DEFINITION: Shame. I.1. The painful emotion arising from the consciousness of something dishonouring, ridiculous, or indecorous in one’s own conduct or circumstances (or in those of others whose honour or disgrace one regards as one’s own), or of being in a situation which offends one’s sense of modesty or decency.

—The Oxford English Dictionary

“The basic problem is that there is an absence of a culture of shame.” That is the recent judgment of a European business executive regarding the ongoing scandals of corporate America. His words, however, go beyond simply corporate wrongdoing, and can apply to broad aspects of our culture and society, of which corporate greed is cruelly symptomatic.

Clearly, shamelessness has been tarnishing American culture to an ever-increasing degree since the end of World War II, though many Americans and their leaders will acknowledge neither the signs nor the extent of their affliction. To do so would require the kind of stern moral self-examination that is now largely alien to our secular ways and selves. It would require, too, the kind of reflectiveness that a Behemoth society would have no understanding of or patience with, as we press on with our attempts to create a new heaven and new earth here and now. To feel shame is something that hardly crosses the minds of Americans or that discomfits their conscience. We are, very simply, unprepared for dealing with pangs of shame or for undertaking spiritual soul-searchings. We are so governed by our temporal absorptions and adventurisms that we ignore moral and spiritual considerations. Our only certitudes are those that belong to the whirl of the world and the flux of time. We think of shame no more than we think of sin.

Shame is a word that has no active place in our vocabulary, and when it is occasionally invoked it has no real meaning for us. Certainly it is a word that does not excite or liberate or make us enthusiastic. If anything it is a word that is perceived as restricting our expansive sentiments, our rights and ambitions; that implies or is antecedent to self-restraint, and conduces the recognition of self-limitation. Goethe’s belief that only through limitation can mastery be attained is not one that the modern imperial self deems acceptable. Indeed, shame is one emotion that is not valued in contemporary life since it is commonly seen as something that thwarts self-expression and self-indulgence. As such it has been transformed into an ignominious word and emotion, viewed as carrying with it moral intimations and responsibilities that are interpreted as being unproductive and binding.

Both our social scientists and our social engineers, especially since the 1960s, view shame with deep distrust, even scorn, since it has for them inherently moral and religious connotations. Denouncers of the logos, especially those in the academy, prefer to bury or to truncate its meaning insofar as they reject not only standards of language but also standards of behavior. To them the classical and biblical uses of shame in a virtuous sense are objectionable and irrelevant in a postmodern age. Preachers of sexual utopianism in particular view shame as a fraudulent emotion, and today their view has been carried to fantastic extremes in all areas of a secular society, in which the pursuit of what is shameless is often equated with creative freedom.

It is imperative to resist forces that would reject, or muddle, or revamp the definition of shame as it has endured for many centuries. Shame is a heart-word that belongs to the legacy of Greece, Rome, and Israel, and to Western civilization throughout the last two thousand years and must be preserved and transmitted at all costs if a common culture is to survive in these most perilous of times. We need, then, to be reacquainted with what precisely shame means, what it has always meant, despite ferocious efforts of “the enemies of the permanent things” to abolish the meaning of history and of humankind, and to create a new social and moral order. We cannot allow language, which serves as a medium of rational thought, to surrender unconditionally to ideology and dogmata and thus to be stripped of content and meaning, of reality itself.

Shame, no less than words like virtue, honor, loyalty, honesty, and generosity, has become an empty word, or just another expedient word that belongs exclusively to social and political vocabulary, in which words often signify anything or nothing. The decay of words, it can be said, is symptomatic of moral and intellectual decline, about which Simone Weil has very discerning comments in an essay entitled “The Power of Words,” in which these two sentences are as applicable to our present situation as they were to France when they were first printed in 1937: “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.”

In the end, the process Weil is examining is a reductivist one shaped by ideologues who preach license and deride the eternal struggle between good and evil, and who discount all criteria and values, as they strive to remove all civilized vestiges of our sacred patrimony. Within this process, which is one of disorder, the word shame has been denuded of its essences, and it is no longer either properly defined or experienced. The consequences of linguistic debasement also point directly to the consonant growth of blasphemy and irresponsibility, and the deleterious effects on both character and culture.

In what is a demonstrably profane epoch, originating in the Renaissance and progressively fashioned by Enlightenment thought, which has come of age in a postmodern world, both shame and sin are words that suffer the fate of derision at the hands of those powers that dictate new norms that deny transcendent reality and universal moral order. In any case, the expression of shame as well as the confession of the guilt of sin are identified by their close and confluent correspondences. Together they are words that oppose the driving spirit of “autonomous humanism,” which, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn insists, has forgotten God and has gone on to adopt a utilitarian and nihilistic mindset. Shame and sin are foundational words and feelings that belong to an essentialism that has to be rooted out, if the postmodernist project is to be finally triumphant. What was once termed “the drama of atheism” has now aggressively transformed into the drama of usurpation, as we witness the sundry results of the absence of a culture of shame and of its corollary, sin.

