CHAPTER SIX
IN THIS CHAPTER AND IN CHAPTER 7, I take up the defense of shame, specifically, a refined and active sense of shame. My aim is not simply to make an argument for philosophers and psychologists that leads to some interdisciplinary, scholarly reconsideration of the virtues of shame but also to make any reader appreciate the actual work shame is already doing in real-world ecologies, even one like ours in which shame has a bad rap.
In this chapter, I try to reveal the merits of shame by continuing to explore variation in how shame is done. I’ll discuss a culture that uses shame as its main socializing emotion in order to say how shame can work in a philosophically unified culture, the Minangkabau of Indonesia. The Minangkabau wholeheartedly endorse shame as their favored socializing emotion. They also provide an example of a culture in which a mature, internalized sense of shame guides adults in the conduct of life.
But first, in order to make things as ecologically real as possible, I’ll say a bit about how shame and guilt have figured in my life and world, and how I understand these concepts. This will remind the reader of how much variation there is in our midst about what shame and guilt are, and what, if any, social role they fulfill. I’m hoping that how I understand and do these emotions is representative of a certain strain of thinking about shame and guilt among older, educated, white males with a very particular educational, theological, and regional genealogy, in what is, admittedly, a WEIRD culture. I have reason to think my understanding of shame (and guilt) generalizes across some segment of American culture. It might help the reader to be somewhat sympathetic to the premise in my argument, which claims that shame can go right as well as wrong, and that which way it goes has almost entirely to do with the values it is recruited to protect, not with the fact that shame is recruited to protect those values.
I say “almost entirely due to the values it [shame] is recruited to protect,” because the intensity of the shameful feelings might be tuned too high for what the shame is about, and be unnecessarily hurtful for that reason. The settings for how much shame one ought to feel per the type of violation are determined by the sociomoral community, sometimes in microecologies, and embed judgments about the seriousness of particular normative violations. The “shame-o-stat” can be set to be very sensitive to small deviations from conventional and moral norms, or to be forgiving of deviations.
Warm-Up
· In late winter 2020, on NPR radio, I heard an interview with Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota, the second indigenous American to be elected to a statewide executive office in America. Upon hearing her being introduced, my first thoughts did not go to the history of genocide and degradation that the original people of the Americas suffered and that made this fact about Peggy Flanagan possible, but to a magical thought that by way of Peggy Flanagan, I, Owen Flanagan—as Irish as a leprechaun, according to Ancestry.com—was somehow connected to the original peoples of America, and that in addition, we Irish are naturally in solidarity with the ongoing freedom fight of indigenous Americans. I was awash briefly with a kind of pride. But it makes no sense; or does it? Pride inflates. It fills the bosom with relief and self-satisfaction, warranted or not. It is, some say, the opposite of shame and can emerge unbidden to quash it. I have always known that my people really were failed potato farmers (helped to fail by the policies of absentee British landowners) who emigrated from Ireland in 1848–49, and who were for many generations more shanty than lace-curtain Irish. Gabrielle Taylor writes of the oddity of claiming to be proud of the beautiful fish in the ocean or of a desert animal: “For me to be proud of something I must regard it as my such-and-such, or as my so-and-so’s such-and-such, but the ocean or desert are not mine, nor did I have a hand in the creation of the beautiful fish or the animal. But a person may, crazily, believe that he did” (1985, 27). And so it is with my crazy pride about Peggy Flanagan.
· Yesterday, I wondered for about the millionth time whether my children, both in their late thirties, might feel social pressure to have children. I worried about them experiencing what I judged, in this particular rendition of the monologue, to be the entirely unwarranted, stigmatic gaze of judgmental others, if they did not, by choice or chance, have kids. This harsh judgment of those who might dare judge my loved ones for not abiding by conventional norms was immediately swallowed by the audible echo of my own voice saying to them: “When you have your own children …” Rather than simply accepting my complicity in creating the very conditions that might make my children feel shame for what was now a mere possibility, I immediately produced an absolution in imagination for any weight felt about reproductive obligations. As soon as my head cleared of all the vicarious sympathies for misbegotten, unbidden, and unwarranted expectations that might make my kids feel disappointment, shame, or guilt for going childless, I wondered if I didn’t or wouldn’t feel a wee bit disappointed, even a bit ashamed about being the last patriarch in a dead-end line, and that when asked if I had grandchildren I would lower my head a bit and sheepishly say “no.” The whole episode is of a familiar sort. On its surface it contains multitudes, including love, compassion, ambivalence, bad faith, self-serving thoughts, and an acknowledgment of the ways certain things can matter a lot in spite of thoughts that they ought not to matter.
