Sunday, September 5, 2010

Naked and ashamed

It is one of the curious facts of the Bible that guilt and shame enter into the story at precisely the same moment:
Then the eyes of both were opened,
and they knew they were naked;
and they sewed fig leaves together
and made loincloths for themselves.
And it is also interesting that the shame is absolutely separate from the guilt. They are guilty of eating forbidden fruit and they are ashamed of being naked.

I could go on at great length being subtle and nuanced in my interpretation of the Adam and Eve but it seems to me that the story is not intended to explain the presence of guilt and shame. The story of Adam and Eve does not explain anything at all despite considerable efforts to try to make it explain or justify morality. All it does is describe the place of guilt and shame and sin in the world. The story would make no sense at all if shame, guilt and sin weren't real things that always exist in human communities.

By the way, there are two interesting cases of shame in today's readings. Paul's letter to Philemon makes the case that Philemon should forgive his runaway slave Onesimus. That seems like a straightforward guilt-innocence case. But the letter was meant to be read aloud before the whole church. The whole church in this case meaning the Christian community that met at Philemon's house! Paul means to back up his guilt-innocence logic by shaming Philemon into doing the right thing.

Again, in the Gospel, Jesus talks about doing things the right way because it is the right way but underlines this by saying that the consequence of failing to do so will be shame:
Otherwise, after laying the foundation
and finding himself unable to finish the work
the onlookers should laugh at him and say,
'This one began to build but did not have the resources to finish.
One of the most tempting notions of enlightened liberalism is that we might get rid of shame and live in a  world where guilt and innocence are the only things that matter. There is a lot of propaganda in favour of this idea. Think of The Scarlet Letter or Leonora or Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

But I don't think it is possible or desirable to do so.

7 comments:

  1. I agree, the Adam and Eve story says nothing and explains nothing. It was primitive man's naive attempt to understand something he could not possibly understand. In fact, recent fossils discovered within the last few months are of a female several million years older than the oldest male remains, so much for Adam's rib.

    I think it is both possible and desirable to eliminate shame from people's experience, and I have dedicated the past 25 years of my life to doing that in the course of my work. I have seen the devastating affects of shame on both children and adults. Shame might or might not cause people to stop bad behaviors--if that was a problem to start with, usually it has the opposite effect. But many people feel shame not because of something they did but because of things that were done to them, e.g., the victim of rape, or as recently as 30 yrs ago a woman who was divorced, or a man who loses his job because of corporate downsizing. These are clearly residua of a--pardon the expression "fucked up" culture. But shame--whatever the reason for it--always causes people to feel ostracized or they self-ostracize and withdraw into themselves, which makes healing all the more difficult. And that's what we're really talking about here, healing wounds. I think in the story you cite about Jesus, He mentions shame in passing, to make a larger point, not that shame is either desirable or inevitable. Jesus offers the hope of healing, not by shaming people but by validating them and their instrinsic worth in God's eyes.

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  2. I don't quite agree. I think it explains nothing but that it says quite a bit. The Genesis stories are reworkings of older stories from Egypt and Babylon and they are, I think, works of astounding genius that say quite a lot about the human condition.

    i think the special genius of them is that they don't try to explain.

    As to eliminating shame, there is too much to say to do it justice here.

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  3. Well, we disagree about Genesis. Regarding shaming, I can tell you that based on both personal and professional experience, it does not succeed in what the person doing the shaming tries to convince himself and others he is trying to accomplish. It merely provides a "cover" for the shamer to derive smug self-satisfaction.

    But I also think there's a difference between shaming individuals and shaming public officials. When a public official misappropriates public funds or engages in other forms of public corruption, e.g., taking bribes in exchange for awarding contracts, they should be shamed because they betray the public trust. In those cases shaming might serve as an incentive to other public officials not to engage in corrupt activities. But realistically, it probably only serves to make them more diligent and careful about covering their tracks.

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  4. Okay, but why would it be okay to shame a public official in his or her public duties but not okay to shame, say, the people who appear on Jersey Shore.

    Or, for that matter, why would it be wrong to suggest that we should all be subject to some shame in the public sphere?

    It's odd, don't you think, to suggest that only politicians and public officials should be subject to this.

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  5. I don't know what Jersey Shore is, other than a place people go on vacation. Is it a TV show? I'm not being flippant here, or do you mean because overweight women wear bathing suits that are way too small for them?

    The difference between shaming public officials and shaming individuals is that the former are entrusted by the public--the body politic--to look out and protect their interests, and the stakes are often very high. When they do something corrupt they betray the trust of potentially hundreds of thousands of people, and the body politic has a right to hold them accountable, and for that reason they should feel shame about what they did. This would also apply to Catholic priests, teachers, health care workers, anyone who is entrusted with protecting others. Of course, this presupposes that they have a conscience, and I see little evidence of that among any of our elected officials. Whey they say they're sorry, they really mean they're sorry they got caught.

    Contrast that with a 5 year old who innocently touches himself while out shopping with mommy and daddy and is taught shame about his body. Or the adolescent who doesn't get into an elite prep school and can't face her girlfriends out of shame, or the examples I cited earlier about the divorced woman who feels shame and the man who loses his job as a result of corporate downsizing. I would even go so far as to include the 17 yo boy headed for an Ivy-League college who gets a call from his 15 yo girlfriend who tells him she wants to give him a blow job, he accepts, her parents find out and go ballistic, he's arrested and labeled a sex-offender. I worked on such a case several years ago, and without the counseling that boy received--and some very good lawyering which his parents could afford--that incident would have sent him on a downward spiral, because he felt ashamed. In fact, all he was guilty of was an error in judgement. I worry more about those kids whose parents can't afford to mount a defense for their children or provide counseling. In any case, all of these examples are about private matters--even that last one--and they should be handled privately. So no, I don't think it odd that only public officials and politicians should be subject to shame.

    As you said in an earlier post, the issue of shame and shaming is very complex, and a forum like this probably can't do it justice. But the empirical evidence that has been accumulated shows that shaming someone for something they've done usually does more harm than good. Shame says "I am a bad person" Guilt says "I did a bad thing." Two different approaches with distinctly different outcomes.

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  6. Jersey Shore is a reality TV show. In the unlikely event you want to know more (and I think most people would be happier not knowing more) there is a Wikipedia entry.

    As to shame, I think everyone is responsible for the body politic. There are obviously huge differences in degree but everyone has some responsibility and that responsibility should carry the risk of shame.

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  7. I've never seen Jersey Shore or any of the reality shows, but from what I've heard it seems to me that people who appear on those shows--and Jerry Springer--are impervious to shame or they wouldn't be on them. But aren't they being exploited by the network execs and the sponsors who are raking in millions of $$$ at their expense? Aren't they the ones who should be shamed? Their response to that, of course, would be that the audience can change the channel, they don't have to watch, but they do, and that = high ratings. They are in a sense betraying a public trust because they're presenting garbage over the air waves. But I don't think it is possible to shame any of the participants in these shows, from the top brass at the networks, to the sponsors, to those who actually do the dirty work, to them its just a job or the cost of doing business.

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