René Girard XXI: Shame

The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.

Growing up, I was always the smart kid in class, but occasionally I would get into trouble. In grade seven, my friends and I used to gang up on a ginger schoolmate, a shy and intelligent kid. We would mercilessly mock his red hair and freckles. It drove him to tears, and we loved it. It was a very Girardian dynamic, classic scapegoating. 

One time we were doing it at lunch, in the school’s cafeteria. Our music teacher, a bear-sized middle-aged man with an opera voice, saw it and responded furiously. He shouted my last name and got into my face, maybe because I was the model student he least expected to engage in bullying, and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Are you not ashamed of yourself?!” I froze. He followed that with a scathing rebuke. By the end of his rant, I was indeed very much ashamed of myself. 

I have been out of middle school for a while, but from what I’ve seen second-hand, I strongly doubt that today’s teachers – in the West at least – would still use the language of shame in disciplining their students. Would it not seem a little too politically incorrect? Intolerant? After all, one man’s shame could be another man’s pride. Today, schools are much stricter on bullying, and that’s a great thing, but I don’t see modern pedagogues using the shaming approach to rectify the young ones. Shaming someone today is seen as rather… shameful? And on the receiving end, I am not sure that today’s kids would respond to shaming, seeing that no one seems interested to condition them for this feeling. 

What happened to shame? 

The dictionary gives a characteristically prosaic definition of shame: “a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety.” We can do better; we can extract a more scientific definition of shame from René Girard’s mimetic theory. This theory states that we all imitate the desires of our models, people whom we take to possess a state of being higher than our own. We all harbour a private conviction that we lack a fullness of being, and the only remedy we can come up with is to look at someone else and convince ourselves that they are living that fullness. The twist is that our desperation in trying to capture transcendence is surpassed only by our refusal to admit that we lack it. We are too proud. We would expose ourselves to the ridicule of others, who all act as though they don’t lack it.  

Shame, in this scheme of things, can be defined thus: it is the emotion we experience when the personal lack of transcendence that we hide in ourselves is uncovered. 

Let’s look at some examples. As soon as Adam and Eve are banished from Eden, they experience shame. The transcendence they reached out for was supposed to be contained in the forbidden fruit. Inspired by the Serpent, they desired to be like God. But the result of eating the fruit was that they merely realize that they are in fact animals. They then cover their genitals, organs that so powerfully recall our animal nature with all its lusts that know not shame, and therefore with all its definitive lowliness. Clothing is the most universal and most basic human act of hiding our lack of transcendence. Shame always makes us feel naked in some sense.

Next example – all cultures attach some degree of shame to some type of ambition. We are not talking here about rules that restrain ambition from the outside; those would be ways to achieve a balance of power, the checks and balances of American political theory. Shame is a feeling that arises within the conscience of the individual. If we are ambitious, we try our best to convince ourselves and others that we aren’t exactly ambitious, that we don’t pursue ambition for the sake of ambition. We come up with some selfless cause, we say that we are trying to create a positive impact. Being ambitious for no specific reason is pathetic because it reveals that we lack being. And who is going to follow a pathetic leader, one who lacks such a seemingly fundamental thing? Ambition is always an ambivalent, tricky pursuit, wrought with contradictions and requiring careful navigation.

In sexual strategy, one feels shame when one’s longing for another is suddenly revealed but not returned by the person we long for. We are shown to be pathetically self-insufficient and desperate for the graces of a higher being, in this case, the uninterested target of our affections. Big turnoff. 

Loyalty is closely related to shame, too. Loyalty to one’s hometown, for example, invests the hometown with transcendence. Our love for our hometown is what makes it special. If you sell out by moving to another city and abandoning your loyalty to your hometown, you are admitting that the place was never special in the first place. You are uncovering the embarrassing nakedness of your provincial backwater. Again, this may not only bring you scorn from your former compatriots, but the indigenes of your new town might also reject you, because to them too you have now signalled your lack of noble pedigree. And who wants a rootless commoner in their polis? 

Even my example of bullying the ginger kid can be squared up with my mimetic definition of shame. Bullying, like any other form of scapegoating mechanism, is a mechanism for generating transcendence. By bringing down a single victim, the group of persecutors elevates itself. If everyone is convinced that the victim is lowly, it works. My music teacher didn’t see our ginger classmate as lowly, however, and instead, he indicated to me that my bullying merely reveals my lack of transcendence. The terms he used were much less technical, to say the least, but that was essentially what he indicated to me. 

It adds a lot of clarity to remove the cultural-historical baggage associated with the term, and see shame as a feedback signal to tactical failure in the great game of mimetic desire. It allows us to see shame’s fundamental regulatory role as well as all the distortions and abuses it has suffered throughout history. Yes, shame has been used as a tool of oppression. Yes, shame has been abused by what we today deride as Victorian, puritan, fundamentalist, etc., morals. But underneath all those distortions and abuses, we know that shame has practical value. 

