For Shame

Rediscovering the Virtues of a Maligned Emotion

Gregg Ten Elshof

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9780310108672
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Can a better understanding of shame lead us to see its positive contribution to human life?

For many people, shame really is a destructive and health-disrupting force. Too often it cripples and silences victims of other people's shameful behavior, and research has demonstrated clearly the damaging effects of shame on our emotional wellbeing. To combat this, a mini-industry of resources and popular therapies has emerged to help people free themselves from shame.

And yet, shame can contribute to a healthy emotional and moral experience. Some behavior is shameful, and sometimes we ought to be ashamed by wrongs we've committed. Eastern and Western cultures alike have long seen a social benefit to shame, and it can rightly cultivate virtues both public and personal.

So what are we to make of shame?

Philosopher and author Gregg Ten Elshof examines this potent emotion carefully, defining it with more clarity, distinguishing it from embarrassment and guilt, and carefully tracing the positive role shame has played historically in contributing to a well-ordered society.

While casting off unhealthy shame is always a positive, For Shame demonstrates the surprising, sometimes unacknowledged ways in which healthy shame is as needed as ever. On the other side of good shame, lie virtues such as decency, self-respect, and dignity—virtues we desire but may not realize shame can grant.

CHAPTER 1
APOLOGY

Not long ago, I was on a solo backpack trip through the San Jacinto Wilderness. Backpacking in such beautiful country, while glorious, presents the would-be practitioner with many challenges—among them, the biological need to digest food and discard waste in an environmentally sensitive way that respects the dignity of others on the trail. This involves preparing in advance with materials and strategies for responsible “bathroom” stops. Seasoned backpackers know all about this, and there’s no reason to get into the gory details here. Suffice it to say that on the present occasion, I was suitably prepared and had deployed the relevant strategies.

Nevertheless, I was discovered at exactly the wrong time by another hiker who had wandered significantly off-trail. The interpersonal contact was brief and, I dare say, profoundly uncomfortable for us both. I can’t say for certain what the other hiker felt. But I know how I felt. Though I had done nothing wrong, I felt wrongly situated in the world. I felt as though my very presence (such as it currently was) was a source of pain, discomfort, and embarrassment both for this other person and for me. I felt a significant downtick in my social standing in the world—like I was a less respectable person than I had been just moments before. I felt like a person of slightly lesser consequence. I wanted to shrink, to disappear. I think the other hiker felt similarly. Though he had done nothing wrong, I think he felt wrongly situated in the world. He felt his own existence as a cause of pain, discomfort, and embarrassment in the world. He felt slightly less respectable than he did just moments before. He also wanted to shrink, to disappear. Thankfully, he did disappear in relatively short order, and the experience faded into the background of an otherwise sublime experience in the wilderness.

The emotion I’m describing is, I think, a familiar one. We’ve all experienced it. Nobody I know likes it. Sometimes it is mercifully short-lived and relatively mild in its intensity (as was the case in my hiking experience). But sometimes it persists because the conditions that give it occasion are not so easily eliminated. Often, parties to this emotional experience cannot simply disappear as did the other hiker. And sometimes the feeling occurs with an intensity that drowns out nearly all else.

On some occasions, the emotion arises in connection with something we’ve done that we know (or think) to be wrong. We suffer the embarrassment of social discrediting and we want to shrink or hide when we are caught (or when we imagine being caught) in serious moral failure. In these cases, an experience of guilt typically accompanies the emotion in question. On other occasions, though, guilt does not accompany the experience of this emotion. I may experience this kind of embarrassed social discrediting, for example, if my parent is caught in a serious moral failure or if someone accidentally sees me naked. Folks with publicly discernible impairments or disabilities often report feeling this way in connection with the real or imagined public experience of their disability. Sometimes folks experience this felt loss of social standing as a consequence of being significantly wronged by others. Victims of sexual abuse and discrimination of all sorts are paradigmatic cases in point. The emotion in question, it seems, accompanies many of these experiences for reasons having nothing to do with wrongdoing on the part of the people who have them.

The emotion that runs through all these cases—from the trivial and easily shrugged-off to the profoundly painful and potentially life-disruptive—is shame.

When we suffer shame, we feel somehow wrongly situated in the world. Guilt often accompanies this experience. But the experience of shame always involves the sense of diminished social standing—the experience of losing significance in the company of respected others (actual or merely imagined). We experience ourselves as a source of pain, discomfort, inconvenience, or embarrassment for ourselves and for others. For this reason, shame usually causes the desire to shrink, to hide, or to disappear altogether. This feeling of diminished social consequence will be less acutely experienced, it might seem, if we can find our way free of the real or imagined gaze of the other—if we can find the sweet relief of isolation.

Often, though, what health and healing require in circumstances that give rise to shame is the knowing and accepting embrace of the other. We need to be seen when we’re wrongly situated and accepted precisely in that condition to be free of our felt loss of social standing when we experience shame. But shame often motivates the pursuit of isolation. We often desire to escape the gaze of the other (or, worse, to do violence to the other in such a way as to eliminate the possibility of their gaze). The experience of shame, then, often pulls us away from health and healing. For this reason, shame has been the cause of much dysfunction and harm in human experience. So it is no surprise that much contemporary writing on shame has as its ostensible goal the denigration of shame or even the eradication of shame from the range of felt human emotions.

