It’s a shame that shame has gotten such a bad name
Last night I was thinking about shame.
When I was growing up, shame was a much-used parental and pedagogic device. Parents commonly called their children “bad,” for example. Teachers purposely made us feel ashamed – not necessarily with the old-fashioned dunce cap, but with ploys such as the favorite ones of a particularly nasty teacher of mine who thought nothing of cruel name-calling, and who would hand out our tests after she’d marked them and then call our names from the roll book as we were told to shout out what marks we had gotten and she would write them down. This public self-disclosure punished both those who had done well and those who had done poorly. The latter felt shame for their poor performance, and the former were then subject to the wrath of the latter and felt ostracized for their good performance.
No, it wasn’t a very good system. It had its pluses, but it also caused a lot of people to feel that their every move was wrong and that there was no redemption possible for them. A few years later, the idea emerged that it was better for parents and teachers to tell a misbehaving child that the child had done something bad, and could and should do better, rather than that there was something intrinsically bad about the child’s essence. That still seems to me to be the best middle ground of child-rearing.
Unfortunately, the pendulum then swung too far, into the self-esteem movement. Children were told they were great no matter what, and various excuses were made for bad behavior. Was that behavior even called “bad” anymore? I suppose it depended on what identity group a child belonged to, or whether the school was in a red or blue area. And now, children are even made to feel bad for their race once again, only now the races are reversed and it’s the white kids who are supposed to think they bear some sort of mark of Cain.
At any rate, the context in which the word “shame” occurred to me last night was somewhat akin to Robert Welch’s question during the McCarthy hearings: “Have you no sense of decency?” This time, I was thinking about people such as Alvin Bragg and Jack Smith and Fani Willis, who are perfectly fine with stretching the law till it’s unrecognizable in order to charge a political enemy in a transparently partisan move. They don’t care. They probably feel pride. I don’t know much about their backgrounds, but I do know that they are all about the same age: Bragg is 49, Smith is 52, and Willis is 54.
That’s not so very young, but it’s certainly a different generation than mine. My parents were born in the early years of the 20th century, and many of my grade school teachers were born in the late 1800s. Just writing that makes me feel like some sort of dinosaur. It wasn’t the Jurassic, but it was indeed a different world than the one we now inhabit.
Neo,
I think this is a very good post about our changing generations. I’ve written to my Marxist Lite whore of a congressman in the past, and had occasion to tell him that he should be ashamed of himself, but that he had no shame. I don’t bother writing to him any more.
I was going to post an anecdote on yesterday’s Laughter thread, but decided not to. In involved me as a sixth grader, and some fellow students who couldn’t stop laughing during an Assembly with a prestigious guest. Our laughter was triggered by another student loudly farting during the speech. The angry principal afterwards demanded what was so funny, and one of us said “John S. sneezed,” which caused us to start laughing again. In the early Sixties you didn’t say a “bad word” to an adult. Ended up copying out “I will not be disrespectful to guests of the school” 100 times.
We should re-establish shame for homosexuals, transvestites and related deviants.
I remember very specific situations as a child where my parents expected me and my sister to “behave ourselves.” The word afterwards was always, “We’re proud of you for handling that so well.”
The affirmation was powerful and served as an impetus for the next time. We tried hard to avoid the other extreme.
Some of the “trophies for all” movement was based on very poor sociology. For example, studies even at the time showed that black gang members had the highest self esteem of anyone tested. We are now in an era where the left is the most racist segment of society. Blacks cannot accomplish anything without standards being destroyed. Math is “racist” because there is only one right answer. This is insanity and most blacks know it. 50 years ago we all celebrated the high school teacher who got his Hispanic students doing well in Calculus.
His name was Jaime Escalante and they even made a movie about him.
He was driven from teaching by the Teachers’ Union.
