Good Shame, Bad Shame

This blog was inspired by the BBC Radio programme “When Greeks Flew Kites”, airing 4th March 2019, that looked at shame.

The presenter of that programme, Sarah Dunant, tells of how in 1944, following their liberation from German occupation, French society turned on those young women who had been seen as having been too friendly with the occupying German army.

As part of the so-called “Épuration Sauvage”, or “wild purges”, these women were taken from their homes and paraded through crowded streets. They were sat down and their heads were shaved in front of a jeering, insult-hurling public.

This targeting and punishing of the women - named Les Femmes Tendues (the “shaved women”) - served as a kind of cathartic ritual by which the French public “exorcised the guilt and shame of occupation”.

The same radio programme goes on to highlight how shaming can be beneficial.

The example is given of the selling of formula milk in the 1970s to societies that lacked the clean water sanitary conditions needed for making formula use safe.

As explained by Peter Stearns, Professor of History at George Mason University, Virginia, after “a lot of publicity and a lot of angry representations”, going on for well over a year, the corporation in question, Nestle, “really did change its policy, so the corporate shaming practice worked”.

To quote Stearns, whomever the shamed party might be, “shaming does not necessarily guarantee that the shamed individual feels wrongdoing... the shamed individual simply realises that they need to put on a different public face”.

Indeed, certainly when it comes to corporate shaming, Professor Stearns concludes that there’s no “internalising” of shame; rather, the focus is on maintaining a good corporate image and on repairing any reputational damage.

Another way of putting this is that shame works through the enforcement of conformity to social norms... rather than through changing our “inner” psychological world or value system.

In the past, there was more honesty about the use of shame as an instrument of social control.

Dr Mary Flannery of Oxford University has made a study of shame as depicted in the past. “When you look at medieval texts, especially those concerning ideals of female behaviour, you see that people are being encouraged to develop a sense of shame.”

Flannery explains how "in medieval texts addressed to women, you see a lot of instructions there about what kind of behaviour to avoid so that you don’t look like a harlot".

Some examples:

- “Wherever you take ale or wine, take not too much, and leave promptly... it is shameful to be drunk”, and

- “Don’t go to wrestling matches, or to watch cock shooting, as if you were a strumpet or a harlot.”

In that time, shame was seen as a tool for the - shame-less - enforcement and promotion of good behaviour. “If you teach people to fear shame, they will behave in a way that you want them to behave in order to avoid that experience.”

In other words, shame has a long tradition of being used as a kind of stick by which to beat people into a state of "goodness".

Looking back at historical examples of shaming, we might feel revulsion, as when we look at pictures of “justice by the mob”, and scenes like the one above of Les Femmes Tendues.

Shame is as fickle a guardian of morality and “good” conduct as are the ever-changing standards of public taste, and its use can be more about aggression - and about asserting control over others - than about genuinely striving for virtue.

In Stearns’s words, “behaviours that at one point in time are unexceptional all of a sudden become subject to shaming scrutiny”.

Shame can also be blatantly hypocritical when buoyed by moral fervour and self-righteous indignation, as if the judge is automatically more worthy than the judged (we see something similar in today's blame culture).

As was openly admitted in medieval times, shame plays on our fear of social exclusion - and comes at a cost to one of our deepest freedoms: our individual conscience as a "weighing scales" of right and wrong.

In her closing reflections, Dr Flannery makes the point that in the medieval period, though shame was seen as a necessary first step towards penitence and confession, there was also “an emphasis on not feeling too much shame, just because if you feel too much shame, you might not confess to begin with, because you’re just so upset at the prospect of what you’ve done and confessing that to someone else”.

Dunant summarises it like this; “beware of too much shame; it can paralyse you”.

In the modern context, a lot of us might not feel comfortable about the whole business of penitence and confession, but if we put these in more modern terms, isn’t it useful to be able to self-reflect... and face ourselves even when doing so is challenging and sometimes painful?

Here’s a proposition: whatever its uses, shame ultimately relies on psychological forces like fear and anger that rob us of our true potential, and take us in the opposite direction to our love, joy and true intelligence.

The question is, even if somehow we could use shame to enforce the perfect code of conduct, is it wise to steamroller free will and trample on all our freedom to harness and develop our own, innate sense of what’s right?

What's at stake here is our decision to permit - or suppress - our true, creative nature and self.

Without that, it's argued on this website, we will become less and less engaged in our lives on a deeply, satisfied level, and, ultimately, more at risk of stress (and therefore such common diseases as diabetes and obesity); depression; addiction and anxiety).