The central thesis of this book is that the wholesale denigration of shame and the corresponding attempt to eradicate it is misguided. This book is a defense of shame—an attempt to articulate how shame contributes to a healthy moral and emotional experience.

I wish to begin with apology—both in the popular sense (as an attempt to make reparation for pain I’ve caused or am about to cause) and in the older, more academic sense (the giving of reasons for a particular belief, conviction, or undertaking). First, I wish to apologize at the front end for what some readers might initially find hurtful about the aim of this project—defending shame. For many people, shame is a destructive and health-disrupting force. Many need to be rescued from the shame that has crippled them for years. And for those whose lives have been undone by shame, the suggestion that this emotion has an important role to play in human experience may itself be a cause of significant pain. My hope is that the following comments here at the outset will partly assuage whatever pain this book causes.

First, though I look at the need to redeem some of the healthy aspects of shame, not all shame is healthy. Much shame is destructive, and it would have been better were it never felt or experienced. Many of the books and resources that denigrate shame and seek to eradicate it have brought unmistakable healing. Countless people have found their way free of destructive and health-disrupting shame with the help of these resources. This is cause for celebration. Even as I criticize the wholesale denigration of shame, I want to celebrate any occasion when one finds their way free of debilitating or unhealthy shame.

The situation we’re in with shame is analogous to the one we’re in with sexuality. For many people, sexuality has been a destructive and health-disrupting force in their lives. Whether through abuse or dysfunction, they have experienced harm and need to be rescued and redeemed from the destructive effects of sexuality in their lives. When something has powerfully damaged us, it’s tempting to eradicate it. But this current situation is a case of swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction. A full account of human sexuality must include both the ways we use it to harm ourselves and others and an articulation of its positive contributions to human experience. Yes, we must seek to be sensitive to those who have been harmed by negative experiences surrounding sexuality. Yet a full-orbed perspective on human sexuality and human flourishing takes into account both the negative and the positive. The potential for destructive abuse and dysfunction is great, to be sure. But we cannot let it narrow our vision to the point where we miss the positive aspects. I think something like this is true of shame. There is a relatively narrow band of “shame experience” that makes an important and positive contribution to human life. And there is a seemingly infinite field of potentially harmful abuse and dysfunction. Resources abound, at present, for dealing with and finding freedom from shame. But the full story about shame requires an articulation of its unique contribution to human flourishing. And precious few are the resources aimed at making clear the positive contribution that shame makes to our life together.

This brings me to the second type of apology I wish to make—setting forth the reasons for this undertaking. I attempt to defend the legitimacy and fruitfulness of shame and to clarify its contribution to the good life. But why? Even if there is a narrow band of healthy shame experience, why bother? If, by and large, shame has been a destructive force in human experience, why not simply be rid of it? It’s easy to see why we would want to temper our critique of unhealthy sexuality with a positive vision for healthy sexual experience. The thought of a sex-less world is hardly a utopia. But would a world devoid of shame really be all that bad? What would be lost? Anything we care about?

I hope to make clear that something good would be lost were shame to be eradicated from the range of felt human emotion. While much of contemporary literature is aimed at helping folks who experience unhealthy and debilitating shame, this book seeks to address a different problem—the problem of an increasingly shameless culture. Chapter 1 will unpack what we mean when we talk about shamelessness, but for now you might ask yourself, “Is ‘shamelessness’ a vice or a virtue?” Most people I’ve talked with don’t find it complimentary to be described (or to have something they’ve done be described) as “shameless.” Why is that?

Shamelessness—or the lack of a sense of shame—is on the rise. It is most evident in the arenas of politics and the entertainment industry. But it is also increasingly present in the rough and tumble of everyday life—in the classroom, at the family dinner table, and in the workplace. And I will argue that this lack of shame has a destructive effect on our life together. Shamelessness is the tendency not to feel shame where shame would be the apt thing to feel. If shamelessness is a vice—not a virtue—then there are conditions and circumstances wherein shame is the appropriate emotional response. The first step in addressing the rise of shamelessness in our culture is to clarify what those conditions and circumstances are and to determine the appropriate contours of this particular emotion. So the first and most straightforward reason for this defense of shame is to address the disintegrating effects of the rise of shamelessness in modern society.

Overview

We begin by examining shamelessness more closely. What are the conditions under which we would describe someone as “shameless”? And what exactly is the failure we attribute to someone who is “shameless”? The next order of business is to distinguish shame from the closely related experience of guilt. Though these two emotions often accompany each other, they needn’t. We will consider instances where shame is experienced in the absence of guilt and where guilt is experienced in the absence of shame.

Having clarified the nature of shame, we will take a brief look backward to examine the place of shame in a healthy life, drawing from some of the culture-making wisdom traditions in human history. A common misperception is that the East is a shame-and-honor culture and that Western moral sentiment has been rather more guilt-centric. The truth is that shame has been an important moral emotion in both the East and the West. It is only in the post-Enlightenment West that shame has had trouble finding a natural home. The radical individualism of our contemporary Western mindset renders us uniquely incapable of integrating shame, unlike virtually all other cultures around the globe and throughout human history.

