Blue-eyed Buddhist

On 2 March 1901, the Buddhists of Rangoon (today’s Yangon) in Burma celebrated the full
moon festival, the largest of the year. Visitors, respectfully barefoot, filled the grounds of the
huge gold-plated Shwedagon Pagoda, the country’s most important Buddhist pilgrimage site,
its glimmering spire visible from miles away. On the platform, people were chanting,
meditating, offering candles, flowers and water, talking. The surrounding streets were alive
with food stalls, music and drama performances, banners and decorations. In the midst of these
crowds and celebrations, an act of profound civil disobedience took place: a shaven-headed
Buddhist monk stepped out in front of an off-duty colonial policeman, in the employ of the
British Empire, and ordered him to take off his shoes.

We can imagine the ripple that spread as people noticed the confrontation. Wrapped in the
saffron robes of religion, the monk was not just challenging one policeman. His protest targeted
the power of the empire, the largest the world had ever seen.

News of this act spread from the Rangoon bazaars into the Burmese newspapers. It sparked
attempts by the colonial authorities to control the situation, followed by further polemics and
confrontations, and launched the ‘shoe issue’ as a rallying-point for Burmese anticolonialism
for the next two decades. When Barack Obama visited the Shwedagon more than a century
later, he did so barefoot.

Who was the monk that started it all? The eyes that stared down the policeman were the blue
eyes of the mysterious ‘Irish Buddhist’ from Rangoon’s Tavoy monastery, known to many by
his Buddhist name of U Dhammaloka. What was his original name? Where had he come from?
And what was an Irish-born man doing as a Buddhist monk, in Rangoon, challenging imperial
power beneath a full moon?

Even in his own day, Dhammaloka was no easy man to pin down, despite the best efforts of
the colonial police and intelligence services. He used at least five aliases and left out about 25
years of his past in the very different tales he told. It took me and my co-authors Alicia Turner
and Brian Bocking a decade to put together the pieces in our book The Irish Buddhist (2020) –
but, in tracing his life, we rediscovered an extraordinary biography that offers a window on the
crowds, networks and social movements that brought about the end of empire in Asia.

Burma had been conquered by Britain in three wars, the final one followed by a brutal
counterinsurgency in the late 1880s, a little more than a decade before the confrontation in
Rangoon, the colonial capital and port city from where Burma’s wealth was shipped overseas.
Since the Indian uprising of 1857-59, European colonisers in Asia were uncomfortably
conscious of just how few they were. In colonised Burma, as elsewhere, great efforts went into
intensifying racial hierarchies, marking off the small numbers of whites and their colonial
officials from the millions of ‘others’ they ruled over: Burman Buddhists, Indian Muslim
dockworkers, the Chinese diaspora, Tavoy sailors, Shan and other ethnic minorities. Empire
was not just military power and economic exploitation. It was also, crucially, cultural hierarchy.

Clothing – especially shoes – was key to the imperial colour line. In Burma, like much of Asia,
shoes are considered dirty. They are not worn inside houses, let alone in sacred spaces, as a
sign of basic respect. For whites and representatives of the Empire, like the off-duty policeman,
to take off one’s shoes would have meant lowering oneself to the level of the barefoot or sandal-
wearing masses: not just personally humiliating but dangerous to imperial power, which
depended on constantly reinforcing racial, cultural and institutional hierarchies. When poor
whites ‘went native’ – settling down with local partners, taking casual labour alongside Asians,
wearing the same clothes as their neighbours and coworkers – it marked a dangerous breach in
white solidarity.

A European Buddhist – someone who went as far as converting to a local religion, bowing
down to ‘heathen idols’, perhaps a monk or nun ritually subordinated to an Asian religious
hierarchy, begging for food and of course barefoot, shaven-headed and wearing robes –
epitomised this breakdown of racial hierarchies. Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim (1901), which
tells the story of the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, brought up in a Lahore bazaar and
following a Tibetan Buddhist guru, was a bestseller that helped win its author the Nobel Prize.

