Lately I've seen some advertisements for workshops purporting to be in the service of banishing shame from people's lives. The reasoning seems to be something like "If it feels bad, it must be bad". I think this is a gross simplification, perhaps to help people or perhaps to provide a salable product. I propose to take a deeper look at shame and how it functions.
Firstly, shame is a phenomenon that only exists in group settings. If you were hopelessly alone on an island in the middle of an ocean, would shame be relevant to your experience? Would you blush if you were nude in the open? Would remembering some social gaffe you perpetrated earlier in your life embarrass you? Probably not. If you were giving a lecture to a hundred people and discovered that your fly was unzipped (assuming only for the moment that you are male) or loudly farted, would you be humiliated?
Shame appears when the unacceptable behavior is known to other people in your group. To feel shame you would have to have done something others in your group would find unacceptable. When you are a young adolescent, for instance, wearing the "wrong thing" can be catastophically shameful. If nobody notices you would not be embarrassed.
Shame is experienced when we deviate too far from the norms of our group. Partially it includes fear, fear of rejection in the form of being laughed at or jeered. It is an emotion that operates to push our behavior back within the range of acceptance of our group. It encourages conformity to our particular group norms. Deviating from the norms of a group to which we do not belong is not shaming. Something in us tells us that being excluded from our group is awful-bad-dangerous. We are urged to change our behavior to fit in. Think of The Scarlet Letter, for instance.
What happens in a world in which there is no shame? There is nothing to encourage conformity. There are few prohibited behaviors, and we can do pretty much what we want. But do we want to live in a shameless society? We would be confronted with behavior that is now strictly prohibited. We would live in a world in which little is forbidden other than those things we prohibit by law. Our behaviors would be wildly divergent. Breaking the law would still have consequences, but shame would not be among them.
It would be a lot like it is now, only more so, wouldn't it? I leave you to decide if this is a good thing.