· Many years ago, I was in the grip of an addiction. Alcohol owned me. At the end, every day was the same. I’d wake up at 6:15 a.m. awash in shame and self-loathing for drinking the previous day. I’d promise myself that today would mark a new sober beginning. But the pattern would repeat: swear off booze, drink, shame, self-loathing, promise again, break promise. There were many days when the shame and self-loathing made me wish to die, even by my own hand, in a coup de grâce of pills and booze. But I worried that when you are dead, you can’t drink, and I lived to drink. I was also motivated not to abandon my family financially. Eventually, I stopped drinking. According to my story, the shame of not living up to my own standards of a good life was motivating. Without the shame over how I was living, and the guilt over my violation of a host of obligations to specific others and institutions, I do not see what could have made me care enough to want to stop drinking, and then stop. Then again, truth be told, it was also this shame that made me want to die, to be gone, to be done with it. Shame would have won either way. Sobriety or suicide. How do we know when shame will yield good results rather than have its receptacle shrink to nothing, disappear, self-annihilate, be gone?
· There’s a line from the Billy Joel song “Only the Good Die Young” that says, “You Catholic girls start much too late.” We Catholics get this. Catholics learn that sex is sinful. Luckily, sins can be confessed. But it is important to number them. Sins are things you do. So if, as a child, you hit your sister or didn’t share with her, you could tell a priest that you hit or didn’t share with your sister seven times (“since my last confession”). And if you were a Catholic boy who “made out” with a Catholic girl on two consecutive Saturday nights, you could say you had made out with that girl twice. I leave aside perverse priests who might have wanted to hear more details and had different methods for individuating sins (and no doubt, in those days, same-sex “making out” was an altogether different kind of shameful thing). I believe that, in my day, “making out” without roving hands was a venial sin (akin to a misdemeanor), whereas getting to “second base” (breasts) was either a mortal sin (akin to a felony) or close to one. Further bases culminating in intercourse were definitely mortal sins and could get you a ticket to hell if not confessed. The background theory is that you are guilty for the sins you commit, and if you have a working conscience you will, to some degree, feel subjectively guilty about the sins you are objectively guilty of having committed. Guilt cuts and splices. It can be enumerated and excised. Of course, harms that can be forgiven, if only by God, but not repaired fully, can and do remain as sources of regret, remorse, and shame.
· Antiblack racism in America can poison the souls of black people and cause some to feel shame for being black. The people who ought to feel shame, of course, are white racists. The civil rights movement aimed to overthrow legal and structural racism exemplified in the American South by Jim Crow laws, and maybe eventually to excise the racism in the hearts and minds of white racists. A favorite tactic was nonviolent civil disobedience, which in one standard form involved sit-ins by blacks in places where they were not welcome and were sometimes legally prohibited from being—in segregated bathrooms, the fronts of buses, at lunch counters, and so on. Martin Luther King Jr. saw sit-ins as prideful exercises, where one literally took one’s rightful place at the table. But Malcolm X thought sit-ins were entirely demeaning: “The day of the sit-in, the crawl-in, the cry-in, the beg-in is outdated.” A sit-in mimics evolutionarily basic protoshame where one makes oneself smaller and averts the eyes in the face of the more powerful and dominant. Who was right here? Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X? I don’t claim to know. This looks like a genuine disagreement about how to read a certain kind of action: a sit-in as a prideful expression of rights, a way of standing up to the racist, versus a sit-in as a submissive gesture of a weakling—“a cry-in” or “a beg-in”—a plea for mercy from the racist, who has all the power. A person who is ashamed makes themselves small and innocuous rather than ferocious. Shame, some say, has the nasty property of misplacing itself, seeping into where it does not belong and has no place. Tactically, revealing that one gets the message that one is perceived as shameworthy—as lesser than or in the wrong—can be read as confirmation that one has received exactly the message intended and is thus merely asking for mercy, to be upgraded some. Furious anger, and not so peaceful civil disobedience, therefore, can seem at least as rational a response to downgrading, with the upside that it can be understood as unambiguously prideful.
Some Observations and Lessons
Before I draw some lessons from these vignettes, recall the three kinds of holism I distinguished analytically earlier: Conceptual holism says, first, that emotions are complex acts with opaque aspects, and thus that emotion terms are theoretical terms not observation terms, and second, that emotions invariably have complex relations to other emotions (both linguistically and in reality) that are often culture specific. For example, the English distinction between shame and fear is not made by the Gidjingali Aboriginals of Australia (also known as the Burarra) (Hiatt 1978). Both are covered by the single word gurakadj. Shame and embarrassment are not distinguished by the Japanese (Lebra 1983, 194), Tahitians (Levy 1973), the Newars of Nepal (Levy 1983), or the Ifaluk (Lutz 1980, 209). The Ilongot use the single word betang for shame, timidity, embarrassment, awe, obedience, and respect (Rosaldo 1983, 141). The Javanese use isin to cover shame, guilt, embarrassment, and shyness (Geertz 1959, 233). Bedouins use hasham to describe shame, embarrassment, shyness, and modesty. And Americans do not reliably distinguish between guilt and shame, although Americans who are well versed in the Abrahamic traditions, and thus familiar with the concept of sin, are more likely to hive off guilt somewhat from shame. Each of these conceptual differences warrants thinking that they affect the phenomenal structure of shame, how it seems experientially, in these different places.
Normative holism says that normative assessment of the role that emotions such as anger, shame, guilt, and pride play in a sociomoral ecology requires attention to the way they contribute or don’t contribute to personal well-being, as well as to well-being in wider ethical and political spheres. This requires evaluation of the quality of the values they are designed to protect. Pride, shame, guilt, and anger can all be called upon to serve bad values as well as good ones.
