A Philosophy of Shame by Frederic Gros Matches the Moment — Mostly
Growing up in the 1950s, the local NYC area television stations like Channels 9 (WOR) and 11 (WPIX) showed a lot of Westerns. Shane from 1953 proved a favorite for young boys. Bad guys, nice decent father, beautiful mother, gunslinger hero, Shane, hero-worshiping son, Joey. The father wants to act to avoid the shame of not doing the right thing, the necessary thing. The mother although attracted to Shane remains devoted to her family because to do otherwise would bring shame upon her. Shane beats the father to the punch (literally) in confronting evil because of his sense of honor. Like so many movies of the first half of the 20th Century that we watched over and over on our black and white TVs (Angels With Dirty Faces, Gunga Din, Tale of Two Cities, The Defiant Ones), Shane is simplistically and sentimentally about doing right so as to avoid shame. This does not mean they were all good movies, true tales, Not going there. But descriptively shame played a central role in all these stories being etched into our eyes. That’s all.
At the end of the movie after Shane outguns all the bad guys (and one of them is Jack Palance) our hero makes ready to depart. Joey cries out, “Shane! Shane! Come Back Shane!”, but the hero just keeps riding off to the mountains. He can leave because everything is going to be all right now in the valley. With the bad men defeated, the community will prosper in its culture of righteousness, industry, — and as a deterrent — shame. The good guys in this and every other Western and war movie we saw acted as they did to avoid shame. Who would dare make such a movie today in which shame proves the most powerful force? And if they did, who outside of their particular bubble would care?
Shame was on my mind as the whirl of transgressions in the political arena reached Category 5 cyclone status; that’s the ‘super-typhoon’ kind that blows you and your roof away. Of course, having gone to Catholic grammar school in the 1950s, shame is always renting some space in my mind. A post will flash about a specific instance of the wrongs of the world, and I wonder why the malefactors were so unconstrained by any sense of shame.
And then WaPo grabbed me with this headline:
This philosopher thinks we should embrace shame for the good of all
The book review covered A Philosophy of Shame by Frederic Gros translated stirringly by Andy Bliss and I ordered it right away, consuming its pages avidly while filling the helpful back blank pages with note after note. Yes, my priority right now should be producing our play Retrospective premiering August 13th as part of The Broadway Bound Theater festival (Get your tickets here, you highly cultured New York area lovers of dark comedy), but this transmutation of shame in American life has such a strong hold on me, and Gros offers a engrossing tour of the subject.
A tribute to his treatment is that I marked ten places in the book where he defines shame. Why is that a strength? Because the word has stayed the same while the phenomenon when cited by citizens now is all inconstancy. Gros heeds the wisdom of Samuel Butler that “A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of ideas within a wall of words.” The wilderness that is our concept of shame needs those ten attempts at definition. Here they are:
- “Shame is the result of the internalizing of social contempt” referencing de Gaulejac and DeJours
- “… One might be justified in asserting that, in the present age, these three types of shame (moral, narcissistic and social ideal) are systematically superimposed, merging in a dizzying spiral rather than operating in a dialectical manner.” They are no longer “tethered to stable points (the law structured the superego, norms shaped the ego ideal and sin contained the ideal ego.”
- “…these three principal domains of shame (social inferiority, moral infamy and physical uncleanliness) entail scathing insults and crippling humiliations…. [Shame is to have] been relegated, rejected and excluded from the community of ‘ decent, ‘ normal’, ‘ respectable’ and ‘ likeable’ people (or sometimes from the human race.)”
- “What defines shameless behaviour? An absence of reserve: I flaunt myself, my qualifications, my personality, my success, my private life and my body. I have no shame, as they say. By contrast, shame can denote an ability to put the brakes on and rein oneself in — to display a certain reserve.”
- “… A basic sense of humility, restraint and reserve, and this is what is meant by shame in Eastern thinking. It is not so much a virtue among others as a principle that underpins all of them, or rather prevents them from being twisted out of their natural shape through exaggeration…”
- “Shame introduces a principle of economy into ethics and functions as the continuous base note of morality. It imposes limits and thereby prevents emotional outbursts, transgressions and people simply doing as they please.”
- [Quoting and otherwise referencing Plato in the Charmides and Laws] “’Sound mindedness makes a human being have a sense of shame….’ And there is the fear of an evil reputation; We are afraid of being thought evil, because we do or say some dishonourable thing, which fear we and all men term shame.’”
- “People tend to forget, for example, that the opposite of guilty is innocent, but the opposite of shameful is indeed shameless — in the latter case, it is the first word that carries the positive ethical value.”
