SHAME One of the defining stories of western culture, variously interpreted, is the tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It is a story of innocence, curiosity, and shame. It tells—literally for a few, metaphorically for most of us—of our discovery of ourselves. It is about self-consciousness and what that means for us for good and for ill. Shame is one of the expressions of our self-consciousness, an awareness that somehow we are bad, weak, inadequate, ugly, stupid, not like others, unworthy. Vern Rutsala's poem, "Shame," begins with these words: "This is the shame of the woman whose hand hides her smile because her teeth are bad… …This is the shame of being yourself, of being ashamed of where you live and what your father's paycheck lets you eat and wear…" John Updike tells us in his memoir, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, of carrying "a secret behind my clothes," psoriasis. He wonders if his "thick literary skin" is just "a superior version of my poor vulnerable own, and my shamelessness on the page a distraction from my real shame?" Milan Kundera writes that "when someone discovers his physical self for the first time, the first and most important feeling that comes over him is neither indifference nor anger, but shame: basic shame, which will accompany him all his life, sometimes intense and sometimes milder, dulled by time…The basis of (this bodily) shame is…that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter…" Urination, defecation, vomiting, menstruation, nocturnal emissions, short legs or long ones, straight hair or kinky hair, dark skin or pale skin, large breasts or small breasts, a big nose or a small one, and hundreds of other features of our bodies can cause in us a deep sense of shame. Learning about sex as a child, many of us laugh out loud at the absurdity of such an act. We are even more disbelieving to think our parents did something so funny-looking and undignified. Somehow the authority of our parents just does not fit with engaging in such a ridiculous exercise. It's shameful even to think about it! We live with shame from an early age, beginning with physical things about which we feel ashamed, but in time expanding outward to cover all aspects of our selves, physical characteristics, feelings and behaviour. The Oxford English Dictionary offers this comprehensive understanding of shame: "The painful emotion arising from the consciousness of something dishonoring, ridiculous, or indecorous in one's own conduct or circumstances (or of those whose honour or disgrace one regards as one's own) , or of being in a situation which offends one's sense of modesty or decency." Shame is about judging ourselves and finding ourselves wanting. It is about feeling judged or being judged by others in a way that leaves us feeling that we are not what we should be or that we have failed to do what we should. There are three ways in which shame appears in our society. The first of these is what Lewis Smedes has called "bad shame." Bad shame is shame that leaves us utterly drained of any good feelings about ourselves. Bad shame reminds us of how unloved we are, how powerless we are, how lacking in achievement, how truly bad we are. This kind of shame can come from parents who, truthfully, never should have had children. They scream at their children. They insult their children. They never praise them. They never allow them to feel good about themselves. Parental shaming goes so deep into a person's psyche it is often impossible to recover from it fully. Child abuse is one form of bad shame. Religions are a second source of bad shame. I will speak of the religion in which I was raised, blessedly mitigated by loving parents who had good sense even if they gave verbal allegiance to some horrific doctrines. As most of you know, my father was a Presbyterian minister. Part of the theology of that branch of Christianity is a doctrine called predestination. It means not only that God knows what is going to happen but that God has foreordained that it will happen this way. One might think that logically God would then be responsible for the bad as well as the good things that happen, but that was not the theology of the church to which I belonged in my childhood. That theology said that even though God knew and planned everything that took place, it was us wretched human beings who were to blame. We were the sinners and we would pay and we would deserve it. Other forms of Christianity and other religions have their own teachings by which children can be made to feel unworthy. I was "saved" by parents who did not remotely live such a doctrine, but spent their time telling me what a good boy I was. (I was not, but what they did not know could not change the sweet things they said!) One reason I was so attracted to the Universalist side of our heritage is precisely that this faith affirms the worthiness of every human being. Universalism rejects bad shame as being a scourge on humanity. Parents, religion, and society can all work grievous harm through shaming. A culture can develop which thwarts