The Victorians Had It Right

We are watching this. An economic meltdown, a political meltdown, a social meltdown. Have we no shame? Corporate execs get a government bailout and take over $400,000 and go to a corporate spa. A Fannie Mae CEO takes $90 million dollars out over six years as it becomes the root cause of our current financial collapse. People buy houses they know they can’t afford, cry fowl when they default, and expect the government to bail them out too. Famous women don’t wear underwear and expose themselves in public. Teenage age girls compete to get pregnant. Public sex is ok at Spring Break. Teenage boys form posses to sexually exploit (even rape) girls. All of this with no social consequence. All of this with no sense of shame or guilt.

DEFINITION: Shame. 1.1. The painful emotion arising from the consciousness of something dishonoring, ridiculous, or indecorous in one's own conduct or circumstances (or in those of others whose honor or disgrace one regards as one's own), or of being in a situation which offends one's sense of modesty or decency. (OXFORD)

The sense of shame has been diminishing since the sixties, if not before. It’s even thought of as a quaint concept that has no bearing on modern society. How few are those that engage in the intellectual and spiritual self evaluation necessary to know shame, and how to deal with it. Any of those CEO’s knows what it is? Any of the politicians that stole the American people’s money to pay off the failed business execs know what it is? Absolutely no moral evaluation is being done here.

This is, in my view, the result of the cutting of the religious underpinnings of western society. Temporal. If it feels good do it. We become absorbed in the material. We give up having to do what’s necessary to live right lives. Do you know anyone, or hear any leader, speak of shame? No. Self-indulgence and self expression are more important. There is no consequence.

I don’t think a culture can survive without shame. The Victorians had it right. It may be hypocritical, the way they structured their society. In public, staunchly civil, but behind the doors was another story. But it was a successful culture. Is our culture the better for it that behavior has no restraints? Goethe believed that only through limitation can mastery be attained. What limitations do we have have? What are we mastering? Self-centeredness, selfishness, greed? How few of us place limitations on ourselves, or the weaker willed of us, put ourselves in places where we accept limitations put on us? I’ll finish with a quote from one of my favorite philosopher/writers Simone Weil: "In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends. To keep to the social level, our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities." (Written in 1937)

Shame is no longer a part of our vocabulary. We’ve also lost virtue, honor, loyalty, honesty, generosity. If we had these things, and they were internalized in each of us, and through that connected us to each other, we would have a strong religious culture, business culture, and a social connectedness that would maintain a strong civilization.