Empire and religion were deeply intertwined: ‘bringing the Gospel to the heathen’ was a key
justification of colonialism (alongside claims familiar today: bringing modern science and
education, rescuing women, or bringing rational government). The imperial establishment
belonged to approved Christian denominations, and in 1901 the missionary effort was close to
its height, supplementing the brute force of military power and colonial law with the soft power
of conversion and Christian schools (run in English and supported by the state).

Yet this brought risks for a colonial power that had to proclaim itself officially neutral around
religion, willing to rule Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Christians and others without fear or
favour. By highlighting shoes in pagodas, Dhammaloka put his finger on this contradiction.
Did the empire actually respect Burmese religious sensitivities, in their own holy places – or
not? Either answer was risky for the structures of imperial and racial power.

This weak point had long been probed in colonised Ireland, where the Emancipation movement
had asserted the rights of the Catholic Irish against the Protestant establishment to great effect
in the 1820s, enabling national self-assertion and political organising under the protection of
local religion, which British colonial authorities could not be seen to attack directly. Later in
the century, mass participation in the Land War ended the (largely Protestant) aristocracy, and
saw their (mostly Catholic) tenants coming to own the land they worked, while the ‘Irish Party’
became increasingly significant in Westminster.

At the same time, the Irish were leaving the island. Of the 8 million before the catastrophic
1845-49 famine, a million died and another million emigrated in the following decade;
emigration eventually brought the population down to just over 4 million, as the young left for
the factories of Boston or Birmingham, for Australia or Canada. One of these was the boy who
would become ‘U Dhammaloka’.

But who was he? The answer is not easy to untangle. History, of course, is written by the
winners – and the colonial newspapers that are the most common sources for his life were
written for and by people who had committed themselves to colonialism, becoming colonial
officials, soldiers, missionaries and others, and moving to Asia to become part of the imperial
structure. Dhammaloka was also a working-class radical who sailed very close to the wind. His
multiple aliases and missing years are common in a time where mugshots and fingerprints were
widespread as tools for state surveillance of the migrant poor; covering his tracks whenever
possible was sensible behaviour. We can trace his life only thanks to the huge strides made in
digitising newspapers, books and archives in recent years. It turns out that his story crosses at
least 12 different countries.
Despite his aliases, the name ‘Laurence Carroll’ fits with a birth in 1856 in the shadow of the
church at Booterstown, a village becoming a suburb, an hour’s walk south from the Dublin
docks (his name was also confirmed by an Irish journalist in Singapore). Carroll was the
youngest of six. He left school around 13 and emigrated to Liverpool. Finding work in a ship’s
pantry, he is recorded as arriving in New York in 1872. He worked on cargo ships up and down
the East Coast before becoming a ‘hobo’ (a migrant worker) and travelling west, jumping trains
and making his way via Chicago and Montana to the fruit boats of the Sacramento River and
eventually the San Francisco docks.

Dhammaloka’s anti-racism was probably chosen on this long journey. Liverpool docks were
contested between English and Irish workers. New York and the hobo trails, following the US
Civil War, saw many Irish ‘becoming white’, using ethnic solidarity and racism to cement their
position at the expense of Black people. He passed through Montana in the period between Red
Cloud’s War and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Northern California – and the San Francisco
docks – were sites of anti-Chinese racism but, throughout his later life, we see a refusal of
racism and a consistent choice of cross-racial solidarity many years in the making.

Somewhere along the way, he also picked up the skills and ideas of late-19th-century
radicalism, which he would put to good use in Asia alongside local and Irish traditions. This
may explain the gaps in his biography – these were the years of Fenian (Irish republican)
violence, of the Molly Maguires, a secret labour society that fought Pinkertons in the
Pennsylvania coalfields, of the 1877 general strike, and of a widespread radical culture, not
least among migrant workers.

From San Francisco, Carroll worked the trans-Pacific ships to Yokohama, and eventually
became a docker in Rangoon. In 1900, he ordained as a Buddhist monk in a major ritual
celebrated by senior monks, with another 100 monks and 200 laypeople in attendance, all
sponsored by a Chinese Buddhist. Working in the multi-ethnic spaces of sailing and dock work,
Dhammaloka claimed to speak seven Asian languages. At the very least, he certainly spoke
Hindi-Urdu well enough to win arguments.