Network holism says that when, as in the present case, an emotion such as anger or shame appears to be causing trouble, we cannot automatically assume that it is the emotion as such that is causing the trouble. It could be, as in normative holism, that the values the emotion is protecting are bad. Or it could be certain background metaphysical or theological views that are the culprit. For example, when people talk about “Catholic guilt” or “Jewish guilt” or the shame that Irish Catholic women experienced about pregnancy out of wedlock in the second half of the twentieth century (Hogan 2019), they are gesturing at a problem with the metaphysics or theology of guilt and shame in certain cultures or subcultures, not to any intrinsic features of guilt or shame.
So, what follows from these vignettes about how I understand shame and guilt? Possibly nothing very interesting or generalizable. Remember, we live in cultures with multiple views in play. I’ll leave it to the reader to judge, but here are some patterns I have noticed, each of which supports the three kinds of holism I claim obtain: conceptual holism, normative holism, and network holism.
First, I think of shame and guilt as different to some extent, although I often use the terms interchangeably. My experience is that Catholics, who are familiar with ritualized, confessional practices, have a concept of guilt that is associated with sin, which then generalizes to actions that are bad but not sinful, like not doing one’s chores properly. Not everyone parses emotions this way, which is why psychologists have trouble finding principled criteria in WEIRD folk psychology for distinguishing shame from guilt. Recently, I discovered that two Chinese scholars, one a PhD student writing a dissertation on emotional detachment in cross-cultural philosophy, the other an assistant professor at an elite American liberal arts college, and an expert on comparative philosophy, both of whom are entirely bilingual, and with whom I have worked for years, did not know that there was any distinction in English between guilt and shame until we read an article recently on the topic (Wong and Tsai 2007).
Second, nothing in the way I was taught about shame led me to think it was ever appropriate to extend shame to whole persons, although I got that it (guilt, as well) could apply to bad habits and dispositions. That is, I understood early on that guilt and shame were appropriate responses to acts or actions, but were also appropriate responses to general behavioral tendencies and dispositions. I was a painfully shy child. As we arrived for Thanksgiving or Easter visits with my Connecticut cousins (all ten of them), my parents would say: “I want you to shake hands with everyone when we get to Uncle Bill and Aunt Grace’s.” It was obvious then, as it is now, that this reminder was designed to mitigate the effects of my shyness that might lead me to show, but not intend, bad manners.
Third, there was explicit instruction in my family, school, and church that one ought never to judge another human being on the basis of their physical appearance, race, or disability status. One ought to feel ashamed if one did. This instruction came with a warning that some people would, in fact, judge people for their looks, race, and disability status, and that, furthermore, such judgment might well cause the people so judged to feel ashamed of themselves (this was the intention), which was entirely undeserved. This, we were taught, warranted additional obligations to work against such practices, and extra sensitivities, when interacting with those who suffer unwarranted shame. The whole normative edifice was very complicated, but learnable.
Fourth, I am very familiar with the kinds of cases where shame seeps beyond the borders it was intended to cover. People with low self-esteem or who are oppressed and discriminated against are especially vulnerable to this kind of penetrative, oily shame. I felt global shame when deep in the grip of addiction, and I experienced the desire to die or kill myself when I experienced that kind of global shame. It is a terrible kind of shame—one that is never warranted. My shame of addiction came from one perfectly sensible source. I was not living up to my own standards (Flanagan 2013). Why did I wonder, in this particular case, about my entire being, and feel sometimes that I was a total failure? I ask, in part, because the case has similarities with psychoanalytic shame and TOSCA shame insofar as, at times, it felt global, about me, about the entire being I am. My tentative suggestion is that, once one learns what shame is and how it works—it does call attention to oneself as one major source for how things go in a life—there are some bewildering patterns; addiction is one, where there are no good explanations in terms of a single, modifiable character trait that is easily isolated as the cause that needs to be modified. The temptation therefore is to blame one’s global self. Other kinds of cases, involving unalterable traits—such as the color of one’s skin, one’s sex or gender, or one’s sexual orientation—invite global shame, if the society one lives in is racist, sexist, or queerphobic.
Fifth, guilt and shame are invitations to change oneself. In the simple view, guilt is an invitation to stop doing what one ought not to do. Shame is an invitation to change some aspect of oneself so as to be a better person. When a person has been shamed about the entire person they are, or has generalized shame about who they are as an entire person, the shame, I’ve insisted, is entirely unwarranted. Furthermore, such shame might be so debilitating that the individual cannot any longer or easily take up the invitation to change for the better. The problem in such cases is not due to shame as such; it is due to various kinds of system failures and harms caused by certain fragile learning mechanisms and by bad cultural values—for example, sexist or racist practices that take advantage of certain cognitive vulnerabilities.