Yes, none of us possess transcendence, and yes, it’s an especially civilized thing to confess to it. The thing is, the whole human civilization is built around the problem of dealing with conflicting desires. This is a central theme of Girard’s work. Acting as though we possess transcendence means acting as though we don’t have any uncontrollable desires. Pretending that we are self-sufficient helps keep the peace. That pretence will break down every now and then, and this is where confession and contrition come in. But we can’t have the pretence breaking down all the time, and to keep that from happening, a sense of shame is supremely beneficial.

Having a sense of shame creates tactical advantages for individuals, too. Restraining your desires saves you from revealing your neediness. It makes you look self-sufficient in the eyes of others and thereby creates an aura of transcendence around you. This makes you fundamentally more attractive as a romantic or business partner, a leader, or in any other capacity. A sense of shame, when wielded skillfully, is not a sign of victimhood but of mastery. 

When the sense of shame is lost, the mastery is lost too. The much-vaunted “freedom” of individuals melts away. One becomes a slave to one’s passions, as they say. It’s a slippery slope that can lead to addiction as one continually tries to grasp transcendence in the objects of one’s desire and fails. The failure itself may become interpreted as the indicator of transcendence, and this according to Girard is how one becomes a sadomasochist.

After I read Girard on this topic, it all sounded like common sense. In a more traditional society, it was common sense. So again, what happened to shame? 

Traditional societies needed shame as a social regulator much more than we do today because traditional societies had much weaker policing power. Lacking reactive correctional mechanisms, they had to resort to proactive ones, such as shame (also, ritual, but that’s another topic). Our modern society puts its faith in the policing powers of the state, but perhaps it puts even more faith in the power of modern technology to produce enough goods to satisfy everyone’s desires – and avoid conflict that way. Yet, modern society may not be strong enough to handle the complete rejection of shame either.  

Another angle on the loss of shame has to do with the romantic idea that people are essentially good and that their desires are essentially innocent and not conflictual. If desire is innocent, why should it be hidden, and if it shouldn’t be hidden, then what’s the point of shame? The romantics of the 18th century didn’t see how their well-meaning theories would lead to Wall Street greed and pornography of the 21st century. We have the benefit of hindsight. 

Convinced of the authenticity and rectitude of his desires, and confident in his ability to produce the objects to satisfy them, the modern man marches on in his quest to self-actualize, to be the best he can be through the pursuit of his passions - the pursuit of happiness. Yet, the reports of people reaching this El Dorado of modern ambition are vanishingly rare, and the few reports that do exist are suspect. Does Jeff Bezos live in a state of transcendence? It may not be an empirically falsifiable claim, but anyhow, I personally doubt it. Modernity hasn’t cracked the existential problem, I’m afraid. 

The modern man reveals a peculiar blind spot in the surprise he exhibits when his unbridled pursuit of ambition fails. To a time-traveller from the past, modern ambition would appear shameless, and its ending in failure would appear as a banality. It would seem to him only too obvious that open ambition would attract rivals, who eventually become enemies obsessed with each other and forgetful of their original object of contention. René Girard talks about rival as the skandalon or stumbling block often mentioned by Jesus in the Gospels, and he interprets Satan as the archetype of that obstacle. He presents a fascinating dynamic in which rivals first suggest desires to each other (Satan as the Seducer), then become obstacles or stumbling blocks to each other (Satan as the Adversary), and finally become enemies of each other (Satan as the Accuser, his passport name). 

The mimetic nature of desire means that we desire things that others possess, and we don’t. For this reason, it doesn’t matter how many products modern technology can produce; we will always desire that which is scarce. No matter how wide the wide gate to the Kingdom of Heaven, the desiring mob will always create a jam in it. Yet, we moderns don’t want to follow these truths because it would require us to face up squarely to the fact that our desires are inauthentic, empty, and harmful to society and the environment. But originality and ecology are both sacred cows of the modern age.

Rather than being ashamed on of our desires and dialling down on them, we exonerate. A popular thing to do is to burden our political system with the responsibility of safeguarding us against ambition. Let’s take as an example the American reliance on their Constitution, which I concede is one of, if not the best political creed. It must be confessed that the document alone has contributed to unprecedented freedom and prosperity. 

In the United States, there is endless debate around the Constitution. The country’s top legal minds are constantly interpreting the document. The fact that many of them make a living out of it makes them less likely to advertise the idea that for a society to function, it needs more cultural tools besides brilliant legal documents. Perhaps the most basic of such tools is a common sense of shame. Rituals are another. This must have been so obvious to the founding fathers that it didn’t occur to them to include in the founding documents. None of them thought it necessary to include an appendix saying something along the lines of: “None of this stuff will work unless people retain a basic sense of common decency.”

We don’t question ambition anymore. Why do you want to go Harvard? Don’t you see that they don’t want you there? Have you no shame? Why are you trying to get rich?... Rather, we abandon ourselves to unbridled ambitions and passions, and expect the Constitution to clean up the mess those leave in their wake.

Rather than abandoning popular desires and finding our niche, of differentiating ourselves in both girardian and business sense, we follow the herd. Consider: by merely walking the other way we signal transcendence, regardless of our aptitude. If we don’t, we find ourselves bound and weighted like cattle on various scales of fake differentiation: salary gradients, aptitude tests, social media likes. And the fattened hearts are the ones ready for slaughter.

Read more in the book Catharses.