If anything has been institutionalized, it is not racism but guilt, though guilt of a peculiar, ersatz, dishonest kind.
Guilt is an appropriate response to one’s own bad actions or omissions, and its level should be proportionate to the bad action or omission.
While I feel guilt for my own bad actions or omissions, the kinds of things that are under my direct control, I do not feel guilt that my own life has been a comparatively fortunate one, probably more fortunate than that of the majority of mankind. On the contrary, I feel gratitude, or perhaps, more accurately, I should say gladness. I feel sorrow for the unfortunate, but not guilt toward them since I am not responsible for their sorrows.
True, I did nothing to deserve having the opportunities that I have had, but I did nothing not to deserve them, either. I took the world as I found it and for me to feel guilty about my comparative good fortune would be a sign not of moral sensitivity or virtue, but of moral grandiosity.
Moral grandiosity has probably done more harm in the world than indifference, inasmuch as it recognizes no limits to its power to bring about a supposedly better world.
Nevertheless, posers and posturers prefer to concentrate on distant problems because they require nothing of them except the expression of the right opinions and sometimes a protest, demonstration, or even riot, which of course is a pleasure rather than a discipline, in the way that acting virtuously is a discipline.
- Theodore Dalrymple