Sixth, shame and guilt feel bad; they are designed to feel bad, and this fact can make it hard to focus on the invitations to stop doing what is wrong, to improve, and to step up one’s game. If shame and guilt only aimed to make one feel bad, then they would both be morally unacceptable for the same reasons I argued that anger that aims to pass pain or gain revenge is wrong. When shame and guilt are used to introduce a child to the normative order, or to keep an adolescent or adult in normative conformity, they are acceptable prima facie so long as they aim at the good.
But seventh, aiming at what some culture or subculture thinks is good, and having it right about what is good, are not the same. The culture I grew up in made people feel ashamed about aspects of sex and sexuality that no one should feel bad about. Many cultures and subcultures still think being gay is shameful. Gay pride denies that there is anything for gay people to be ashamed about. Some cultures shame women who are victims of rape. This is wrong. In all these cases, the problem is with bad values. It teaches nothing about shame as such. Shame can be weaponized by terrible values (Bartky 1990; Piper 1996; Calhoun 2004). And shame can wound even when one knows that it has been so weaponized, and even when one entirely rejects the values it protects—white supremacy, patriarchy, mandatory heterosexuality. It is the same with other emotions such as fear and sadness. Being afraid because one is black—there are stories in the news that during the coronavirus pandemic, many black people feel uneasy about wearing masks, lest they are thought to be robbers or muggers—feels terrible. But the problem isn’t fear itself; it is the evaluative object of fear, one’s race, and the reason behind the fear to the effect that black people are dangerous. Similarly, it can feel terrible to be treated as an object of patronizing sympathy and sadness because one is neuro-atypical, deaf, blind, gay, or transgendered. Sympathy and sadness are not the problem. The problem is the evaluative object and the reason for the sadness.
Generic Shame
Recall, generic shame has this structure, first for the child new to the normative order, and second for the individual with a sense of shame.
1. The child is invited to feel bad in a shamelike way if it does Φ in situation S, where Φ names a violation of a social or moral norm. Feeling bad in the shamelike way is designed to inhibit future acts of Φ type, as well as dispositions that might dispose the child to Φ.
2. The mature person accepts that Φ-ing violates the social and/or moral order and embraces the value system V, which makes it so. Once a person accepts, avows, and internalizes a set of values that set standards for things they would feel ashamed of doing in their own eyes, as well as things they would feel ashamed of not doing in their own eyes, they have a mature sense of shame in the formal sense.
I say “formal sense” to mark an idea from John Rawls, who said certain good traits of character, like sincerity, integrity, and authenticity, are virtues of form. They are desirable only if and when they protect good, substantive values. Hitler had the formal virtues of sincerity, integrity, and authenticity.
Philosophers who are impressed by autonomy should be pleased by the fact that (1) the child has a heteronomous relation to Φ and Φ-ing, but that (2) the mature person affirms for their own reasons that Φ-ing is wrong, and that traits or dispositions that lead to Φ-ing require self-modification and cultivation of better ones. This, at least in philosophical quarters, is the mark of autonomy: one reflectively endorses, as one’s own, values that one did not initially embrace.
Generic shame, like generic guilt and generic pride, awaits socializers to provide the content, Φ. Pride that one has gotten better at tennis is fine. Pride that one is an exemplary neo-Nazi is not fine. The difference is what the pride is about. If not Φ-ing expresses a good value, then the shame associated with Φ-ing is sensible and protective of good values—the same with guilt and pride.1
Shame and guilt are tools designed in the first instance to make people feel bad, or aware that they will feel bad if they violate certain kinds of norms. In a multicultural community, or a very liberal community with value diversity, or in an edgy community of artistic types who aim to defy conventions, shame may be very audience-specific or, in the case of edgy artists, have no purchase at all in certain expressive zones of life.2 If I know that some, perhaps many or most people, think that the way I dress is weird—suppose I am an orthodox Jew or orthodox Muslim in an American city—this may not be experienced as embarrassing or shameful at all, if the community whose opinion I value approves of the way I dress, and most of the others seem, at any rate, indifferent. How I feel about myself might not depend on the opinions of all, but rather, at least in certain zones of life, only on those in my identity community.
Shame is an emotion that, along with its sibling guilt, is associated with normative conformity and designed to eventually do self-monitoring normative work. A person with a sense of shame knows that if they were to Φ, they would feel ashamed. Shame has a negative valence. But because a person with a sense of shame endorses the values that deem Φ-ing to be a normative violation (conventional or moral), they are disinclined to Φ. The sense of shame has a positive valence. Ideally, it is associated with prideful feelings of having sincere value commitments, being a team player, and possessing a working conscience. Shame, when activated, is designed to make individuals feel bad about not being in normative conformity, including when they anticipate doing something wrong. A person with a sense of shame isn’t inclined to want to do something wrong, in part because it is shameful.3
There are many ways one can feel bad: physical pain feels bad, sadness feels bad, fear feels bad. Shame doesn’t use physical pain to produce its kind of feeling-bad feeling. But, according to one plausible theory, it does recruit sadness, fear, and anxiety, which have been assembled phylogenetically and come with the equipment, or are quickly assembled in ontogeny as the proper affective response to threats of social disapproval and exclusion. Evolutionary or psychic alchemy unites or blends these lower-level emotions into the complex emotion of shame and links it to the situations and act types that warrant shame. Some such situations provide a prototype, exemplar, or schema upon which the emotion is constructed and refined.4 A person with a sense of shame knows the bad, shamelike feeling, as well as what kinds of actions on their part will cause others to judge an act as shameful. Once a robust sense of shame is acquired and developed—including by self-cultivation—it constitutes a space of embraced, autonomously endorsed values.
