What's Shame Got to Do With It?

[Nevilledog]

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Elizabeth C. McLaughlin (she/her)
@ECMcLaughlin
"What we took for consensus in a smaller public square was really domination of those who could not afford the price of entry by those who could."

That sentence gave me goosebumps. Looking forward to more from @tressiemcphd at the NYT.
"Lapse," Dionne Lee, 2022.

nytimes.com
Opinion | What’s Shame Got to Do With It?
How and why we confuse shame and stigma.
9:55 AM · May 21, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/opinion/whats-shame-got-to-do-with-it.html?smid=tw-share

No paywall
https://archive.ph/dBzJw

In the old comic strip “The Family Circus,” four precocious children blamed invisible goblins — “Not me,” “Nobody” and “Ida Know” — for their messes. In the real world, adults who should be too old for invisible friends are doing the same deflection with a goblin named “Shame!”

The shame goblin has friends in places both high and low. Last month, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene told a conservative podcast audience that Democrats “tried to shame” her for supporting the Jan. 6 insurrection. The Times editorial board recently implicated fear of shame as cause for Americans’ “losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country.”

That’s not to minimize how bad shame feels. Shame can be excessive — toxic shame, it is called — but it can also be functionally good, like when it keeps your pants on in public. Despite the bad rap that shame gets in our overly psychoanalyzed culture, it is merely a feedback loop that tells you something about your behavior as well as the expectations of others. Psychologists often refer to shame as a secondary emotion, one that can be positive or negative, depending on the primary emotions that generate it. Those primary emotions are more dangerous to public life. Anger or contempt, for example. Yet we have chosen to turn shame into a social problem. It is bizarre to think that we should legislate, regulate or condition away an emotion or that we should do so for shame when contemptuous, irrational anger is right there.

Shame. Shamed. Ashamed. Shunned. We use these interchangeably to describe myriad fears, but shunning comes closest to the public problem that we are actually trying to name. Shunning is a close cousin to stigma in that they are both about what we do to people rather than how people feel about themselves. It isn’t shame but stigma that jeopardizes our constitutional rights, our human agency and our collective well-being. Stigma sorts and stratifies people, assigning them to categories against their will. Powerful forces then attach moral and political value to those categories that cut some people out of public life. If we ask not who is ashamed to speak but who is stigmatized for speech, it is easier to diagnose what is a crisis and what is fearmongering.

*snip*

[pandr32]

1. Excellent read