You should be ashamed of yourself. Shouldn't you?
Shame is the message of the moment. California physiologist-turned-radio-therapist Laura Schlesinger nabbed a longtime perch on the best-seller list with How Could You Do That?! a compilation of tongue-lashings she'd administered to her morally mucked-up callers. General Colin Powell wooed voters and wowed pundits with his call for a renewed culture of shame in America. The Return of Shame even made the cover of Newsweek.
On the other side are shame's toxic avengers, psychologists and others who point to shame as the first cause of every psychic ill. Tour the self-help section of any major bookstore and you'll be deafened by the silent screams of millions of inner children, all desperately trying to heal the clouds of shame that smother them.
Is shame the missing ingredient needed to cure American society? Or is it psychology's answer to original sin, the noxious seed whose dark flowers are discord and despair?
Those two warring perspectives came face to face last summer when Powell and novelist Dorothy Allison shared a podium at the annual booksellers' convention in Chicago. Powell talked about the crying need for a renewed sense of shame in American society. "I'm appalled at some of the things I see coming into my home," he said. "We have lost any sense of shame or outrage." The blame for this ultimately rests on the mothers and fathers who have failed to instill a respect for common decency in their children. "I remember as a young boy growing up," he said. "My mother didn't lay a hand on me, didn't even shout very much. All she had to do was say, 'Colin, 'shamed of you.'"
As he spoke, heads nodded approvingly. Then the novelist came to the microphone.
"I think shame kills people," Allison said flatly. Growing up poor, illegitimate and abused in rural South Carolina, Allison was suffused with a shame that left a permanent stain on her life. And she was horrified at Powell's suggestion that shame should be the centerpiece of child-rearing. Instead, she said, "I think children should be raised with a belief or hope in their own ability to do something with their lives."
You can't watch a television talk show without agreeing with Powell that shamelessness has taken over society. But you can't watch someone paralyzed by shame over past evils they have committed or endured without believing, like Allison, that shame kills. Who is right?
Shame is equally elemental in psychology. "Shame is a basic, primary, natural human emotion," says Gershen Kaufman, a Michigan State University psychologist who has written extensively on shame. "It's part of our biological inheritance, along with anger, fear and joy." Shame is the searing realization that we've done something so seriously wrong that it calls our very essence into question.
By contrast, embarrassment is a tickle in the psychic throat. "Embarrassment, mortification and abashment arise when you make a bad impression on others," explains Rowland Miller, a psychology professor at Sam Houston State University and author of Embarrassment: Poise and Peril in Everyday Life. "We feel goofy and awkward in the throes of embarrassment. People are nice when they're embarrrassed; if anything, appropriate embarrassment tends to make a good impression on people." But when we expose our shame, others avert their eyes and leave the room.
After they leave, our shame persists, camping on our pillows and endlessly repeating that we are defective, damaged goods. It fogs our minds and fries our souls.
Somewhere between the two lies guilt, the knowledge that we have done something wrong and the fear of discovery and punishment. "Guilt is generally considered punishment for an action we've taken, whereas shame is punishment for something about the self," says Donald L. Nathanson, M.D., author of Shame and Pride.
But the apotheosis of shamelessness has to be the television talk show, where feuding spouses, parents, children, neighbors, friends and observers bat shame around like volleyballs.
"We're in a society where it's harder all the time to shame people, where shamelessness is just part of everyday life," says Jean Bethke Elshtain, professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago. "People put the most intimate parts of themselves on display. Sometimes, when you think of these afternoon talk shows, I can't believe a mother saying that to a daughter, or a wife to a husband."
The standard talk show scenario is simple: the injured party vents her spleen at the offender, who then denies the offense, flings back a charge of even greater magnitude, or simply shrugs. Meanwhile, the show producers try to create ever greater spectacles of even worse offenses and even less shame.
It's easy to dismiss talk show guests as the victims of some peculiar attention deficit disorder, willing to sell their most private thoughts, feelings, wounds and misdeeds for 15 seconds of fame. "In talk shows, we see people to whom we feel superior make fools of themselves," Elshtain says. "I think it's an ugly phenomenon: 'Let's gawk at the geeks.'"
Such shameless guests help the rest of us soothe our consciences about our lesser foibles. But the guests themselves are not precisely shameless, as they attempt to heap shame on those who have abused or disappointed them, in a tape loop of ethical jujitsu.
Wendy Kaminer, author of I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, believes the talk show phenomenon grows out of the U.S. tradition of revival meetings. The host takes the place of the evangelist, and the guests stand up and give testimony of past sins. Most of those sins, however, were committed by someone else. "People don't get up on Oprah and say, 'I've sinned,'" Kaminer says. "The focus was never on their own behavior and always on the behavior of other people towards them. They're not confessing, they're complaining. But it's complaint in the form of testimony."
Even when you're confessing your own sins, penitence is no longer a requirement in the talk show revival tent. The simple act of "being honest" about some heinous deed is considered penance enough. "It's a bastardization of the revival tradition," Kaminer comments. "It's the idea that salvation comes simply from the act of confession."
"That's just cheap grace," Elshtain adds bluntly. "That's bargain-basement salvation."
The anti-shamers say our public lack of remorse is merely a cover-up for the overwhelming burden of shame we carry within us. We are ashamed of our looks, our clothes, our incomes, our cars -- everything that lets others know we don't measure up to society's standards. We are ashamed of our parents' mistakes and our children's missteps. We are even, sometimes, ashamed of our own shortcomings and sins.
The problem, psychologist Kaufman says, is that the experience of shame is so painful we can't bear to bring it out into the open. "People can appear shameless and still be riddled with shame."