- [Quoting and otherwise referencing Sartre in Being and Nothingness] “Shame begins with the feeling of being seen, watched, caught out and objectified. In my own company, I feel no shame and indulge in coarse behavior, dressing in a slovenly way, snorting loudly and stuffing my face with food. But in the company of others, everything changes…” And “shame is the state of being able to conceive of oneself only within the constraints (on one’s aspirations or abilities closed parentheses imposed by another.”
- “Greek philosophers located the root of shame in the thumos (heart), which should be thought of not in the sentimental but in the dynamic sense of ‘ working your heart out: it is an ardour, an energy for transforming oneself and the world, a fuel of existence.”
So, what stands out in this wilderness of ideas, this cluster of definitions of shame?
Shame can be ‘an energy for transforming oneself and the world’. But for shame to have any objective power it must be ‘tethered to stable points.’ Those points evoke a respect, even a fear of being judged as cut off from them. To feel shame is to be “intensely aware of [oneself] as an object of judgment for an unknown other…” But that fear and anxiety of shame “makes human beings what we are: interdependent and self-conscious, in both senses of the word.”
But as Gros points out the stable points, the tether of obligations, the limits of standards do not exist today as widely or perhaps at all in Western societies. The stories pelting us from every corner of the digital domain emphasize that absence.
Want evidence? This Guardian story leads with a few exhibits: “Audrey Southard-Rumsey pushed a flagpole into a police officer’s chest. Ralph Celentano shoved an officer over a ledge. Pauline Bauer accused Democrats of stealing an election and trafficking children and demanded: “Bring Nancy Pelosi out here now. We want to hang that fucking bitch.” Phil Buehler created a wall of shame “to document and highlight the stories and alleged crimes of more than 1,575 people involved in the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol who were pardoned by Donald Trump.” Where is any shame among those involved even after they were convicted in court? Plato’s ‘fear of an evil reputation’ does not exist in this context; there is no common agreement that to have done these things was evil.
It would be unfair to just cite politicians in this disappearance of a central concept of shame. Recently I cited the argument by Andrei Shleifer and Larry Summers that hostile takeovers “worked” largely through “breach of trust”: breaking implicit contracts with stakeholders in corporations, especially ordinary workers. No expressions of shame will be forthcoming in such instances. Bonuses, yes; shame, no.
Corporate governance scandals over the years (as broached in an excellent post by Woz Ahmed) do not seem to have engendered any shame in their perpetrators. Sports figures and movie stars shamelessly urge people to gamble when they know most of those so persuaded will lose often money needed for family essentials; see Margie Stewart’s article about gambling’s harm.
Of course, seeing the fault, the shamelessness in whatever ‘the other’ is for us is easy; MAGA vs. ACLU, U.S. Chamber of Commerce vs. Democratic Socialists of America, Right to Life vs, Planned Parenthood, Mitch McConnell vs… Oh, there’s no real parallel for Mitch. But Gros offers a more universal explanation for the disappearance of those ‘stable points‘ that everyone might use as markers of where shame should exist, a reasoning that implicates a wider and often self-righteous swath of the population
“These days it is difficult to imagine shame being an ethical cornerstone, so accustomed are we to viewing it as a repository of bitterness and suffering that needs to be eradicated at all costs — a wound to be healed, a poison to be neutralized. Overcoming shame and rooting out its causes is the stated objective of the purveyors of Wellness and happiness…. Shame is now essentially condemned as a poison of the soul, the major obstacle to resilience, the worst enemy of happiness —it is what stops us becoming ourselves, reaching our full potential, enjoying the best of life and other people and taking pleasure in being ourselves.”
This is not to say that shame and shaming aren’t out there, They are potent in fragmented forms peculiar to subcultures. The common understanding of what is shameful is what is missing. In Shane, the next town over in the valley doesn’t think that Jack Palance and his henchmen were cool. Shame is balkanized. Silcon Valley’s version no longer even fits San Francisco’s idea of shame. Artist Phil Buehler can build a Wall of Shame, but isn’t that impressive giant red, white and blue mural in Bushwick just interior decoration for the bubble that is Brooklyn? Similarly, the shaming that goes on in the posts of X of liberals is weigghtles because it is unheeded by those being shamed. For progressives, a paraphrase of Yogi Berra seems to fit regarding X, Fox News, WSJ Opinion pages, etc: Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded with people I don’t like.
What does Gros think this lack of an agreed upon ethical cornerstone will create? Can shame make a useful effective return to our social and political lives in the USA? Tune in next time for more about this intriguing book,