In his final years at Garfield, Escalante received threats and hate mail.[14] By 1990, he had lost the math department chairmanship. Escalante’s math enrichment program had grown to more than 400 students. His class sizes had increased to over 50 students in some cases. That was far beyond the 35 student limit set by the teachers’ union, which increased its criticism of Escalante’s work.[14] In 1991, the number of Garfield students taking advanced placement examinations in math and other subjects jumped to 570. The same year, citing faculty politics and petty jealousies, Escalante and Jiménez left Garfield.[14] Escalante found new employment at Hiram W. Johnson High School in Sacramento, California. At the height of Escalante’s success, Garfield graduates were entering the University of Southern California in such great numbers that they outnumbered all the other high schools in the working-class East Los Angeles region combined.[15] Even students who failed the AP exam often went on to study at California State University, Los Angeles.
When I was in grammar school, the nuns seated us in the order we were ranked by grades. They would hold frequent spelling bees where the losers sat down until one winner was left standing. I don’t remember anyone getting hysterical about it.
50 years after graduation we held a reunion and an amazing number of my classmates attended. It was in Chicago and a number of us, at least a dozen of the about 50 attending (out of a total of about 70.), came in from out of town.
Best book about McCarthy is blacklisted by history by m Stanton evans.
Zipper:
Here’s a previous post of mine on Stanton Evans.
Stanton Evans’ book on McCarthy tells a very different story from that portrayed by our “History”. The Democratic Senator from MD, name I dont recall, coined “McCarthyism” very soon in Senator Joe’s State Dept concerns, which were well founded in fact. Me? I think McCarthy was an American hero.
McCarthyism has become an insulting adjective.
I’ve been saying that we need to bring back shame for some years now. My call to bring back shame started re: children out of wedlock. I actually remember when girls were ashamed of being pregnant without having been married first. But at some point, shame was shifted from the girl* to the people who basically “coerced” her into giving the child up for adoption. But I know of way too many people who would’ve been MUCH better off if their mother had given them up for adoption.
* – Yes, back in the old days, unfairly or not, it was the girl who was shamed, primarily. But that also helped keep her from giving into to sweet talk.
FWIW, there is an element of shaming in Anthony’s song Rich Men North of Richmond.
Shame used to be a factor in keeping elites from going totally off the deep-end, what with the Rules of Chivalry and noblesse oblige being put forth as ideals, if not always lived up to. I was noting to AesopSpouse yesterday that our elites’ disdain of the plebes is very much like that of the Court of Louis XVI, and we know how that ended.
https://www.britannica.com/summary/Louis-XVI
“Influenced by the reactionary court faction, he defended the privileges of the clergy and nobility.”
The decline of shame as a societal nudge to practice personal, as well as governmental, virtue has accompanied the decline of honor, which is kind of an omnibus of those virtues (leaving aside the school grades and spelling bees); it may be that there is a direct connection between those two which greases the slide into civilizational decay.
On the importance, and components, of honor:
Psychology of a Hero: FRODO BAGGINS by Cinema Therapy (my favorite movie-talk channel).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5VgahGh2I0
Walking miles to school alone or in packs, roaming about until dusk. Yep, different.
Some of us still have elderly parents alive but even I am so much closer culturally to the people who *walked* across a plains to settle than even my daughter’s generation. Different view on self-sufficiency.
In seventh grade I had a science teacher – Miss Finus. She was already dottery but kinda spry (she walked that same distance to school I did) I used to help her out at her house by the river. She traveled the world and saw the Mau Mau behind fences and a lot of other weird stuff.
The whole world has shifted. Is shifting.
pride is the greatest sin, ‘goest before the fall’ to put yourself before god, before your neighbors, in their property and their persons, now in the ‘woke’ (I so hate that word, you should feel shame only before the collective,
I have been wanting to tell this story out loud, I think maybe I have found a place to do it. Please excuse if it does not fit this conversation.
In 1950 my young divorced mother talked her second husband into driving to California where there “was sunshine and jobs and hope”. I was in 4th grade when we landed in a very upper-middle-class all-white neighborhood in southern California. Mostly engineering types from Lockheed, etc. Mom was not educated, but she did have a good, proper upbringing and a willingness to work. Upon arrival, she retook her beautician’s license and then rented a very small space next to an old-fashioned freestanding brick grocery store. She did hair and nails. On days when there were few clients she made crafts to sell, and at night she and her husband went out to clean offices for a couple of hours every night.
