Monday, January 07, 2019

The function of shame

In recent years there has been somewhat of a movement in the direction of treating "shame" as a bad, neurotic, harmful sort of thing.  It is treated as an illness, something to be eliminated or to be recovered from.  It seems to me that this view of shame as a pathology ignores the positive and useful aspects of it.

What does "shame" do for us?  It seems to me that shame is a group function whose purpose is to emotionally motivate an errant or deviant member of the group to change their behavior so as to conform with the group norm.  Shame is an unpleasant experience, of course, that being its point.  It is perhaps the primary force intended to produce conformity.  (Conformity to a group's norms, of course, is one of the characteristic elements defining the boundaries of group membership).

It is frequently important to a group to establish its identity by publicly displayed behaviors or dress.  The threat that shame poses to an errant member is that of being expelled from the group.  The threat is not just to the errant behavior, but to the identity or self, and therefore is experienced as a depressive event.  As a result, the experience of shame has elements of depression as well as of anxiety.

When we try to imagine a "shameless" society, we picture a group of people whose behavior is totally without regard to the norms or standards of ours.  Certainly we are most likely to imagine a group whose norms are very different from ours.  We find ourselves "shocked" or repulsed by their behaviors.  Historically, when this has occurred, we have attempted to "shame" the others into conforming to our behavioral norms.

Instances of "shameful" (or aberrant) behavior by an individual may be defined by their group  as "sick" or "insane" or even "evil".  The norms that an individual violates usually have little to do with realistic limits, and are frequently irrational or unreasonable.  The shaming carried out by a group can be personal, aggressive or even violent, and may not be proportional to the offense.

Interestingly, people with untreated schizophrenia have great difficulty in understanding or conforming to the norms of the groups to which they belong.  An individual might dress or behave in a bizarre fashion and experience no discomfort from the disapproving or shaming behavior of others.   In fact, as such individuals get older, their behavior may depart more and more from the local norms, since they experience  no shaming force to cause them to comply by modifying their behavior.

Sometimes the norms of the group have (or had, at least at one time) a rational basis.  But the real motive force behind a group norm is to identify the group, keep it separate from other groups, and to make it readily identifiable.  There is nothing rational about clothing norms, for instance,  but they are highly important to specific groups of people.

Currently there has been a sort of rebellion against "body shaming".  People who are obese experience instances in which a group rejects or shames them for their body shape.  Ostensibly this shaming is based on health issues and sexual attractiveness, and is expected to provide pressures for the obese person to conform by losing weight.  It is rarely effective, however, and almost always painful to the object.

But without shame, why would we conform to the norms of our social groups?  We would have no manners, no etiquette, no rules for acceptable public behavior.  Many people would say we are moving in that direction fairly rapidly already.  Without shaming, there would be little to stop the drift into ungoverned public behavior.

However, while shame may have its uses in producing conformity and rules, it does so through producing discomfort and unhappiness in the person shamed.  When the shamed behavior is out of the control of the individual, the shaming is only damaging and hurtful.  For instance, "making fun" of an individual with a physical or intellectual defect is obviously a hurtful thing to do.  It can't produce conformity, which is not in the realm of possibility for the shamed person.

A more serious instance is in the case of the individual who shames themselves on the basis of what they consider unacceptable behavior.   As a result, they emotionally expel themselves from their group. What makes this more serious is that the group from which they think of themselves as deviant, from which they deserve expulsion, is the human race itself. They withdraw and isolate themselves and ultimately may become suicidal as their ultimate non-membership.

Individuals whose behavior or characteristics are the subject of shame may prefer to view their non-conformance as "not their fault", i.e. something out of their control and thus not be subject to shaming.  Sometimes that is true, but sometimes it is an attempt to justify behavior that the subject knows is aberrant and probably not acceptable to their group, so they believe they can be granted an "exception".

The more "exceptions", the less potent shaming can be as a force producing conformity in manners and behavior.  Too much shame has produced in the past societies with rigid and narrow standards of behavior.  And too little shaming produces a society whose standards are rude and "uncivilized".  Which direction do you think preferable?