Shame on who?

Elites in society, like guards in a prison, encourage the middle classes to shame the lower classes and thereby exert dominant control over all. First we must relieve the shame to redress the injustice of poor-bashing

by Michael Nenonen <mnenonen@republic-news.org>

Joan Swanson's Poor Bashing: The Politics of Exclusion (Between the Lines, 2001) triggered a nation-wide discussion about the role humiliation plays in preserving an unjust economic order. Swanson argues that our contempt for the poor distracts us from the structural forces that cause poverty, making it more difficult to challenge those forces. People who benefit from the current economic order do their best to spread this contempt, while those most afflicted by this order often internalize the contempt directed towards them. Unfortunately, Swanson fails to provide an adequate analysis of shame, the emotion at the heart of these dynamics. Until we understand shame, we won't understand the full ethical significance of poor-bashing.

According to Donald Nathanson, author of Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self (WWNorton & Company, 1994), emotions exist primarily to reinforce patterns of thought and behaviour. During sex, desire intensifies our lovemaking. If a bear is chasing us, fear prompts our feet to move faster. Pride in our work encourages us to work harder. Emotions focus our attention and our energies, and thereby contribute to our survival.

Nathanson believes that shame is qualitatively different from other emotions. He calls shame an "affect attenuator." Its purpose is to shut down positive emotions. Consider what happens when we feel shame: we experience distress, our neck and face go slack, our eyes look downwards, we become somewhat confused, and feelings of happiness and interest disappear.

This may sound dysfunctional, but shame exists for a reason. Positive emotions tend to be related to the success we have in our various pursuits. When we encounter serious obstacles to these pursuits, we need to have the option of disengaging from them. We can't do this unless we can turn off the positive emotions that keep us engaged. Imagine what would befall an author whose enthusiasm for writing was never tempered by his grammatical mistakes. Such an author would certainly enjoy his craft, but his writing would never improve. The same would happen to an architect unmoved by his blueprint's design flaws, or a boxer whose performance was unrestrained by his inability to land a punch. Without the ability to disengage, we wouldn't be able to learn from our mistakes. By disrupting our positive emotions, shame gives us the chance to reconsider our actions.

Most of us don't use the opportunity shame provides. Instead, we typically rely upon four basic strategies for shame management. Each of these strategies, when carried to an extreme, can have dangerous outcomes. First, we can withdraw from the source of the shame to a place of privacy where we can allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by our thoughts and emotions. If we use this retreat for productive self-reflection and change, it can be quite useful; letting ourselves drown in shame, however, is ultimately self-destructive.

Second, we can distract ourselves from the shame by focusing on other things. This strategy is called avoidance. Addicts, daredevils, and workaholics are examples of people who take avoidance beyond its healthy limits. While this strategy can give us a competitive edge, it can also blind us to the negative consequences of our behaviour and prevent psychological growth.

Third, we can attack ourselves verbally, emotionally, or physically, and thereby gain the illusion of control over our shame. This strategy makes us extremely vulnerable to abuse, and may lead to suicidal behaviour.

Fourth, we can quell our shame by attacking others, with sometimes tragic results.

Shame becomes a problem when all avenues of success in important pursuits seem permanently obstructed. In such cases, shame can become excessive, blocking one positive emotion after another. This threatens us on a core level: by disrupting our capacity for positive emotions, enduring shame assaults everything that makes life worthwhile. Just as someone suffering from third-degree burns will fearfully avoid any open flame, people who are perpetually ashamed will frantically defend themselves against any further threat to their self-esteem.

The more important our pursuits, the earlier our success in achieving them is blocked, and the longer this blockage lasts, the more devastating and chronic the shame will be. The earliest and most important pursuit is the pursuit of a parent's love—a love that, rather than remaining hidden in the parent's heart, must be visibly expressed through empathy, attention, and respectfulness.

Children who, for whatever reason, are unable to sufficiently elicit this love tend to form identities grounded in shame. Even children who receive sufficient love may be poisoned by shame if they fall prey to mental, physical, or social problems beyond their control. These damaged children will often build their personalities around one of the four strategies of shame management. Those who habitually withdraw develop lifelong problems with anxiety and depression, while those who constantly avoid shame often become narcissists. Children who deal with shame by waging war upon themselves can become masochists, while those who deal with shame by waging war upon others can become sociopaths.

This last point deserves elaboration. In Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (Vintage Books, 1996), psychiatrist James Gilligan argues that, far from being shameless, sociopaths experience almost nothing but shame. Whereas Nathanson believes that shame attenuates positive emotions, Gilligan believes that, when taken to its extreme, shame shuts down all emotional experiences except, perhaps, rage.

Gilligan worked in a maximum-security penitentiary for many years, counselling people imprisoned for grotesque acts of violence. The prisoners he worked with consistently described themselves as the "living dead," a term they used to refer to their inability to feel anything besides anger. They backed up these assertions with horrific acts of cruelty and self-mutilation. How could they do such things, Gilligan asks, unless they were in some way emotionally numbed? Each of these prisoners had suffered profound emotional or physical abuse in childhood, and each responded by going on the offensive.

Besides being a significant obstacle in its own right, poverty exacerbates every other obstacle we might encounter, particularly in childhood. Shame and poverty are therefore intimately related. For this reason, the poor may be at much greater risk of developing depressive, narcissistic, masochistic, and sociopathic character traits.

Our economic order ensures the permanent existence of an impoverished underclass, and therefore ensures the existence of widespread shame, with all of its psychological consequences. Poor-bashing simultaneously reinforces the economic order and intensifies the shame it produces.

Gilligan uses the prison system to illustrate the strategic use of shame in capitalist society, drawing attention to the role that institutionalised rape plays in modern penitentiaries. He suggests that the purpose of the digital anal rape euphemistically referred to as a "cavity search" isn't primarily to find concealed drugs, but rather to inflict sufficient shame upon the prisoners to ensure their ongoing submission to the guards. He also suggests that guards turn a blind eye to prisoner-on-prisoner rape because, by dividing prisoners into rapists and rape victims, the prisoners' rage is redirected away from the guards and towards one another. The cost of this strategy is borne entirely by the prison population, whose already compromised humanity is systematically ravaged.

Gilligan argues that in this way the prison system mirrors the class structure of the larger society. Just as the guards break the collective strength of the prison population by encouraging the stronger prisoners to humiliate and oppress the weaker, so the upper classes preserve their social dominance by encouraging the middle classes to humiliate and oppress the lower classes. The guards and the upper classes both use shame as a weapon in the battle to control their social environment. The victims of prison rape, like the lower classes in the larger society, are psychologically damaged by the excessive shame they're forced to bear. Relative to other classes, their capacity for positive emotion is greatly impaired, and their risk of developing psychological disorders is dramatically heightened. These problems seriously hinder their individual and collective ability to fight for social change.

Restoring levels of shame among the poor to healthy levels must be a priority for any serious social justice movement. Unfortunately, previous attempts at this have been haphazard at best. Too many people focus on healing emotional wounds and building personal self-esteem without challenging the social structures that drive the poor into shame's corral. Others fiercely refuse to examine our existence as emotional beings, preferring to focus exclusively on the political and economic dimensions of the class war.

Either approach, taken alone, is unequal to the challenge confronting us. The poor deserve both pride and power, and they need to fill both their stomachs and their spirits. Our society seems unwilling to acknowledge this simple fact, and that, more than anything else, is truly shameful.

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