As Cathy O’Neil points out in her latest book, shame needs shared communal mores to function correctly. But online shaming just creates pariahs.
There’s shame brought on by our failures to fit in to the norms of society, often appropriate—drunk driving, parking in a handicapped space, undertipping. Or, O’Neil describes, little people punching up to shame government inaction or corruption.
At least Wallace could know what to be ashamed for. He knew his career, and knew what it added up to: lynchings, poverty, Birmingham churches and dead girls. For most of us, there is no specific moment for our shames—nobody chooses to be poor, overweight, or often even a drug abuser. O’Neil writes about the “shame clowns” of the Hopi Tribal Nation. In the culture’s ceremonies, the clowns first perform as children, behaving “with no knowledge of morality. They eat filth from the ground, steal, simulate sex. They seem depraved, shattering the rules of decency and decorum.
Social media makes everyone shame clowns, jabbering at whoever blundered into that day’s disaster. But shame without redemption is vengeance. While social media is an effective mechanism for Hopi-style group shaming, the Hopi’s good faith is quite absent. “We’ve had the cosmetics industry telling us we’ll look less old, or the diet industry telling us to be thin,” O’Neil said. “Direct shaming of customers is the old version. The new version is we don’t directly shame you; we create the perfect platform for you to shame each other while we make money.”
Instead of considering bigger changes that require investment and communal sacrifice, O’Neil writes, “the shame networks are busy engaging us to rip apart our social fabric and addict us to the short-term highs of petty outrage or vengeance. We will continue on, living in ever-smaller communities, focused on our outsize emotions instead of the poorly-designed system that provokes them.”
“In the past, we’d find a universal norm,” O’Neil said, “We all love children, we love the country. It’s hard to disagree with the question, do we even have these common norms now? The white, rich, elite David Brooks saw a threat in Kaepernick’s knee. Brooks ignored the shameless white fans who don’t take their hats off and whoop at the anthem’s quiet parts.
While serving in the Army many years ago, one of my friends asked me what I thought about interracial dating, a common event among the troops. I said I didn’t like it. I knew I was wrong, I told her, but I just didn’t think it was right. She let my thoughts pass without comment. I was young, but not that young.
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