Oh, the shame!

As promised, a post on shame culture versus guilt culture. Ross and Ta-Nehisi have pitched one in my wheelhouse by bringing it up, and Ross gets double points for connecting it to conservatism:

One provisional answer would be to say no to guilt, and yes to shame: I think they're different emotions, and that shame's connection to "dishonor" rather than "culpability" makes it a more appropriate response to sins that you yourself are only complicit in indirectly, through the ties of blood or citizenship or ideological fellow-travelership. But shame, in turn, only makes sense in relation to communities that you wish to associate yourself with, or that you can't disassociate yourself from even if you tried. So where race and racism are concerned, I feel much more ashamed as an American than I do as a twenty-first century conservative, because I feel a stronger loyalty to the America of the 1950's (or the 1850's) than I do to the conservative movement of the 1950's. I'm sure I would have subscribed to the early National Review and felt philosophical affinities with many of its writers, but I'm also pretty sure - allowing for the faint absurdity of any such hypothetical - that I wouldn't have self-identified a Buckleyite right-winger during the Civil Rights Era, and I don't think it makes sense to feel shame over the decades-old conduct of people you wouldn't have agreed with at the time just because the shifting currents of American politics eventually landed you in the same political camp.

Leaving aside the idea that the connection between Conservatism Then and Conservatism Now is simply a matter of "the shifting currents of American politics eventually landing you in the same political camp," I agree with Ross. Shame trumps guilt: it's more aristocratic without being substantially more elitist; it eliminates all hemming and hawing about the (often unanswerable) question of culpability; it stops in its tracks the deeply irritating liberal habit of psychologizing public wrongdoing. To understand all is not to forgive all—this is true whether you use the language of guilt or the language of shame, but when we talk about dishonor it's more obviously true. Remember that time that Foucault railed against confession, and especially the psychotherapeutic "breakthrough," as the most reliable path to truth? Remember how right he was?

More than that, though, I'm worried that guilt—liberal guilt in particular—is something a person can be proud of. It takes a strong man to own up to something, we say, and that's fine, except when it becomes congratulatory (or self-congratulatory). There's no humility without humiliation, and guilt is not humiliating. Consider sex scandals: Bill Clinton was guilty, John Profumo was shamed. Who prefers the former?

All of that being said, I'm still a fan of genred guilt, especially the Catholic and Southern kinds, and honor culture can, of course, go wrong. (If, for instance, I were to get huffed about Kathy G.'s insulting post about conservatism and challenge her to a duel...) But guilt culture's problems aren't exceptions, they're systematic—just ask any politician whose ever gone through the post-scandal podium ritual.