THE RANGE OF SHAME
Shame
by Vern Rutsala
This is the shame of the woman whose hand hides
her smile because her teeth are so bad, not the grand
self-hate that leads some to razors or pills
or swan dives off beautiful bridges however
tragic that is. This is the shame of being yourself,
of being ashamed of where you live and what
your father’s paycheck lets you eat and wear.
This is the shame of the fat and the bald,
the unbearable blush of acne, the shame of having
no lunch money and pretending you’re not hungry.
This is the shame of concealed sickness—diseases
too expensive to afford that offer only their cold
one-way ticket out. This is the shame of being ashamed,
the self-disgust of the cheap wine drunk, the lassitude
that makes junk accumulate, the shame that tells
you there is another way to live but you are
too dumb to find it. This is the real shame, the damned
shame, the crying shame, the shame that’s criminal,
the shame of knowing words like “glory” are not
in your vocabulary though they litter the Bibles
you’re still paying for. This is the shame of not
knowing how to read and pretending you do. This is
the shame that makes you afraid to leave your house,
the shame of food stamps at the supermarket when
the clerk shows impatience as you fumble with the change.
This is the shame of dirty underwear, the shame
of pretending your father works in an office
as God intended all men to do. This is the shame
of asking friends to let you off in front of the one
nice house in the neighborhood and waiting
in the shadows until they drive away before walking
to the gloom of your house. This is the shame
at the end of the mania for owning things, the shame
of no heat in winter, the shame of eating cat food,
the unholy shame of dreaming of a new house and car
and the shame of knowing how cheap such dreams are.
From The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
. . .The sofa, for example. It had been purchased new, but the fabric had split straight across the back by the time it was delivered. The store would not take the responsibility . . .
“Looka here, buddy, It was O.K. when I put it on the truck. The store can’t do anything about it once it’s on the truck. . . .” Listerine and Lucky Strike breath.
“But I don’t want no tore couch if’n it’s bought new.” Pleading eyes and tightened testicles.
“Tough shit, buddy. Your tough shit. . . .”
You could hate a sofa, of course—that is, if you could hate a sofa. But it didn’t matter. You still had to get together $4.80 a month. If you had to pay $4.80 a month for a sofa that started off split, no good, and humiliating—you couldn’t take any joy in owning it.
(32)
Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently, for a year she had prayed. Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope. To have something as wonderful as that happen would take a long, long, time.
Thrown, in this way, into the blinding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people.
(40)
Pecola stood a little apart from us, her eyes hinged in the direction in which Maureen had fled. She seemed to fold into herself, like a pleated wing. Her pain antagonized me. I wanted to open her up, crisp her edges, ram a stick down that hunched and curved spine, force her to stand erect and spit the misery out on the streets. But she held it in where it could lap up into her eyes.
(61)
Now we must deal with the problem of chronic shame. It is the complex emotional picture represented by the poem of Vern Rutsala and the novels of Toni Morrison. It is life itself for so many of us—lives of unreached goals, unmet expectations, chronically and repetitively and recurrently and constantly dashed hopes. It is a world where wish itself becomes only predecessor to humiliation. To the extent that we cannot augment our experience of self, to the degree that we are unable by our actions to have an experience of efficacy that can elevate us in our own self-esteem, to the limits (often apparently limitless) that life prevents us from achievement, we can develop a shame-based personality.
Make no mistake about it. This is about a life of pain, the constant pain that afflicts, to one degree or another, the overwhelming majority of any population that has been raised without hope. What does one do to diminish the pain of such a life?
Simple. We can, for instance, become jealous of whoever is loved more than us, or we can through greed marshal our efforts to acquire superficial but highly visible evidence of achievement, or we can through envy seek to destroy the self-esteem of anyone who seems to have some personal competence or sense of self-confidence. To the extent that we are unable to reduce our own steady sense of pain, we can share it with others. We can share our own harvest of shame with those whose more conventional crops we covet.
By vandalism and graffiti we can deface the public structures that represent the affluence and pride of a society and which therefore can come to represent the poverty and degradation of an individual whose life is the reciprocal of the visible norm. If enough of our fellows share our pain and accept our creative urge, we can roam out in groups attacking, frightening, dispiriting, discouraging those who have become emblems of our discontent. (What must happen for a section of society to accept, legitimize, sanction, cheer, or otherwise amplify graffiti? Who makes the first gesture, and what powers the split of cultures into such widely divergent styles of display?) Vandalism and graffiti are statements, messages, instructions about shame.
Once, driving to work in my precisely tuned state-of-the-art foreign car, traveling from my beautifully landscaped upper-middle-class suburb to the center of our city and the enclave of tony offices where I have practiced medicine for so long, passing through one of those sections you can find in any American city—once bustling and white middle-class, now slum and black and full of the danger that lurks in any cluster of the disadvantaged—I realized that the smooth brick side of a large old home had become the medium of display for that particular slum, the vehicle through which the most articulate of its inhabitants had learned to gain access to the consciousness of those who saw this route as nothing more than a convenient access to the city. “Free Huey Newton,” it cried for a while. Later, in sequence, the wall saw each mayor skewered verbally by the precise language of this ghetto. No slogan lasted very long before it was painted out and replaced by the cry of its day.
