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Classics: Shame and Guilt

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Ruth Benedict gave classic formulation to the contrast of shame and guilt cultures: “True shame cultures rely on external sanctions for good behavior, not, as true guilt cultures do, on an internalized conviction of sin. Shame is a reaction to other people’s criticism. A man is shamed either by being openly ridiculed and rejected or by fantasying to himself that he has been made ridiculous. In either case it is a potent sanction. But it requires an audience or at least a man’s fantasy of an audience. Guilt does not. In a nation where honor means living up to one’s own picture of oneself, a man may suffer from guilty though no man knows of his misdeed and a man’s feeling of guilt may actually be relieved by confessing his sin.”

Douglas Cairns (Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature) is skeptical.

He traces Benedict’s conception back through Margaret Mead to Weber, and concludes that the internal/external dichotomy is not the real basis of the distinction. Rather, “supervenient on this criterion is the further thesis that guilt and conscience, and therefore truly internal sanctions, can exist only in societies in which the child is socialized by parents who stress the kind of imperatives, the absolute Good and Evil, which are hypostatized in the figure of a fatherly Deity. The shame-culture-guilt-culture antithesis, then, stands in a direct line of descent from Weber’s protestant ethic.” Thus, “only a society which relies on Protestant, Anglo-America methods of parenting can be said to place much emphasis on internal sanctions.” In the end, it is not the internal or external nature of the sanction that distinguishes between the two, and “evidence for internal sanctions and even for guilt-like behaviour [in 'shame cultures'] is being ignored because these sanctions are not set up by the methods applied in white, middle-class America.”

Ultimately, the whole distinction ends up in tatters, and this has important implications for how we regard cultural difference: ”There is no justification for the unlikely claim that there are societies in which internalization of social and moral values does not take place, and none for the view that conscience is a phenomenon restricted to a very few cultural contexts. If this is so, then I cannot see much use for the antithesis.”

That is, not much use conceptually or analytically. But it has its political uses. Cairns traces the distinction back to Weber, but it also seems to participate in the liberal Protestant metanarrative that Milbank identifies. That is, religion progresses from externalized, ritualized, “Catholic” forms to internalized, spiritualized forms. In this progression, religion gradually sheds its unnecessary external props and emerges in its pure religious essence. Shame v. Guilt culture thus implies the superiority of Western internal and private religion over the culturally embedded and embodied religions of the past, and thus the distinction plays its part in the policing of the boundaries of the sacred. The distinction ensures that the sacred stays where it should be, deep in the heart of the individual.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, August 28, 2010 at 6:30 am

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Classics: Shame and Guilt

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