Our University-Culture, Chapter 4: The Collective Guilt Culture (Part 1)

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I. The Evolution of Social Regulators

As different societies become more complex, they give rise to new cultures and cultural expressions. New art forms emerge, new moral expressions and theories emerge, new ways of educating emerge, new forms of government emerge, and new ways of knowing emerge. And each of these is intimately interrelated with the others. For example, the same social structures that gave rise to capitalism in the Modern Era, for example, also gave rise to the novel as an emergent art form. And these same social structures resulted in the breakup of the Catholic Church in the Reformation and responsibility as a primary social regulator.

A social regulator is different from a moral system. For example, the ancient Greeks and Romans had a good-bad moral dichotomy, while Christianity had a good-evil moral dichotomy. Yet we saw in the ancient Greeks a movement from a shame to a guilt culture, and the Romans had a guilt culture that was beginning to move into a responsibility culture with the rise of Stoicism, only to have Christianity take over the Empire, keeping it a guilt culture through the Medieval period. The main difference between the…