I watched the neighborhood change, saw the buildings crumble and the shoulders of its people slump into chronic helplessness. A large blank space appeared on this billboard of discontent, and I waited to see what would replace the now routine display of complaint. It was an interesting slogan, one which remained there for many years, untouched by later editors. Only when the neighborhood had rehabilitated itself, had spruced up the faces of its buildings and tidied up its gardens, when the general level of local affluence had improved just enough for the commercial advertisers to recognize that this was a neighborhood now with enough money to purchase more expensive brands of liquor or cigarettes or hair goo, that the more conventional billboards were again suitable for assignment to one or another of these products, did anybody dare to replace or deface this particular slogan.
There have been no graffiti on that building since that neighborhood rose in status. For some years now its bricks have been clean and russet, the mortar pointed and pretty. But I still see what is no longer there, the message of another day. It had stared at us for too long to be forgotten, stared at its neighborhood for nearly a decade, demanding change. Neatly written, in Palmer penmanship script better formed than I can write at my best, its very neatness in stark contrast to the ugly violence of the other spray-painted messages that came to frame it as a wooden gilt molding outlines a painting, it told us that “the name of the game is shame.”
Did the sign change anything? Yes, I think it did. I draw significance from the fact that for years no one altered or defaced or removed or supplanted this slogan. It hit home, reached its target, maybe even awakened people to the idea that they lived in shame. Nobody had to tell them that they lived with anger. When shame is identified as shame there can be change, however subtle and slow.
Faced with societal discontent, whole nations have been urged on courses of action designed by their leaders to reduce chronic shame. Is the public hungry for evidence of personal competence? A war might be just the thing. “No one can humiliate us,” announced Saddam Hussein as a massive array of multinational troops and matériel began to assemble in response to his invasion of Kuwait. “We will pluck out the eye of the invaders.” As individuals we can feel bigger when our nation annexes territory, humbles an enemy, develops a weapon that can destroy more people and lay waste more territory than ever before.
Take, for instance, the situation where everybody is more or less equal, where misery and comfort are distributed along a gradient understood and accepted by all. What happens when somebody emerges from this culture, becomes differentiated on the basis of innate excellence? I refer to the special light of genius, the prodigious strength of a Samson, the talents of a Pele or a Pavarotti or a Picasso or a Paul Newman, the goodness of a saint, the business creativity of a tycoon, the luminous beauty of a star. We hear about these special people when their ability has been nurtured, when their cultural milieu provides a platform from which their careers can be launched. By definition, we do not hear about those whose light is snuffed by a cultural milieu that cannot tolerate anyone who might place it in danger of invidious comparison. That is the stuff of novels.
All too often it is the stuff of case histories, a world to which we can gain real entry only through the door of empathic understanding, where we can create change only by therapeutic techniques based in empathic relatedness. You cannot treat such people by remaining safely remote. In order to be helpful you must have the courage to live their pain as it hovers and buzzes around your own empathic wall, the strength and self-confidence to wrest yourself from their pain by the techniques of decentering, and the wit and skill to offer new ways of understanding, new safety within the therapeutic relationship that allows the formation of a new inner world. But first you must learn about shame as affect and the compass of shame as our assemblage of responses to it.
It is all around you, this shame. Rarely is shame presented to us, available for study as shame affect in the pure state introduced to us by Tomkins. What we see is shame bundled with the affects of dissmell and disgust—the other inborn mechanisms of interpersonal distance—as well as shame embedded in anger, distress, and fear. Often what we encounter is shame affect experienced not even as anything we might call shame but as a reaction pattern determined by the point on the compass of shame made natural by the way each of us has traveled through time to develop our attitude toward shame affect.
Yet always associated with the moment of shame will be certain inviolable characteristics. Normally, things have to be pretty good for shame to happen, for shame affect provides an innate limitation to the pleasant experiences of interest or contentment. There will have been a source—something that triggered the affect—something that interfered, even for a moment, with the flow of the initial positive affect that otherwise would have been sustained. But shame can be induced in situations that are already awful. It can be made to take us from bad to worse, for we can be humiliated when we are already in the throes of a negative affect. The triad of shame, dissmell, and disgust make for a powerful weapon in the arsenal of misery.
Once triggered, shame affect proceeds along its prewritten path, pulling eyes and face from communion with others, recarving the upper body into a slump, attacking higher cognitive functions to produce a cognitive shock within which we are incapable of clear thought. Shame makes us stammer, hesitate, halt. Suddenly this moment of shame affect forces from memory into awareness a host of scripts, of situations within which we had experienced shame. Unbidden, unwanted memories of shames past course through consciousness, adding to our discomfort.
Now we have a choice. Up to now there had been no choice. Source has triggered affect because that is the way we are built. Affect has unfolded as it has evolved to unfold. Memory has been triggered as it had been laid down, scripts assembled from clustered memories. Until this moment, no part of this sequence of actions is capable of alteration. But now that it has brought us to this point, we can choose to reflect on what we have been shown by shame—and we can agree to learn from it. Shame can teach, can reinforce our best intentions to learn from error and failure.
It is this pattern of acceptance that so often characterizes an attitude of personal enlightenment. I think that the facial display seen on anyone who has achieved personal mastery is the affective disposition of one to whom shame is no worse or no more powerful a message than any other source of information provided by the human instrument. It is possible for an enlightened adult to enjoy a moment of stupidity as an opportunity to learn, to relish a moment of incompetence because with it will come a welcome lesson that can lead to further exploration of human ability. The sometimes puzzling face of the Zen master reflects an attitude of joy toward all learning.
