‘Have you been eating of the tree I forbade you to eat?’ The man replied, ‘It was the woman you put with me; she gave me the fruit, and I ate it.’ Then the Lord God asked the woman, ‘What is this you have done?’ The woman replied, ‘The serpent tempted me and I ate.’ (3:10-13)
Introduction
There’s a French phrase of which I’m rather fond – j’accuse, s’excuse. Something like: by accusing you, I excuse myself. Basically, I avoid blame by blaming others. The repressed poet in me rather enjoys noting balm embedded in blame. More ‘innocent’ versions of this might be shifty finger-pointing kids with chocolate-smeared faces standing next to empty cookie jars. At the other end of the same spectrum, though, stands genocide. This eye-watering range points to something deeply rooted in the human psyche. We’re being given another aetiology. This time, a timeless portrait of the psychological phenomenon of guilt displacement and why we seek to deflect moral responsibility away from ourselves.
Brilliantly, both responses are factually accurate within the story, which only serves to emphasise the point that factual accuracy isn’t the point. Yes, the serpent is the ‘source’ of evil here, yet not exactly the source of sin. Cutting her losses, the woman simply points to the snake, and it’s telling she already has a clear conception of temptation. The man’s doubling-down reply is acutely observed. He’s gone from, “wow, this woman exceeds my wildest dreams!” to “it’s your fault for putting her in here with me!”
Guilt Tripped?
Guilt displacement is a highly complex idea woven out of associated and equally profound ideas: objective right and wrong, moral responsibility, choice, temptation and beguilement, remorse, and guilt itself. All these, in turn, are grounded in the idea of a loving God. Remove God from the equation and what do any of these really mean? Great, no guilt. But then no choice or moral responsibility. Good luck for society.
Of course, it’s very tempting to jettison the idea of guilt. What exactly is it? How is it real if I can’t see it? Isn’t it just made up if I can’t feel it? Sounds like the controlling mechanism of retrograde religion, no? Life’s tough enough without the added sense that I’m a permanent cosmic let down. Why do we need this idea in our lives making us unhappy? Indeed, guilt tripping can simply be people dumping their personal toxicities on others.
Well, the writers of Genesis are trying to show that removing the idea of guilt doesn’t remove its reality. They’re trying to show that hurt is more than physical. They’re trying to show how we begin to punish ourselves and others when we do wrong. They’ve stripped down wrongdoing to its core: disobeying God. And now they’re presenting a simple portrait of what happens to human behaviour when guilt is in the mix. They’ve deliberately focused on the observational.
The Unbearable
Of course, the impulse to buck pass comes from a foreboding of punishment. This, in turn, is based upon the idea that we can’t escape our dues. This itself is based upon the idea that guilt somehow sticks and stains so that the bad we’ve done doesn’t stay done and gone but affects our present nature. Another truly astonishing idea: that the observable damage we inflict on others results in unobservable damage to ourselves!
How are we supposed to manage that, or strand it out from mere unhappy memories and disappointments or wider feelings of letting ourselves or others down, or even low mood? What is the exact extent of the damage? Is it the same for everyone? Where and how do you find healing? Because it’s a pretty crude metric analysing by effects. They’re not always clear or clearly connected. And yet, as we know and as the writers here are intimating, remorse and guilt and blame-shifting can be curiously brutalising to the human psyche. There’s an echo of this later in Cain’s words regarding his mark: my punishment is greater than I can bear, (Gen 4:13). This idea of the unbearable character of guilt is crucial.
The Barely Bearable
How, then, does one bear the unbearable? How does one live if the punishment for sin is too great? Not just physically but psychologically? The blame game reveals that we can’t mend ourselves. It indicates that what’s done can’t be undone. And, crucially, that guilt isn’t transferable. Even though we’d very much like it to be and will always seek to unburden and find release often at the expense of others.
We have this idea in the modern world of getting things off our chest as well as highly effective talking therapies. It’s not a completely alien idea to seek to ‘externalise’ hidden trauma or damage. What of guilt? Why can’t hidden guilt and its damage be externalised and somehow transferred? Rather than blame-shifting, what if there was a legitimate way to pass on the unbearable? As in, one sanctioned by God.
Then Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the sons of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins; and he shall put them upon the head of the goat, and sending him away into the wilderness by the hand of a man who is in readiness.The goat shall bear all their iniquities upon him to a solitary land; and he shall let the goat go in the wilderness. (Lev 16:21-22)
[The Scapegoat (c. 1854-1856) by William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Public Domain]
More genius. The Scape Goat emerges in response to this intractable problem. That shame can be shifted from humans to animals seems based on the assumption that animals are non-moral creatures. Only a morally blameless beast can bear the burden away. Guilt is deemed destroyed along with the pitiable creature out there in the wilderness, a demonic waste space. It’s a temporary and imperfect fix but equally a genuine cultic attempt to address this moral phenomenon.
Brigading and Dogpiling
No, me neither! This early image of our couple seeking to pass on the burden of blame – especially when righteously called to account – serves as dire warning about a deep-set and dangerous tendency in our fallen natures and its vital need for management. Without appropriate external or public release, festering personal and collective guilt can quickly transform into a firestorm of projection, transference, finger-pointing and victimisation. In other words, scapegoating. The modern prophet of such matters is, of course, René Girard. In fiction, The Scarlet Letter comes to mind. The paradigm New Testament portrait must surely be The Singled-Out Woman, most interestingly masquerading as religious self-righteousness!
Blaming others is revealed as a corruption of the legitimate need to unburden appropriately. We can’t carry the guilt. It destroys us. We have to transfer the destruction. The scape goat represents this impulse but also the search for an appropriate personal and social mechanism for release. There’s something painfully personal in the man blaming the woman and the woman blaming the serpent and all implicitly blaming God whilst stood right there in front of one another.
What we’re all learning to our horror is how much worse it can be when depersonalised, anonymised and universalised on the internet. The frenzied feel of blame on social media is precisely an unhinged amplification of blame and scapegoating. Guilt displacement reveals that there will never be enough victims to satiate this desire. And the twisted pleasure some seem to derive from the destruction of others will always slip like sand through the fingers. Then, one day, the destruction storm will come for them.
Conclusion
The story told here, at the very outset of Genesis, is one we ignore at our peril. Sin is real, so is guilt, and we have scapegoating as the observable symptom. The Judeo-Christian tradition addresses this truth about human nature head on. Ironically, for doing so, it’s often blamed for being unnecessarily pessimistic. The writers are proposing: if you don’t yet recognise yourself in this portrait, you will at some point. Guilty, your honour. They’re asking: who’s your chosen scapegoat today, that person you’ve singled out for particular needle? It can be as subtle as you like. Death by a million underminings. Expensive humour. Endless invalidation. Invisible transference. Always those others!
Once more we have to read ahead to discover the truth that there can never be enough goats and never enough temporal victims to fix the damage done by this disobedience. Indeed, the blame-shifting precisely reveals this and hints at its scale. We learn that only a victim able to bear the weight of the original offence and its terrible effects can ever achieve such restitution and rehabilitation. I don’t want to spoil the plot, just in case you don’t know the rest of the story, but it’s an exquisite irony that we discover the unwitting truth most perfectly expressed in the mouth of Caiaphas of all people.
‘You know nothing at all; you do not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish.’ (Jn 11:50)
Header photo: Adi Goldstein, Unsplash
This is one of the most beautiful essays you’ve written yet. I just loved this! Truly inspired.