MY GOSH those wives of the upwardly rising hated her. Fourth grade was nice for me, but by fifth grade, it was clear that my hard working mom did not fit in with the stay at home mothers. My fifth grade teacher was a monster.
One Sunday mom and her husband drove down to Tiajuana because they had heard so much about it. She came back with one of those Mexican dancing girl skirts and a gathered blouse for me. No sparkles, just some lace and gathers.
For one hour on Wednesday of every week the boys went outside to be with the coach for “boy time” and the girls stayed inside with Mrs. B for “girl Time”. During that hour Mrs. B talked about proper styles and proper ways to wear your hair and how to sit and how to behave, etc. The boy’s coach just did an extra 40 minutes of baseball.
During the lesson about how girls should dress she called me up to the front of the class in order to demonstrate how you should not dress ever. She ridiculed my dress and also pointed to my hair which mom had curled “too tightly”. She then asked the other girls to point out other things that were wrong with my looks. Then she announced that “California did not need any more migrants from Ohio, or anywhere else”. When I started to cry she sent me out to sit with the boys. That wonderful man who was the coach saw me coming across the empty field crying. He looked up at her window with such hate I could taste it. I started to feel a little better–at least I was not alone. He set me down next to him and taught me how to be the scorekeeper.
I learned early who and why not to trust. It has made me stronger, but it did ruin the next seven years of my school experience. Fortunately for me, the next year mom moved us close to the area where there were horses stabled and I immediately switched my focus from the pain of being shunned into something wonderful. I still had to go to the same school, but life was better.
That is the corporate/bureaucratic/careerist/consumerist world that we live in. It worked well enough when people were brought up with the values of an earlier era. But those who came of age wholly in the new world and rose to the top don’t have the same moral constraints.
As with Watergate, there were a lot of behind the scenes machinations in the McCarthy hearings that can make one skeptical about the old black and white, good and evil version of events. But the public in both the Fifties and the Seventies was still capable of being shocked.
The gift of a vicuna coat cost Sherman Adams a top job in the Eisenhower administration. People who supported Ike couldn’t just dismiss the charge, and Eisenhower and Adams couldn’t either.
Shame. Yep, it’s a feeling that helps us guide our behavior. I can’t imagine anyone not feeling shame when they fail to live up to their oath of office. As Joe Biden has done – especially as it concerns the border. He and Mayorkas simply have no shame.
Thanks for telling you story, Anne.
Some children of my era (1933-1950) were subjected to shaming by teachers and coaches that was damaging.
One classmate was not into playing football. He was publicly called a sissy by the coach on numerous occasions. Years later we had dinner together and he told me he still couldn’t shake the feelings of inadequacy that those comments had caused him. A terrible thing.
I once missed a tackle in a game. The same coach benched me and had some choice things to say about my football skills. It wasn’t until a year later, when I made a tackle that stopped a touchdown from being scored on us, that I finally began to regain my self-esteem.
In those days people were less concerned about how much damage was done to children’s psyches. It was thought to motivate us to do better. 🙁
There’s a balance that can be struck that motivates people to do better without shaming them deeply and creating long-term psychological effects. Unfortunately, we’ve gone too far the other way.
Anne, thank you for sharing. That teacher *should* have been ashamed to treat her student so hatefully. I am glad the boys’ coach counteracted her behavior some. I notice that you did not say you felt ashamed; I hope you did not, but I recognize that for a child it is hard to resist feeling ashamed when a powerful adult shames you. It’s hard for adults too.
Not only do I think shame, or its prospect, is a good motivator for right behavior, I think regret is, too, and just like shame, regret has become devalued by our culture.
Many of the actions I feel regret about, I’m the only one who remembers them. That doesn’t stop me from knowing I did wrong. It doesn’t stop me from knowing I don’t want to repeat that feeling.
But think about the language that accompanies words like shame and regret: right and wrong, good and bad, correct and incorrect. These words, too, have been devalued and co-opted. Think about the binary children face in school today: OK and not OK. Not excellent or surpassing, and not poor or failing. A flattened binary that doesn’t even have the strength of “that’s a no-no.”
We’re people defined by whether we’re OK or not, being ruled by the shameless who have no regrets.
He was driven from teaching by the Teachers’ Union.
