Shame has been gaining a lot of currency in American culture these days.

The idea of shame and guilt cultures stems from a book, published just after the defeat of the Japanese in World War II when anthropologist Ruth Benedict described the difference between American and Japanese society as that between a shame culture and guilt culture — America being a guilt culture and Japan’s ancient culture being based on shame.

Many people idenify the idea of guilt taking moral precedence over shame, associating it with core American values, the gist being that with a strong sense of guilt, we have no need to fear of our community’s disapproval, because our internalized values enable an individual to conduct themselves entirely by their own moral compass, taking precedence over anything “the crowd” believes.

“We do not expect shame to do the heavy work of morality” Ruth Benedict suggested in her seminal work “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” (1946) comparing American to Japanese Culture. “The early Puritans who settled in the United States tried to base their entire morality on guilt,” she argues. While this is highly questionable, the fact is that Benedict’s shame/guilt dichotomy has framed a great many introductions to inquiries regarding the differences between west and east culture, with the Puritan pilgrims standing in as foundational figures for the “guilt” mindset and their ancient Japanese counterparts doing the same for the foundations of “shame”.

Some people think the way we fashion our morality is changing, and that we are rapidly turning away from guilt to an eastern variety of shame to come to our moral conclusions. Are we? The validity of the question has gained some traction as of late. In a 2016 OpEd for the New York Times, David Brooks writes in “The Shame Culture”

“Some sort of moral system is coming into place. Some new criteria now exist, which people use to define correct and incorrect action. The big question is: What is the nature of this new moral system?”

He goes on to suggest that “social media has created a new sort of
shame culture”, and then lists a number of features of online socialization, such as the balkanization of social groups clamoring for the recognition of their identities as well as often viciously attacking those it sees in opposition.

Is this a shame culture and are we turning into one? I don’t think so. I like what one blogger has to say about the question. Psychologist Stuart Schneiderman points out that:

[T}rue shame cultures do not weaponize shame. Guilt cultures do. Shame cultures are about avoiding shame, not seeking to shame. They prescribe propriety and decorum, temperance and probity. They and set down rules that each individual should follow in order to be a member in good standing of the culture.

This would exclude our online Troll Nation, as one author called it. Japan, for instance, does not weaponize shame the way our modern doxxers do.

If we cannot claim to use shame in the reverent manner that the Japanese do, steeped in ancient confucianist wisdom with which they order their own society, how do we characterize the shame that seems to surround us today? It seems to me that while we may not be turning into a shame culture in the easter sense, we may be turning ito a shaming culture — distinguisehd by the weaponization of shame that we see today all around us.

Maybe this is a good point to take a step back

Christopher Boehm’s Moral origins: The evolution of virtue, altruism, and shame provides an excellent framework to make a deeper inquiry. Boehm takes into the world of our ancestors, Homo Erectus and Australopithecene to inquire on the circumstances that led to changes in the way that we regarded each other, locating evidence such as our growing brain size and other bodily changes that led the way to meat sharing, which for Boehm is the seminal change in behavior, inspiring us to a level of cooperation that was not possible before.

The centrepiece of this change was, undoubtedly the emergence of the slef’conscious emotions, including shame, guilt, pride and embarrassment. Distinguishing us from our primate cousins these emotions grew out of what Boehm calls our “protoconscience” the roots of human behavior, probably arising from fear, and transforming itself over evolutionary time into an abiilty to understand each other’s thoughts and feelings in a way that enabled a level of cooperation that Boehm terms “full-blown morality, eventually leading to our ability to live in cities, hold jobs and raise families under very specific rules of conduct.

One strand of the narrative of our rise to “full-blown morality” goes something like this:

We moved from total selfishness (think chimpanzees) in which tyrants ruled by brute force to being able to function in groups by understanding and conforming to collective values, for which shame is a dominant feature. In a nutshell, fear of shame took over as the means of social control over tyranny.

According to some, however, the highest manifestation of this movement to “full blown morality was guilt. Shortly after World War II many academics began distinguishing between a “guilt culture” and a “shame culture”, with the United States representing the gold standard for guilt cultures and Japan reperesnting the same for shame.

