February 5, 2024
Shame Will Save the World
“Shame will save the world” – often translated as “Shame, the feeling that will save mankind” – is what the character of Kris Kelvin utters near the end of Solaris, the film by Andrei Tarkovsky.
Can shame save the world?
For Dostoevsky, it was beauty that would perform that miracle. However, as a Greek blogger has said, beauty will save those who can see it. I tend to agree with this variation much more readily.
In any case, there is a point in selecting shame as the better candidate. I realized it going through a list of freelance jobs with ridiculously underpaid remuneration – think of $5 to produce 1500 words of text. Reading this I said out loud: “I would be embarrassed to offer that”.
And that’s when I realized the role of shame in saving the world.
Shame Will Save the World: Morality and Growth
As you well know, if you’re a long-term reader of the blog, I am fiercely anti-growth. I mean:
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
Edward Abbey
Yet our societies seem to be locked inside an infinite loop from hell where it’s not enough to simply be happy with what you’ve got. It’s often not even about greed: An employer might be operating with the best intentions, that is, without being greedy, but unless they can grow enough, they will be swallowed by those who are.
In this context, more and more small and medium businesses seem to operate on the principle of “eliminate expenses before anything else”. And because there’s only so much you can cut from raw materials, rent, etc., sooner or later the axe falls on human resources, that is, the employee.
It’s a tale as old as, well, not time, but certainly capitalism.
Should We Be Embarrassed about Paying Someone too Little?
Yes, we should; that’s the easy answer.
The more complex answer is: Yes, we should; but we need to define a few things first.
The first thing, which is easier to tackle, is what constitutes “too little”. To some extent, this is subjective both in individual and social terms. In other words, for two equally educated and skilled persons in the same country, a remuneration of $30 for a given task might be seen as too little by one and just right by the other.
Similarly when we consider the globalization of labor, $30 will hold much different value in Finland compared to, say, Nigeria. $30 might be good money in the latter, but I guarantee you, in Finland it’s not enough even for two people to eat at the local pubI’m looking at the menu of my local pub: The veggie burger is 19.90 euros (~$21.80). If two people wanted to have a burger and a pint of beer each, the total would be about $60. Meanwhile in Nigeria, as I see on this page, $30 would be more than enough for two people two have a 3-course meal at a mid-level restaurant..
The second thing to consider – which is also the hardest – is what “being embarrassed” really implies here. A person can be embarrassed, fully admitting they’re doing something wrong, yet still do it. In some sense “being embarrassed” alone doesn’t save the world. The idea is to be embarrassed enough to not do the thing that embarrasses you.
In plain terms, we need to be embarrassed enough for our morality to overcome everything else.
Shame to Save the World: On Responsibility and Personal Morality
There are no easy answers.
You can’t be both peaceful and free.
There are no heroes.
These and other such similar realizations is what separate us from true knowledge – even if it’s only knowledge of inability, knowledge of our absurd state.
I don’t know if shame will save the world. At the very least, I’m highly skeptical of the ability of enough people to feel shame. I’ve even made a Punning Walrus cartoon about it:
But shame can save you. And few things are more liberating than being able to see yourself in the mirror and feel contentment, albeit wistful.
Certain professions seem to have given up shame entirely – a former president comes to mind: no shame at all.
I was brought up understanding that my parents would not tolerate certain behaviors, because it brought THEM shame to have one of their daughters do those things and for people to find out about it. I passed that on to my children where appropriate, and only had to make the point a couple of times per child.
Those are the conventions I assumed the whole world had.
I don’t know what kind of family the dictators and grifters and certain politicians came from, because they don’t seem to find anything egregious, while my jaw drops just from thinking about their transgressions.
Is it something we can reconnect with? Making promises and not lying? Or is it too late? I still operate on the same principles: there are things I would not do. But it means I may be operating at a disadvantage to those who have no qualms about doing objectively shameful things. Codified law is a poor substitute.
But we all know the past was nowhere near perfect – and in days when one would not lie to the electorate or one’s neighbors, it was perfectly acceptable to lie to the Native Americans who were being systematically disconnected from their lands.
One standard for ‘us’ – another for ‘them.’
The problem is complex in its temporal dimensions. You correctly point out that the past was nowhere near perfect, yet at the same time I think we’d agree there seems to be something ‘special’ about the current times.
The important point, I believe, is to understand whether there is something systemic about this complete disregard of morality. In other words, we need to contemplate on whether the issue is more elaborate than simply accusing e.g. technology, the internet, social media, etc. This is too simplistic, we need to go deeper.
The answers are to be found, I’d argue, in the amoral structure of the socioeconomic system itself, capitalism. By ‘amoral’ I mean that it’s morality-agnostic. Economics don’t care about morality. To the extent it’s quantifiable, morality is a matter of political intervention (for non-quantifiable definitions we’d go to philosophy of course), not economy.
In other words: When a self-feeding mechanism makes everything progressively more about money and less about morality (less about art, I’d dare say), it’s not surprising that you see kids disrespecting and even attacking senior citizens just to upload a video on YouTube (and – gasp! – monetize it). It’s not surprising you see teenagers stabbing and shooting each other over a cell phone or a pair of shoes. It’s even less surprising to see vast portions of the population not only disregard but actually condone a former president’s countless acts of illegal and immoral behavior.
We live in the era where, as Carl Sagan predicted (far before social media), ignorance is more than accepted; it’s celebrated.
We live in the democratic dystopia Plato warned us about, and particularly its last, ugliest phase. There is only one way this is headed, and it’s not pretty.
I know good people having kids – I’m not as worried as you are. We’ll see. People still do the tough jobs.
And when the population here starts to decline, I think we’ll remember immigrants among us have always filled in – in exchange for the very system you don’t like, which is still a thousand times better than what they had where they came from – like my Hungarian forebears.
Time will tell –
I think shame might not save us, but it can help pave a way to better living together. Now, this is not to say shame is, in itself, a perfectly moderate feeling. It, too, can be used to put others down. But the mere possibility of people self-regulating is such an amazing advancement (even if the regulation does not really come from the self, but from shame). What shame should entail is the deal here. That’s why socialization is so important: what we do from an early age, and from which we emerge unscathed on the other side, forms our notion of interpersonal boundaries and what is acceptable. This is just one example of how socio-economic differences during an individual’s growth change the whole concept of relationships and socializing.
These are all valid points. On what you said about shame being used to put others down, it reminded me of a hilarious joke by Žižek:
A rich CEO or whatever is praying in the synagogue, saying “oh, Lord, I am nothing. I am so unworthy of you.”
Then comes a rabbi, standing next to him, and he begins to pray too, saying “I am nothing, Lord, pay no attention to me”.
Then a poor man enters, and stands a bit farther and also prays by saying “I am nothing, Lord.”
So the CEO turns to the rabbi and says: “Hmph! Look at this guy! Who the hell does he think he is, to also claim he’s nothing!”