Most of us are less masters of self than slaves to shame. Unable, unready to accept what can be taught by shame, we barely pause when given this moment of choice by the cognitive phase of shame. Instantly we move into some characteristic pattern of reaction dictated by the scripts stored as the compass of shame. We withdraw, submit, disguise, or attack as seems most appropriate to the moment. Rarely do we “know” that we have been in the throes of shame affect; even less frequently are we aware that the actions of another person have been dictated by shame.
SHIFTING PATTERNS OF REACTION
One recent evening, stopped at a light during my drive home, in my usual end-of-day trance, I was shocked into frightened alertness by a sudden thumping noise. Standing next to me, pounding on the side of my car, was a tall, angry man of African descent shouting obscenities. I had cut him off at an intersection, he raged. “Where, how?” I asked. I had no idea what had provoked his anger. From among his threats and imprecations I dissected the following statistics: Half a mile back we had been driving two abreast, he to my left. At a point where we crossed a major thoroughfare, he paused, apparently in preparation for a left turn. I moved into the lane he had now made available and continued in that direction. But he had paused for other reasons and saw my action as endangering and humiliating him.
His was certainly an attack other script! As he strode back to his car I was left to muse about the changes in our society that might make a relatively trivial driving incident into something that could have ended with real danger to my person. Something has happened to encourage a large and growing segment of our population to extend the radius of its response to shame. People now go to greater lengths to redress humiliation than ever before in my lifetime.
There have always been a number of people who carry firearms in their cars—witness the number of roadside signs used as targets for the game of “Dot the i, center the o.” But now it is increasingly common to hear that guns have been used to terminate the common highway altercation. Cut off at an intersection, “beaten out” at a traffic light, motorists on occasion will reach for their trusty sidearm and shoot the driver now defined as a tormentor. Affronted at barroom or pool hall, men are likely to leave, only to return with a gang of friends determined to heap severe injury upon whomever has delivered the initial insult. This era is witness to a radical escalation of the techniques, the severity of response, deemed appropriate for the attack other script. There may be no better example of the attack other script than vigilante action.
One rule seems applicable to all of these situations, these explosions of civic violence as part of an attack other script. In each case I have studied, the perpetrator was one whose otherwise normal use of attacking scripts had earlier been further restrained by social shame. It was the societal approval for release from that specific variety of shame that had given permission to launch an actual attack. And the extraordinary intensity of the ensuing attack was directly proportional both to the length of time this response had previously been inhibited and to the importance-to-the-self of the original insult.
Meyer Kahane, a rabbi born in New York City, was so inflamed with rage at the injustice done the Jews during the Holocaust that he organized the Jewish Defense League and insisted that its members learn karate. Kahane knew that the Italian word ghetto referred to the sections of Rome within which Jewish merchants had been confined; indeed, that they were merchants and moneylenders only as a function of restrictive laws forbidding them to own land because they were Jewish. What in biblical times had been a tribe of warriors was forced to live in shame as a legion of otherwise powerless businessmen, artists, and scholars. It is not surprising that Kahane’s JDL operated under the slogan “Never again!” And it is not surprising that Kahane was eventually assassinated by Middle Eastern forces ill-disposed toward the concept of outspoken Jewish warriors.
A similar process, less easily impeded by the death of a leader, may be seen in the plight of the African-American population. Brought as slaves to the land of the free, African tribesmen and women were removed from their own vigorous culture and turned into little more than beasts of burden and creatures designed to fulfill the fantasy needs of fellow humans who now claimed to be their owners. Can there be a greater source of chronic and ongoing shame than to be declared so much less than human that one is only a piece of property? Richard L. Rubenstein, in The Cunning of History, notes the succession of legal maneuvers through which Nazi Germany was able to orchestrate the wholesale extermination of the Jews: Jews first were declared non-Aryan, not truly German. Next, those who were not truly German were declared not true citizens; soon they were defined as a lesser species of human; then not truly human and therefore worthy of treatment more suited to animals designated as a source of food or pelt. But this was done with German efficiency and a truly German sense of legal nicety.
The slave trade incorporated none of this artful system of legal redefinition, for it was not neighbors and doctors and artists resembling us who were being redefined, but scantily clad men and women with bones in their hair and rings in their noses who could quite easily be treated as some life form intermediary between the more powerful (armed) Caucasians and the beasts of burden then used for farm work. In the 19th century there was much debate about whether Negroes were capable of blushing, for it was thought that only humans could feel shame and that slavery was an acceptable economic pattern only if those enslaved were not truly human. Whatever the social stratification of African tribal life prior to capture and translocation, slave life in America was based in a system of shame and terror.
Throughout history we have studied examples of the processes through which whole cultures emerge from slavery. For 40 years Moses kept his tribe of Egyptian Jews wandering through a region the size of Rhode Island, only to “find” the Promised Land immediately on the death of the last individual born in slavery and not trained by him. No one with a slave mentality would be permitted entry into the new world.
No such period of retraining was made available to the African-American slaves, to whom legal freedom and apparent equality were conferred by the Emancipation Proclamation and made more real by the Civil War. After a century of slavery, this large group of Americans was intellectually and emotionally incapable of full assimilation as equal members of the larger culture. Denied the education necessary for acculturation and reared to accept definition as inferior individuals or members of an inferior segment of humanity, this group of Americans lived for another century as a nation within a nation.
Whatever differences can be detected between newcomers and the established majority will be magnified as “reasons” for exclusion. Skin color, hair, language, remnants of tribal custom, and lack of relevant formal education formed continuing barriers to acceptance, excuses for the maintenance of this vigorous citizenry in the status of a dissmelling subculture. Person or group, whoever is exposed to chronic dissmell will adopt an attitude of self-dissmell and shame-of-the-self; merely to be of African descent meant that one was born into shame.
