The Many Uses (and Abuses) of Shame
March 18, 2022
When we experience shame, we feel bad; and when we inflict shame, we feel good. Those seem to be among the few points of consensus when it comes to what the historian Peter N. Stearns calls a “disputed emotion.” Unlike fear or anger, shame is “self-conscious”; it doesn’t erupt so much as coil around itself. It requires an awareness of others and their disapproval, and it has to be learned. Aristotle thought of it as fundamental to ethical behavior; Confucius saw it as essential to social order.
But it can also be harmful, even ruinous. Recall children in dunce caps, perjurers in pillories, adulterers branded with scarlet letters. Last fall, Vivian Gornick published an essay in Harper’s Magazine that described the most extreme experiences of shame as tantamount to annihilation. “Humiliation lingers in the mind, the heart, the veins, the arteries forever,” she writes. “It allows people to brood for decades on end, often deforming their inner lives.”
No surprise that it’s such a rich subject for novelists. In addition to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” Gornick lists many others, including George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” and Richard Wright’s “Native Son.” There’s Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth,” snubbed to the point of addiction and suicide.
But shame isn’t always a matter of life and death — and perhaps sometimes it can even be salutary, shaking someone out of solipsism and complacency, eliciting a belated awareness of others. In Zadie Smith’s “Swing Time” (2016), when the unnamed narrator is confronted for having an affair, she knows that the shame she feels is a “suspicious emotion,” supposedly “antiquated and unhelpful”; but when she experiences it “at last,” it seems to arrive as a sort of relief. “Shame gets a bad rap these days,” Smith once said in an interview. “I think it’s quite a useful emotion, a corrective on certain kinds of behavior.”
Advertisement
Its absence can be liberating or terrifying, depending on where you sit. When he was president, Donald Trump was often described as shameless, berating his opponents in the most lurid terms, gleefully signaling his imperviousness to decorous (or even democratic) opinion. His supporters still love him for this, excited by his willingness to say all of the obnoxious things they used to be “allowed” to say but can’t anymore. You could call it reactionary shamelessness — a defiant refusal to accept that the norms of the culture have changed, and a nostalgia for a time when Trump’s supporters were the ones doing the shaming. Over the last several decades people who might have been on the receiving end of such mockery have asserted their right not to be shamed for their weight, for their gender, for their desires.
This assertion is a kind of shamelessness, too, but according to Cathy O’Neil’s new book, “The Shame Machine,” it’s of a different kind — not bitter and resentful but “healthy and freeing.” O’Neil distinguishes between shame that “punches down” and shame that “punches up.” To punch down is to deride and shun people for things that O’Neil says are largely shaped by forces beyond their control; for her, these include addiction, obesity and poverty. To punch up is to hold the powerful to account for their deeds — “police chiefs, governors, CEOs.”
Such distinctions are bound to be controversial — too categorical or potentially condescending, portraying people as more abject than they might see themselves to be. O’Neil’s previous book, “Weapons of Math Destruction,” explored how algorithms encode and exacerbate inequality; the “shame machines” in her new book, which include the weight loss and wellness industries, function similarly — fueling bad feeling in order to buoy profits while maintaining an unfair status quo.
But we shouldn’t ignore how shame has also been used as a force for positive change, O’Neil says. She quotes what Frederick Douglass said he hoped to do for America: to use “the public exposition of the contaminating and degrading influence of Slavery” in order to “shame her out of her adhesion to a system so abhorrent to Christianity and to her republican institutions.” At a time when slavery was still legally sanctioned, Douglass couldn’t appeal to government authority, but he could appeal to its ostensible ideals.
“In some cases, shaming is all we have,” Jennifer Jacquet, a professor of environmental studies, writes in “Is Shame Necessary?” (2015). Shame is powerful and also wildly imprecise, meaning it must be deployed “shrewdly,” she says, with “scrupulous implementation.” Overzealous deployment can backfire, making the target feel victimized and even more isolated. “As with antibiotics, if shaming is abused, we might all end up as victims,” she writes.
Advertisement
O’Neil and Jacquet encourage readers to try to think more deeply not just about what shame is but what it might be for. If it’s for sheer punishment — for banishing someone out of the circle of concern forever — then there’s no need for forbearance or mercy. But this can also sound like a nonviolent (and still extremely painful) form of sadism. Both books suggest that shame can help teach us how to live among one another, inculcate shared values and achieve mutual respect. O’Neil gives the example of Hopi “shame clowns,” who poke fun at transgressors in a ritual that offers “ridicule and then redemption.” The purpose of the ritual is reintegration, not ostracism: “The people they mock remain members of the community.”
This seems far removed from how many people experience shame nowadays, whether as a participant or a spectator, looking on with amusement or horror as some nonpublic person gets a very public comeuppance in a social-media pile-on. O’Neil inevitably touches on these kinds of scenarios in a book whose subtitle refers to “the new age of humiliation.”
A book that really delves into the digital morass is Jon Ronson’s “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” published in 2015. Ronson chronicles what he calls a “great renaissance of public shaming” that is “coercive, borderless and increasing in speed and influence.” He talks to people who did things that were stupid and, in some instances, indisputably wrong — though not necessarily, in the grand scheme of things, especially harmful. Online notoriety led to real-life punishments. He recounts his own experiences as both a shamer and a shamee. Sometimes public exposure is wholly righteous, he says; videos of police officers brutalizing Black people shouldn’t be kept secret. But uploading such videos is “a world away” from, say, jeering at a woman who had been in a train crash and calling her a “privileged bitch” because she worried about her violin.
“One act was powerful and important — using social media to create a new civil rights battlefield,” Ronson writes in the afterword to the paperback edition. “The other was a pointless and nasty cathartic alternative. Given that we are the ones with the power, it is incumbent upon us to recognize the difference.”
But are “we” truly “the ones with power”? It can sometimes seem as if the entire discourse around shame reflects a dispute about this: Who has power and who doesn’t; whether a shaming campaign amounts to a bullying onslaught or a principled unmasking of some entitled jerk. O’Neil herself allows that a person with plenty of status and influence in real life can feel victimized when shamed by a crowd of nobodies online, but she says that any attempt to lash out and turn the tables will just amount to punching down; such elite shamees are ignoring their own “power and privilege” and need to get a grip.
Yet the beauty and terror of social media is its scrambling of traditional hierarchies. What fuels online engagement is the capacity of digital platforms to make everyone feel both enormously powerful and utterly powerless. Recently I was in a crowded subway car when a couple of men standing in front of me started talking loudly about a woman they knew, discussing in detail her looks and her bra size, with one of them telling the other exactly what he needed to do to get her to sleep with him. It was the dumbest kind of bravado, and I had to hope that this woman would see right through these bozos. But it also struck me that probably everyone on the train had a device in their pocket that could record this foolishness and potentially blow up a stranger’s life. The prospect was giddying and frightening.
“Aim higher,” O’Neil writes about the temptation to expose some random person’s lousy behavior. A simple rejoinder to our digital phantasmagoria, and not a bad piece of advice.
No comments:
Post a Comment