How the Absence of Shame Weakens Democracy
Earlier this year, I wrote a series of columns about how the decline of the Church in America had eroded the social infrastructure that once supported sustained political protest in this country—leaving us, today, with millions of social-media posts and a few flash-point mass demonstrations, but no effective movement.
The transformations that have decimated protest movements—undone by digitization, atomization, and the evanescence of online life—have also affected shame and its ability to mediate social norms without the intervention of the state. We can type and post and record selfie videos about shame, but we cannot make anyone really feel it. We cannot collectively levy its force against the powerful and shameless.
So here’s something of a synthesis of these ideas, or, at the very least, what I think I’ve been getting around to saying: life experienced on phones and through social media leaves us lonely and alienated from one another; this has led to an existence that’s somehow at once both intensely individual and intensely tribal. We can find online fellow-travellers for our worst impulses, people who will influence and reinforce these tendencies, but this does not provide a real sense of community. Rather, it often emboldens what once would have been regarded as obviously shameful behavior. Finding broadly shared truths and convictions is becoming nearly impossible, and this has enabled the cultural rise of tech and finance, which are governed by a specific kind of quantitative thinking. We are now in an era of brutal rationalism, an intentionally blunted gospel of optimization in which all the answers are self-evident. Shame is becoming something that people dismiss altogether.
To bring this down to earth a bit, let me talk about sports, as I did at the beginning of this series. In 2003, the journalist Michael Lewis published the book “Moneyball,” about how the Oakland A’s had become a World Series contender by bringing the ruthless quantitative thinking of tech and finance to Major League Baseball. In the film adaptation, a character based on the sabermetrician Paul DePodesta, played by Jonah Hill, tells his boss, the Oakland general manager Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, to pick players using a single criteria: if they get on base. In a pivotal scene, Hill and Pitt sit at a table with the sclerotic Old Guard of scouts and front-office zombies. As the group debates players, Pitt reveals the new modus operandi for the Oakland Athletics. None of the old considerations—age, body type, drug problems—matter as much as that one thing, how often the players get on base.
In the past two decades, “Moneyball”-style thinking has spread, and nearly every part of American life seems to have found its own version of “he gets on base.” Calculations are completed, and the answer is immutable. A more nuanced view—one that considers, for example, that Oakland actually was so successful in large part because of three great young pitchers who had all been scouted by the old guard—almost always gives way to the dogma of the quants. When brutal rationalism is challenged, especially by traditionalists, its defenders will often justify themselves by pointing to the intelligence of its adherents. The message is, We are the smart ones who understand the math of on-base percentage, and all of the heretics who talk about “watchability” or even say that it’s good for a sport to be entertaining are stupid.
But this notion of intelligence contains a whole set of assumptions about what is valuable. Here’s another sports-related story, closer to home. I recently had a conversation with a fellow-parent about paying for parking and admission at their children’s youth basketball games. If they wanted to watch their kids play, they needed to pay twenty-five dollars for parking and another twenty dollars per person just to get in the gym. I said that this was gross behavior and that such things would never have been allowed back in our childhoods. The other parent, who was equally disturbed but perhaps a bit less emotional, said, “Yeah, they’re just being smart, I guess.”
“Smart” is how brutal rationality is justified to the public. The public might still hate what’s being done, but they will accept that that’s how the world works today. Of course, charging for parking and admission at a kid’s basketball game is a low-level version of extractive efficiency when compared to, say, the way that corporations treat their employees. But we experience the loss of shame most intensely in these personal moments when that loss intrudes into spaces we thought of as sacred, such as our children’s play.
The discontent we feel about so much of modern society is the failure of shame to triumph over “smart.” We feel alienated precisely because we can’t shame the organizers of the basketball league to stop charging for parking just because they can.
Last week, I appeared on a public-radio show with a psychology professor from the University of British Columbia, Jessica Tracy, who does not think that public shaming is particularly useful or productive. She pointed out how many lives had been derailed by shame on social media, and suggested that we should not rely on a groundswell of public discontent to police horrible behavior; instead, she argued, the government and official bodies should act to enforce norms. Of course, the state and other official bodies know when to step in only because of public shame; the N.B.A., for example, would not make anti-tanking rules if there was no public outcry. More important, it seems unwise to ask a corruptible government to both set the agenda and to enforce the social code.
It’s true that social media can function as the ultimate shaming machine. But its real-world effects are almost entirely heaped upon the unlucky individuals who briefly become the internet’s main character. The social norms it enforces with such viciousness might show up in human-resources documents, but the past decade that has followed the peak of online shaming has shown us just how flimsy those social norms really were. Do you look around in whatever city or town you live in and see evidence that social-media shaming has made people more submissive to a shared set of social norms? Or do you see influencers invading personal space, people rudely taking out their phones in the middle of conversations with actual people, and theatrical, internet-incentivized, constantly filmed conflict? The attention economy of social media, and the ease with which anyone can now record anything, has made us far more shameless. That seems obvious enough.
But shame requires actual communities to function. The reason we feel powerless against “smart” measures like charging parents twenty-five dollars to park to see a twelve-year-old’s basketball game is because we have lost the ability to collectively grouse and complain and make the assholes stop optimizing society down the drain. As our major institutions—the Church, the mainstream media, the university—totter and fall, what will provide the infrastructure and the manpower to uphold our shared values of decency, generosity, and help for the less fortunate? Can a GoFundMe link replace that? A twenty-four-hour social-media outrage session?
I don’t mean to suggest that everyone needs to go back to church. Churches, it hardly needs to be said, have their own dogmas and agendas, and they aren’t always steadfast stewards of community. But I do think that we need the social ritual of gathering, a time when a community comes together in the same room, passes around a plate, and hears lectures on what it means to be a good neighbor. The person who charges for parking at the children’s basketball game should have to sit in a pew next to the parent who’s upset about it. We have now structured our economy and society in a way that these confrontations never take place. We never know who is reaching in our pocket, who is denying our health-insurance claims, or who has told the underpaid clerk to read their upselling script. We don’t know whom to look in the eye with disgust, whom to turn our backs on when they fail our communities. ♦