Shame and consent

Casey Chalk writes at The Federalist,

the Left has been appropriating shame to serve its ideological objectives for generations.

Psychoanalyst Joseph Burgo, writing for the Washington Post, observes that the #MeToo movement is a bit ironic, given that “shame has increasingly come to be viewed as a repressive force whose shackles must be thrown off.” Indeed, the progressivist agenda counsels everyone to “feel no shame,” whether they be “gay or transgender or overweight; having had an abortion; having survived rape or childhood sexual abuse; or struggling with mental illness or addiction.”

...liberals have certainly employed shame for certain pet causes, usually related to environmentalism or the sexual revolution.

...The effects of divorce are a huge drain on our nation’s wealth and resources. If the United States enjoyed the same level of family stability today as it did in 1960, one sociologist has estimated that the nation would have 750,000 fewer children repeating grades, 1.2 million fewer school suspensions, approximately 500,000 fewer acts of teenage delinquency, about 600,000 fewer kids receiving therapy, and about 70,000 fewer suicide attempts every year. Wilcox’s research has found similar detrimental effects caused by cohabitation.

Yet our culture, media, and dominant institutions have not only abandoned any kind of shame attached to divorce, cohabitation, or other deleterious side-effects of the sexual revolution (e.g. abortion on demand, pornography); we promote them as an intrinsic part of our freedom to pursue our own life goals and self-actualization.

Curiously, the only elements of the sexual revolution mainstream culture seem focused on attacking are those perceived to violate consent — harassment, rape, etc. Even here the hypocrisy runs deep: children from divorced families don’t consent to broken homes; the approximately 650,000 American babies aborted every year don’t consent to their conception or subsequent murder; and most parents have not consented to a culture where children are exposed on average to pornography at the age of 11.

...Ironically enough, far removed from the Enlightenment and its attempts to remove the shackles of institutional religion’s influence on society, modern experts are (seemingly unknowingly) taking their cues from the tactics of pre-modern Christian societies. Forms of shame — both public and internal — are now good and useful. So is public penance and ultimately, forgiveness (although one wonders why darlings of the Left like Al Franken are being forgiven so quickly). If only liberals had a principled means of applying shame, we might actually be able to cooperate on a vision of the common good for all Americans.

Read more here.

Ashamed of things we can't help?

Ann Voskamp writes today,

...“Don’t you think the things people are most ashamed of are things they can’t help?”― C.S. Lewis

Sometimes — and there really are times — that you can’t help where you’re broken, you can’t help how the story turned out, you can’t help how things fell apart and you got banged and busted up. And shame about the things you can’t help — helps you the least.

I can trace the truth of it:

Shame of scars can scar worse than the original scars.

Shame of being broken can break us worse than being broken.

And I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to know, but I’ve felt it in the marrow of my bones:

We can live with the pain of brokenness… what can slay us is the shame of brokenness. We can live with the pain of brokenness… what can slay us is the shame of brokenness.

Maybe on the days we want out of our lives — it isn’t so much that we want to die from shame, but hide from shame.

Read more here.

Why is the Middle East falling apart?

Stuart Scheiderman writes at Had Enough Therapy,

The Middle East is falling apart because it failed to modernize, failed to adopt free enterprise solutions to its economic problems and failed to function according to the rules and norms of a liberal democracy.

... Such is the issue in the Middle East, where Israel’s neighbors take its success to be the problem. They would do better to see Israel as a beacon showing them the way to improve their societies and their living conditions.

Now, however, many of these people do not know how to deal with the shame they feel when they see how Israelis live. They believe that Israeli success shows them to be failures and they believe that they must destroy it to restore their self-esteem. After all, this is a culture that believes that best way to restore family honor when a teenage daughter is caught holding hands with a boy is to murder her. They hold to fanatical beliefs, not because they do not feel connected to others within their community, but because the world seems to have passed them by. They cannot accept that their culture and their religion need a serious reformation.

Read more here.

The role of shame in modern society

What role does shame play in your life? Megan McArdle writes about it at Bloomberg View:

...shame doesn't just punish wrongdoers; it also turns us into our own moral enforcers. Once we've been shamed, we are strongly motivated to avoid doing the things that brought it on. Or at least, most of us are -- one of the hallmarks of sociopaths is that they don't feel shame or remorse. To paraphrase Gordon Gekko, shame is good. Shame is right. Shame works.

So we need shame. The problem is, maybe we don't always need so much of it.

...it's a lot easier to imagine the worst of some faceless stranger -- and to say rather incivil things yourself.

...Memories Pizza ended up not by closing up shop and issuing a tearful apology, but trying to figure out what to do with the donations that poured in. The public shaming didn't change anyone's mind on gay marriage, or even make it extra-costly to operate an establishment that won't cater gay weddings; it just hardened each side in their respective positions.

If we want shaming to be restorative -- to help us create and enforce better norms in a broad community -- then it needs to come paired with charity and forgiveness. Shame-storms rarely offer either; the shame is administered, then the storm drizzles away, leaving only a terrified victim and Google's memory of our momentary collective outrage. Without the mercy and restraint of the small community, it can too easily become nothing more than a particularly destructive way to pass an idle moment.

Read more here.