Delphic Maxim 74: Revere a sense of shame
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
74. Revere a sense of shame
Shame is a weird emotion. It hits us at the weirdest times, calling us back to events that have happened in the past (or inviting us to feel embarrassed about things that are frequently out of our control). So to say that we should ‘revere’ a sense of shame is pretty challenging: it’s a feeling that we often try to repress.
I suppose it’s worth distinguishing between valid shame and unnecessary shame.
The easier to understand — and perhaps even to reject — is the kind of unnecessary shame that attaches to social judgements. This is the kind of shame that comes from body shape, or nakedness, or elements of our identity. It’s the feeling of shame we get for things that are out of our control. This isn’t a sense of shame that we should revere, and I think it’s a particularly modern phenomenon — you don’t really read about the Greeks being too ashamed to be seen in the nude. So the kind of shaming we see here is unnecessary, and can be dismissed.
I am also reminded of Jon Ronson’s excellent book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. We’ve weaponised shame in the age of social media — and it’s often more destructive to a person’s life than actual legal remedies. Shame should be a highly personal condition, and the kind of public shaming that takes place on Twitter well exceeds what we’d consider a rational reverence for shame. We all feel shame, I don’t know that the stacks-on helps.
The other kind of shame is that necessary one — the one that teaches us because we made a bad choice. There are things in my past that I’m ashamed of, but they’re not things that I would necessarily undo. That’s because I’m happy with the person I am today, and everything that has happened in my life — good and bad — has brought me to where I am. The sense of shame is a learning one though, which is important. Without it, I wouldn’t necessarily have the sense to avoid making the same mistakes again. Revering a sense of shame here, despite it being uncomfortable, is about learning from the past.
If you think about the history of Australia, I think the classic tension is between national shame and national pride. There’s an incongruity between the remembrance and celebration of a day like Anzac Day, on which most Australians will feel public pride for the actions of people in our past. And that’s totally fine — historical memory is important, and I’ve argued in the past that we should never forget the horror of war (as long as people actually make the effort to properly remember all that that entails).
But where is the correlative recognition of national shame? Australia has no day of remembrance — at least no official one — for the frontier wars, in which the English colonists slaughtered and decimated Aboriginal Australians. True reverence for the past also involves revering — respecting the need for — this sense of national shame. We shouldn’t whitewash our history: this kind of emotional erasure isn’t just hypocritical, it’s unhealthy and it tears at the fabric of our modern community.
If we want to revere and respect and remember our past, then we should have pride, but also shame. Shame like this helps us to learn from our past, and perhaps improve the condition of our society for the future.