More than this, he knew how to get on with people. Like many a sailor, hobo and Irish emigrant,
telling stories helped him make new friends and get through hard times. Living on his wits, he
was quick to make a connection, interested in other people’s lives and worlds, and outraged by
the injustices they suffered. When people met him, they remembered him – and told
Dhammaloka stories long after he had passed through their lives.

In particular, Dhammaloka loved the richness of Asian cultures and sought to defend them
against colonial destruction. In his 14 years as a campaigning monk, he was active in the
countries we now call Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand,
Japan, Australia, and perhaps also China, Nepal and Cambodia. Along the way, he gradually
became an anticolonial celebrity: crowds of thousands would travel, sometimes for days, to
hear him speak in remote places in rural Burma or Sri Lanka, so much so that laws may have
been changed to stop him. His pamphlets were published by the tens or hundreds of thousands,
and distributed widely.

He became immensely popular for his willingness to confront colonial injustices, such as the
kidnapping for slave labour of young boys and women, or corruption in high places. Colonial
officials regularly abandoned their ‘native wives’ and children when they retired ‘home’ to
England: Dhammaloka campaigned against this so effectively that the viceroy forced them to
legalise such marriages, hence preventing them from remarrying ‘at home’.

But he was not just an isolated troublemaker. At every stage he acted as the dramatic ‘front
man’ for effective Asian networks of many different kinds: Sri Lankan anticolonial Buddhists,
Indian radical activists, the diaspora of the Tavoy (Dawei) ethnic minority across Burma and
Thailand, the Chinese diaspora in Burma and in Singapore, a Shan chieftain from Burma’s
borders, Japanese Buddhist modernisers – and beyond these, the developing social movements
of pan-Asian Buddhist revival and popular self-organising that would eventually help sweep
the empire away.

Buddhism played a crucial role here, connecting people across Asia in very different ways than
did European empires. The religion had been born in India and Nepal, then spread into today’s
Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan and along the Silk Road. It was dominant in British Burma
and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and French-ruled Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia). It played
an important role in today’s Malaysia, Singapore, China and, to some extent, Korea.

Of the three Asian countries uncolonised in 1901, Siam (today’s Thailand) and Tibet were
Buddhist. The rising power, Japan, shortly to be the first Asian country to defeat a European
power in the Russo-Japanese War, counted Buddhism among its main religions, and sent
Buddhist clergy to the rest of Buddhist Asia and to the diaspora in Hawaii, California and
Brazil. Buddhism was older than Christianity and (wrongly) believed to have more adherents.
Together with the empire’s weak spot around religion, this gave Buddhism real potential as a
vehicle for anticolonial action.

As Dhammaloka said – repeatedly, loudly and publicly – colonialism came with ‘the Bible, the
whiskey bottle and the Gatling gun’. From this perspective, a practical programme of
challenging missionaries and working for temperance followed. The Gatling gun – military
conquest – could not be challenged directly; but the Irish move of challenging colonial religion
as a proxy for imperial power worked well.

More than this, an Irish Buddhist was a worry for the British Empire, and not only in Kipling.
Irish emigrants worked not only in factories or as domestic servants. Some, like Dhammaloka,
did work on the ships and docks that held the empire together. Many of the poorest joined the
British Army: the rifles pointed at Asian crowds were often held in Irish hands. But what if
they lost their loyalty to the empire, and made common cause with Burmese – or Indian, or Sri
Lankan – people who were also organising themselves and might once again revolt against
foreign rule? And what if they converted to a pan-Asian religion like Buddhism? When
Dhammaloka confronted the off-duty policeman at the full moon festival in 1901, these were
some of the unnerving questions that he brought to the fore.