The reality that shame has been universally embraced across human cultures, both in the East and West, should give us pause. At the very least, it should make us question whether our contemporary denigration of shame is missing something others have seen and valued. On the other hand, sometimes a new movement in culture at a particular time and place represents a genuine improvement over what has been nearly universally accepted in the past. Recent movements against slavery, racism, and gendered hierarchies are plausible examples of this. So it’s possible that the negative view of shame that accompanies contemporary Western individualism represents a genuine improvement in the human condition. Perhaps we are healthier without shame and should be grateful for this unique insight and contribution of contemporary Western culture. Perhaps radical individualism, whatever its other merits or demerits, should be lauded for the denigration and wholesale rejection of shame.

An impressive body of empirical psychological research certainly seems to indicate that shame correlates with unhealthy states and postures (e.g., suicide, eating disorders, anxiety, and depression), while guilt does not. Any defense of the idea that shame has a positive role to play in human experience must grapple with this impressive case against shame. Defending shame in light of this research requires careful attention to the subtle differences between shame, low self-esteem, self-loathing, and other failures of self-respect that routinely disrupt health and well-being. I hope to advocate a mediating posture that takes the research seriously, carefully distinguishing healthy shame from the unhealthy emotional and cognitive attitudes that sometimes follow in its wake.

Once we have healthy shame squarely in view, we’ll be well positioned to ask whether shame has work to do that can’t be done equally well in some other way. Suppose it has not been demonstrated that healthy shame is maladaptive. Even so, if guilt can do for human experience everything that shame can do, why bother with the seemingly more dangerous and potentially destructive experience of shame? A defense of shame must show that there is important work for shame to do that cannot be done by guilt.

Finally, having made the case that we should preserve shame in some way because it contributes to the good life, I want to distinguish between shame and shaming. It’s a short step from the suggestion that shame has important work to do to the idea that we are warranted in shaming others—something all too easily accomplished in the wake of the social media revolution of the last decade. But seeing the good of shame should not lead us to shame others. This is not a step we should take. We will explore the difference between shame and shaming and the possibility that shame can do its good work without the need for self-appointed shame dispensers.

Again, I wish to be clear. Shame is a difficult and painful topic. This makes it difficult for me to know what to hope for you as you make your way through this book. I do, of course, hope the book will be helpful—that it will play some small part in stemming the tide against the rise of shamelessness. I also hope it will be, at least in some places, enjoyable.

And if you find it neither enjoyable nor helpful? Well . . . shame on you.

CHAPTER 2
SHAMELESS

Steve went to Harvard.

That was twenty-three years ago. Still, if you’ve known Steve for more than ten minutes, you know that he went to Harvard. Steve has an uncanny ability to insert his Harvard-alumni status into a conversation about anything. Recently a conversation about donuts (donuts!) turned into a discussion of a donut shop in Harvard Square that had unparalleled bear claws. Steve wondered aloud whether that donut shop he frequented as a student was still there. Those of us who have known Steve for a long time always feel a little uncomfortable on his behalf when the conversation takes one of these forced and predictable turns. We can read the faces of the others in the room. We cringe when we see their mildly disgusted reactions to the shameless self-promotion on display. But not Steve. He feels no discomfort at all. He is unaffected by the embarrassed sideways and downward glances of his conversation partners. He can’t feel the air flying out of the discussion as fewer and fewer make the attempt to contribute to it and more and more seize on any available escape to another conversation or occupation. To his ear, these forced references to his alma mater fit hand in glove with whatever we happen to be talking about.

Steve is a shameless self-promoter. But what do we mean, exactly, when we put him in that category? Has he done anything wrong? Anything immoral? Nothing obvious. No one is wronged when Steve self-promotes in the way he often does. No one is harmed. There are no rights violations. But something is wrong with Steve. He doesn’t feel something that, it seems, healthy, well-functioning people feel when they get caught up in self-promotion. It should be uncomfortable for him to lose social status the way he so obviously does when he makes these ceaseless references to Harvard. But it isn’t. Steve is shameless.

Notice that it is not the act of self-promotion itself that warrants the indictment of shamelessness. There is a difference, after all, between a shameless self-promoter and someone who self-promotes. The difference lies in the presence or absence of shame that we expect to naturally accompany self-promotion when all is otherwise well in the human psyche.

Consider Janet, an author who has been gaining some notoriety for her past two books. She recognizes that she has a growing audience and wishes to leverage her newfound influence to help folks who reside in homeless communities not far from where she lives. She’s just completed a third book—an autobiography—and has instructed the publisher to direct all proceeds to various dimensions of aid in the alleviation of suffering for these hom...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Apology
• 2. Shameless
• 3. Shame Everywhere
• 4. The Case Against Shame
• 5. Definitional Interlude
• 6. What Shame Is for
• 7. From Shame to Shaming
• 8. Conclusions and Applications
• Acknowledgments
• Notes