Shame is an inner emanation of a transgression of good taste, of propriety, of standards, or of an unwritten or written law, ethical and moral. Sin is a willful violation of or offense against a sacred religious or moral principle, and separates man from God. In the self-recognition of shame and in the confession of sin are found the signs of a conscious yielding to humility, which is the subduing of haughtiness. These “signs,” however, are precisely those that have been gradually leveled in a society that has removed itself from a moral universe. Whether we choose to view them in intellectual, or historical, or theological terms, their very absence ultimately testifies to an “apostate culture” in which the signs of negation are ascendant: in our educational wastelands; in our arts, entertainment, and print industry; in our political arena; in short, in individual and collective activity of which, most recently, the egregious scandals in the business community are emblematic of social dissolution and decadence in extremis.

No doubt for some readers who are duped by “terrible simplifiers” or held fast in the clutch of ideology, the preceding observations will perhaps amount to no more than a litany of woes or the arcane protests of a reflective conservative mind. Many there are amongst us who obviously prefer the safety of pure illusion or the myths of romancers who would have us reside in a dreamland or in reverie, drifting endlessly within the gates of Eden. Surely Irving Babbitt is a far more trustworthy guide when he asks us to wrestle with the “immediate data of consciousness”: with those realities that can never be escaped, even with eyes shut tight, transfixed by Rousseau’s siren call, “Let us begin by setting aside all facts.” (Try as he will, Freud cannot vanquish sin, nor Kinsey overcome shame except in a totally disordered cosmos.)

Dissidence of dissent, as spoken by exemplary conservative minds, will always reveal the courage to call us back to first principles and to remind us that human existence is meaningless without the living experience of sin and shame. Such a mind is on display in a remarkably enduring book published by the National Humanities Institute, The New Jacobinism, written by Claes G. Ryn. It is a book that remains profoundly pertinent to the subject of this editorial commentary and also to the larger ongoing crisis of culture within which a struggle, visible and invisible, is going on to save words that perpetuate the idea of value from being expelled from the lexicon of life. The results of this expulsion are objectified in the shameless episodes and the sinless attitudes that currently identify wrongdoing in the human community.

Professor Ryn’s book helps us to discern the steep and continuing decline of Western democracy, of which the current absence of a culture of shame registers a major problem threatening civilized life. Ryn goes to the very heart of the problem when he writes: “Democracy is suffering the consequences of an evasion of individual moral responsibility.” He goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of man’s natural goodness giving rise to “a radical redefinition of moral virtue” and cites in particular the ideological fanaticism of the Jacobins during the French Revolution. In our own time, Ryn writes, a renewed Jacobinism can be seen as a general tendency, and “as a common denominator, an organizing and structuring force,” which seeks to eradicate totally the traditional Western view of man and society and, in effect, to extinguish “the old morality of character” that revolves around self-restraint, self-control, self-discipline.

Lawlessness, permissiveness, crime, Ryn points out, are everywhere prominent: “Old-fashioned honesty and integrity yield to shadiness and opportunism.” “Behaviors are accepted or held up for emulation that once were considered abhorrent.” No two sentences better capture the tenor and temper of Ryn’s book or more fully confirm and reinforce its diagnostic insights into the condition of American civilization entering a new millennium, as the New World Order takes on more concrete shape, and as an empowered majoritarian, plebiscitary democracy fearlessly redefines and refashions moral and cultural concepts. These concepts, however, build neither character nor personal responsibility as we observe incontrovertible signs of social disintegration and of intellectual and moral confusion. Malaise, in a word, now afflicts both the general population and political and intellectual leadership.

The New Jacobinism, then, examines problems that point to dangerous trends in the form of partisanship and fragmentation. “The law,” Ryn further observes, “once regarded as an attempt to transcend mere power politics, is perceived more and more by lawmakers and voters alike as an instrument of partisan ambition.” Those who influence and dominate public opinion refuse to accept moral centrality and what Ryn calls “moral realism,” choosing instead to promote “false or faulty definitions” as well as “abstract and distant solutions.” Ryn’s penetrating book helps us to discern utopian-ideological ideas that distract the person from making critical distinctions and holding fast to time-tested, time-honored definitions.

Since the appearance of Ryn’s book, the problems, trends, and abnormalities he delineated have fossilized as a result of inattention or conscious neglect or superficial judgments on the part of the public and its leaders. The consequences are now coming to fruition as scandal after scandal shakes our foundations—politically, economically, intellectually, religiously. “Contrary to widespread belief,” Ryn states, “evidence is accumulating that Western democracy is in continuous decline.” The acuteness of this decline, as it is embodied in the absence of a culture of shame, will continue to be discounted by neo-Jacobin groupings in the sociopolitical realm that, loudly and zealously, impose their sentimental and abstract moralism and radical attitudes.

As the old moral and cultural ethos pitilessly wanes, it is steadily being replaced by ideological superstructures and relativistic methodologies that arbitrarily reconstruct human nature so as to be in sync with the Rousseauistic general will that tolerates no opposing viewpoint. Within this new hegemony we can perceive the causes and effects of the absence of a culture of shame, and the growing menace of a postmodern Zeitgeist and tendencies that, to recall Joseph Conrad’s phraseology, “breed monstrous crimes and monstrous illusions.” 

George A. Panichas was a prolific author and former editor of Modern Age.