In the decade that followed, he was active across Asia on speaking tours, founding schools,
creating organisations, publishing and distributing tracts. The year 1909 saw a high-profile tour
of Ceylon marked by newspaper polemics, counter-lectures, police surveillance, threats of legal
action, disrupted meetings – and very large crowds. In a time of increasing tension across the
empire – with Gandhi’s boycott movement taking off in India and facing severe repression –
colonial authorities may have felt they had to intervene. In late 1910, Dhammaloka was charged
with sedition in the Burmese town of Moulmein, centred around his challenge to ‘the Bible,
the whiskey bottle and the Gatling gun’. Complaints about this had been made by two
missionaries: one Anglican and the other Baptist (the latter shortly to be fined for his
mistreatment of inmates in the institute for the blind). The streets were so full of Dhammaloka’s
supporters that his trial was postponed. Eventually, it was held surrounded by soldiers and
police. He was convicted: missionary critique of Buddhism was legitimate, but a monk’s
critique of Christianity was sedition.

On Friday 13 January 1911, the streets of Rangoon, too, were filled with a multi-ethnic crowd
supporting Dhammaloka in his appeal against the Moulmein conviction. He was pulled in
ceremonial procession by a crowd of laity and Buddhist monks, an honour normally reserved
for the most senior monks and members of the deposed royal family. It was not only the
‘Burmese bazaar’ that closed that day. Dhammaloka’s Tavoy monastery – a node for that ethnic
diaspora and for poor whites like him – was located in Chinatown, where he had many
supporters. The Chinese and Indian bazaars also emptied on to the streets of Rangoon, and even
the local cinema (the first in the country) donated two days’ takings to the defence fund.

His lawyer was U Chit Hlaing, later a leading nationalist figure, but Dhammaloka’s most
strategic supporter was Pranjivan Mehta, a Mumbai-born physician and close ally of Gandhi’s.
The newspaper Mehta founded, United Burma, was seen as deeply subversive by the
authorities, but even more threatening was his developing alliance with the Indian Muslim
dockworkers who made Rangoon’s activities as a colonial port possible. This multi-ethnic and
multi-religious crowd – Burmese, Indian and Chinese – stood behind Dhammaloka in his
confrontation with the British Empire, and prefigured the alliances across entrenched ethnic
and religious divides that challenge the Burmese military dictatorship today.

Faced with this incipient alliance, the authorities tried to lower the stakes without losing face.
Dhammaloka was bound over to keep the peace: forced to stay within the law for 12 months on
pain of his supporters losing the bond money they had to put up for him. (We discovered some
of these details in the Swedish-language pages of the Minnesota Forskaren, an anarchist
newspaper that republished clippings Dhammaloka had sent to his radical free-thinking allies
in the New York journal The Truth Seeker.)

Then, despite the multi-ethnic struggle he had instigated and his growing prestige, the day after
his term of good behaviour ended, Dhammaloka sailed for Australia, never to return to Burma.
From Melbourne came a pseudonymous letter announcing his death, signed with the surname
of an Irish labour organiser, and obituaries were published around the world. A few months
later, he reappeared in Singapore, Penang, Ipoh and Bangkok, and claimed to have spent time
in Cambodia. He vanished for good in late 1913 or early 1914.

Despite our best efforts and those of collaborators around the world, we have not been able to
find out what happened to Dhammaloka. Perhaps he died quietly, somewhere remote, with the
impending world war drowning out the news. Maybe he was killed and buried somewhere
unknown. Or perhaps he changed his name and costume again, slipping away to lead another
life somewhere else. We do not know.

What we do know is that his story gives us an unexpected window into the multi-ethnic
grassroots that in these decades transformed anticolonial resistance from a largely elite activity,
led by Western-educated middle-class activists, to the mass popular struggles that would
eventually lead to the end of empire.

Then, as now, 60 per cent of our species lives in Asia. Asian decolonisation alone is the single
largest social change that movements from below have brought about in the past 100 years –
making it an important touchstone for today, when the question of whether climate justice
struggles can overturn the fossil fuel capitalism driving us headlong to climate breakdown is
an existential issue across the planet. Or, indeed, in an age when the question of what
decolonisation might look like today, after national independence has failed to resolve those
problems, and the effects of empire and slavery live on, is a burning issue across the world.

