Shame.

Is It Good for Anything? Sometimes. 🤔

Dogs can feel it.

I started my Substack account just a bit over a year ago. Like any new venture, it’s been a work-in-progress. I’ve written 53 stories at last count. I’ve learned as I’ve moved forward. One thing you learn is that it doesn’t necessarily get easier as you go. To the contrary, there are ways that it gets harder. At first, there’s a certain amount of low-hanging fruit: You may have a few stories already in the pipeline, or you may have some interesting topics where you’re emotionally invested and well-versed. These are the pieces that (more-or-less) write themselves in a relatively short amount of time with minimal effort.

Somewhere along the way, these easy targets will disappear. There comes a point where it starts to look like actual work. Light-bulb-style inspiration can carry you only so far (I’ve found this methodology harder as I’ve gotten older). This is where many people will quit. Not to put too fine a sheen on my personal skills (such as they are), but if you can navigate this inevitable turn and continue to produce effectively, you may have earned the right to call yourself a writer. You’ve learned how to chop wood in tune with the basic and time-honored verities of every valued profession.

I’m sure this will surprise some readers, but I don’t think of myself as a purely political writer. My aspirations (again, such as they are) are more universal than that. Of course I work in those daily foaming rapids: That’s important work and I try to make small contributions where I can. I tend to get more👀 on those themes, but it’s a crowded, feverish, and angry place. Taken by itself exclusively, it can rob you of your spirit and dilute your talent. It becomes more difficult with each passing day to locate a personal vantage-point from which to make a unique contribution in that babbling and (mostly) repetitive swirl. You need to reach for other concepts and test different muscles…

________________________

…so I’m here today to write about SHAME. Shame is such a disheveled notion in our disordered contemporary moment that I doubt many of our younger people could use it in a sentence. Here’s the Oxford English definition:

“a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.”

This is the accepted classical definition: You’ve done something you know to be wrong, and you feel the weight of that knowledge. There’s some mixture of guilt and regret, and it’s expressed as intense moral discomfort (what we used to call ‘conscience’?). When shame is earned, proportional to the offense and when one is allowed the possibility to atone, it can have positive effects. Shame (more accurately, the fear of it) is one of the adhesives that enforces societal norms and permits us most of the time to coexist in relative peace with each other.

But shame has an ambivalent character. When I did an online search, the first three entries described it in mildly morbid psychological terms as a malady to be treated therapeutically. It’s possible to see it either way; it’s entirely a matter of degrees and extremes. Shame can certainly be abused and applied in ways it was not intended to be used. It can have connotations of cruelty and bullying. It appears to me on the whole that there has been a shift of the balance in more recent times. It’s come to be viewed more negatively as an issue of threatened self-esteem, and less as an expected and proper internal consequence of wrong behavior.

In any case, it’s clear that shame no longer functions as a reliable guide to behavior in our public life. Bad behavior is actually not new😉. Over the course of my life, I’ve seen some of it and I’ve done some of it (in both cases, I knew it was wrong). What does seem to me to be new is that the absence of even the capacity for shame is increasingly seen not as the psychiatric defect it actually is (ASPD. Look it up🧐), but as an advantageous boost to one’s civic prospects. That’s the real malady.

Before an increasingly cynical and stupefied public, the person who will not compromise their human dignity, their decorum, their principles, or their common sense is at a disadvantage against those who will do those things. It’s become a distinguishing feature of a certain dominant strain of public behavior. Those of lesser standards can appear to separate themselves from their fastidious and overly snooty elitist opponents. They can pretend to the common touch (“I’m no better than you are. I don’t have silly touchy-feely moral notions, just like you don’t!”). And it works 😵!

But it shouldn’t 😠. That we allow ourselves to be manipulated and outmaneuvered by deformed personalities in so many areas of our American life is no credit to the normal rest of us who tow the country in our wake. We should be in charge. We should be making the rules. We may not be able to enforce shame in a blighted place where it won’t grow, but we should certainly have a say in consequences. I’m thinking it’s only a matter of time.