Introduction

What is shame?

Shame is an emotion so powerful that many people would rather die than endure it. It is perhaps designed to have this effect as many men, over the course of human history, have marched into battle, often nearly certain of their impending deaths, rather than face the shame and dishonor of refusing to fight. Today an alarming number of women experience shame about their body image are so powerful that they stop eating, ending their lives through malnutrition because of the machinations of shame that we still do not entirely understand.

Many books on the subject are not so much about shame as how to avoid it, or how to transform it into something else, or how to form a coalition of others to surround it with “resilience” rather than let it corrode our innermost being. One would think that over time, the human race would have found a way to dispose of such a corrosive emotion, but the fact is it is central to what makes us human and therefore, sadly, probably inalienable from our inward experiences.

Shame versus Fear of Shame

Very often when we speak of shame we are actually talking about fear of shame. This should come as no surprise as it is a soul-destroying emotion to be avoided at all costs. It is in its main tributary, the anticipation or fear of shame, that a great deal of our anxiety, as moderns living in the twenty first century, is tilted towards as we navigate the increasingly complex social world we find ourselves in today.

Perhaps it is the case that shame itself, in its truest sense is not very interesting. Consider for a moment the case of Harvey Weinstein, the movie mogul convicted of rape and sentenced to more years in prison than he is likely to live. Confined to a small cell, he is isolated from other inmates due to his notoriety, so has little company. Perhaps he has a television, some very sparse furniture. It is unlikely that any appeal will be successful. His glorious past is behind him. In a way Mr. Weinstein’s demise is uninteresting. Shame in its truest sense is static and irreversible. Typically, an irredeemably shamed berson will have the word ‘disgraced’ appended to their name (such as disgraced movie mogul, Harvey Weinstein). It signifies  an ending with little or no chance of reprieve.

Consider instead the movie moguls who have now taken his place, terrified of a similar fate and guided by this fear not to make the same errors as mister Weinstein. It is here, in society at large where we might find a more interesting scenario, but here it is not shame we are dealing with but its anticipation — the fear of shame.

It is for this reason that fear of shame may be of greater interest to us. It is also of much greater interest to others who wish to use shame to further their social agenda. We will not spend much time with Mr. Weinstien, in his lonely and monotonous cell, because we would soon find it as barren of meaning as he must. It is the anticipation of shame, and how it operates today, to create an occasional Weinstein to sacrifice on the altar of public opinion, that will take up our attention through most of this book.

Shame: A Functionalist Approach

Rather than start with how shame feels, it will be helpful to begin with what it does, socially. There is widespread agreement that shame is an adaptive trait which evolved to enable humans to achieve “complex social goals”. The ability to feel shame, as well as the ability to bestow shame on others, serves as a sort of tracking tool. With this ability, we can monitor our own reputation through the feedback we receive from others, verbal or otherwise, and also monitor others’ reputations in relation to ours. This sort of intuition is necessary for complex goals because in many distinctly human endeavors, we need to not only keep track of our own interactions with others in relation to a shared goal, but also keep track of the other relationships in which we take part.

Shame is one of a collection of emotions known as the self-conscious emotions that guide us in our uniquely human social lives. Other self-conscious emotions include, pride, guilt and embarrassment. Over the course of this book, we will have occasion to talk about all of these. Over the last few decades, shame has picked up the nickname “the master emotion”, and for good reason. It is unquestionably the most powerful of the bunch and capable of changing our heart rate, blood pressure, and behavior more rapidly and permanently than any other emotion in our portfolio.

At the other end of the emotional spectrum is the emotion of “pride”. Shame and pride can be thought of as a continuum, that is, comprising a system of keepig track of ones status in a community, large or small. At one end of the spectrum is completely ostracism from the community. Think of Harvey Weinstein, languishing in prison without the slightest chance of redemption and reintegration into his former social network. Perhaps, from the perspective of social science, such a dilemmas is not of much interest is static: languishing in his cell with no chance of redemption, Mr. Weinstein’s plight is not of much interest to social science. The only thing that could make Weinstein’s predicament of general interest is if he somehow found some means of redemption. Richard Nixon, for example, achieved this after resigning the American presidency in disgrace. He did so by apologizing, and writing many books and doing everything imaginable to attempt to redeem his reputation. By the time of his death, he was arguably quite successful at doing so. What is interesting however, was not his shame, but rather his effort and partial success at transcending it.

