There is no such thing as ‘corporate guilt’ says The Record’s Guy Crouchback.
By Guy Crouchback
As readers of this column may know, I greatly admire the works of CS Lewis. Yet I also find it possible to disagree with him, or at least to suggest an occasional, and I hope gentle, correction. I was recently re-reading his The Problem of Pain (Fontana, 1957). In this he says:
“A reaction – in itself wholesome – is now going on against purely private or domestic conceptions of morality, a re-awakening of the social conscience. We feel ourselves to be involved in an iniquitous social system, and to share a corporate guilt.
“This is very true: but the enemy can exploit even truths to our deception.
“Beware lest you are making use of the idea of corporate guilt to distract your attention from those hum-drum, old-fashioned guilts of your own which have nothing to do with ‘the system’ and which can be dealt with without waiting for the Millennium.”
I confess I am not a trained theologian.
But here I think Lewis does not go far enough.
I do not think we can ever address the problem of “corporate guilt” except to deny it. It does not exist.
Sin can only be committed by individual souls. Even with an institution, organisation or government whose workings result in much wickedness, the guilt lies not with the corporate entity but with the individuals who make it up to the extent that they are responsible for its policies.
If a newspaper knowingly prints lies, the newspaper has not sinned. Paper and ink cannot sin. The company which owns it, and which has no existence except as a legal concept, cannot sin.
The sin is that of the individual reporters who wrote the lies, the individual editors and sub-editors who passed and consented to them, the individual share-holders who permitted the policies, and perhaps the newsagents who sold the paper (That is, of course, to the extent that each of these consciously knew they were party to a lie and had power to control the outcome, or were negligent).
The concept of “corporate guilt” leads quickly to atrocities in wartime, or at least to gross callousness with a clear conscience, even among good people: an enemy sailor from a sunken ship is left to drown because his government runs atrocious prison-camps, for example.
One of the most egregious examples is, of course, anti-Semitism: Jews were historically persecuted on the grounds that a tiny number of their ancestors clamoured for the execution of Christ centuries ago.
One might have thought that, in the post-Holocaust world, such feelings were out of court among civilised people, but we have seen a shocking and alarming resurrection of anti-Semitism in recent times.
If we follow the rules and conditions necessary for a “Just War,” we should not fight thinking that enemy soldiers or civilians are corporately guilty although there is always a temptation this way.
It is also necessary, if one must go to war, to fight whole-heartedly and to fight to win, and to fight effectively it is probably necessary not to be racked with guilt over the fact that one is killing people who are individually innocent – that is one reason why the Christian rules for a “Just War” hold that, among other things, war must be a last resort.
But that is another matter.