I HAVE LIVED through two times—fifty years apart—when things seemed to be falling apart socially and politically. The present most resembles the period beginning in 1967, when the psychedelic “Summer of Love,” among what Joan Didion called the “missing children,” graced the grimy streets of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. It was also the year of bloody racial upheavals in more than 150 American cities, including Oakland, just across the Bay from the Haight, in what was, in those fiery places, a summer of extreme pain and exhausted demands for racial justice. This period lasted until 1975, by which time Richard Nixon had resigned the presidency in disgrace, and America had withdrawn its last troops from Vietnam. “We Shall Overcome” was the anthem we sung during those years, for both civil rights and for ending the war in Vietnam.
It is convenient to peg the starting date of our current turmoil—for which there is not yet a song—to the presidential election of November 2016, or to the beginning of Donald J. Trump’s administration in January 2017. This has the advantage of perfectly preserving the fifty-year interval between the two times of crisis. A dramatic unraveling came in quick order: immigration restrictions on Muslims, a deadly rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, government-endorsed separations of young children from parents at the Mexican border (there are still 600 children who have not been reunited with their parents), and a series of deaths of black Americans at the hands of police, culminating in the protracted suffocation/strangulation of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25, 2020. After Floyd’s murder, the #BlackLivesMatter movement (born after Trayvon Martin was fatally shot in February 2012) became national, multiracial, and multigenerational. At the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic—which has killed more than 3,500,000 people worldwide and more than 590,000 Americans—was sweeping the land, disproportionately harming the working classes and racial and ethnic minorities, amid presidential lies and utterly unnecessary, childish wars over face masks and freedom.
These events created enough stress for any social system to withstand, but Trump, the master of mayhem in chief, could not resist adding fuel to the fires he had already lit by claiming that the election of Joe Biden was a fraud, which incited a violent invasion of the US Capitol Building to stop certification of Biden’s victory on January 6, 2020, yet another day that will live in infamy. As a result, America experienced the first nonpeaceful transition of presidential power in its history, due to a mendacious egomaniac who refused to concede to what every election official in the entire country agreed was a free and fair election. The news offered a vivid reminder of one of the major diseases that ails us, when the day after the Capitol riots, we saw the broken glass, furniture shards, and garbage left by the white insurrectionists cleaned up by the black housekeeping staff that does that sort of work. Perhaps ours is the time when the racial reckoning that America needs for justice’s sake has finally arrived. It is too soon to mark the end date of our current troubled times, the date when things calm down, “get back to normal,” as we say, and when the racial reckoning finally occurs. We are still in the thick of the crisis—or, more pertinent, various crises.
The sources of our woes are many, and many different things are coming apart at once. Some sources—systemic racism, economic inequality, long wars, inadequate social safety nets, and the indifference of the well-off—persist across these five decades. Other sources are entirely new. The internet did not exist in 1967 and, for all the good it has done, it is also a source of our problems. The internet has allowed an epistemic free-for-all in which truth is not aligned with facts but with what various influencers or interest groups say are the facts. There are very dark places on the web that convince unsuspecting souls that they are seeing the light, when, in fact, they are rummaging around at the bottom of Plato’s cave.
My focus in this book is on two emotional habits that are mixed up in our troubles. We are, as a people, angrier than ever—at least angrier than I have ever seen. We model for one another and our children a “passionate intensity” that is overly confident, narcissistically demanding, demeaning of those with whom we disagree, noisy, unwilling to listen, and often embedded in cruelty. How we collectively do anger needs work.
Simultaneously, there is also a loss of a shared sense of shame. People ought to be ashamed if they disregard what’s true, good, and beautiful. But they aren’t. Shamelessness is common, and it reflects a situation in which many values are weakly held, and in which norms suited for a common life that aims at the common good yield to precepts for winning friends and influencing people, gaming, and getting ahead.
