Unpacking the Deadly Politics of Shame
Source: Édouard Moyse
(Note From the Future: While I think this article has a lot of cool research, I do not agree with its conclusions anymore. See Historically, Shame Has (Sometimes) Been A Good Thing to read more about how I think today.)
I want to tell you about the time I almost died because of the shame of others. After a long shift, I was eating dinner at Whole Foods — one of the cheapest venues in the upscale neighborhood where I happened to work. I had taken a seat in the upstairs section amongst the plastic tables and chairs they set aside for shoppers to eat, scarfing down food I had hastily purchased from the hot bar.
I had not eaten lunch that day. I was so incredibly hungry that I swallowed a piece of Mongolian beef whole. It lodged in my throat, and I immediately started to choke. I couldn’t breathe, flailing about in my seat, watching people watch me die. No one approached me to help, and one person I scanned in the crowd was even someone I knew — an ex I had ghosted several weeks ago. I remember him looking at me, and then we both immediately looked away — embarrassed to be seeing an ex. So embarrassed I might die.
I didn’t approach any of these people either. Knowing I would have to vomit the food out, I proceeded to stumble to the bathroom — a thing they advise choking victims never to do. Thousands of people die from choking every year. If I had not been a former alcoholic who knew how to vomit on command, I might have joined them on that Whole Foods floor — too ashamed to inconvenience others with the continuation of my own existence.
As I emerged from the bathroom, I found a woman waiting for me at the door. Like many others, she had noticed something was not right, but she had not checked in on me because I was in the men’s room. It was a social custom she was not willing to circumvent, even if it meant my death, and so she waited by the door, hoping everything would sort itself out.
I told her I had been choking, and she hung her head in shame.
“I almost died,” I shouted to everyone in the room. Most were not even paying attention to me, having been trained to look away after a lifetime of uncomfortable encounters.
Even small social barriers can snowball into another's death. Many pointless social conventions were standing between the crowd and me: the norm to avoid people causing a scene in public; the norm to not inconvenience others; the norm to not cross gender lines; the norm to avoid bothering a lover who has spurned us.
Our society is united in a shared sense of shame, and it leads to a lot of needless death. Or, more succinctly, we use our customs — and the shame they are psychologically rooted in — as a justification for why we do not intervene in, or in some cases, even perpetuate others’ suffering. The politics of shame focuses not on emancipation or accountability but on subjugating a class of people through humiliation.
Like most worthwhile fields in academia, the debate over shame, or the intense embarrassment and humiliation we feel at ourselves for violating a social norm we believe in, is contentious.
Some have put forth the idea that shame is a social construct that is not present at birth and instead takes roots as we, as individuals, gain more self-awareness. This theory proposes that we start with primary emotions (e.g., joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, etc.) and develop exposed emotions (e.g., embarrassment, envy, empathy) and evaluative emotions (e.g., pride, shame, guilt, embarrassment, etc.) over time as the rules and standards of society become perceived by us.
Others advocate for the concept that shame is a product of our evolutionary psychology. People in this camp believe that it's an evolved process that happens when certain conditions have been met, such as losing perceived status, which under this branch of thought, we have a natural inclination to obtain. Some scholarship has even argued there may be a link between shame and the base emotion of disgust, casting doubt that we do not have a natural inclination for shame.
Regardless of where you stand on the matter, it’s not really disputed that the source of shame is contextual, from culture to culture and even person to person. The scholar Michael Lewis gives the example of a test, saying that a student's expectations of the results pattern whether or not they feel shame. An 85 may be an excellent grade for one person and suboptimal for another. The level of shame depends on the norms and expectations the individual has internalized.
When discussing my own near-death experience, something that might be brought up is the Bystander Effect, a well-documented concept in psychology claiming that people are less likely to intervene in an incident if others are present. The research on this appears to be holding, though the extent and application of this theory are argued about at length. People do have a desire to resolve conflict — that woman did approach me upon leaving the bathroom — but social customs also limit that intervention. Norms told her that she could not go into the men’s bathroom, which conflicted with her feelings of empathy, telling her to save my life. People feel shame over intervening (or not intervening) in an incident for distinct cultural and personal reasons, and, as we shall soon see, that emotional basis can become deadly.
