A sense of guilt is an essential human trait

“Those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them.”

That quote – which, it turns out, I remembered incorrectly – is at the heart of this article, the idea for which came to me while reading Tony Parson’s Man and Boy. This novel is about Harry Silver, a thirty-year-old television producer who has a one-night stand and regrets it because it triggers the breakup of his marriage and shifts his life into a new, unsettling phase where all the old certainties have gone.

It’s his regret I’m going to focus on: more specifically, his sense of guilt.

The notion that we should feel guilt, or remorse, which is just a stronger version of guilt, over wrongdoing is entrenched in society, culture and literature the world over. (So too, of course, is the need for redemption or, if that isn’t possible, punishment.) For instance, in Man and Boy, Harry redeems himself by looking after his son when his wife leaves him; in Charles Dickens’ classic Oliver Twist, Sikes keeps seeing the bloody, battered face of Nancy (whom he killed) every time he shuts his eyes, as well as experiencing an irrational fear that people know what he’s done whenever a stranger looks at him for more than a few seconds.

The ability to feel guilt, as I think these examples show, is a sign of humanity. It’s one of the things that separate us from animals and, without it, true compassion is impossible. Yet, as we all must know, guilt can be destructive.

There are two basic types of guilt: behaviour-induced guilt, which stems from regret over something we’ve done that – usually afterwards! – we believe is wrong (such as Harry’s one-night stand) and instinctive guilt, which is purely an emotional reaction. For example, people often feel this when someone close has died however well they have treated him or her.

However, the behaviour-induced form can sometimes serve a useful purpose by acting as a warning not to repeat behaviour we feel is wrong in some way (ie, immoral, negligent or selfish). It allows us the chance to learn from our mistakes and redeem ourselves. Which takes us back to the quote I started with. The trouble is, when I looked it up, it didn’t say exactly what I thought and it probably wasn’t intended to apply to guilt:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

(George Santayana, philosopher and critic, The Life of Reason, published 1905)
It will have to do, though – after all, no-one’s perfect.