The visions of the future that Dhammaloka and others in his generation had were naturally
shaped by their present. In multi-ethnic, multilingual empires held together by telegraphs,
railways and steamships, today’s world of independent nation-states, each defined around a
single dominant ethnicity, was not obviously the wave of the future – indeed, nostalgia for past
local kingdoms and empires was still widespread. The vision of a pan-Asian Buddhism did not
come to pass (although we are familiar with pan-Islamisms of various kinds). Liberals foresaw
a world shaped by modern science, education and rationality. Communists and anarchists had
their own internationalist visions of the future.

In the 1910s, it was far clearer that empire could and should be ended than what would come
next. This would only really come into focus in the decades that followed, as the struggles of
peasants, urban workers, women, religious groups, ethnic minorities and others were brought
under the leadership of nationally organised elites-in-waiting that attempted to make a state in
their own image. Yet the struggles of that earlier generation laid the groundwork for what came
afterwards. What we do, in our attempts to bring about a better world, is more foreseeable than
the details of the visions that we imagine, of a future that even in a much smaller world defied
the brightest minds of Asia to conceptualise. It is not by writing blueprints but in the concerted
efforts to challenge the forces of destruction that things change. This thought can, perhaps, help
us relax some of our attempts to map out the future, and encourage us to pay more attention to
how we work together today to overcome the current cycle of catastrophe.

We can also see that Asian (and African) decolonisation was not a single homogenous thing.
The different forces that predominated in different countries meant that China and India, Burma
and Vietnam, Tanzania and South Africa inhabited this new shape of independent nation-states
in very different ways. So, too, we can imagine that within broad parameters there may well be
many different kinds of ecologically sustainable futures possible.

From my own work on the life of U Dhammaloka, I have drawn a deep respect for Burma’s
Civil Disobedience Movement today and its capacity to challenge anti-Muslim and anti-
Rohingya racism in the Burman Buddhist majority, as well as to connect many different social
classes and ethnicities in a shared challenge to the dictatorship. The forces ranged against them
are massive and brutal; each day brings news of more disappearances and killings. And yet
they do not give up, any more than we should when faced with climate despair or the repression
of ecological activism. After all, they have been here before: in previous uprisings that have
caused military power to wobble, in the end of British rule in Burma, and before, on the streets
of Rangoon, 100 years ago, with this irrepressible, quirky, brave and remarkable Irish
Buddhist.
 Collective wrongs
As a country, the United States enforced slavery and segregation, engaged in bombings that
killed civilians all over the world, imprisoned alleged ‘conspirators’ under false pretences
during the Red Scare, and on and on. The US continues to grapple with devastating harms
caused by the state, and it isn’t alone. Nearly every country and every organisation that has
wielded power for any length of time has a record of moral harms.

The Catholic Church subjugated, forcibly converted, murdered, and abused millions of people
across continents. The legacy of the residential school system, through which the Church
abducted, forcibly converted, abused and even killed Native children in the US and Canada
remains an ongoing scandal, one Pope Francis is trying to address. Germany, Rwanda, the
Balkans, Sudan, Turkey and Myanmar all have genocides in their history (and that list is hardly
exhaustive). Most of Europe and many countries in the Middle East and east Asia have histories
of colonialism that include the occupation of other states, extraction of resources, and the
oppression, enslavement and murder of local populations.

The individual people who perpetrated these acts are in most cases long dead, but the states
and organisations remain. Individuals can commit heroic acts and horrible crimes, but so can
states and organisations. Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon; the US put him there. President
Andrew Jackson ordered the forcible and violent displacement of tens of thousands of Native
people, killing thousands; the US, the nation, committed genocide. Armstrong and Jackson are
dead but the US still exists, and the fact that states and organisations outlive individual actors
creates the problem. In the US, we’re happy to claim collective responsibility for Apollo
11. Yet as a community, we are uncomfortable acknowledging collective responsibility for acts
of genocide perpetrated against Native people. If we want to take collective responsibility
for Apollo 11, then we should be willing to reckon with taking responsibility for genocide, too.