In Analects 2.4, Confucius offers his autobiography and discusses the long journey to the stage where his inner sense of shame is aligned with what is right. “The Master said, ‘At fifteen I set my mind upon learning; at thirty I took my place in society; at forty I became free of doubts; at fifty I understood Heaven’s Mandate; at sixty my ear was attuned; and at seventy I could follow my heart’s desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.’ ” Does it really take seventy years to develop a mature sense of shame? Maybe.
This question of how long a mature sense of shame takes to develop is an interesting empirical question. This moment in Confucius might remind one of the moment in book 1 of Plato’s Republic where Cephalus says that, although he doesn’t know what exactly morality is, it is easier to be moral when one is old. A philosophical naturalist has to be open to the possibility that the development of a mature sense of shame, a reliable moral compass, and a well-honed conscience takes lots of experience, and, in addition, is helped by less “fire in the belly” and less sexual and aggressive passion, which reduces temptations that violate conventional and moral norms.
The Feeling-Bad Feeling of Shame
Fear, guilt, shame, sadness, and anger are all negative emotions. They feel bad; they are negatively valenced. But they can do positive work—expressing, enacting, and protecting value commitments—and they are part and parcel of living a full and meaningful, embodied human life.
The feeling-bad feeling of shame is often, though not necessarily, associated with the experience of being seen and judged by an audience because one has violated an important social or moral norm.5 Once internalized, the survey is one’s own; no real audience is required. In the classical Confucian text The Doctrine of the Mean (before 300 BCE), three virtues are celebrated: self-watchfulness, sincerity, and leniency. We are told that the noble person is “watchful over himself alone.” Here, the metaphor is visual, but it is not about being seen by others, as is the Chinese virtue of “saving face.” It is about passing self-inspection.
Often, as mentioned earlier, Chinese metaphors for a well-honed sense of shame are tactile-kinesthetic (Shun 2001; Geaney 2004; Seok 2017a, 2017b). The positively valenced sense of shame one ought to develop involves a sense of things one should not touch or boundaries that one should not cross.
For guilt, socializers can produce the feeling-bad feeling by using the example of a creditor who has come to extract some measure of rectification for a debt gone wrong.6 The feeling-bad feeling of guilt in its mature, internalized form comes from self-directed anger, where the creditor is one’s own conscience. At least something like this is the ethnotheory in WEIRD precincts.
Shame is classified as a self-conscious emotion. Anger is not, although it is extremely self-expressive and speaks in the loud voice of a demanding ego. Anger typically expresses the aims or goals of the self, insofar as it is a response to something that gets in my way. Anger targets what is outside the self in service of the self but is not, as it were, an emotion that makes oneself focal. What is focal is the obstacle—except, of course, if guilt is anger turned inward, in which case anger metamorphosizes into the self-conscious emotion of guilt, shame’s sister.
We teach children that they ought to feel bad about themselves—either ashamed or guilty—for their wrongful actions, and/or for the reaction they get from others when they do what is wrong. The norms are not, even in the first instance, just moral ones. Children are often taught about norms of decorum in eating, table manners, cleanliness, and dress, where satisfying the standards for these things is a reason for pride and being ill-mannered or sloppy is a reason for shame for both the child and their family (Stohr 2012; Olberding 2020). Even in liberal, individualistic quarters, we think that our children’s poor manners reflect badly on us. That said, poor manners are not considered full-on moral violations; they are not sins, not the kind of thing that God gets angry about or is likely to bring up on Judgment Day.
We can say we feel shame by saying “I am ashamed” or by saying “I feel really bad about that” or “I feel like shit for that.” Context will determine whether we feel bad or like shit for physical reasons or because we have committed a norm violation. If the former, shame makes no sense; if the latter, it does. Saying “I’m very sorry,” again depending on context, can be an admission of remorse for shameful behavior or for an accident, such as bumping into someone in a crowded space. One can be embarrassed, and rightly so, for making a mistake; one might also feel ashamed for making a mistake, but not rightly so.
Bill Buckner, the Boston Red Sox’s first baseman, made a costly error in game 6 of the 1986 World Series that led to Boston’s defeat. Buckner did something embarrassing. Normally, a professional baseball player would have caught that grounder. A pro is someone who is supposed to reliably catch the ball. Buckner had bad knees, and he made a mistake, a consequential error. And because his error was in a big game, as big as they get in baseball, and caught by a worldwide TV audience, he was seen, and knew he was seen, making his error. This is enough to make embarrassment sensible. The laws of physics and human physiology guarantee that baseball errors will happen (the highest lifetime fielding average for a first baseman is .997). But Buckner did not commit the error on purpose (he intended to catch the ball and tried) and thus did not violate the sort of norm that would make it sensible for him to feel shame. If Buckner’s error had been caused by drinking between innings or taking a bribe to commit a consequential error, then he’d have had reason to feel shame. But Buckner didn’t drink between innings or take a bribe, so he should not have felt any shame. But reasons against emotions don’t always defeat or override other causes that make us experience these emotions. So Bill Buckner might have gone to his grave feeling ashamed for what he shouldn’t have felt shame for. If so, shame didn’t cause the problem; mental laws of association and cruel people did.
