Part II of The Reconsidering Shame Campaign
He that deceives me once, it’s his fault; but if twice, it’s my fault
This quote comes from a 1651 book attributed to Anthony Weldon, “The Court and Character of King James”. In this spicy collection of gossip and dissing, the narrator, supposedly Weldon, claimed this saying was a rendering of an Italian proverb. Deceiving proved a common theme amongst his chronicles of the ciourt of James I, but Anthony himself knew from deceiving. He reputedly was dismissed from that court after the discovery he had penned racist comments about the Scots while serving this Scottish-born King. He was shamed. While some scholars dispute his authorship of any of these tracts, “Weldon is remembered not only for his vitriolic attack comparing the Scots to animals, but also for first suggesting that James had an effeminate interest in men.” But in this installment we remember Anthony for the connection of the above saying to our subject of shame.
What does that proverb have to do with shame? Various sources claim it is the progenitor of a saying much more familiar to Americans, “Fool me once, shame on you, Fool me twice, shame on me.” Weirdly (to me at least), these sources 2 state confidently that one proverb became the other despite their obvious differences.
The original Italian saying has thus far eluded me but Italian proverb books were popular in 16th & 17th Century England making the likelihood of the quote’s origins plausible. The books I could find did include standards that speak to fault 1 (“Contro i difetti del vicin t’adiri, e gli stessi difetti in te non miri “or ‘Angry with your neighbor’s defects, but you do not consider the same defects in yourself’) and shame (“Chi mal pensa, mal abbia” or “;English equivalent: “Shame take him that shame thinketh.’) but those proverbs suggested the opposite effect of what Weldon cites.
[I know, I know: why spend time looking up Italian proverbs to write about shame when getting people to buy tix here and then go enjoy four wonderful highly talented actors directed by a superbly creative artist in my new comedy RETROSPECTIVE opening August 13th for just three performances as part of Broadway Bound Theatre Festival should be the priority? It’s a combination of poor impulse control, chafing anxiety over our tumbling,toppling society, and a refusal to be just one thing in public when my interests are manifold that keeps me writing stuff like this for my legion of subscribers, all .]
But look at how the phrasing evolved; the virus known as English usage gradually mutated Weldon’s Italian borrowing from an observation about fault — ‘A defect, imperfection — to an indictment of shame, which is …
The painful emotion arising from the consciousness of something dishonouring, ridiculous, or indecorous in one’s own conduct or circumstances
The transformation replacing ‘fault’ with ‘shame’ suggests a change in the accepted sense of such an event: to deceive or to be deceived in the same way twice instead of just being a defect should elicit a ‘painful emotion’, a signification of diminished esteem in your own eyes and/or the eyes of others. To be fooled twice become an indecorous, unseemly, shameful state.
Our first installment in this series, Come Back, Shame, cited ten definitions found in Frederic Gros new book A Philosophy of Shame. One of them cited Sartre: “Shame begins with the feeling of being seen, watched, caught out and objectified.” There is a sense in the now common understanding of shame that it exists because we care about how we do or might look to others as the result of some action we took.
But who are these others today? Where would the monitoring come from? Is there any common principle that everyone shares and respects so that its transgression would result in indubitable shame for the transgressor? Is there even a common group of observers that could see our fault as an occasion of shame or are we just a series of bubble communities only able to enforce such principles within our own boundaries. Returning to Frederic Gros and A Philosophy of Shame offers some possibilities by looking back to what was.
The concept of shame as a community feature required a sense of owing something to the people around us in our behavior. As Gros puts it, shame denoted “an ability to put the brakes on and rein oneself in — to display a certain reserve”, but not just a a capacity but as an obligation. Why? Because the community judged such checking and refraining of behavior as necessary given its beliefs. Shame as a universal only works if a group buys in to that necessity, commits to the forces that create shame: morality, community.
It is from another’s perspective either active or already ingrained (and, therefore, powerful in our imagination) that shame emerges. As Gros puts it, without a sense of another person’s disapproving perspective of our behavior (even if it’s only that ‘other person‘ in our head nattering on about our behavior), there is no shame. The other watching was a requirement all along with shame.
We find that precept in the concepts of honor and shame as a given in our most ancient literature from Confucius to Plato to Jesus. Perhaps that is why shame’s presence is even more palpable in the histories of communities and their families. Clan shame — for good or ill and it was often the latter — enforced that restraint; yes, people didn’t do certain things because of the shame that would be heaped upon their families, (always heaped apparently, never sprinkled or scattered), but they primarily didn’t do them because someone was watching.
This up close familial watching as the precondition for shame may persist rather violently in some corners of the world — not just Pakistan as it turns out — but Gros argues to its receded nature.
