Shame

Most of us have felt it at some point in our lives, despite an unstinting effort to eliminate it over most of the last century. Shame appears to be a cousin of guilt, which psychoanalysis has sought to seek and destroy, but guilt differs in its associations with legal and judicial issues. A judge may declare you to be guilty, for which you may feel shame, or you may not, but shame essentially comes from within. 

Religious and political institutions have tried to instill the concept of shame to keep the populace in line with the prevailing notions of desirable behavior. The political institutions tend to favor the concept of guilt, along with fear, since they have a whole judicial system, backed up by police and prisons, to channel behavior as needed. Their arsenal has been expanded lately by the internet, with its surveillance apps and social media, as well as by the emergence of new organizations created to combat “misinformation” and “disinformation”. Lacking most of these tools, our religious institutions, which disproportionately focus their efforts to shape human behavior on matters related to sex, usually try to have their members internalize their precepts. 

Remorse, whether genuine or staged, can be useful in sentencing hearings, even if it carries little weight during trials. Shame is real, which means it cannot be called up for effect, but neither can it be easily dismissed once it has made its presence felt. 

Besides personally feeling regret and embarrassment with our own foul deeds, we do encourage feelings of shame in others, certainly more often than in ourselves, and we lament its absence wherever we think it should be. Thus, we are familiar with hearing “shame on her!”, currently out of fashion, and “shame on him!”, now more popular than ever in regard to men’s treatment of women but rarely heard any more regarding other areas of comportment. 

The most forceful public assertion of shame that I can recall was when Special Counsel Joseph Welch turned to Senator Joseph McCarthy on June 9th, 1954, and said “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last”? The unspoken answer was clearly “no” and that marked the beginning of the end of McCarthy’s vicious career of destroying other people’s lives through lies, slander and innuendo. Shortly after this, he was investigated, censured by the Senate, and left to die in disgrace. It also marked the last time that shame played a major role in American public life. Full immunity to shame has been developed over the subsequent seven decades and has opened the way to breathtakingly new behavioral extremes by the two entrenched contenders for the presidency in 2024, both cheered on by young acolytes who, as members of the Enron generation, have no need to develop an immunity to shame, a concept to which they’ve never been introduced. 

The last time I’ve seen a poll on the upcoming USA election, 77% of US voters wanted neither available option. Is that a sign that a majority of Americans still have a conscience, or is it just that they realize they’re being toyed with by the bi-partisan oligarchy? 

Men behaving badly toward women is not a new phenomenon but political “leaders” publicly bragging about it is something of a novelty, as is stealing from charities set up to assist children with cancer. And now we scheme to get countries to fight wars with other countries we openly admit we want to weaken and overthrow. Machiavelli might have approved and Hitler certainly would, but who would have imagined that this would be the policy of the unitary superpower, the upholder of the rules-based order? 

As we’ve removed shame from its role in shaping our actions, we’ve tried to replace it by assigning the role of “friend” to countries, much as we’ve assigned the role of “person” to corporations. Saudi Arabia is a rich friend so when its Crown Prince decided to carve up a US-based Saudi journalist into small disposable packages in its Turkish consulate, the event was treated by both recent presidents as just an erratic episode among friends. Then, when Israel, another friend, but more a member of the family than a friend, opted to try out genocide to deal with neighbors it wasn’t getting along with, we declared our unconditional support, much as we might with a close friend, whose drug-addled son has just gone on a rampage, shooting several classmates and by-standers. “How can we help poor young Hannibal? Do you need a loan to get the therapy he needs, or a good lawyer?” Friendship is a beautiful thing, but it has its limits. President Trump taught us something of those limits. President Biden has pushed the envelope even further. The total lack of shame in both men is, well, shameful. 

For eighty years we’ve wondered how all those good Germans could have lived with the mass exterminations of a chosen people in their midst. This year’s chosen exterminees aren’t really in our midst but they are ever so much more visible in their agony than any previous victims of mass extermination efforts. So now we know. This time it’s us, whether we’re Americans, Europeans or Israelis, or anyone else sending the butcher tools. Those weird pronoun people weren’t all wrong after all. Pronouns can be important. It’s no longer they or them. Right now, it’s us and we, and there’s no relief in sight.