Development Note #13
It seems, almost everywhere you look, people are becoming angrier and more aggressive. Reports of unruly airline passengers have increased. So have incidents of road rage, threats to politicians, and workplace and school violence. Within many countries, political and cultural divisions sharpen by the year, and tensions between nations regularly spill into open hostility.
Contributing factors to aggression include social isolation and depression, and economic inequality. Those might be some of the roots of aggression, but what of the internal reactions—like regret—and external forces—like shame—that can work to check anger and aggression? In earlier eras, in response to the cruelty or indifference of the local culture, writers like Charles Dickens and George Orwell created works such as A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, 1984, and Down and Out in Paris and London. These books became classics, in part, because they appealed to a shared moral sensibility—an instinctive recognition of justice and injustice that goes beyond reason and touches something deeper.
When people witness an event that is clearly wrong, there can be a community-wide reaction. In the past, in communities where people lived in closer proximity and interacted in-person and with more regularity, neighbors were more likely to notice injustices, feel discomfort, talk about the issue, and come together to offer a response. Of course this still happens. But do we expect it to happen or are we surprised when it does?
Before the electronic age, people primarily learned about right and wrong through the people around them—parents, teachers, neighbors, local leaders. It wasn’t a formal curriculum; it was absorbed through daily life, a shared social contract of the community. Society was oriented inward, toward the people we actually lived among, not toward distant personalities on screens.
Moral sentiments act as quiet guides—helping us distinguish between what is good and what might cause harm. Without them, individual behavior and national behavioral norms alike can go dangerously off course. Ideally, wrongdoing should stir something inside us—an internal alarm. But when moral sensibilities—like shame—are weakened, it can become easier to follow the a morally-conflicted path.
Shame: as benefit, or as liability?
Among social consequences, shame is one of the most powerful. It can keep us honest, accountable, connected… and make us feel miserable. Shame is not something we want triggered by every small mistake we make. However, in some cases, if we don’t allow our actions to be checked by the fear of feeling shame, we can make mistakes that harm people.
Our current social structures are organized around the avoidance of shame. Where we should feel shame, we seem incapable of feeling it at all. Our culture—people, institutions, and public figures alike—often reacts to moral failings not with remorse, but with defiance, distraction, or indifference.
Politicians never make mistakes, companies never sell products that harm us, and government policies are always positioned as providing assistance where they are most needed. Failures to do the right thing, rather than resulting in a public reckoning, are instead covered up, often with aggressive behavior (People should not feel shame for being poor, but government officials should feel shame for not helping to eliminate poverty and its consequences).
The ability to feel and express shame is not taught to us the way we learn math, science, or history. An official learns to be indifferent to poverty through cultural norms. Modern society has decided that feeling shame and expressing regret are weaknesses. We now have a global culture that prizes strength above all else: “might makes right.” In conflict, there is no middle ground: you either win or lose, but regardless of the outcome, show no remorse.
Strength comes not from shutting down emotion, but from facing what makes us feel fragile. When people become isolated or are disconnected, they can increase their defenses and reduce their ability to experience vulnerability. The antidote to this defended position is human connection—to allow for the feeling of shame when we need to feel it, and to allow for recovery from our transgression.
As a society, we have ignored shame to the degree that we now have fewer checks and balances for behaviors we should find abhorrent. In part, we have gotten to this state of affairs by disallowing the human connections necessary to promote healthy social interactions—we don’t know ourselves the same way we used to. We need greater social connections. It is through being connected socially within a healthy community that we are able to feel healthy shame when we mistreat or neglect each other; shame that inspires us to act and not hide. The feeling of shame, so objectively unpleasant to the individual, can be beneficial for the social structure of a community.