individuals by never giving them recognition as full human beings. That is what slavery in this country did. Slavery was part of this land from the earliest days of the 17th century. Slavery was written into the Constitution. Slavery was justified by Biblical passages. Slavery required a war for its elimination, while its effects continue into the 21st century. Slavery said that a black person was only three-fifths of a white person. Slavery said that black people were fundamentally stupid, lazy, and immoral. Slavery said that God made things this way. Every thing that could be done to shame black people was done. This is bad shame. It was practiced against women, and in some cultures to this day is still practiced, devaluing females because of their biology, asserting that women have lesser intellectual powers, talking of "the little woman" and referring to grown women as girls. Primo Levi wrote of experiencing shame in the concentration camps. He tells feelingly of his remorse at being alive when "a man more generous, more sensitive, more useful, wiser, worthier of living" perished in the arbitrary murders of the Nazis. Levi tells of the shame he and other survivors lived with because they had not done more to save their comrades, not been more heroic, even in circumstances where heroism was virtually impossible. Bad shame is shame generated in us by others whose goal is to control us. Erica Scott has written of shame imposed on us by those who fear us and who seek to gain control over us. Parents who abuse their children, religions that give all power and all knowledge to their hierarchy, and social systems that try to keep minorities and women restricted and sometimes enslaved are using shame to maintain power. This is bad shame. It is not easy to counter it. Often all we can do is to hide it, by becoming the sweetest thing you ever saw, as women often did; by becoming passive, as slaves have often done; by becoming distant, as victims of abuse have tried to do; or by becoming angry, as some in every category of those experiencing bad shame have done. Better to work towards a sense of respect for self on the individual level and to work towards a truly just society on the large communal level as a way to deal with bad shame. Sometimes therapists are needed. Sometimes religious discipline can help. Sometimes strong relationships, romantic or platonic or collegial, can hold bad shame at bay. And sometimes working with others towards a common goal of making our society more equitable so that others do not have to suffer as we have can ease our sense of bad shame. Bad shame is the first way that shame appears in our society. The second is shamelessness. We live in an age in which virtually nothing is private any more, modesty is considered out of date, and what is decent today would have gotten people jailed just few decades ago. "In olden days," Cole Porter observed, " a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows! Anything goes." Television talk shows feature guests who have been raped who have married their rapists, teenage girls telling their mothers why they hate them and their mothers responding in kind, and men talking about what it's like to be castrated. For $34 a month, you can watch Voyeur Dorm. This is an Internet site providing live coverage of seven female college students who eat, sleep, undress, shower, and do other things under the watchful gaze of 30 cameras. Courtrooms are now open to public gaze, recently including jury deliberations. Is there anything we do not know about the British royalty? Jean Bethke Elshtain observes that when our intimate life is publicly exposed, we are actively seeking the exploitation of our own lives by others. We give away too much, shamelessly, to an unknown audience, who can do with it as they will, not as we will. We live in a shameless age. CEO's in too great number receive compensation packages 200 or 300 or 400 times the lowest paid worker in their companies without blushing. Bonuses are given to corporate executives who lay off hundreds and sometimes thousands of workers, and even to executives who take their companies into bankruptcy. The Roman Catholic Church for decades allows priests known to be predators, especially pedophilic priests, to continue in the priesthood. Bishops shuttle the priests around from parish to parish without any warning to the new community they will serve of their predilections and addictions. All of this till the last year was done virtually without the slightest indication of any remorse, guilt, or shame. Cole Porter was right: "The world has gone mad today And good's bad today, And black's white today, And day's night today…Anything goes!" It is a shameless age. Arthur Schnitzler's novella of a century ago, "Miss Ella," would be little understood by the reading public today. Miss Ella is the daughter of a man deeply in debt whose creditor offers to forgive the debt if the young woman will show herself to him nude. She agrees, but then is so mortified at what she has done that she goes mad with shame and dies. In our times, nudity is common