The case for shame

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/09/shame-guilt

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In California they call it #droughtshaming. People found using lots of water when the state is as dry as a cream cracker are facing trial by hashtag. The actor Tom Selleck is the latest target, accused of taking truckloads of water from a fire hydrant for his thirsty avocado crop.

Most people seem happy to harness the power of shame when the victims are the rich and powerful. But our attitudes to shame are actually much more ambivalent and contradictory. That’s why it was a stroke of genius to call Paul Abbott’s Channel Four series Shameless. We are at a point in our social history where the word is perfectly poised between condemnation and celebration.

Shame, like guilt, is something we often feel we are better off without. The shame culture is strongly associated with oppression. So-called honour killings are inflicted on people who bring shame to their families, often for nothing more than loving the “wrong” person or, most horrifically, for being the victims of rape. In the case of gay people, shame has given way to pride. To be shameless is to be who you are, without apology.

And yet in other contexts we are rather conflicted about the cry of shame. You can protest against honour killings one day, then name and shame tax-evading multinationals the next. When politicians are called shameless, there is no doubt that this is a very bad thing. Shame is like rain: whether it’s good or bad depends on where and how heavily it falls.

There should be no question that we need shame. Morality is in essence the means by which we control the way we treat each other to maintain as much peace, fairness and social harmony as is possible. Both guilt and shame are central to this.

Guilt works from the inside out, emerging in the privacy of your own conscience. You can feel guilty about something no one else ever finds out about. Shame works the other way around. Shame is all about how you are perceived in the eyes of others. This is why the innocent can be made to feel shame, and why the guilty who evade detection can evade shame.

Anthropologists distinguish between guilt and shame cultures, depending on which is more important. The broad, simplistic generalisation is that guilt is more prevalent in western, Christian cultures, whereas shame is more potent in Asia.

The link with Christianity is not accidental. Guilt has most power when you have a sense of a divine eye who sees what your peers might not – a soul that can be stained without any physical sign of defilement. In that sense, guilt is a kind of internalisation of shame.

As Christianity loses its power, we might then expect guilt also to loosen its grip. And if conscience provides a weaker motivation to behave morally, we might need to rely more on the overtly social mechanism of shame. If we want people to pick up litter, pay their employees a fair wage or worry about whether their noise bothers others, shaming them might be the only way.

If we are to use shame positively, however, we must be mindful of how easy it is to abuse it. Because shame is a social mechanism, it can all too easily become a tool of bullying, a psychological form of mob violence. This is what Jon Ronson warns against in his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, in which he worries about the causal cruelty of social media turning against people often on the basis of flimsy or no evidence.

That is why shame is a dish best served cold. If we are to use it, we ought to stop and think whether it is really merited. Hot-headed indignation too often leads to hasty judgment and the vile scene of the masses turning on the vulnerable. Shame is a strong moral medicine – and, as with any pharmaceutical, applying the wrong dose is worse than not using it at all.