Tip-Off #119 - Ashamed of Feeling Guilty
"With shame, my space should be instantaneously empty. With guilt, even if I disappeared, it would come with me." - Bernard Williams, moral philosopher. [*]
The return of public shaming and vigilante justice, of viral videos and tendentious Tweets ("X's"), algorithmic biases, and digital gangbanging, makes guilt and shame worth renewed attention.
Guilt is about doing something wrong or feeling bad about doing something wrong. Shame is feeling bad about getting caught. While shame is an inward, negative perception of ourselves, guilt stems from a recognition of violating our standards or hurting others. Shame is other-directed, while guilt is inner-directed. Confusing the two breeds emotional turmoil.
Thinking about culture and conflict in the context of war, I came across one of many examples. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Americans realized that they were about to fight a war with people whose culture they did not comprehend. The renowned anthropologist Ruth Benedict was called to help Americans understand Japanese culture. After the war ended, she published her classic, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. It made one of the key distinctions between guilt and shame cultures and why confusing them can be destructive and prevent cross-cultural understanding. In shame cultures, the highest value is honor. In guilt cultures, it is justice.
Moral philosopher Bernard Williams makes another important distinction in his book Shame and Necessity. The most primitive experiences of shame are "connected with sight and being seen," while guilt is rooted in hearing: the sound in oneself of the voice of judgment, "the moral sentiment of the word."
Extending Williams' thought, I looked again at the story that has been given so many other interpretations: the sin of Adam and Eve in the garden. On reflection, the story is not about forbidden fruit, sex, or original sin but about seeing and hearing as moral activities.
The woman looks at the forbidden tree: "it was lust to the eyes" and "lovely to look at." Eyes are linked to intense desire. The fruit of the tree is eaten, although God had said don’t do it; the couple's eyes are opened, and they know that they are naked and try to cover their nakedness. All this is visual. Adam is punished first for the crime of listening to the voice of the woman taken by the beauty of the tree more than by God’s warning. Only after eating the forbidden fruit did the couple remember. The sin of the first humans in the Garden of Eden was that they followed their eyes, not their ears. Guilt distorts what shame conceals. Adam blames Eve, and Eve blames the serpent. “It’s not my fault.”
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam believe in an unseen creator who spoke words during creation that base the moral life on something other than public opinion, appearance, honor, and shame. "The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart" (1 Sam. 16:7). The critical term in Judaism, Shema, "hear" or "listen" underscores the importance of the inner voice, of guilt rather than shame; of repentance, not rejection; of forgiveness rather than appeasement; of the dignity of the individual regardless of their deeds. This is a decisive break from conventional ancient value systems and has had a lasting impact on global ethics.
An important thinker leaves us with another distinction — and a wry thought. In his classic work, The Humiliation of the Word, the sociologist/lay theologian Jacques Ellul wrote of the growing dominance of the visual over the verbal. Shame is easy to see and to blame; it's good press. On the other hand, guilt is harder to hear, much less confess, except perhaps in a court of law: there's often a good excuse, a sense that "everyone does it," it's easier to save face. What passes for culture is designed for the snap judgment. Ethics shifts to an external game of impression management.
And so it has become a shame to feel guilty. As Sarah Silverman says, "Without guilt, people would think I’m getting away with something.”
Notes
[*] abridged—Williams, Shame and Necessity (2nd edition 2023), 89. An exploration of the cultural and historical context of shame and guilt, including how classical thinkers illuminate aspects of our own world. Bernard Williams was a seminal moral philosopher; his wit and humor added a distinctive flavor to his teaching.
Adam and Eve - All references are to Robert Alter’s translation, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (2019). Alter: "The sharpness and vividness of biblical style are diluted when it is represented in English, as virtually all the versions do, by a single, indifferent level of diction." The general result is to "disambiguate" the terms of the text, "to reduce, simplify, and denature the Bible." Introduction xxxiii, xv; 15-18. On “lust to the eyes,” note 6, p. 16. - Cf. Introduction and Postscript in David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament - Second Edition (2023).
"Anyone wishing to save humanity today must first save the word." Jacques Ellul - The Humiliation of the Word (1985). “With the proliferation of images, the word and its vitality are diminished and finally discarded.” (254). Ellul is often considered a militant iconoclast, but he is not as severely Protestant as he sounds. He relishes polemics and sometimes reduces adversaries to their excesses but continues to inspire debate on technology, freedom, and the intersection of religion and politics.
Enhancing Ellul’s argument (without mentioning him): A comprehensive paper - “Ocularcentrism and its others,” Organization Studies 25(3): 445–464 [2004] at academia.edu: “Metaphors based on sight and light will have a diminished role in the future of our discipline [Organization Studies].” In many Eastern philosophical traditions, such as Buddhism and Taoism, there is a greater emphasis on holistic, embodied experience, which includes all the senses.
God in Search of Man - Abraham Joshua Heschel (1976). This classic is a philosophy of Judaism — for the world: call it a philosophy of the sublime; of wonder, mystery, deep darkness, awe, God, and faith! Heschel was one of the most revered religious leaders of the 20th century.
Interesting!