in magazines and films and on television. The story we tell is of The Proposal, a popular movie in which Robert Redford offers $1 million to spend one night with Demi Moore, a woman married to Woody Harrelson. We live in a shameless age, partly brought about because the age before ours was so full of shame, so full of prudery, so full of false piety that it seems inevitable looking back that such unnatural attitudes had to change. There may be truth in what one writer suggested, that shame is about resisting what we desire and desiring what we resist, but not all desire is bad and sometimes being without shame is a good thing. It is a good thing, for example, that we talk openly about sexuality, about sexually transmitted diseases, and about sexual morality. Sexuality is a wildly mysterious, often uncontrolled force in our lives. We need to educate ourselves and our children about this force, its power, its beauty, its perils, its potentialities. As much as anyone, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop helped bring this country closer to an attitude about sexuality not so burdened with shame. He talked frankly and unashamedly about important issues in human sexuality, like STD's and the use of condoms and educating young children about their bodies and about sex. Another factor in bringing us into our shameless age is our remarkable wealth and technological wizardry. Since the Second World War ended, we have been astonishing ourselves with one marvelous invention after another, to the point where our senses have become dulled to wonder. Because our wealth is in part based on our consuming products and services, even if we do not need them, and because we live in a mostly unplanned society with a lot of competition for our dollars and our attention, new products, new entertainments, new faces, new ideas are always being developed, each one trying to be more interesting—that is, more revealing, more shocking, more titillating-- than what has gone before. Madonna's Truth or Dare, the Ozzy Osbourne Show, reality tv, news programs guaranteed to bring you murder and fire and scandal, lurid magazines and pornographic advertising—sensationalism rules the economic and entertainment worlds. Whatever sells is okay. This attitude of shamelessness extends into every corner of our society. Politicians shamelessly accept money from Political Action Committees and other sources and tilt legislation accordingly, avoiding the bi-partisan reforms that could bring integrity to our national political system. Olympic athletes and college football and basketball players shamelessly pose as amateur athletes or student-athletes, while a never-ending flow of money pours into them from businesses, the media, and boosters. Our educational institutions are bought off with huge payments and endorsement contracts. In the world of health care, bureaucrats shamelessly dictate to doctors what medicines they may prescribe, what tests they may run, what procedures they may perform. Shamelessly, insurance companies make huge profits, as do drug companies and some hospitals while tens of millions of our citizens are without health insurance, including one of my children who has need of surgery and no insurance and no money to pay for it. Our health care system has some of the best medicine practiced in the world, if you can pay for it. Shameless! We live in an age of shamelessness where anything goes. To some extent this is a good thing because the constraints of former times were not always healthy. To some extent it is a very bad thing indeed, built on unbridled desire, selfishness, and greed. There is bad shame. There is shamelessness. There is also good shame, what Elizabeth Austin has called "that perilous gift." Mark Twain noted that the human animal "is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to." Leo Strauss agreed, reminding us that we are "the only being which can be concerned with self-respect." That self-respect is closely tied to our ability to be disappointed in ourselves when we do unworthy or shameful things. Good shame is grounded in the recognition of our limits and of the fact that we are part of a much larger whole—a family, a city, a state, a nation, a species, a planet, a universe, (God?). Shame implies that we have standards, ethical guidelines, rules by which we know we should live. Shame arises in us when we know that we have fallen short of doing those things that we should. Erik Erikson argued a half century ago that shame arises in us at a very early age, somewhere between 18 and 24 months. We become aware that others are judging us. We begin to judge ourselves, to understand how things ought to be, and how we fall short of those standards. Feeling bad about not meeting the standards is the beginning of shame. In Erikson's understanding, shame then "provides a foundational element of conscience." Conscience in turn causes shame to rise up in us, a sense of having failed in our responsibilities whether moral or practical and a commitment to do something to remedy that failure. The Apostle Paul wrote wisely in his letter