Shaming, Self-improvement, and Political Action

By Wade Lee Hudson

In “The Shaming-Industrial Complex, Becca Rothfeld describes the problem: Absent structural change, self-improvement will be limited. A large network of supportive small teams whose members are aware of this problem could be one solution. In itself, this network could constitute structural reform, which Rothfeld seeks. It could also nurture a strong sense of community whose members, given their awareness of the Shaming-Industrial Complex, would logically pursue structural reform in other social sectors and, ideally, cultivate holistic and systemic transformation.

Rothfeld notes how our social fabric has recently “frayed considerably,” aggravated by “the brutality that fuels Internet shaming” and wonders “whether there is anything redeeming about our transformation into bloodhounds as soon as we log on.” Her review of two books addresses this issue. She says “How to Do Things with Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame Across Cultures” by Owen Flanagan “suggests that our tense political climate is the product of poor emotional regulation, whereas “The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation” by Cathy O’Neil suggests that “shaming is structural: its ubiquity is the fault not of individual vigilantes but, rather, of the many industries that manufacture and exploit mortification for profit.”

According to Rothfeld, there’s “an ambiguity built into the very concept at issue. Shame is an emotion…but it is also a state of affairs.” This ambiguity leads her to ask, “Is shame fundamentally a feeling or fundamentally a social phenomenon? Should we treat it as a matter of psychology or of politics?”

Rothfeld says, “Flanagan casts his vote for psychology... Shame, in his view, is an unjustly maligned emotion that we might rehabilitate in order to discipline racists and misogynists… [Because] shame requires a shared social context...[it] is a means of enforcing whatever values are operative in a given society,” He, therefore, calls for shame “to be enlisted in the service of social justice.”

Flanagan calls us to “get away from thinking that emotions are only or primarily ‘inner things’ [because] they follow ‘scripts’” that are socially learned. This socialization is illustrated by other societies that “do” emotions differently’ such as the Nepalese Tamang who “value harmony and self-effacement and strongly discourage anger” and the Tibetan Buddhists, who “believe that anger, resentment, and their suite are categorically bad.” Flangan argues that “we might follow suit if we only took the trouble.”

Rothfeld believes Flanaga’s book:

is a welcome corrective to Anglophone philosophy’s tendency to frame Western presumptions as universal. And it presents an appealingly sensible moral program. Flanagan instructs us to begin by acknowledging the cultural contingency of our emotional outlook and to proceed by modifying our unruly inner lives, eliminating vengeful impulses and instilling a propensity for shame in the face of moral transgression. Yet we may wonder how many people are capable of exercising so much control over their feelings… 

And what if we could learn to forfeit the pleasures of pettiness and perversity? Political life might plod on unchanged… The behavior of scattered individuals may have only a minor effect on the institutions that shape our lives and constrain our conduct… 

Besides, if the scripts that define our emotions are social, then personal reform cannot be expected to kick off an about-face. We can adjust our behavior, but we cannot change the nature of emotions until we overhaul the rituals bound up with them.... [Flanagas] gets the proper order of operations backward: to reinvent shame, we must first reimagine those norms.

Shame, as Flanagan sometimes appears to forget, is an effective weapon only when it is brandished against those who already inhabit a shared ethical universe. If politicians on the other side of the aisle strike Flanagan as shameless, that’s not because of any shame shortage but because they are not bound by the norms he favors... A mere increase in the total volume of shame in circulation would not result in...social betterment...; big feelings do not guarantee big changes.

From Rothfeld’s perspective, “O’Neil takes a more promising tack, proposing that shame is inextricable from its institutional buttresses...” Her analysis of the “shame industrial complex” examines a “weight-loss industry that capitalizes on eating disorders, a pharmaceutical industry that capitalizes on widespread addiction, and a cosmetics industry that capitalizes on women’s discomfort with their sexual selves.”

O’Neil notes that “digital titans, led by Facebook and Google, not only profit from shame events but are engineered to exploit and diffuse them.” Rothfeld reports, “Social-media companies work to push paroxysms to the top of our feeds in defiance of our feeble scruples… The primary drivers of online scandals are not isolated cyberbullies,... but machine-learning algorithms that optimize for traffic.”