Read (if you can bear such prolonged immersion in the world of shame, dissmell, and disgust) Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye. Young Pecola grows into adolescence surrounded by, immersed in a literal sea of, parental contempt, from which she derives a self-image of terrible ugliness that she attributes to her negritude. If only her eyes were blue (like those of her pretty blonde classmate), then certainly Pecola would be less dissmelling and perhaps even acceptable to her chronically angry and shaming parents. Nothing slows or modulates the constant onrush of degradation to which she is exposed. She is steadily and steadfastly beaten by her mother, then raped and impregnated by her father. A trusted adviser leads her to kill a dog—the only creature with whom she has some sort of kinship—by giving him poisoned meat that will make him vomit to death. Pecola is allowed no solace save psychosis. Peace comes to her only with the delusion that she is beautiful, that she now has the bluest eyes ever to be seen, that finally she is worthy of love.
What makes Morrison’s novel so extraordinary is the apparent ease with which she makes us understand that such mistreatment of individuals within a family is a metaphor for our societal treatment of an entire population. Pecola’s parents treat her much as they themselves have been managed by the host culture that so clearly defines them as dissmelling and shameworthy aliens. One is reminded of the young Polish boy in Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird, who becomes mute when tortured by immersion in a vat of human excrement, then forced to duck his head below the surface of this foul milieu rather than risk physical injury. Shame bundled with self-disgust and self-dissmell can destroy self-esteem with a ferocity unequaled in human experience.
Why do we—all of us—do such things to people? Examine the 1972 New Yorker cartoon by Stan Hunt, in which one businessman refers proudly to another as his “immediate inferior.” It seems that nearly everybody needs an inferior. Life assaults as often as it beckons with opportunity. If we have through study or religious discipline or psychotherapy achieved an attitude of enlightenment that turns each failure or defeat or rebuff into a welcome lesson, such incident then adds no degree of toxicity to our own personal well of shame. But where study has been inadequate for this purpose, or religion designed for other intents, or therapy ignorant of these issues, the attack other form of reaction to shame asks for vehicles of detoxification. Good masochists are hard to find. Masochist submission from within an attack self script legitimizes an attack other script; it requires a partner whose shame must be handled by the accumulation of power over others. When there are too few masochists to go around, we need inferiors. It is through the creation of legions of inferiors that entire cultures spend their accumulated and perhaps nearly inevitable shame.
The poem of Emma Lazarus assures each wave of immigrants that the Statue of Liberty holds her lamp beside the golden door so that she can welcome “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Yet each member of those tempest toss’d huddled masses experiences America as a land hungry for new inferiors. The Irish of the 19th century East Coast, the Chinese of the West Coast, the freed slaves of the Reconstruction, the displaced persons of war-ravaged 20th-century Europe, boat people, Cubans, Thai, Laotians, Puerto Ricans—the list is endless and always capable of increase by whatever new group is willing to trade the discomforts of an unbearable homeland for the ignominy of immigrant status. All nations seem to hunger for inferiors capable of doing work “unfit” for their “betters.”
Slavery afforded every southern Caucasian the opportunity to be far more powerful than every African. The entire population of slaves was kept under control by terror mediated by whips, chains, forced concubinage, lynching, ritual murder, castration, branding, and public humiliations of unimaginable variety. Poverty, denial of voting rights, exclusion from educational opportunity, and the brilliantly designed structure of the Ku Klux Klan (which mimicked African tribal ritual in a calculated campaign of terror and humiliation)—all operated to maintain this citizenry as virtual if not actual slaves. Such politically sanctioned and maintained systems of behavior served to protect the southern economy from any loss of cheap labor. But at the emotional level, the system kept alive contrasting ideas of white supremacy and black inferiority. For the white majority, shame (notwithstanding its actual source) could always be mitigated by an attack other action taken against its African sub-population. To be called “black” in America meant to live in a state of shame; negritude implied helpless submission to overwhelming force.
Note, too, that the scripts available in the reactive phase of the shame sequence were quite different for the two cultures. Whites were permitted to attack both whites and non-whites; African-Americans were permitted only to attack their own people. (Discussing rape as an act of insurrection, Eldridge Cleaver wrote that he perfected his skills in the ghetto before bringing them into enemy territory.) A culture inhibited from redressing wrongs perpetrated against it (especially wrongs committed by those pledged to uphold a legal system promising, guaranteeing equality for all) will store and accumulate and build up a powerful arsenal of resentment. The forces of the majority preferred that its African populace express shame as withdrawal; as “Step’n’fetchit” attack self scripts; as avoidance scripts expressed as shiny new Buicks in front of and expensive television sets within the shacks of successful workers who had been denied any opportunity to buy better homes; and attack other scripts restricted to the boundaries of clearly established ghettos. Fear and shame work wonderfully well to prevent the expression of anger within the attack other script. They also foster the magnification of self-disgust and self-dissmell.
All of this worked until the cultural explosion of the 1960s, when, under the banner called “freedom of expression,” legions marched protected by a new understanding of constitutional guarantees of civil rights. Suddenly free to attend any school in the land—indeed, urged to do so by a majority populace now ashamed of its history of repression—African-Americans entered the mainstream of contemporary culture. Now our doctors, lawyers, politicians, engineers, and bankers might derive from the racial and ethnic minorities so long excluded from such privilege. A more affluent African-American minority became a new source of income to an entire economy; advertisers and the entertainments they used as a medium of display began to feature models drawn from the society at whom the advertising was aimed. The newly released African-American population provided a significant portion of the energy, the excitement that drove the ‘70s and the ‘80s.