In this book, I will be referring to shame, guilt, embarrassment and pride as “the social emotions” instead of the self-conscious emotions. My reasons are because self-consciousness is a subject unto itself with many thousands of books devoted to it. Consciousness is a field of inquiry larger than our concerns here and therefore, the social emotions, which are largely synonymous, suits our objectives better.

Why do we shame each other?

Most of us look at the news shortly after we start our day, either online or on television. Regardless of our preferred news outlet, we are likely to begin our day with an account of what our politicians are saying about each other. Most likely they are speaking in the strongest terms about the flaws of their opponent’s character. Next will be what sex crimes some of our favorite celebrities have been accused of. Today, for instance, it was Justin Beiber and a young Broadway star. Tomorrow it will be someone else. How it pans out – forgotten in a week or progressing to court and incarceration is anybody’s guess.

Incivility is a word commonly used to discuss the social climate today. We are not as courteous as we once were, but the changes seem to be deeper than that. Clearly we have become politically polarized, and a chapter of this volume is devoted to that polarity, but there is a level of social anxiety that was not there before. People worry about their reputations much more than in the past. Not just because the internet has a longer memory of silly pictures we took in high school. It seems much more can be indelibly etched on our public reputation to harm us in the future.

When we seek employment – and people seek employment much more frequently than they did in the past, our baggage follows along with us: speeding tickets, unpaid utility bills can now mean the difference between getting a job and not. At no time in the past has our reputation been so visible to others and so capable of causing calamity. Once hired, our firnedly human resources department will be on hand to ensure that your views, conduct and general deportment are in line with the compay’s values.

Similarly, when we enter a university our social views are likely to be scrutinized. Orientations are designed to ensure that our social views are in line with the institutions expectations. This may include seminars on subjects such as race, gender, microaggressions and the importance for inclusivity of all members of the community.  “Callout culture” pervades many public and private university campuses today. They are environments where “anyone can be publicly shamed for saying something well-intentioned that someone else interprets uncharitably.”[1]

Are these signs of shaming? Not exactly. What they are are singposts that have the effect of teaching us to fear shame.

One way to look at it is in terms of quantity: that is, the number of places, and the number of different ways that an individual can attract a loss of reputation amounting to shame. Codes of conduct are everywhere,  and today it seems that a growing number of people are interested in measuring and evaluating our conduct and personal opinions, classifying them and coming up with an evaluation to compare to others.

The Roots of Shame

Clearly, the manner in which this central emotion is transacted has changed recently. In order to understand these changes, and why they are taking place, it is necessary to look under the surface to learn what shame is, exactly. By doing so, we can better understand how it effects us, how it is triggered and in that way better control our response.

There is widespread agreement among academic researchers in the social sciences that shame emerged within a basket of other “self-conscious emotions” to achieve “complex social goals”. “Survival,” according to this line of thinking, depended on “our capacity to overcome numerous complicated social problems.”[2] In the first chapter of this volume, we will sort through a number of these social problems to learn how shame enables us to work together, as members of a community, to meet the challenges that early human life wrought upon our species.

Why study shame from an evolutionary perspective?

Some people might not feel that the study of evolution has anything to offer on a contemporary look at shame as a social emotion. Many people feel that human emotions are culturally determined, and therefore any influence by what we bring to the table as an evolved species is neglbible or nonexistent. Others feel that biology plays a role in all human interactions and therefore how we evolved should be considered accordingly. This discussion, often heated, is known as the nature/nurture argument.

The fact is, our emotions, in particular the social emotions, have a great deal to do with what separates us from our cousins, the Great Apes as well as all other species in the primate order. Along with our ability to solve complex social goals, the social emotions such as shame

“Turtles all the way down”

The eminent physicist Stephen Hawking begins his best-selling book, A Brief History of Time with the following anecdote:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. Hedescribed how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on.” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down.

We can apply a similar analogy to the nature/nurture debate that has raged for some time. Applying it to the subject of shame and shaming, some may prefer to think that shame is entirely a cultural construct, something that, with the proper modifications to our educational institutions and workplaces, can be banished to the dustbin of human development within a generation or two. This collective has reacted vociferously to the findings in the neurosciences lately that have found a firm and robust set of differences in the structure and function of the limbic system (the midbrain anatomical structures thought to regulate our emotions) and the neural connectivity that differentiate male and female brains.

For those of us who believe, sensibly I think, that the human emotions are part biology and part culture, we might think of the turtle analogy as one of degree – that is, there are definitely turtles (culture) but at some point, the turtles must stop and rest on something else. In the case of shame and the other social emotions, that something else is biology.

What Has Changed Recently?