Shame as Socializing Emotion
In America, there are many distinctive child-rearing practices. Positive reinforcement, pride, and guilt for failing to abide by social and moral norms are all considered acceptable, and there is at present some overlapping consensus that using shame is bad. If my argument in chapter 5—that shame has an undeserved bad rap—is correct, this consensus is unwarranted. But, in fact, each method of socialization has benefits and costs. It is true, due to the laws of association, that shame (guilt also) can seep in where it doesn’t belong or do any good.7 Pride can also do this. Some children entirely raised on regimens that only praise good behavior develop into entitled, self-satisfied egoists who feel too good about themselves.
In some parts of the world, there is a wide cultural consensus about how one ought to raise children and, in particular, which socializing emotion to use in teaching social and moral norms. A socializing emotion is one that is normally highly, emotionally arousing and is effective in helping the young internalize social and moral norms. Recall that every culture ever studied uses high-arousal socializing emotions to teach social and moral norms (Quinn 2005).
Socializing emotions, especially when they are culturally universal and not part of a plural package,8 are interesting because they provide something of a controlled experiment to see how commitment to a single socializing emotion works in a single ecology. Socializing emotions are used to teach and fix norms, including norms for doing other emotions. Often, the socializing emotion is enforced by itself (this might always be true in a culture that is univocal in its support of a single, dominant socializing emotion). The Minangkabau, recall, use shame (malu) to socialize the youth. Furthermore, shame is policed by shame itself. If one overreaches in using shame (or even more so if one uses marah [anger]) to teach a child moral and social norms, one ought to feel shame.
Röttger-Rössler and others write that “these special emotions [univocal socializing emotions] have the psychological power to develop into a general psychological control function through which children are able to adjust not only their behavior but also their repertoire of other emotions such as anger, embarrassment, or pride in the normative prescriptions of the culture” (2013, 263). Another interesting fact about socializing emotions is that they are normally themselves heavily theorized inside the culture. The members of the culture have views, an ethnotheory (ibid., 265), about why the socializing emotion is used, why it is good, why it is better than the alternatives, and so on.
Emotions that are well theorized by ordinary people are called hypercognized emotions, as opposed to hypocognized emotions (Levy 1973). Cecilea Mun (2019) and Bongrae Seok (2017a, 2017b) think that South Koreans hypercognize shame. Americans are not clear about how, or even whether, to make a distinction between shame and guilt. Typically, Americans think using either word for a violation is okay, although for reasons having to do with shame’s bad rap, Americans will also say, somewhat incoherently, that shame is an ugly emotion—bad to experience and bad to display. This indicates that shame and guilt might be hypocognized among ordinary people. But shame is not undertheorized among psychoanalysts, clinical psychologists, educational psychologists, and philosophers. It is overtheorized, and incorrectly so, as an inherently “ugly emotion.” This involves a host of mistakes (as discussed in chapter 5) that include (1) picking out an unhealthy variety of shame as paradigmatic of shame; (2) failing to distinguish shame, and a sense of shame, from the practices of shaming and humiliation; and (3) failing to distinguish the emotion of shame from the evaluative object of shame (e.g., shame about dishonesty versus shame about the color of one’s skin).
Minangkabau Shame Culture, Again
In part 1, I discussed the contrast between the Bara of Madagascar, who use fear-inducing anger as the main socializing emotion, and the Minangkabau of Indonesia, who use shame (malu) in that role, and I discussed the finding that using a pretty ferocious kind of anger, often theatrically scripted, to socialize the youth—as the Bara do—does not cause the problems we would expect from using such anger in socialization. I suggested that this surprising fact is best explained by the generalization that when there is agreement and consistency in the use of a socializing emotion, and when there are well-understood and predictable scripts—theatrical and ritualized—for enacting the socializing emotions, then it works differently from how the same socializing emotion works in an ecology that has plural socializing emotions, disagreement about which ones are best, and that lacks legible rituals for reparation, repair, and reconciliation. Now, I go more deeply into the Minangkabau shame (malu) case.
The Minangkabau are an Indonesian ethnic group of about eight million, two-thirds of which live in rural areas in West Sumatra, and these were the ones studied by Röttger-Rössler and others (2013). The culture is Muslim but has a matrilineal kinship structure, so households are female-led and property passes through the mother’s line, not the father’s. The Minangkabau value formal education highly; children are raised to be bilingual and are in school for many hours a day from age six onward.
Here are the main findings about malu (shame) among the Minangkabau:
· Interviews with caretakers indicate that the aim of child development is to raise modest children who are respectful of elders and who internalize and thus comply with social norms (one enters a house right foot forward) and moral norms (theft, adultery, and murder are wrong).