But, on the other hand, something had to happen to the mountains of shame, self-disgust, and self-dissmell heaped up within this population. The scripts through which this newly released community expressed its response to shame old and shame new shifted toward the attack other system once fear and shame no longer limited the expression toward others of anger, disgust, and dissmell. The problem of urban or civic violence, the cultural need to “shove it to whitey” within shame-reversing attack other scripts, public bravado expressed as growing insolence toward authority figures historically associated with the repression of both positive and negative affect, machismo, redress of previous wrongs, and magnification of cultural methods of active attack all devolved from this relatively “abrupt” but long-overdue removal of external control over affect expression.
This subculture would now be causing major change in society simply because of the gifts it brings to it—the absence of these gifts has made our world poorer for far too long. But more has happened. Major social change had to occur also because shame and fear no longer operated as culturally sanctioned impediments to the attack other script. Unfortunately, a sizable fraction of the African-American community now has come to equate all modulation and control with shame, which has made for a terrible problem in shared living.
Were this a cohort in psychotherapy we would describe such behavior as part of the process through which one achieves freedom from depression. Therapists (and the families of their patients) have long come to accept that people released from clinical depression tend to be effusive and uncontrolled. But nothing so simple has happened here. Release from control by shame and fear has come to operate like an antidepressant drug spread over an entire city by a department of public health. And there is no kindly and trusted psychotherapist with whom the patient can discuss what it feels like to be so suddenly empowered.
When you add to the mix the tragedy that the psychoactive drugs of the street have become normative accoutrements of ghetto life, and that these drugs generally act to amplify the same excitement and anger that power the macho defense against shame, the current pattern of public violence and explosiveness becomes increasingly understandable. Death by gunshot is four times more common in the African-American than in the Caucasian-American population. The attack other script has no inherent object of attack; whoever is handy when the mood strikes will be struck down.
Such a radical shift in the way one group interacts with others must force a commensurately fierce reaction in what was once the dominant society. Two styles of response may be noted: One stresses the need for us as a society to accept this change and all the tension it brings, simply because we are the descendants of those who caused the problem. The other seeks to return the world to its previous level of comfort for the dominant group by interfering with the ability of African-Americans and other minority groups to reap the benefits of political change. The tension between these two sociopolitical systems can be made more understandable in the language of script theory and the differential magnification of innate affect.
In the name of “affirmative action.” it is the first path that has been taken by many colleges, universities, foundations, and other institutions. For some years, they have taken the position that inter-group violence is a direct result of our long-standing policy of inequality. Needed, they say, is a reverse prejudice through which members of previously suppressed minority groups are assisted toward prominence throughout the educational establishment. Critics from the second group complain that the scholars and teachers made newly powerful by these political decisions are “poorly qualified” for their grafted-on eminence. They worry publicly about possible declines in teaching standards, quality of research, fluency with language. Affirmative action implies that the hypothesized but unproved period of decrease in quality of education would be but a small price to pay for the rich rewards to be reaped by a society exposed to such a broadened base of cultural knowledge and attitudes. Defending such a position is a host of novel educational and philosophical theories that aim to reduce the significance of the very values and training in which minority scholars are thought to be deficient.
This latter, “politically correct” belief (that traditional values must be scrapped to produce a new world order) has been given considerable power through its use of shame psychology. Anyone who dares suggest that the old values have intrinsic validity is accused of unconscious or inherent bigotry, of standing in the way of the new, counter-shaming philosophy. Academic violators of this new set of rules have been isolated, humiliated, stripped of their local political power, threatened with loss of research grants and access to graduate students, and “exposed” before the student body as perpetrators of foul and incorrect ideas. The very movement that seeks to redress the wrongs done to minority groups through a century or more of chronic humiliation now uses the tactics and techniques of the oppressors it disavows! Spirals of sophistry are being wound around the compass of shame.
Not unexpectedly, an inevitable backlash has gained power and momentum; this is the second path mentioned above. Seen on a college campus recently and reported by Dinesh D’Souza, was the sign, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste—especially on a nigger.” This macabre, dissmelling assault on the hallowed slogan of the American Negro College Fund is emblematic of the anger now being expressed by those who feel their rights are being ignored in favor of the previously suppressed African-Americans. Muttering in the wings is the huge crowd of those whose self-esteem depended on their ability to feel better than the hated (dissmelling, disgusting, shameworthy) designated inferiors.
Read God and General Longstreet—The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind. Thomas L. Connelly and Barbara L. Bellows follow an array of issues—the consistent theme of sadness in southern songs and ballads, a cultural sense of inefficacy and incompetence relative to the “northern establishment.” the need to prove cultural superiority to “the Negro race”—and attribute them to defeat in the Civil War and the forced termination of slavery. A group shorn of its designated inferiors will be destabilized just as much as the group that has been freed from the status of inferiors. The renewed contemporary attacks on African-Americans have been launched by powerful forces whose purpose is to restore the early 19th-century balance of power that gave every southern white a feeling of superiority over every “black” man and woman. No attack other script works unless someone can be found to receive the attack.
