While spending the hot and humid evening on a friend's roof, rollicking in the knowledge that my only ambition for tomorrow is to play badminton in Prospect Park while drinking Bloody Mary's, on a Tuesday afternoon no less [I'm one of those types that never takes a vacation - last one was a week long trip to LA in the summer of 2002], I came around to the notion of shame.
Because I feel shame for my life, and I think it is the most damaging emotion; the most self-effacing obsession; the most dangerous imposition. Shame is one of the the most powerful, deceitful and controlling vestiges of an ancient age - an age before the idea of the personal, before Augustine's will. Shame is the negative of those texts that called us to humanism - it is the difference between ancient and modern humanism, precisely because it is the unresolved problem of ancient humanism.
Shame was thought to be moral. In a public world, a world before the 'I', the understanding of a personal that had to be right somehow because it 'was', because it existed, shame was the expression of morality. We, as the public, or as the family shamed another for behaviour deemed against what was due. We shamed people for going against the public mores, for trangressing the acceptable.
Yes, there were heroes for the shamed - Dionysios comes to mind with the shreading of the Athenian notion of moderation, and another ancient, whose myth was largely crafted on top of the Dionysios myth, one Jesus sought out the company of the shamed. It's funny in that way - the supposed followers of his religion today use shame as their shield from the world their saviour so tried to reveal to them. Then again, most Christians have never read the Gospel of Thomas, a work excluded from the formal Bible, like many others, because it didn't jive with the ends of the Roman Empire who are responsible for the Bible as we know it... Why such shit is decided by the power of empire will always amaze me - it seems that every movement against entrenched power is doomed to be appropriated by it, changed and ultimately anesthetized by it.
But shame, shame is still with us. It still is the public face of morality. Despite the hundreds of years of humanist history, in which we've developed the ideas of reason, of science, of democracy, of the self, of a morality that arises from our recognition of the a priori equality of human beings, as ends in themselves, we are still left with shame as the public face of morality.
Shame is the end of our "justice system", shame is the end of our "diplomacy", shame is the end of our political and social discourse, shame is the end our personal tantrums about a friend's or family member's behaviour. We still believe that morality rests in creating a sense of guilt in the 'guilty party'.
It is like Foucault's analysis of the 'modern soul' in Discipline and Punish. The self, rather than iterated as a freeing, self-creative process, is reiterated as a paranoid, self-searching inwardness born of the the notion that 'everyone is watching', that this novel and powerful concept of a self must conform to the expectations of the 'watchers'; we must feel shame before others; our lives must be lives of shame, because our self is constantly at odds with what is peceived as the real.
We use shame, all of us, every day, myself included. We use it innocently, without thought, based on the instinct of our social programming. We use shame to judge. We use shame to dismiss. We use shame to deliberately misunderstand. We use shame to fight. We use shame to denigrate another for not living up to our collective, or more often, very personal expectations. Rather than addressing whatever problem might underly these instances of shame, we defer a solution precisely by not treating others as equals. We, in our age of reason, forget the first premise of reason, that rational beings are ends in themselves. And in our everydayness we appeal to an archaic morality, the very public morality of making people feel shitty about themselves - the exact morality that excludes the self as a viable entity and subjects it to the seismic shifts of an external destiny.
By shaming others, we shame our heritage as humanists. Just think for a moment. What is the greatest shame done a criminal? The taking of his or her life. This act exemplifies a morality of shame - the self is so unimportant that we can simply extinguish it. No attempt at understanding. No attempt at recognizing the humanity of another despite their acts which themselves display a lack of recognition for humanity. Do we ourselves aspire to criminality?
And this is the crux of the matter. The economy of shame promotes, invites and invents the criminal. Through shame, we all see ourselves as criminal - as capable of acts that are unacceptable to the social order, whether they be intrinsically moral or not. And more often than not, acts which are intrinsically moral, in the humanist sense, are those most shamed.
I feel shame every day. I feel shame because my life is not what it was expected to be. I feel shame because I am an underachiever, though anyone who knows me knows I'm hardly that. I feel shame because I cannot accept a path for my life like so many around me. I feel shame because more than anything else, I want to be myself. I want to express who I am in everything I do. I want to evolve in a world surrounded by others who do the same. I want a world without bullshit, without expectations; a world where for better or for worse, we are who we are. I want a world in which we recognize each other for our honesty about ourselves.
In short I want a world without shame. And on this July 4th of 2006, I think I can say that this world is one envisioned, at least in spirit, in our Declaration of Independence. After all, as humanists, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men[sic] are created equal". Do we, as 21st century Americans believe this enough to realize that idea? Can we transform our inherited sense of morality from the archaic to the one envisioned by the founders of this country?