“A constant in these shaming industries is the concept of choice,” O’Neil writes. “The guiding premise is that the victims screwed up: They could have chosen to be rich, shapely, smart, and successful, and they didn’t.” Peddlers of diets and fitness routines insist we could lose weight if we cycled more vigorously or ate fewer calories—when, in fact, “obesity isn’t a disease of willpower” but a “biological problem,” as a biomedical researcher assures O’Neil...

Rothfeld comments:

In reality, O’Neil says, the opioid crisis is the fault of “publicly traded corporations, from pharma giants to private prisons,” which “profit from this grim status quo and perpetuate their thriving empires by casting blame on the victims and shaming them into subscribing to their offerings.” ...

Rothfeld offers a needed corrective to this focus:

There’s no reason to think that companies capitalize more on shame than on the other negative feelings on offer. Envy and good old-fashioned insecurity are at least as prone to consume us with doubts about our own self-worth. And, worse, O’Neil ricochets between characterizing shame as a social state and as a feeling. “Shame, by definition, is something we carry inside,” she informs us at one point—but is this true at all, much less true “by definition”? Aren’t shame machines outside us, and isn’t that precisely the source of their horrible power?...

O’Neil ends by championing “healthy shame,” which is levied against the powerful instead of the vulnerable. The usual suspects, namely righteous protesters, serve as examples of healthy shamers, engaged not in bullying but in venerable “punching up.”

Rothfeld cautions:

Yet it seems unlikely that shaming the shamers will yield anything approaching justice. Even when shame is employed in the service of virtuous norms, it’s bound to spawn excessive cruelties when it is unleashed on a national, or even a global, scale. By now, so many blunderers have become full-fledged personae non gratae that it is impossible to keep track of all of their demolished lives. Many of these untouchables have exhibited bona-fide misjudgments, but the scope of their censure is disproportionate to the severity of their crimes....

Perhaps the perils of shaming are so readily underrated because of its peculiarly dual nature: it is a public punishment cleverly disguised as a trifling psychic disturbance, and both O’Neil and Flanagan ultimately submit to the temptation to write it off as a feeling to be managed. Although the first two sections of “The Shame Machine” attack companies for shifting social burdens onto individuals, the book ends by recommending that we “detoxify our relations.” It’s self-improvement that’s paramount. We should stop feeling shame, and we should stop inflicting it....

This neglect of the political context is critica, as Rothfeld puts it.

But how much does it matter whether we make a habit of it? The suggestion that our emotional practices have such outsized political import belongs to a dubious theory of cultural change. There is little evidence that electoral havoc is an offshoot of private insecurities,The force of shame stems from its status as a social condition, not from its emotional resonance….to be discussed and dismantled on the psychoanalyst’s couch. Vicious gerrymandering and laws that continue to disenfranchise millions are at least as consequential as a handful of private outbursts…

This reality leads to the necessity for structural, cultural, and political change.

If fat-shaming is the result of the weight-loss industry’s machinations, we almost certainly cannot alter our feelings without altering the institutional arrangements that support them. Flanagan may be right that emotions are culturally specific—but we will still have to change a culture in order to change the emotions that it generates. How effective can a personal crusade really be when the gears of the shame machine go on grinding?

Rothfeld’s analysis is solid as far as it goes, but it fails to examine a key root cause: Our dominant social system — the Machine — socializes individuals, organizations, corporations, and nations to dominate and exploit others if they can or submit if they cannot. The Machine encourages everyone to climb social ladders, gain more wealth, status, and power for selfish ends, and look down on those below. Shaming is merely one way individuals try to establish oppressive dominance. Dissolving the selfish desire to dominate will help dissolve the arbitrary impulse to shame.

One way to “change a culture” and move toward “altering the institutional arrangements” is to build grassroots models that illustrate what we seek. Members of supportive small teams who endorse a shared set of principles can help each other undo oppressive social conditioning by honestly acknowledging their weaknesses and mistakes. These negative impulses include using shaming as a way to establish dominance. Dissolving the desire to dominate, which drives our dominant social system is key to holistic and systemic transformation.

By gathering in regional, national, and international conferences, members could undermine the Shame Industrial Complex, counter the Machine, and plant seeds for new, liberating cultures. And they could engage in political action to advance structural reform throughout society. In so doing, they could serve humanity, the environment, and life itself