It is very difficult to redress the wounds created by shame unless one understands shame. I plead for an understanding of the affective roots of prejudice, and for systems of release from forced inferiority that take into account the compass of shame.
WOMAN IN AN ERA OF MADNESS
But no society has ever had to go outside its boundaries to find a band of designated inferiors. For the greater part of recorded history, Western civilization has taken for granted the “right” of men to control women. Men have been able to victimize, seduce, rape, impregnate, enslave, humiliate, entrap, and otherwise use women simply because men are, on the whole, larger and stronger than women. And it is true that the more advanced a life form, the more time is spent by the female of the species on matters related to childbearing and childrearing. Women, therefore, can be rendered noncompetitive with men by insemination.
None of this is to say that women are without power over men. Women have been able to victimize, seduce, enslave, humiliate, entrap, and otherwise use men. They do not, however, have the same sort of power available to men, an asymmetry that creates its own tension around the issues of shame and pride, as well as its own cluster of scripts stored within the compass of shame. Humankind is by nature split into groups on the basis of gender, each group debating its worth relative to the other. Always do we compare ourselves to others in our own set, while for different reasons we contrast ourselves to members of the other. Wherever there are significant differences between clusters of traits there will be the opportunity for attribution of both shame and pride. I mean only to indicate with the most casual of brushstrokes that the war between the genders is eternal—and unavoidable as long as people remain uneducated about the complex nature and history of shame.
“What fools men are!” say a multitude of knowledgeable women. “Aren’t women so damn stupid!” say a horde of apparently well-informed men. Issues of shame and pride hover constantly about the interface between the genders.
Although for obvious reasons men and women exist in approximately equal numbers, it has become fashionable to refer to women as members of a minority group simply because our societal treatment of women resembles our behavior with groups whose powerlessness devolves from their numerical inferiority. Again, this classification by analogy would be unnecessary were the connection to shame affect of inferiority, helplessness, weakness, and dependence understood better. Yet the assignment to minority psychology of gender-based problems has encouraged the use of sociopolitical maneuvers directly analogous to those used to reverse discrimination against African-Americans. The changes? Everywhere we see women who are more sure of themselves, more free to compete in a male-dominated marketplace, more comfortable with their sexuality. And everywhere we see evidence of trouble among those men for whom the shaming of women formed so large a part of their own security system.
Motion pictures model and suggest the new woman; she is athletic, comfortable with her body, often scantily dressed, freely and comfortably sexual, wise and energetic in business, skilled in the arts of self-defense, and ready to fight back against anyone who endangers her. It is not unusual to see a woman in the movies using the advantage conferred by anatomy to disable an attacker by kicking or kneeing him in the groin. Nor is it unusual to see film images of women who are far more powerful than their men, occasionally subjecting them to torture and humiliation. These films cater to the long-suppressed desire of women to reach out and kick someone in an attack other script.
Yet crimes against women are increasing at an alarming rate; it is no longer unusual to see movies in which women are treated with savage brutality and to read in the daily paper of similar attacks on our own friends and neighbors. Perhaps in some bizarre spirit of equality we now see men treat women just as they treat men—by hitting them full-force with a fist in jaw or midgut.
I scanned a group of “Violence” films recently. Yes, most of them still show the interplay of good and evil; resolution of the central conflict (the story line) allows good to triumph and evil to be punished. One subtext involves the idea that prolonged study of the martial arts under the aegis of a master leads to power that can only be used in the service of good; the new hero has achieved affect modulation through mastery of violence. This, too, is a shame theme: Confidence conferred by physical superiority is a powerful antidote for shame. Every little boy longs for the day he is safe from taunts and malevolence.
But there is another subtext that speaks to another audience. The bad guys in the movies are different these days. These are vigilante films in which the climactic horrific and disgusting execution of the villain, rendered as never before permitted on film, is excused on the basis of Talionic law. They are designed less to show the moral superiority of the enlightened hero than to demonstrate for the great mass of macho men these new trends in cruelty. What they do to women is more humiliating, more deadly, more violent, and more graphically rendered than at any time in our history. I do not believe that the economic success of this genre depends a whit on a societal interest in the triumph of good over evil.
And, as part of this process, real women are being mauled, slashed, disfigured, raped, kidnapped, and murdered in numbers and to a degree previously unimaginable in our history. Once we clucked over the idea of a “Jack the Ripper” who murdered and dissected prostitutes in London. Now he is everywhere, and the target of his attack is the innocent woman whose only crime is her enjoyment of her femininity.
A PLEA FOR EDUCATION AND MODULATION
Our societal attitude toward homosexuality provides another example of this process—the emergence of a disease seemingly specific for this group of men (seen often as dissmelling and disgusting) was taken by some as the operation of moral justice. There were many who felt that the autoimmune deficiency syndrome should not have received so much expensive research attention because this fatal disease “only” affected homosexuals. These angry citizens seem to view as a shame-reducing personal efficacy experience the extermination of what to them is a dissmelling and disgusting tribe.
Next examine the police riot at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention. One group of radical activists decided to diminish our faith in the police. Taunting “the men in blue” by calling them “mother-fuckers,” dropping on their heads balloons filled with excrement, intentionally violating every possible standard of commonly accepted behavior designed to limit dissmell, disgust, and shame, they provided a stimulus for which these officers of the law were completely unprepared. Reacting with violence in classic attack other scripts, the police clubbed, beat, humiliated, jailed, and terrorized large numbers of their tormentors—producing a reduction in their own public image that will not be repaired in our lifetime.