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One of the subsidiary points of The Peter Principle is ‘the super competent and the super incompetent get fired, because they disrupt the system’.
Some children of my era (1933-1950) were subjected to shaming by teachers and coaches that was damaging.
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Both you and Anne offer examples of public employees abusing their positions to flog personal beefs, as does the moderator in her 2d paragraph.
The prospect of public shaming would more effective as a modifier of behavior if there were a shared set of expectations. The Trump prosecutors named earlier do not have to worry about being shamed in the eyes of their compatriots, or half the citizenry.
Baby, you are setting yourself up for a Sumdge meme! On the left, you yelling “have you no shame” at Bragg and Smith, and pointing. On the right, said prosecutors blowing cigar smoke your way and grinning “Nope!”
As a 55 year old Gen X member I don’t think that has much to do with their lawlessness. All ages of the Democratic Party and media (BIRM) are far left today, and if anything Gen X is more cynical and conservative than other generations, both of the Baby Boomers and Gen Y & Z. Barrett, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are all Gen Xers and are pretty good.
I get what the author is trying to say, but I can very well see, e.g., Joe Biden being ashamed of Hunter not because Hunter is rotten, but for being too much of a loose cannon: “You are an inept crook, Sonny Boy, so get your act together and do it right!” I have no idea if it would work on Hunter, though… 😉
RE: “They don’t care. They probably feel pride. I don’t know much about their backgrounds, but I do know that they are all about the same age: Bragg is 49, Smith is 52, and Willis is 54.”
An interesting observation, but David Weiss is 66. Metrics Garland is 70.
I’m sure these people don’t feel shame, but I believe that their age and upbringing isn’t the issue. Instead, I think that they’re true believers, willing to do whatever is necessary for the greater good.
rcat:
I certainly wasn’t saying that it’s ONLY people in that age group who would behave that way. I just think it’s more common among prosecutors of that age group and younger.
Looking at my own family, those of us who were around in the Sixties and came of age in the Seventies have long been skeptical about “The System” and still are, even if we are far from accepting the radical politics of the Sixties.
Those who were born in the Seventies and came of age in the Eighties aren’t so skeptical or so cynical about the way things work, but they’re also more likely to accept today’s progressive ideas.
Of course, there are people even older who have bought into today’s wokeism, and my family certainly isn’t representative of the whole country, but it seems like what stays with people from their formative years isn’t the explicit ideas and ideologies of that time, but a mood or a temperament: pessimistic or optimistic, skeptical or credulous. Of course it could also be a result of birth order.
Neo: My point is that it’s not the age and not the shame. In fact, a lot of millennials and gen-z’s value conformity to group norms. I believe that the key issue is their activism. They are on a mission to rid the world of a great evil. Even if they were sensitive to shame, they’d still do.
If you want to consider generational differences, I suggest that these people share the following:
1. They don’t understand how the “ends justifying the means” frequently ends badly.
2. They don’t stop to consider whether or not the enemy is evil at all.
3. They dehumanize the enemy and his supporters.
4. They don’t understand the values and norms of a western democratic society. And they don’t understand why those ideas matter. In particular, tearing down the justice system and undermining individual rights (e.g. free speech) destroy the foundations of the country, and the damage cannot be repaired peacefully.
rcat:
Of course they are leftist activists and that’s primary. I think that almost goes without saying. I don’t know how old you are, but in my generation even most leftist activist lawyers had more respect for the law. They used it but were less inclined to twist it – although of course some people did. Now it’s standard operating procedure and almost universal among leftists of later generations.
Just to take one example, in older generations leftist activists were more likely to respect the adversary system and didn’t try to block people on the right from having legal representation, nor did they try to disbar lawyers on the right. But this is very often the approach of leftist activists nowadays.
neo:
As you alluded to in another article, the leftist activists of the 60s failed because their views were in the minority. Hence they relied on the Law and free speech for protection — while they played the long game.
But now the long march through the institutions bares fruit. They have trained legions of activists who don’t understand the values and norms of a western democratic society. Once they wield the power of the majority, why should they accept restrictions on that power?
Besides, those who are ignorant about how their social arrangements work will never notice when those arrangements are being undermined.