The amount of shame and shaming that gets bandied about online and in our news outlets on a daily basis is clearly a sign of our times. A few things that I think have become very clear lately.

1. Shame is power

Clearly, there is a struggle over shaming rights. This struggle plays out in many fields. The United States has struggled with racial issues for centuries now and continues to. What has accelerated recently is shame connected to the subjected.

It is clear that those seeking social changes that may include reparations for some are suing shame to steer their campaign.

Shame and power are hardly relegated to racial issues, however.

One of the hallmarks of the current age is that everyone seems to want to get in on the new currency. What are know as “hashtag movements” in which people express their solidarity for cuases in which the central motivation is to shame others for doing or believing something we don’t like. “slacktivism” is another name for these movements, as they are broader than they are deep, often involving “liking” a post with little if any commitment beyond this.

The “metoo” campaign, for better or worse, is based on shame.

Shame and Digital Media

It appears that much of the fervor surrounding the new shame and shaming has emerged from the usual suspects — the internet, handheld digital devices and social media. Clearly much of the shame we avoid as well as hurl out to others we disapprove of, is digitally enacted and received.

And yet perhaps the digital age is not as unique as we might imagine. In centuries past, technologies have also increased mass communication, with the printing press (mid 14C) and television (mid 20C) having, arguably just as profound an effect on how we think of ourselves and others within the “imagined communities” we conceive of ourselves as belonging to as the reach gets longer and the world becomes smaller. These questions will be taken up in the history chapter on shame, but for now it is enough to notice that how power has been transacted, locally and across borders has always involved the social emotions such as pride and shame in terms of how we regard ourselves in relation to others according to the values we maintain as well as those that are modified over time. From this longer perspective the internet is just one further example of how our communication technology influences how we think of ourselves in relation to others, as how we participate in manipulating those parameters.

In the history chapter we will show how histoy operates in lockstep whith what is shamed and shameable with several examples from the work of Francis Fukuyama as well as the American Civil Rights and Women’s movements, beginning in the mid 20C.

The preceding examinations of shame from the perspective of our history and natural history will prepare us for a cold hard look at shame as we have it today, and it is this topic that forms the core topic of this book. By reviewing how shame empowered and disempowered different individuals and social groups in the near and distant past,  we will become prepared to examine how shame and shaming has taken an alarmingly large sized role in contemporarly life.

I hope to show that this ever-growing behemoth has, in recent years, distorted a great deal of the way we communicate and interact with each other, negatively effecting a wide variety of our core relationships. It effects our experiences in our learning institutions, our workplaces, our increasingly important online lives, as well as who we elect to public office. In each of these areas it has transformed what is required of us as students, employees, civic-minded participants in our real-life as well as digital communities we participate in.  The chapters contained herein will examin all of these areas of our lives with an eye towards the manner in which shame and shaming influences each.

Sex Differences in the Experience of Shame, and the Use of Shaming

‘Shame is organized by gender,” insists the pop-pyschology writer Brene Brown. When I first began researching this book, I buckled when I read this, and determined to prove her wrong, believing wholeheartedly that shame was something experienced equally by both men and women. I soon learned that this was not the case : shame is indeed organized by gender both from a cultural perspective and from the deeper, evolved sense that we will explore in the next chapter. Men and women experience shame differently, they tend to feel ashamed about different things, and they tend to weaponize shame for use against others in different ways.

Regardless of where you choose to place your turtles (see above) it is clear that there is an adaptive component.  Evidence from the neurosciences backs up the paleoantrhoplogical research on emotion and adaptation to suggest that men and women have evolved different ways of responding to and utilizing shame that have become imprinted on our brain tissue in umistakeably engendered ways. We will explore these differences in the chapters ahead with an eye towards trying to discover how these sex differences effect our every day lives in all of the areas we will cover, at work, at home, at school and online.

Regardless of your politics and social views, I think you will see that sex differences in shame and shaming is an aspect of the topic that cannot be ignored, or cast to the side as other theorists seem to have done. By the end of this book, in the chapter I have reserved as the Afterword, I hope to synthesize all of the topics into something we can then use to discuss the future of shame and shaming, with some ideas about what can be expected in the near and even the far future.

A word of warning. If ever there was a subject that was “triggering” it is shame. Shame is inherently something that tends to be connected to our deepest and most unpleasant memories. For this reason, it is likely that there will be places within this book that may trigger unpleasantness. If so, I encourage you to work though such triggerings with the goal of untangling some of the knots that you may encounter over the course of your reading.

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[1] Haidt, Coddling, P 5.

[2] Tracy, et al.