In a world in which it is every ego for itself, it is better to seem honest than to be honest, and acquisitiveness of the “greed is good” sort—once a deadly sin—has various honorific disguises. Hoarding wealth is the reward for genius, innovation, and entrepreneurship, the everyday lingo of top universities. Graduates of these universities create brilliant and allegedly benign financial instruments that profit off magic tricks, wheeling and dealing, and absolutely no commitment to a common good, except, perhaps, after the fact, when the genius takes his seat among the philanthropist class. This, it seems to me, is shameful. We need to rebuild a mature sense of shame that reflects a deep moral commitment to what is good, true, and beautiful, and we need to restore the idea that there are things that good people just ought not to do. In other words, we can do shame better.
There are objections to my idea that we ought to work on emotions, and specifically that we should amend the ways we do anger and shame. Many say that anger, as we do it, is simply inherent and justified, given the way things are. There is innate anger circuitry, and when you present it with craven politicians, traffic jams, or uncooperative colleagues, it activates. But this is false. Emotions are more like winks than blinks. They are plastic, not reflexive, and subject to norms of appropriateness and conditions of legibility. We can ask emotions like anger to obey high and demanding norms or we can let them run loose without principled, thoughtful guidance, in which case you can get a world like ours, where almost everyone is pissed off a lot of the time.
Regarding shame, the dominant view is that it is a primitive emotion, an adult version of embarrassment, and nothing weighty enough to make anyone abide by high ideals and norms. Shame, it is said, is merely social, awaiting the gaze of the other, and being caught and humiliated. Thus, shame is a poor emotion to depend on for sincere moral conviction and virtue. For that we need something deep, some emotion linked to transcendent sources—guilt in divine eyes, for example.
I disagree. There is no doubt that the causes of our anger—whether political, material, or personal—often require attention. But anger itself is also part of the problem. Anger is an emotion that often expresses the ego’s demands, not the demands of justice or the other’s good; ego doesn’t listen well, and it tends toward disdain and enacting pain. How, why, and when we do anger is a cultural matter, the result of cultural learning, including, especially, how elders model it for the young. The way we are doing anger today is not good ethically and not good instrumentally; it doesn’t get us what we want. This book is an invitation to explore how other cultures have thought about—and in most cases still think about—anger and how and when to do it.
As for shame, the situation is similar. As this book was going to press, following the period between the presidential election of November 3, 2020 and January 6, 2021, my argument in these pages for retrieving a robust and mature sense of shame started to win some advance support, as everyone started to wonder how the former president, his handlers, and his supporters could continue to lie every day about election fraud—in fact, a landslide in his favor—with a straight face and without loathing themselves. The media and ordinary people started to wonder and ask: Where has the sense of shame gone?
The answer to that question is complicated. My focus, as with anger, is rehabilitating how we do the emotion of shame. I am a fan of what I call a “mature sense” of shame. Mature shame, good equipment for morally serious people, is recessive in our culture, but we could revive it. Again, the anthropological record is relevant. The official view in North America that shame is a primitive emotion is a rarity in other parts of the world, in the past and now. And there is little evidence in its favor. How we do emotions is normative and scripted. There is widespread cultural variation in which emotions—not only anger and shame but also compassion and love—are deployed to support social life. And there is huge variation in why, when, and how these emotions are enacted. So, as with anger, this book is an invitation to think about how other cultures do shame, and how they socialize the youth in norms of how, when, and why to do shame. Learning about how other cultures look at shame will help us think critically about our own situation.
The invitation to reflect deeply on how we do anger and shame, and to change how we do these emotions, is not just a call to change the tone and atmosphere of our interactions. How any culture does emotions embeds and thus reveals their views on the aims of social life, respect, human dignity, justice, love, and compassion. My view is that the ways we are doing anger and shame now reveal contagious soul sicknesses that include selfishness, atomism, shallow values, and low epistemic standards. If we can correctly diagnose the ways in which we as a people are emotionally “off,” we can change how we do emotions.
Emotions are things we do. This means that if and when they cause trouble, we can consider doing them differently. Cross-cultural philosophy, cultural psychology, and anthropology provide treasure troves of evidence for the varieties of emotional possibility, among them ways of doing anger and shame, which would benefit us all.
February 2021
Durham, North Carolina