In these discussions, Americans have long prided themselves with the notion that their heritage provided them with this stalwart internal compass to guide them, rather than the public opinion that eastern relied upon. The idea is that, with a guilt-framed conscience, our moral rectitude is impervious to outside influence. When we see something wrong we needn’t look to our right and left, seeking validation from others in our social group. This idea has not gone unchallenged, certainly, and yet it remains a foundational starting point for any opposing argument.

Recently, however, it seems this longstanding foundation in the widely-perceived difference between west and east has begun eroding. One can argue with substantive evidence that much more of “the heavy work of morality” that Benedict sopke of in 1946 is being achieved by shame, rather than the guilt that Americans have long prided themselves for.

Examples abound: the #metoo movement relies heavily on shame to catapult a national discussion and social change to the way that women are treated in their daily lives. Black Lives Matter and several other racially-inspired movements dig deep into American history to dredge up unresolved injustices that they seek financial reparations to reconcile. Their main impetus is indisputably a deep sense of shame they wish to inspire in “whiteness” for which they insist white-skinned people must acknowledge their privilege.

More and more often we see our politicians and pundits seeking to harness the power of shame not only to social causes, but also to tax laws and traffic violations. In yesterday’s New York Times Opinion piece, one pundit sought to publicly shame border patrol agents doing their job on the U.S. Southern border.

“Immigration lawyers have agent names; journalists reporting at the border have names, photos and even videos. These agents’ actions should be publicized, particularly in their home communities.”

The author, Kate Cronin-Furman, an assistant professor of human rights at University College London,  continues:

“The knowledge, for instance, that when you go to church on Sunday, your entire congregation will have seen you on TV ripping a child out of her father’s arms is a serious social cost to bear. The desire to avoid this kind of social shame may be enough to persuade some agents to quit and may hinder the recruitment of replacements.

Clearly this person is trying to harness shame to a social cause in a manner that we are seeing more and more of.

Jon Ronson’s book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” details the ease in which a life can be destroyed through online shaming, when a post goes viral. Similarly, Jennifer Jacquet’s book “Is Shame Necessary” serves as an instruction manual for anyone wishing to try public shaming for social causes. ‘The power of shame is that it can be used by the weak against the strong’ Jacquest informs us. While the scenarios she describes tend heavily towards the David versus Goliath variety — brave individuals standing up against behemoth’s in corporate malfeasance, it is clear that the template she suggests can be used for just about any social cause, just or otherwise, in which enough resentment can inspire enough clicks on Twitter to create a movement.

Schneiderman continues in the same post:

“Those who are using shame to gain certain political ends on college campuses are not promoting social harmony. They are not working to show people how best to get along with each other [as in a true shame culture]. They are looking to produce permanent struggle and public drama in order to force everyone to feel so guilty for their sins that they will feel obliged to make concessions, as a way to do penance.”

There are those who are a bit more magnanimous thatn Schneiderman. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, in their recently published The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, suggest that much of the activity revolving around social justice on campus and elsewhere stems from authentic fear which, ultimately, stems from a generation of overprotective parenting. The solution they suggest among other things is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy CBT to try to coax a bit more toerance out of todays college students.

Whether this shaming is borne out of fear derived from too much of a coddling or a more manipulative source, today we get the sense that shame is being used as a new kind of currency to do the heavy work of morality which before we relied on our own sense of right and wrong, rather than the young lady with the bullhorn, making demands in a stance outside our dorm, who seems content to do that work for us.

Clearly the preceding tells us that there is much at stake for shame as a social force today: up for grabs is what gets shamed, as well as when, why, how, how long and how much. Surely the internet and all that it comprises factors heavily in this complex equation, but looking beyond that are other technologies interacting with changing attitudes and, as I hope to show, no shortage of people wishing to devise new ways to harness the power of shame to make individuals as well as the broader society behave more to their liking.

While there have been a number of title’s surrounding the phenomenon lately, my objective is to try to get under these to try to discover what is it in our political nature that makes such things possible. I beleive that to understnad where we are going with this trend, we need to understand its past, which I locate deep in the Pleistocene, rather than the more recent birth of the internet.

As such my next post will be regarding The Origins of Shame as an adaptation. Stay tuned.