The fact is that collectives can act. Some of those acts are analogous to acts of individuals; in
the case of smaller collectives, they might even be the same. I can buy a pizza; the philosophy
department can buy a pizza; the US can buy a pizza (though, usually, the US goes a bit larger
than a pizza). These actions vary mostly based on procedures required for the purchase to take
place. Both individuals and collectives can buy things; both individuals and collectives can act;
and both individuals and collectives can take positions. I can condemn the Russian invasion of
Ukraine; the US, collectively, can condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

But there are some acts that can be undertaken only by collectives. For example, states declare
war; individuals don’t. This is because collectives coordinate the behaviour of many
individuals. Acts of governance aren’t things individual people can do (unless operating as
agents of the collective), because those acts of governance coordinate the behaviour of many
people. An individual can commit crimes against humanity but acts such as maintaining
institutions of slavery and segregation are collective acts. Those are things that the US did,
acting collectively.

So just how does a collective act? There are three stories to account for the way this occurs.
These narratives are not mutually exclusive, so feel free to mix and match.

The most prominent view is that groups are formed and act based on ‘collective intentionality’.
Basically, a group of individuals shares a set of beliefs about how the world is, and those
individuals (by virtue of all sharing those beliefs) create a collective identity, which then allows
for collective action. From this perspective, the existence of the US depends collectively on
members of the US holding shared beliefs, which include the belief that the US is a country,
and that the country has a Constitution. (If no one believed that there was such a country, then
there wouldn’t be one.) The existence of the US is established by that shared belief, but so are
a range of facts about how the US works, including how the collective is governed (as in the
three branches of government and the powers of those branches).

This does not mean that the US is ‘just made up’ or that its existence is arbitrary. It just means
that the beliefs of people are necessary for the US to continue existing as a collective identity.
Some of the beliefs about the US are grounded by fact. There is a Constitution of the United
States. Some of the beliefs about the US are grounded by the shared agreement and
acknowledgement of the belief within the group.

This also does not mean that everyone in the community must share those beliefs. There are
some people who might not believe the US is a country; there may be some people who might
not believe the US has a Constitution. It is enough if, generally, people believe in the US. The
US is not in danger of falling apart because your drunk uncle believes that the US is actually a
corporation, not a country, that was created in 1910 by a cabal of bankers at Jekyll Island who
supplanted the Constitution in 1913. Weird beliefs are not in danger of undermining the
existence of the US unless a sufficiently large portion of the collective adopts them.

In this first story, a collective is formed by the collective beliefs of the members. That collective
also acts through the collective beliefs of the members, either directly as a result of belief or
through the processes (like the Constitutional processes) that govern the collective.

The second story holds that collectives need not have any beliefs at all. Rather, collectives act
when the behaviours of individuals are coordinated in any way. The US acts when the members
of the group largely behave in a similar, patterned manner. Think of individuals buying and
selling on the stock market. Individuals may all have different beliefs that inform their
behaviour, but if they’re mostly buying, then the values of that market go up over time and the
behaviour of the group (taken together) is the behaviour of the collective.

The first story gives us the most straightforward account of how declared acts of collectives
work, for example establishing the formal structures of the US government. The second story
gives us an account of how a collective can act without a formal declaration or the clear
structures of the government. For example, the US has become increasingly urbanised over the
past century. More people are moving out of rural areas and towards cities. This shift is not the
result of an explicit, collective belief that we have. Rather, it is something that we are doing
collectively over time, through a set of behaviours. Not everyone is moving to the city; this is
an expression of a pattern within the US. There’s a good argument that acts arising from this
second story aren’t appropriate sources of blame, because they’re not things that any individual
(much less the collective) may actively believe should be done. So, I’d like to set the second
story aside and focus on the first and third.

