all bets were off.
To be blunt, I doubt very seriously whether a thorough moral reckoning with the past is possible in our own time in part because these older literary/cultural (and yes, religious) models are no longer part of what we might call the “general condition” of the ruling elite. I realize that this conclusion puts me in the company of some cultural conservative (but not libertarian!) thinkers, and that’s fine.
I put the gendered terms in quotes here to point out that the common phrase comes from Augustine, Descartes and their inheritors. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Harvard University Press, 1992).