“The ethics of clan shame have somewhat faded into the background. The three pillars of Western modernity which have been identified and extensively analyzed by an army of historical sociologists, have significantly contributed to discrediting the sensitivity to honor. With the centralising of power came a rational obligation on subjects to obey the law (rather than observe a sacrosanct family code) as well as a state monopoly on justice. Channels of private vengeance were frowned upon and prescribed in favor of judicial resolutions sanctioned by a sovereign. Later on, liberalism placed the emphasis on individuals and their rights and freedoms, loosening the constraints of family and religious duty. And then capitalism came along and largely cast aside the symbolic import of debt, acknowledging only mercantile and monetary transactions: everything can be bought, sold, negotiated, sold on and sold off. It put an end to tragedy, heroines and avengers.“
But is there a new force that does the watching of us and then the castigation if we break some code? Does the combination of Coldplay, Jumbotron, Astronomer, and the subsequent memeification of two people’s shame, which still ripples around the internet a dozen days after that unfortunate couple’s failed foxing at Foxborough suggest that shame has not receded but just taken a different form? There is some sort of community out there enforcing some standards as evidenced by headlines like The Coldplay couple sit in the virtual dock, victims of online mob justice If things are as serious as this WaPo op-ed claims (The Coldplay kiss-cam frenzy shows we need a culture shift) how do we square up that take with the vaunted devaluation and even denunciation of shame in recent years?
The answer appears to be that we are paradoxical regarding shame. Many say it should disappear, that its features deserve discrediting. Gros in the last pages of his book speaks to the effort to destroy shaming by forbidding it or as puts it “reflect shame back” through inverting and subverting the harms intended. Yet we have not only this most recent example but many others of recent years where shame still endures. John Oliver called shaming “one of America’s favorite pastimes”, but shame is there and not there like Schrödinger’s cat. Threatening enough to spawn all the horrible clip art above but erratically impotent as we look at the aftermath of cancel culture. The internet tortured perhaps unfairly Justine Sacco, Lindsey Stone, and Walter Palmer but the public flocked back to shows of Louis CK? (Not saying Louis shouldn’t perform or should disappear, but he is not a poster boy for the power of shaming)
While Gros argues that “These days, it is difficult to imagine shame being an ethical cornerstone so accustomed are we to it being a repository of bitterness and suffering that needs to be eradicated at all costs“, wasn’t the Coldplay catching a powerful enforcement of a moral principle even if the principle was ‘don’t be stupid enough to get caught lying and cheating‘? If the latter interpretation seems less like an ethical cornerstone than a cynical prop perhaps that is because we now have a different power stimulating shaming. Shame worked because a group bought into a force that may or not have been morality.
Attention Machines As Our New Moral Guides?
The imposition of shame came from a more powerful and pervasive system than family or church or even government: the attention machines. That’s the name that Jac Mullen gives to Big Tech and AI’s operations and intentions, the way in which the action behind our screens shifts and pins our looking to a ‘where’ and ‘what’ more and more not of our deciding. Attention machines lead to choices and judgments increasingly outside of our control. Mullen calls these attention machines “the first set of emergent powers to govern not through memory systems, but primarily through attention systems.”
In the past, the governing that occurred through shame — and as Gros documents it was powerful — proceeded from those institutions like the clan, the guild, the village, the religion, the state. Now, as the plight of CEO Andy Byron and his HR Chief Kristin Cabot showed shame is the province of ‘distributed networks of corporate entities, … and techno-oligarchs.’ As Mullen stated recently “control… over others, will be exercised more and more through ambient forms of algorithmically mediated behavioral engineering, adaptive control systems programmed to nudge, herd, and condition populations toward the achievement of the policies and goals — monetary, sociocultural, militaristic, bio-political, etc. — of the system’s controllers.” Mullen is not speaking directly about shaming but with this example doesn’t it apply? Shame from its first mentions in our literature is a form of both directed attention and control. The difference over the recent decades is who exerted the control and the potency or lack thereof of its imposition. The shaming of the folks at the Coldplay concert depended upon algorithms and that seems importantly different.
What will the effect of this new mechanism be upon shame? If as Gros (and translator Andy Bliss) put it so sensibly, “Shame introduces a principle of economy into ethics and functions as the continuous bass note of morality“, will the attention machines effect such a result or merely a bait and switch where the eyeballs are turned to ‘shamefulness’ only as means to consume or buy something else? Gros (and I include translator Bliss because the language used in the English version is so specific) aver that shame “imposes limits and thereby prevents emotional outbursts, transgressions and people simply doing as they please.” I can see the attention machines stopping people from doing as they please but to what purpose would the limits they foster be? Are the techno lords trying to fool us as to that aspect of their new world? Have they already fooled us not just once or twice but multiple times without our getting wise to the game? That would be a shame upon all of us.
More next time. Meanwhile look for the book.
1 Strauss, Emanuel (1994). Dictionary of European proverbs (Volume 2 ed.). Routledge. p. entry 806. ISBN 0415096243
2 https://donmcminn.com/2024/05/fool-me-once-shame-on-you-fool-me-twice-shame-on-me/ and https://grammarist.com/proverb/fool-me-once-shame-on-you-fool-me-twice-shame-on-me/