For if the concept of historical guilt means anything, it means that a hereditary stain of complicity can be said to pass down from one generation to another. It is true that for many centuries, because of a single verse in the Gospels, some Christians held the Jewish people accountable in just such a way.18 And it took until 1965 for a Catholic Pope to formally lift this historical burden.19 But in this and almost every other such case the modern age views this descendant-blaming as morally repugnant. The case of the Jews is especially disturbing because it suggests how long such a vendetta can last. The guilt with which modern Europeans now find themselves burdened, by contrast, only began in recent decades. It is a pathology of the late twentieth century onwards. So perhaps it could – like the Christian idea of the hereditary guilt of the Jews – continue for another couple of millennia. Yet even then it is hard to see how it could be lifted.

First, because so many Europeans seem to want it to continue. Guilt, as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner has diagnosed it in his book La Tyrannie de la pénitence, has become a moral intoxicant in Western Europe.20 People imbibe it because they like it: they get high on it. It lifts them up and exalts them. Rather than being people responsible for themselves and answerable to those they know, they become the self-appointed representatives of the living and dead, the bearers of a terrible history as well as the potential redeemers of mankind. From being a nobody one becomes a somebody. In 2006 Britain threw up a particularly curious example of this type in the form of one Andrew Hawkins.

Mr Hawkins is a theatre director who discovered in mid-life that he was a descendant of a sixteenth-century slave-trader called John Hawkins. In 2006 he was invited by a charity called ‘Lifeline Expedition’ (which organises trips to ‘heal the past’) to go on a ‘sorry’ trip to Gambia.21 The upshot was that Hawkins joined 26 other slaver descendants in June of that year who paraded through the streets of the capital, Banjul, with chains around their hands and yokes about their necks. As they walked to the 25,000-seater sports stadium Hawkins and the other participants also wore T-shirts with the words ‘So Sorry’ on them. Weeping and on their knees the group apologised in English, French and German to about 18,000 people in the stadium before being ceremonially ‘freed’ of their chains by the Gambian Vice-President, Isatou Njie-Saidy.22