That may be why so many people feel acute shame about things that were done to them. The shame of rape victims and abused children can be unbearable, despite all rational explanations that they've done nothing wrong. When they've been subjected to an act so shameful and confronted a perpetrator so apparently shameless, there's so much unclaimed shame left floating in the air that it has to land somewhere.
The trouble is that many psychologists make little distinction between unearned shame and shame that is richly deserved. The culture of psychotherapy has long embraced the idea of being value-neutral. The I'm OK, You're OK philosophy glides serenely over the reality that sometimes we all behave in ways that are clearly not OK.
Therapy defines social and moral misbehavior as behavior disorders that need treatment. Patients are urged to free themselves from the feeling of shame, without scrutinizing their consciences about the shame they have brought on themselves.
Taken to extremes, the idea of norm-free therapy is laughable. "If a guy comes into a therapist's office to confess he's just strangled somebody and feels kind of bad about it, and the therapist helps him understand that the sense of shame he's feeling about murder is very destructive, and that he is after all a good person engaged in a bad act -- if the guy gets up, says `Thanks, Doc, I feel a lot better,' I'm not sure that therapist has done his job," Kaminer comments. But how is that different, in essence, from a therapist who helps patients free themselves of the deserved shame of committing adultery or of neglecting a sick friend?
Shame can be misguided, but it can also be a valuable compass, pointing us away from evil behavior and letting us know when we've fallen off the path. Shame may be toxic, but it resembles the toxin in a vaccine: too much may kill you, but the proper amount confers lifelong protection.
So we have no recourse when we confront behavior, in ourselves and others, that is flatly not OK. We can't admit that we've done wrong, can't allow ourselves to experience and profit from our shame. And that leaves us with no empathy toward the shame of others. When others expose their wrongdoing, we try desperately to define their behavior as a psychological disorder. If we can't, we draw away as though they carry a moral plague.
That's why we eagerly define ourselves as victims. As a society, we have decided that victims should feel no shame, neither for the wrongs done to them nor the wrongs that they, because of past or present victimhood, have inflicted on others. Thus we see the Menendez brothers pleading (shamelessly) that their parents' alleged abuse justified -- even necessitated -- their own murderous attacks.
"One of the benefits of victimhood is that you don't ever have to say you're sorry," Kaminer says. "You're not responsible. That's contributed to the competition to see who's been victimized the most."
And what an unforgiving bunch of victims we are. Because our victimhood lets us off all moral hooks, we never have to seek forgiveness from others. And, never having been forgiven, we can't forgive. If we, as "survivors," forgive those who have hurt us and try to forge new emotional bonds with them, we're not showing Christian forgiveness; we're just in denial.
Only the one who has been hurt can forgive, and we can be forgiven only by admitting the wrong we have done and asking for pardon. That process forces us to look those we've wronged full in the face and see exactly what harm we have done. It is the prerogative of the injured party to decide whether our remorse is real and what we must do to make amends.
"People don't want to ask other people for forgiveness, because they don't want to admit authority outside themselves," Marino says. "So they try to short-circuit the process and forgive themselves." We prefer to beg forgiveness in absentia. On the therapist's couch, we may make a perfect act of contrition to an empty chair we name ex-wife or mother, reaching closure ventriloquist-fashion when we help the chair say the words of pardon we think we deserve.
Part of the problem is that we have lost our belief in God's forgiveness, so a human who refuses to grant pardon leaves us with nowhere to turn. That's why we try to usurp God's place and forgive ourselves. "That could be blasphemous, to think you can wash away your own sins and make yourself over again," Marino says. But unable to trust in God's forgiveness and unwilling to seek forgiveness from our brothers, what other course do we have?
General Powell's notion of a culture of shame held a kernel of truth: We do need to embrace the ideal of shared values, a culture based on clear-cut notions of morality. "Shame requires some set of standards, some set of norms," Elshtain says. "When people transgress those, it's appropriate to feel shame." But as members of society, we must think carefully about what those standards should be. We need to agree that we hold the collective right to punish the immoral and unethical, but we also need to make sure our standards do not inflict equal penalties on the eccentric or the extraordinary.
Just as importantly, we need to realize that we all commit shameful acts, and we all must seek forgiveness. Too often, the politicians who call for a return to shame focus their opprobrium on the poor and powerless, pointing their fingers at 14-year-old welfare mothers while happily accepting campaign contributions from corporate presidents sporting trophy wives. "The most powerful people should recognize shame as part of their responsibility," declares Claire L. Gaudiani, president of Connecticut College, who speaks and writes on shame. "They would set a good example by identifying areas where they feel shame, admitting they've done wrong, and asking for the help of others in doing better in the future. That's not such a horrible set of things to say."
We also have to widen our definition of shame, so that we take some moral responsibility for the actions of our peers and our communities. Instead of circling the wagons, the doctors in a community should express shame when one of their number commits malpractice, and the journalists should admit fault when a peer defames someone unjustly. "Our society doesn't expect the powerful to come to grips with the full range of their responsibilities to the lives of others," notes Gaudiani, who received an honorary doctorate from Notre Dame in 1996. "If they don't insist on some kind of restitution from a person who has shamed the community, then it causes the less powerful to lose trust in the system that frames our community life."
If we accept shame as a necessity in a just society, none of us will be spared its sting. That's a painful prospect. But we cannot try to pass off a culture of shaming as a culture of shame. Shame humbles us all, and if we cannot bear our own humility, we cannot rightly expect it of others. A true culture of shame would be a culture of empathy, with each of us connected by our shared experiences of shame and redemption.
In a culture of grace, shame is a perilous gift. Shame is the mirror to our secret souls; when we look into that reflection, we have the choice of smashing the mirror or reshaping our selves.