To bring this point home, I want to examine the incident that caused public interest in the Bystander Effect — the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City. Genovese was a woman who was robbed, raped, and then stabbed to death outside her apartment building in Queens. 37 people, the story goes, allegedly watched or listened to the incident and did nothing to stop the attack. 37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police; Apathy at Stabbing of Queens Woman Shocks Inspector, went the title for an infamous New York Times story. The reporting at the time earned national attention by intellectualizing this incident as a part of human nature.
In retrospect, however, it's more complicated. The Times relied on an exaggerated police figure for the number of witnesses, and it's doubtful that everyone saw the incident directly. One woman, Sophia Farrar, rushed out of the building, cradling the dead Genovese in her arms, screaming out for someone to call the police. While the attack was on Austin Steet, another man opened his window and screamed at the attacker to ‘’Leave that girl alone!’’ While the Bystander Effect may make it less likely that an individual will intervene, that doesn’t mean that someone in the collective will not intervene in some capacity.
And of those that refused to intervene, it had less to do with human nature and more about the cultural norms preventing them from doing so directly. There was an obvious gendered element that accompanied this murder. Genovese and her murderer could be mistaken for a woman and man fighting at night, and that dynamic, especially during the far more conservative 1960s, was seen as normal. Several people in the Genovese case mentioned that they did not interject themselves into the fight because they thought it was a “lovers’ quarrel.” In the words of Sarah Kaplan in the Washington Post:
“Like some of Genovese’s neighbors, [the police] may have taken the woman’s screams for a lover’s quarrel that didn’t warrant their intervention. In 1964, marital rape was not a crime in New York, and domestic violence cases — in the rare instance where they were prosecuted — were considered in family, rather than criminal, courts. Beating would not become grounds for divorce for another two years.”
From a glance, it’s so easy to label the lack of intervention in the Genovese case as intrinsic to human nature, but the norms that restrained some of these bystanders were contextual. Some people ignored the fight because they were taught to prioritize the privacy of a romantic partnership over the potential harm done within that relationship— the comfort of not having to intervene in other’s affairs over the safety of a potential abuse victim. As Scholar Rebecca Solnit remarks in her essay A Short History of Silence, the same week of the incident, the United Press International ran a story about how a judge in Cleveland thought: “it’s all right for a husband to give his wife a black eye and knock out one of her teeth if she stays out too late.”
We actually see this bystander logic play out a lot in abusive relationships. Whether romantic or platonic, familial or fraternal, we treat partnerships in the United States as atomized spheres that perceived outsiders should not interfere with. How many times have you heard, in response to saying that a relationship is potentially abusive, that “it’s not our place to judge?” often being paraphrased directly from the bible verse “Judge not, lest ye be judged” (Matt 7:1). “Don’t judge someone’s Relationship…It’s their relationship, not yours,” reads one popular Facebook post. “Don’t tell me how to parent,” goes the title of a ranty mommy blog. The shame being employed by these posters is not to stop potential abusers but rather to keep people out of others' relationships.
Ignoring unhealthy relationships, however, has costs. The CDC estimated in 2015 that 1 in 4 women and 1 in 10 men would face some form of intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. Nearly 700,000 children in the US have officially documented cases of mistreatment a year, and the true number is expected to be well higher than that. Atomized relationships are not immune from abuse, and yet there are norms in our society pushing us to ignore potential red flags, which of course, lead to greater harm, and they are rooted in shame.
When you get down to many of the cultural norms we have talked about so far, a lot of them seem to prioritize comfort and inaction over the safety of others: the ability for a shopper to eat unperturbed by another person’s suffering, an onlooker not having to bother themselves with the childrearing of a parent; the building resident comfortably rationalizing why to ignore the screams outside. Shame, in these instances, seems to be propelling people to inaction, or worse, callous disregard, rather than preserving another’s life.
Shame is not always the best motivator for pushing people to action. It can sometimes become toxic, leading to intense self-loathing that is internalized to the point that it alters our self-image. We begin to develop shame-based beliefs that essentialize us as a person (e.g., I'm stupid, I’m a failure, I’m a bad person, etc.). Eventually, these beliefs don’t have to be triggered by an external event and can be brought on by our own thoughts of shame or the fear of experiencing shame.
When organizations have tried to use shame as a basis for intervention, its effects have often been devastating to those on the receiving end. Although we have focused on largely interpersonal dynamics, it should be rather obvious that this emotion can problematically be the foundation of a movement or even an entire society’s politics.