· When very young children display shy or deferential behavior—for example, hiding behind their mother’s dress or avoiding eye contact with strangers—mothers reinforce the behavior, labeling it malu-malu, the diminutive for malu. Malu-malu is entirely positive. Furthermore, mothers never attempt to introduce the child to strangers; nonetheless, a stranger who is otherwise entirely unengaged with the child will normally add their praise for the deferential malu-malu behavior of the child.
· When children (over the age of five) violate a social norm having to do especially with bodily modesty or bodily functions that ought to be private—for example, they are seen naked, or caught urinating in public, burping or farting, or are smelly—caregivers and peers will induce malu (this is understood in the Minangkabau ethnotheory as what they are doing) by theatrical public mocking.
· When children display anger and defiance toward their caretakers, siblings, or peers because they don’t get what they want, they are judged to have committed a serious violation. Marah (anger) is the worst emotion among the Minangkabau, and it is constrained and subdued by malu (shame). The script that caretakers, siblings, and peers use is this: “When a child starts to use abusive language or show aggressive behavior, the caregiver immediately stops interacting with the child, steps back, and displays embarrassment in a theatrical manner toward the audience. The caregiver continues to ignore the child until he or she has calmed down. We never observed any acts of social reintegration initiated by caregivers” (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2013, 270).
· Sometimes, in cases of in-school marah (anger and defiance) or public social rule breaking, teachers and peers will mock the transgressor. The schoolchild will be asked to come to the front of the room and then is dressed down for the transgression. Malu is induced by mocking and sometimes, in addition, by a degrading punishment—for example, cleaning the school toilets.
There are three interesting additional features of inducing malu. First, the child is introduced to successively wider audiences who have permission to use malu to provide commentary on its behavior. At first, only parents, grandparents, and older siblings are authorized to use malu as the socializing emotion. Eventually, teachers and peers are authorized to publicly comment, sometimes in a theatrical manner, on normative transgressions. By thirteen years of age, everyone is a competent “social juror” (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2013, 283). Socializing a child into the Minangkabau way of life is a communal exercise—not one left only, or even primarily, to its parents and family.
Second, the locus, focus, and object of shame is, in the first instance, the child who doesn’t know the norms (she is just learning them) or knows (or is on the way to knowing) them but violates them. There is also the norm that if my child violates norms and it becomes public, then I, the parent, should also feel shame. It is unclear from the ethnography whether this norm of shame sharing is due to a view about the individual responsibility of parents to raise their own children correctly, such that the child’s bad behavior is understood as the parent’s fault, or, alternatively, whether the malu (shame) of the group is due to an expansive ontology of the self, where the family is conceived as an interconnected or extended whole, or both (see Flanagan 2017, 228–31, on culturally variable conceptions of the self).
Third, malu is not equivalent conceptually, semantically, or practically to shame, as we are likely to conceive it.9 The reason is that it includes, or authorizes, the use of mocking to induce shame. In WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures that use shame, sometimes (America) or often (China) as a socializing emotion, mocking is not normally encouraged as a tool in shame induction (although some research finds that Chinese parents comment publicly, especially in front of family members, on children’s bad behavior). There is no necessary connection between using shame as a socializing emotion and thinking that mocking, shaming, or humiliation are good practices.10 Usually, when norms are violated, the invitation to feel shame is conveyed by disappointment, disapproval, or anger. Sometimes, in socialization, the reasons for shame are introduced at the same time as the reasons that warrant the norm being taught. It is good to share, and not sharing is a reason to feel ashamed.11
There are several important findings about the nature, function, and scope of shame among the Minangkabau and also about the mental and moral health of the society. Recall from chapter 5 the received view about WEIRD shame:
· It is entirely negative, an “ugly emotion.”
· It is totalizing: one judges one’s entire self negatively.
· It undermines self-esteem.
· It undermines prosocial engagement.
· It leads to social withdrawal or aggression.
· It leads to depression.
· It leads to high drug and alcohol use, unsafe sex, law breaking, suicide attempts, and lower college attendance rates.
Malu has none of these characteristics. First, malu-malu is encouraged in children. It names a personal style that is modest and respectful rather than immodest, ego-promoting, and demanding a wide swath for individual expression. Malu is introduced in early childhood “as a blend of virtue and social fear” (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2013, 272). Shame-proneness is a virtue.12 Adults understand the positive side of malu, conceiving it as yielding a mature sense of shame: “Malu makes us behave carefully so that we don’t do something wrong or bad” (ibid., 273). Second, malu is only attributed to actions, emotional expressions, and dispositions that violate social or moral norms. There is absolutely nothing about the concept of malu, or the way it is taught, that asks the child to apply it to their entire self. Its aim and scope are aspects of an otherwise good and worthy self that can be shaped, disciplined, and improved, including, eventually, by self-monitoring and self-cultivation. Third, an internalized sense of shame (malu) enables the child to become a mature and adept participant in common life. It equips the child for prosocial life. Fourth, marah (anger) is the worst emotion, and it is tamed by malu (shame).