The third story is formal. The US exists because of the collective attitudes of the people. The
US also has a formal way of making decisions, namely through the explicit branches of
government outlined in the Constitution. Not all collectives have such a formal structure;
collectives that don’t have such a structure can act only through the first and second stories.
However, the big collectives that are the source of moral concern here (the US and other
countries; the Catholic Church and other religious institutions; corporations and
nongovernmental organisations) all have formal structures for making decisions and acting.

In the US, there is a formal process for declaring war. Even if most or even the majority of
people in the US did not believe that the US was declaring a war, it would be sufficient if
Congress did. Why? Because Congress is the formal structure through which the US declares
war. That’s how the collective works and, as long as we collectively believe that the US is
governed by the Constitution, those formal structures will be enough for the US to declare war.

It’s worth noting that a collective belief doesn’t even have to be held by a majority of the people
in a community to be dominant. Rather, the way that collective beliefs work often gives more
weight and importance to those who have the ability to act as individuals within the collective.
That means that a child who has no political agency, and believes that there are no countries,
matters less to the collective beliefs than an adult. Unfortunately, it also means that the beliefs
of the disenfranchised and systematically oppressed don’t contribute to the collective of the US
as much as beliefs of power-players. (This seems at odds with the idea of democracy, which
holds that all members of the community should have more-or-less equal standing to govern
the collective and its acts.)

The first and third stories show us how to evaluate the moral status of the US, where formal
structures supported by widespread collective beliefs underwrote both great achievements and
atrocities. The coordinated behaviour that culminated in the space programme, victory in the
Second World War and other things for which we want to take credit as a country resulted from
the deliberate coordination of action through the formal structures of the government and
collective beliefs. But so did the great moral atrocities like slavery and oppression.

Acts of collectives often have moral dimensions, and may be morally praiseworthy or
blameworthy. The Holocaust is perhaps the most widely discussed instance of collective blame
and responsibility. The German state (along with collaborating governments) committed
genocide, targeting (among others) Jews, Roma and other ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ people,
and people with disabilities. In the years that followed, the state also recognised collective
responsibility for that action, and set out to pay restitution to the groups and the individuals
that it had harmed.

‘Germans deported them. Germans burned numbers on their forearms. Germans tried to
dehumanise them, to reduce them to numbers, to erase all memory of them in the extermination
camps. They did not succeed,’ said the German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier when he
visited the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on 23 January 2020. ‘Germany’s
responsibility does not expire. We want to live up to our responsibility. By this, you
should measure us.’

Consider two discrete sets of phrasings here: ‘Germans [did x]’ and ‘Germany’s responsibility
for [x]’. President Steinmeier does not actually say ‘Germany [did x]’ in this case, but he does
acknowledge collective responsibility for the actions of various Germans, because they were
acting on behalf of and as agents of the German state. He acknowledges collective
responsibility, in line with the position of the German government in the years after the Second
World War.

But there’s something else curious here: Steinmeier was born in 1956, more than a decade after
the end of the Second World War. He is speaking in an official capacity on behalf of the state,
even as most members of the state at the time were not alive during (much less involved with)
the perpetration of the Holocaust. Steinmeier’s point is that, irrespective of personal
responsibility (and there were individuals who held personal responsibility: Hitler, Himmler,
Eichmann, Goering, etc), the state took the actions, and the state is responsible. As such, the
state paid restitution.

Like the US president Jackson, the architects and perpetrators of the Holocaust are dead
(though perhaps, if not to a person, then pretty close). The people acknowledging collective
responsibility for the history of Germany are people who carry no individual responsibility.
President Steinmeier could say: ‘Germany has a collective responsibility’ and ‘No living
German is individually responsible.’ There is no contradiction between those two things.

No individual living American is responsible for slavery, nor the Trail of Tears. If and when
there are living individuals who are responsible for such crimes, there should be individual
accountability. However, the state that perpetrated those acts exists. The United States engaged
in a collective action to maintain slavery, to displace and kill thousands of Native people. Even
if there is no present individual, there is a present collective.