And when that happens, the body count quickly rises.
When I think of the politics of shame, the most obvious example comes from the pop culture hit Game of Thrones (2011— 2019). There is an infamous subplot where the machiavellian character Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) allies with the religious High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce), only for him to subvert her control of the Westerosian capital of King’s Landing. He gets the poorer residents to rally behind him, and how he does that is through a combination of populist politics and shame.
Due to Cersei's influence, the High Sparrow, now the High Septon, reinstitutes the Faith Militant — a group of deputized followers under his command who enforce the Faith of the Seven doctrine. The High Sparrow uses his followers to impose the traditional laws of the Faith of the Seven on lowborn and highborn alike, leading to public trials where nobles confess their sins and receive punishment. He creates a government that, at its face, is centered on rooting out sin.
Sin is technically about judging the immorality of an individual's actions. It is not about shame at all but guilt, a similar, though slightly different emotion. As Annette Kämmerer writes in the Scientific American of the difference between guilt and shame:
“People often speak of shame and guilt as if they were the same, but they are not. Like shame, guilt occurs when we transgress moral, ethical or religious norms and criticize ourselves for it. The difference is that when we feel shame, we view ourselves in a negative light (“I did something terrible!”), whereas when we feel guilt, we view a particular action negatively (“I did something terrible!”). We feel guilty because our actions affected someone else, and we feel responsible.”
Yet, these two emotions are not mutually exclusive, with people sometimes experiencing both simultaneously. The High Sparrow, for all his divine intentions, weaponizes both guilt and shame. In one infamous scene, he has Cersei Lannister perform a walk of shame across the city's main street. Her hair is cut short, and a woman rings a bell behind her, yelling the word shame over and over again. The citizens of King’s Landing throw both vegetables and the vilest of profanities at her.
This scene can be seen replicated throughout history. The word shame was yelled repeatedly by anti-Trump protestors during the late 2010s. It can also be heard in the protests against former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in April of 2006, at Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for failing to institute a mask mandate, and so much more. It doesn’t even have to make sense or be too serious. Protestors yelled “shame” outside the headquarters of People Magazine for failing to label Ryan Gosling the sexiest man alive back in 2011.
Our very recent history has been one of demonizing political and cultural rivals, not just for their actions (i.e., guilt), but for being bad people (i.e., shame). The politics of shame do not just become the basis for words or inaction, but discriminatory policies that punish people for being intrinsically bad. We need to look no further than the Church of our world.
For example, the Inquisition was a series of institutions during the middle ages through the twentieth century where the Catholic church tried to root out sin, usually heresy — a catchall designation for anything the Church (and those using religiosity for political means) disagreed with. The Inquisition demonized entire swathes of people as much as it focused on any particular sin. Muslims, Roma, and Jewish people were often targeted for their faith, and laws were passed to discriminate and expel those who did not convert from whatever land the Inquisition operated within.
During the later half of the Spanish Inquisition (1478 — 1834 CE), punishments for practicing outside Catholicism were severe, including torture and capital punishment. Executions could often be a public spectacle called auto-da-fé or “act of faith.” These were a combination of religious ceremony and public sentencing that often took place in a main square and were surrounded by much pomp and circumstance. The guilty were often dressed up to represent their alleged sin, as the Inquisition attempted to extract a public confession. Although some autos-da-fé were non-lethal, many ended in ritualized burnings at the stake for all to see.
It was not simply non-Catholics who were affected by the Inquisition, either. To sniff out “fake” moriscos (i.e., former Muslims who had converted to Catholicism under the threat of force) and conversos (i.e., the same, but for former Jewish people), attendance for church and religious events was mandatory. Neighbors were encouraged to spy on each other, and those who did not engage in this activity could face penalties. This focus on ascertaining everyone’s guilt led to a lot of shame, as people wondered if they seemed like “good” Catholics.
Much like Cersei Lannister walking through the streets of King’s Landing, members of the Inquisition legalized this shame as a form of punishment. “Verguenza publica,” or public shamings, happened frequently. The accused was typically sentenced to ride a steed, usually a donkey, through town while their transgressions were read aloud to onlookers. The choice of steed was purposeful as the accused was meant to feel humiliated and ashamed of having to ride an ass through their community. They would also usually have to wear a hat known as a coroza, which were sometimes painted with the sin they had allegedly committed, as well as a garment named a sanbenito that they had to wear as a mark of infamy for a set duration of time.