to the Romans of this kind of good shame that "I do not do the good I want but I do the very thing I hate…wretched man that I am!" We do not know what specific things he failed in. What we know is that his shame at his failure inspired him to seek the good and the strength of will to do the good. We know what he was talking about. We know that we should be more patient with our very talkative, very active child. We pledge ourselves to do just that. We feel a sense of shame when we fail to live up to that pledge. That sense of shame may well help us to improve the next time we are frustrated by her questions and actions. We decide to diet, to eat only healthy food and in smaller quantities. Then we are brought a box of luscious cookies. Deviled eggs show up at our next meeting. Other taste treats we know we should either skip or go light on find their way onto our plates and into our tummies. Shame at not keeping to my strict regimen, at least for me, helps to pull me back to it. Each of us in our work, whether a profession or a craft or a sales job or homemaking or anything else, has certain standards of performance that we want to meet. When we fail to do so, shame can push us to work harder to meet the standards the next time. Some years ago I was invited to Traverse City to preach one Sunday and also asked to speak to an evening gathering on Saturday night about medical ethics, a subject I had come to know a little bit about while serving, as I still do, on the Institutional Review Board of the University of Michigan Medical School. I drove up on Saturday afternoon in time for dinner. I had a glass of wine before we ate and put the nearly empty glass at my place at the table to finish during the meal. When I wasn't looking, my host filled up my glass. Having been raised during the Second World War with a food ethic that said you must finish everything on your plate and in your glass to save the starving children of China, I drank the wine. When we finished, we moved to the other room and I began my talk by saying that there were three major ethical guidelines in medical research. I named the first one, autonomy, and talked about it. I named the second one, beneficence, and talked about it, and went on talking about it because I could not remember what the third guideline (justice) was! I talked and talked and talked about beneficence until I literally had nothing more to say and had to confess that I could not think of the third point, but that I would be happy to answer questions and if I did think of it, I would announce it immediately. I doubt I could find words to express my mortification at this failure, but my shame in that moment did teach me a lesson: never again when I am going to give a public talk do I even entertain the thought of alcohol, much less consume any of it. The failure to remember a major point in a talk has never plagued me since. Shame reminds us not only of the ideals by which we would like to live, it also recalls for us the importance of community, of our involvement with other people. Some years ago I remember reading a column by Mike Royko about a colleague of his who had died in a plane crash. He told different stories of her, but concluded by describing his shame at having thought about calling her or going to see her several times in the months before she died, but never getting around to it. He was too busy. He pledged in this column never to let that happen again, to stay in closer and more regular touch with his friends. Shame inspired him to action more in keeping with his own values. Who among us who has been or is now married has not known moments when we have failed our partner: given away some bit of information we knew they did not want known; been late for a dinner date and left her sitting alone at the bar; made a purchase of some financial magnitude and importance for the household without consulting him first. Our shame at such misdeeds can help us to find ways not to do these things that tear at the fabric of our most important relationship. Somewhere Peter Ustinov has said that "love is an act of endless forgiveness." Because we are frail creatures, there is much truth in what he says. How can we find forgiveness, though, if we are not repentant, and how can we be repentant if we are not ashamed of what we have done wrong? Shame is essential to love, to conscience, to improving the world. IT can inspire us to do good. Shame can be a very bad thing, leading to a humiliation that can truly cripple us. That kind of shame we should do all we can to reduce or eliminate. Shame can also be tossed aside so that we act shamelessly, sometimes wisely so but more often in ways that bring discomfort and difficulty to ourselves and others. Thoughtful decision-making is called for so that we foster a healthy lack of shame and discourage harmful shamelessness. Shame can be good, a way of keeping us humble, keeping us morally focused, keeping us aware of the deep ties we have to our fellow human beings. That kind of shame is indeed a precious gift. Copyright 2003, Kenneth Phifer All rights reserved.