Two versions of shame

The overlooked power of shame as a force for good

Cycling through central Spain last year, between lockdowns and in the notes that went on to become Iberia, late one night I saw a shooting star I then realised was more likely a meteor falling to earth.

The photograph above was taken briefly of that horizon some hours earlier. I remember loving its redness; bright red between bands of black. It was a night where all along I had meant to ride late, into the night, and as I rode I thought the below, which I wrote up at breakfast next morning.

The thought came to me as organically and pretty much word-for-word as it appears in the book, and despite some back-and-forth with editors, eventually appeared as originally put down (although without the word ‘rightful’). My reservations were around the fact I find shame a punishing and also thoroughly negative emotion, one that frequently leaves people unable to love themselves as they are and as they ought be loved, keeping them inside this prison, or closet, or whatever it might be, that blocks them from the life they want for themselves. I can only imagine negative social outcomes from such internal repression.

Nonetheless, the sentence stayed in. Because I liked the sentence and the sound of it, and also because I wasn’t in my mind thinking about that kind of shame, but instead a version of political shame; a sense on the part of the powerful, of anyone with power, that that which is ill but within their gift to assert influence over, should not be as it is. That the injuries of the powerful committed against the weak are an abomination and must be seen as such. That abuse of office and contacts is a breach of trust, a breach of contract with the public from which all power and legitimacy ultimately flows. With a little shame so many of the worst instances of abuse and incompetence in public office could be done away with, because - with some shame -awareness of as much could be felt in the heart of the guilty, rather than implored from afar by the comparatively less-powerful. This, even strategically, seems worthy of note.

In more recent reading I had one of those great moments where your own thoughts are explained to you more fully and thoroughly. I was also, relatedly, made deeply grateful to the editorial decisions that suggested we keep shame in a straight form, without - as was discussed - weakening the sentence into a taxonomy of different shames.

The below is from a letter from Marx to a friend, Arnold Ruge, in 1844. It is one of the many examples - quite apart from his unrivalled evaluation of human economic relations - of what a magnificent writer he was. The key and relevant line is somehow jaw-dropping in both its eloquence and precision: “shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling.”

Perhaps even more succinct is the simple assertion that “shame is a revolution in itself”. In it is a power to assert that things that are, ought not be.

The expectation of political writing from Marx saves him the ambiguity of explaining what he means exactly by shame, as does his invocation of the nation; an inherently political idea.

It perhaps then seems worthwhile to separate shame, however simplistically, into a political shame and individual shame, wherein political shame is at a broader state of affairs that indeed brings shame on us all, or on the directly complicit, by its rotten or wrongness.

Individual shame, on the other hand, one that points inward rather than outwards, is an entirely negative emotion; one that takes the anger that ought rightly be pointed at the society that is wrong, or that judges us as individuals to be wrong, and instead internalises it, so that we as individuals become the problem. In the political version of shame is a substantial amount of love, built on the notion of a world different. In the individual version there is a dearth of love; built on the notion that we ought be different to accommodate a world that is wrong.

In this reevaluation of shame, and driving distinctions between versions of it, there is hopefully some way forward in processing it, and also developing more of it in those who ought feel ashamed.

The letter from Marx did make me particularly glad to have kept the paragraph as it was, though I nonetheless still recognise the misgivings it is sometimes the role of an editorial process to silence.

To that end, though, I feel it of value to share what was in my mind at the time, on the subject of shame as a thoroughly negative emotion. In his song, Heroes, David Bowie sings simply,

“and the shame, was there on the other side”

The ‘side’ is perhaps a reference to the wall that then divided the city of Berlin where the song was written and recorded, but I think particularly of a live version of the song, performed in Berlin, that I now and then listen to for its emphatic sense of joy. Bowie sings the line (around the 5minute mark, though the whole version is amazing) with such force, pointing away from himself, as if the shame is being cast off, gone, far from us.

The line, particularly delivered in that performance, is one of liberation, of emancipation as individuals, so that we can forge the politics we deserve, and wrest it back from those who deserve no power to shape it, and where so much shame should lie.