This impulse to capitalize on shame as a form of punishment has never really gone away, though the target has evolved over the years. We even see this religiosity today in how doxxing (i.e., when someone’s private information is released to the public) or harassment campaigns are used by people online to punish those who have crossed perceived social lines, and are now considered to be morally compromised.
Harassment campaigns can theoretically be used to pressure an abusive person from a position of power or for an entity to adopt certain reforms, but they are often not so targeted. The primary objective of an overwhelming majority of them is to punish people for violating certain social norms, or, if we are being particularly dramatic, for committing certain “sins,” and then dragging the accused through the private-public square that is the Internet so that they feel deep humiliation and shame. Shame is not the byproduct but the goal.
As we saw during the Inquisition, these accusations do not have to target a powerful person or even be true. In one infamous example back in 2010, an 11-year-old was slut-shamed for allegedly having sex with a member of the band Blood on the Dance Floor. Since the band member, Dahvie Vanity, was 25 at the time, this would have constituted statutory rape. Indeed he has been accused by over 20 women of assault and is currently under investigation by the FBI.
Dahvie Vanity, however, was not the target of this Internet mob. Again, the target was an 11-year-old who was his alleged victim. This child, who was prolific online, would go on to make a tearful response video that got interrupted by an angry tirade from her father, who said the much-mocked line “You done goofed.” His tirade only egged on his child's harassers. Much like the equally infamous Leave Britney Alone video, it became an object of mockery and ridicule as harassers shared, memefied, and remixed it.
In the midst of all this harassment, the information of the child and their family was released to the public by trolls. The family endured multiple death threats and other forms of harassment as a result, yet part of the emphasis remained on the inappropriate behavior of the 11-year-old. “Why so much profanity in the videos?” a reporter asks the kid in an ABC exclusive.
Every year millions of people report being victims of online harassment. The major drive behind these behaviors is varied. People join in harassment campaigns because they don’t know how to regulate their own emotions or they are not worried about consequences, but regardless of the individual cause, in most (though not all circumstances), it does not appear to be a desire for justice or reform. The end goal is that the target feels humiliated and ashamed. No objective is met other than that the attacker takes glee in their victim's misfortune.
The weaponization of shame has been a consistent force in the political world. It’s not only used as a pretext for why people turn a blind eye to other’s suffering, but a justification used to discriminate, maim, and kill perceived offenders.
It’s a deadly tool, and we have to ask ourselves: is it worth it?
When I was choking on that bathroom floor, I was deeply ashamed of myself. “Is this really going to be the way I die?” I thought. My self-image was so toxic that I was more worried about the fear of experiencing shame over preserving my own life.
I have almost died several times, and although I retain some blame for my decisions, I have learned to be less and less hard on myself as the years have progressed. Every near-death experience was preceded by hundreds of different eyes looking away in embarrassment and shame: too exhausted to deal with a person emotionally breaking down; too embarrassed to deal with the discomfort of someone suffering in front of them; too ashamed to inconvenience another’s relationship.
The politics of shame are old, and they are centered on a characteristic that is integral to the human experience. Shame is an emotion, like any other, and I don’t believe it's helpful to shame people for having shame. We need to recognize that human beings are inclined to feel this, but that doesn’t mean it is a good basis for politics. In fact, shame seems to be a pretty destructive foundation for political organization. It is an emotion that demands self-flagellation and punishment over accountability and understanding.
Some would argue that it's the source of our shame that is the problem. Rather than building a world where we feel shame for inconveniencing others or violating Christian or conservative norms, we need to create a world where people feel deep shame for racism, sexism, wealth inequality, and the like.
As we have already covered, however, shame is often divorced from empathy. It forces the accused to look inwards rather than focus on how their actions have hurt others, which can be a selfish and paralyzing feeling. It does not necessarily lead to self-improvement where the shamed tries to minimize the reasons for that feeling, but rather to wallow in how bad someone is as a person. That feeling may be great for authoritarian governments who want to immobilize public action against them, but it's not the best for those who want to genuinely improve things.
If we want to build a world where fewer people are dying alone on a cold street or floor, we need to build politics of empathy and understanding over self-flagellation and retribution — and there is nothing shameful about that.