What about the claims that shame is extremely painful, more so than guilt, or that shame leads to low self-esteem, depression, and suicide attempts? Neither generalization holds among the Minangkabau.13 In chapter 3, the reader will recall that I suggested that there is a kind of looping or self-fulfilling prophecy effect that can be seen in these types of cases. If a culture theorizes an emotion—shame in the present case—as a dangerous socializing emotion, or as a dangerous emotion period, and especially if it advertises an ethnotheory that claims certain reliable negative effects for that emotion, the emotion will have those effects. The self-fulfilling prophecy effect is even more likely to achieve confirmation if it characterizes the social emotion as only coming in one unseemly variety. But Minangkabau malu, unlike WEIRD shame, is advertised in positive terms. It works to socialize the youth; it leads to internalization of social and moral norms, and thus to the conditions of peaceful and cooperative social life.
Shame and Honor?
Ruth Benedict’s famous book on Japanese culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), was based entirely on anthropological and political records. The book was commissioned to explain Japanese culture during the Second World War, and thus at a time when Benedict could not go to Japan as a “participant observer.” The division between shame versus guilt cultures led to lots of premature generalizations. One generalization is that shame cultures are honor cultures. But Minangkabau culture is a shame culture, not an honor culture. And shame and honor do not reliably go together.
The cultural anthropologist Unni Wikan (1982) argues:
1. Shame is an “experience near” concept in Cairo, Egypt, and in Oman (the “near” versus “far” distinction is Clifford Geertz’s). The word ‘eb means shame; it is understood by every toddler and is used constantly in ordinary discourse.
2. Honor is an “experience distant” concept in both Cairo and Oman. It is rarely used by anyone to describe behavior. It is a theorist’s concept, not an ordinary person’s concept, and furthermore, it doesn’t apply all that well to what motivates the normative order in either Cairo or Oman.
Wikan believes that this second point generalizes: the concept of honor figures hardly at all in everyday discourse in the Mediterranean or Middle East.
1. Shame is the main socializing emotion (both ‘eb and fudiha = scandal), and it is always used to mark shameful actions or dispositions, never a whole person. This means either that ‘eb is not WEIRD shame, which allegedly applies to whole persons, or it is false that shame applies to whole persons (which is what I believe).
2. Even if both Cairo Egyptian culture and Omani culture are accurately described as cultures in which shame (‘eb) is the main socializing emotion, close observation reveals, especially in Oman, that the evaluation of how one lives by one’s own lights matters at least as much for many people as how their actions are seen or evaluated by others. This means that in Oman, as happens the world over, norms that are initially accepted heteronomously, because socializers avow them, become accepted reflectively and autonomously because the individual eventually judges them as good and the reasons behind them as sound.
Here are two more examples of cultures, Taiwanese and Javanese, respectively, in which shame is positive, often assigned to social units rather than to individuals, and not linked to honor: (1) Heidi Fung (1999) and Fung and Chen (2002) have studied shame socialization in Taiwan. One practice is for teachers to criticize (shame share) both parents and children for the child’s poor school performance. Then parents shame share further by explaining to the children that they are vulnerable to being judged badly and need to find a solution (earlier bedtime, more effort, etc.). (2) The anthropologist Andrew Beatty (2005, 30; see also Beatty 2014, 2019) writes of the intricacies of emotional communication between caregiver and child:
In Java, as elsewhere, children in everyday situations are repeatedly presented with words which, in the circumstances, refer to emotions they are presumed not to be feeling but should be.… For the small child, isin, “shame,” indicates a prescribed pattern of behavior before strangers or elders; the word, as presented, does not refer to a feeling which then motivates a certain pattern of behavior. The adult uses the word because the child is not acting ashamed; but this prompting of shame … only indicates what the child has to do.… The prompt is intended to alter the child’s behavior, and the emotion word encodes what is required (a certain posture, action, or speech).
There is a parallel in WEIRD cultures where one can say “you should feel ashamed” without thinking that the person—especially if it is a young person being inculcated with the cultural norms—does, in fact, feel ashamed. The speech act is an injunction or imperative that announces, with considerable associated verbal and emotional fanfare, that I intend eventually for you to reliably feel ashamed when you do this again, or, even better, to anticipate that you will feel shame if you do it, and therefore not want to do it in the future.
The Minangkabau, Cairo Egyptians, Omanis, Taiwanese, and Javanese are the possibility proofs of successful ways of living in which shame serves an entirely positive role and is not linked to honor. The children are well adjusted. The adults know the norms and scripts for doing shame and pass on respectable and stable forms of life.
The Shame Critic
One response is to point out that contemporary Western liberal societies are too complex, multicultural, and heterogeneous to adopt the practices of a largely rural, Muslim, matrilineal minority group from Indonesia or these other relatively homogeneous alien societies. Fair enough. But I only intend for the Minangkabau and these others to serve as evidence that, when shame goes wrong and produces bad sociocultural moral effects, it has to do with bad values, not with shame as such.
I’ll use the possibility proof, the proof of concept, provided by these cases to explain how shame could work for us. Remember the predicament that concerns me: We live in shameless times. More shame, rather than less, for violations of genuinely important values would be good for us.