Individual and collective responsibility can of course be intertwined. The US is responsible for
the bombing campaigns in Cambodia; Henry Kissinger is personally responsible for those
campaigns too, as a major influencer of that policy. The US sanctioned slavery; there were
individual lawmakers and slave owners who had a much higher level of personal responsibility
than (for example) the Quaker abolitionists in the US.

The Netflix documentary Pray Away (2021) involves several figures in the ‘conversion
therapy’ movement, the attempt to ‘pray away the gay’ that includes destructive pseudo-
psychiatric practices resulting in serious damage to LGBTQ+ people. The documentary
considers the responsibility of groups that advocated and performed these practices, including
Exodus International, the Family Research Council and several others. It also includes
interviews with John Paulk, Julie Rodgers, Randy Thomas and others who were personally
involved in the propagation of conversion therapy, advocating against gay rights, but who are
now wrestling with their personal moral responsibility for the harms they helped promote.

Their personal struggle with their guilt and responsibility for those harms illustrates one of the
areas that is distinct in discussion of collective responsibility. When we wrestle with the legacy
of slavery in the US, white people will sometimes respond by noting that they did not
personally own slaves, or even have ancestors who owned slaves, as a way of distancing
themselves from any personal responsibility. This is distinct from the position of someone like
Paulk, Rodgers and Thomas, who were personally responsible as well as part of the collective
that was responsible for the harms of these practices.

Who’s really responsible for all these harms? It’s simpler when we are able to punish the
individuals perpetrating the crime. The state of Israel hanged Adolf Eichmann; were he still
alive, the US could hang president Jackson. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia convicted and imprisoned Slobodan Milošević; were he still alive, the US could
imprison Justice Henry Billings Brown and other individual, institutional codifiers of
segregation. But we cannot hang the United States. We cannot imprison the United States.
Further, there is a strong moral argument against punitive measures aimed at collectives, even
when the responsible individuals are still alive, because such punishments unjustly harm
members of the collective who fought against or had nothing to do with collective action.
Yet there are measures that can be taken when collectives do things that are morally wrong.
Collectives themselves can act by acknowledging the harm they have caused; the US can and
should acknowledge the harm done to people and groups through various collective actions,
and should take responsibility as a state, as did Germany and other collectives with a morally
damaged past.

That is a first, simple step, yet collectives often have a difficult time following through. It is
hard to say whether the US has accepted blame even for something as widely acknowledged
as slavery, especially given the constant culture wars over American history. The same goes
for the genocide of Native people, and the forced labour and segregation of various other
minority groups.

A second step is even more contentious in the US, but widely accepted in reckoning with
collective responsibility for moral wrongs: collectives can offer restitution to those harmed, or
to their nearest living descendants. After all, collectives often include in their membership those
who were harmed. Some Holocaust survivors and their descendants live in Germany or former
occupied or collaborator states; many Black people in the US are descendants of those harmed
by slavery. A material way to acknowledge the harm done is to attempt some restitution.

That often meets with resistance in the US. To protest the idea of restitution for slavery, people
may say: ‘I never owned slaves’ or ‘My ancestors weren’t even here during the days of slavery.’

Others insist that we are so far removed from the legacy of slavery, segregation, displacement
and genocide that restitution is inappropriate. They contend that the people who would receive
the restitution are descendants and not the people personally harmed.

As a historical matter and according to conventions established for such restitution, these
arguments don’t hold up, especially given the pernicious influence of racism in the US well
after the passage of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s. Indeed, even if it were true that
descendants are unharmed (which it is not), aren’t we obligated to provide restitution to the
nearest living successor? Part of living in a society is helping to right the wrongs for which the
group is responsible – whether you were personally involved or not. The harm done by the
collective incurs an obligation; that obligation doesn’t get dissolved when the harmed person
dies. If that were true, it would create a cascade of terrifying, morally perverse incentives – like
the US killing anyone and everyone harmed (or, at least, everyone not already killed by the
harm itself) to avoid the cost of restitution. When a government tortures people, including
innocent civilians, its ethical obligation is to pay restitution to those people – not kill them to
sweep the atrocity under the rug.

The obligation to pay restitution for harms persists until the debt is settled. That’s how it works.