The rising tide of “civil disobedience” (more precisely, of shaming gestures toward those in authority) has made the police as a body increasingly helpless and increasingly apt to use main force in an attack other mode—itself producing more shame and rage in citizens exposed to police rage. In reaction to this shift in behavior on the part of those they are supposed to protect, many law enforcement officials complain that “these people are being allowed to get away with murder.” At the same time, more and more documented instances of police brutality are brought to light. In one recent, celebrated case, an innocent motorist was beaten by four officers while other policemen stood by in mute permission. Their attack was recorded on videotape and shown publicly on TV throughout the country. Registered on the police computer was a communiqué issued by one of the policemen, stating that the incident felt good because he hadn’t beaten up an African-American citizen in a long time. As the populace grows increasingly explosive so does the police force, making the problem worse because now the issues appear focal (the result of special, local conditions) rather than diffuse and culture-wide.
The story is the same everywhere we look. Sociopolitical manipulation undertaken without a clear understanding of the psychological forces involved will always keep the war alive. Few if any of the pundits recommending social change seem to have any interest in decreasing the affective tension associated with it.
Earlier we established that Renaissance sensibility brought about what Elias called a change in the threshold for shame and delicacy, along with a growing requirement for the modulation of affective expression. For hundreds of years, Western civilization has told us that it is better to control one’s output of affect than to be undisciplined and therefore humiliated. Anticipation of shame served well to modulate affect. For the first time in centuries, shame and affect dyscontrol have been unlinked and allowed to travel along separate paths. Since it was partially for the sake of shame that Western civilization learned to control affect itself, it was to be expected that widespread release from domination by shame would foster an explosion of negative affect.
Essential to solving this problem are cross-cultural studies of the relation between shame and cultural types. Have you ever watched television coverage of a sporting event held in Japan? In this most successful of the modern shame cultures, it is considered improper to cheer or jeer unless instructed to do so. Many popular Japanese “game shows” provide an exactly countervailing opportunity to witness the humiliation of contestants and to express contempt by mocking, taunting, and yelling. There are many other examples of public affect management scripts of this sort: Roman rulers encouraged the presentation of “circuses” at which spectators might see gladiators fight to the death or prisoners mauled by carnivores. Such entertainments were consciously designed as antidotes to societal discontent, spectacles allowing culturally sanctioned expression of shame-based rage. More? I suspect that the vigor of both French and German productivity was lowest during eras of “shamelessness” and “sexual licentiousness” and greatest during periods of political repression.
In a former era the models for behavior most available to us were religious and political leaders, doctors, lawyers, all of whom were known to us either through our own interactions with them or what we were allowed to read in magazines or in the press. Radio brought more, television still more of their presence and style. But most of these exemplars achieved prominence through study that demanded affect modulation. Now we have the phenomenon of massive television and movie exposure of sports figures and rock stars, most of whom are well-trained, but whose work celebrates explosive behavior. The majority of what is available as televised diversion each weekend is sports entertainment, often characterized by savage effort in the name of competition, and passionate response to it on the part of the audience. The population watches events that teach affect dyscontrol.
We are moving more and more into a culture of explosion, as a huge and growing segment of our society has adopted the macho script, within which shame is converted to anger and fear to excitement. Civil disobedience, crime, vandalism, an elaborate disregard for the simple rules that allow all of us to share an increasingly cramped space—all this involves disavowal of shame. Violation of the law has become an efficacy experience—a moment of competence engineered to produce pride and reduce chronic shame. More and more people ignore traffic lights because there simply aren’t enough police to catch them; some walk the crowded streets with immense audio systems that literally take over our sonic environment and deny us privacy. All of these are shaming gestures from the macho division of the attack other script library. And they are part of a steadily rising tide of affect dyscontrol that is sweeping our civilization.
War movies have been a staple commodity since the introduction of filmed entertainment. But now we as audience are exposed close-up to battle scenes more gory than the surgical operating room, and from which we were previously screened by the mechanism of disgust—Elias’s concept of delicacy. In other contemporary films, under the guise of “realism,” murder victims (usually female) are exposed naked, bloody, and horrifically defaced. Directors compete with each other to see who can “get away with” the most graphic depiction of carnage. And the modern attitude, shifting the balance of favor between shame and exposure, has shamed the motion picture industry into withdrawing from the business of monitoring its product on the basis of any arbitrary standard of “taste.” I am fully aware that we Americans have a constitutional right to see anything we want, and that the current shift in moral values can be seen as a healthy reaction to the previous century of stultifying repression. But this current relaxation of “rules” against anything that once brought shame, dissmell and disgust has been used to witless advantage by a highly competitive industry directed more by market forces than by any sense of responsibility or morality. Perhaps some social good is served by the cable television programs that demonstrate the latest in surgical technique. We medical students worked hard to curb our revulsion at the bloodless dissection of cadavers, and later at the gory spectacle of surgery. No educational system protects the itinerant viewer who happens on these programs and remains transfixed by horror and curiosity unprotected by the years of study that help diminish the affective experience of such exposure.
War, garish movies, police brutality, gender turf, academic squabbles—is this shame? We have come a long way from our initial study of clowns and comedians. The study of shame affect illuminates matters far afield from such workaday experiences as embarrassment and shyness. I believe that Western civilization is poised on the brink of a precipice to which it has been driven by forces incapable of comprehension until the new era of psychological sophistication made possible by affect theory. Great hordes of people are rendered effectively dysfunctional by addiction to chemical substances; these drugs are ingested to modulate affect of unimaginable density. They alter affective experience in ways for which none of us is really prepared. Some of the pain so treated happens to involve shame affect. But at the root of the problem is the change in the socialization of shame, the release of an entire culture from the constraints once imposed by shame.
Even our religions have split into groups that increase affect and those that damp it. Traditional Judaeo-Christian worship incorporates the modulation of affect into a system of moral values. Our behavior during services is highly modulated—we chant quietly in concert with our fellows, sing politely, listen politely to the more professional choir, cantor, or soloist, worship in hushed tones. Those members of the macho culture who do attend church are likely to choose one in which group activity is loud and demonstrative, in which the leader orates with a wide dynamic range of affective expression, and where the musical accompaniment raises, rather than lowers, the general level of affect in the room. In both systems one may find the solace of moral suasion. It is to the affective tone that I call attention.
What are the moderating forces available to assist our recovery from this crisis? In times of disaster, some return to organized religion in order to hear about a power higher than those now destabilizing life. This involves the form of shame Schneider described as awe, setting into operation the program of affect modulation with which the population is most secure. Recognizing the benefits to be achieved from internalized religious discipline, many have tried to enforce religious study. The civil rights movement had earlier legislated removal of such modulating influences as school prayer, first on the grounds that it violated constitutional separation of church and state, and later for the reason that it “forced” on all children some type of submission to nondenominational Protestant Christianity. Now there is a reactive movement seeking to reestablish this particular moderating influence within our schools, a “fundamentalist” trend looking to “return America to her roots” in Christian theology.
It is likely that the pendulum of social change will move in just that direction, for our country has always swung back and forth from a system of humanistic freedom to a psychology directed by strictly enforced codes of behavior. These two groups, into which our entire population seems to be split, have been studied extensively by Tomkins, who found them to differ on the basis of certain affect scripts. The humanist is more likely to smile, to enjoy the mutualization of positive affect, to experience more often the impediment of shame, and to tolerate or accept the affect of distress. The normative is far less likely to smile in public, will not tolerate shame (which is converted to dissmell and disgust toward others), and uses anger as a stable force in interpersonal relationships. Anyone can confirm these experimental data by inspecting photographs taken of people massed in rallies both for and against abortion. The pro-choice ranks are likely to be smiling, while the faces of the anti-abortion group will demonstrate dissmell, disgust, and anger. Powerful affect modulation scripts always underlie deep divisions in systems of belief.
Unfortunately, it is for precisely these reasons that a shift toward “fundamentalist values” cannot produce a significant reduction in public turmoil. Notwithstanding its highest motives, normative psychology seeks control through shame and fear. Ours is an era that simply will not tolerate or accept control through shame, therefore forcing the normative leaders to resort increasingly to fear through violence and oppressive civil control. Such a maneuver, even if temporarily successful, will only sow the seeds of the next (and more violent) swing of the pendulum. The risk of this program includes cycles in which violence and dyscontrol rise steadily in amplitude and ferocity until the forces of law and order take over again, reintroducing a guilt psychology that eventually enfeebles the normative leaders and opens the way for equally uninformed humanist control.
Needed is a change in our entire cultural attitude toward affect; a shift from this use of shame to control toward the definition of each affect as such; and instruction in techniques for modulation. We simply must study both innate affect and affect management scripts. Even the world of psychotherapy must adapt to this new language.
Our methods and approaches to psychotherapy need revision in terms of this new understanding of affect. Early in my career we were taught that depression would lift when the patient learned how to accept and express anger. People learned how to hit each other with foam rubber baseball bats, to utter the “primal scream.” But depression itself is changing in our era. Whereas an earlier generation of therapists might correctly characterize it as “anger turned inward,” now there is little shame at the expression of anger and little benefit to be achieved by encouraging its release. I suspect that few therapists raised in this new culture of dyscontrol now concentrate on “the lifting of repression.” It is shame, self-dissmell, and self-disgust (poorly defined, inadequately conceptualized, until now little understood) that lie at the heart of the modern clinical complaint of depression. All of us therapists must be reeducated in the language of affect theory.
When affective expression seems blocked we tend to look for a medical reason, a hardware error preventing release. In this current era of concentration on brain mechanisms it is important to recognize that each aberration of neurotransmitter function, each new drug, each newly understood neural circuit, must be evaluated for its relation to the affect system. Individuals who are forbidden by their software from expressing affect often develop somatic illnesses. Few, if any, psychosomatic illnesses have ever been studied for their relation to the neurochemistry of any specific innate affect. We must learn to shift back and forth between our habitual focus on affect as a personal experience and affect as expressed on a societal or cultural level. No study of interpersonal conflict—indeed, of interpersonal relatedness—can be valid without attention to affective resonance and its modulation by the empathic wall.
Charmed by the myriad of fascinating themes and memories encoded within our dreams, Sigmund Freud called the analysis of nocturnal imagery “the royal road to the unconscious.” The inner life is far too complex a territory to be served by only one major thoroughfare. It has been my intent to introduce the reader to the affect theory of Silvan Tomkins, a system of thought capable of providing an entirely new map. I understand the affect system as a democratic system, with no royal road.
This group of nine actors—who put on the plays that make up our entire affective life—becomes an internal repertory theater. The study of any affect can lead us to a new understanding of the human condition. The study of shame forces us to reconsider everything we ever knew about the nature of self and other. Such an enquiry cannot end simply because we have reached the end of a book. It is the future history of affect that must now be written.