Should you be ashamed of yourself?

Shame powers cancel culture, yet its historic role is guarding community boundaries. Henna Cundill takes an in depth look at shame - and empathy.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

The word 'SHAME' spray painted onto a grey hoarding in lime green paint.

Anthony Easton/flickr: PinkMoose, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

“Put on this dunce’s cap and go and stand in the corner!” cries the teacher, and immediately we are transported to a scene that takes place in a schoolroom of centuries past. Likewise, if nowadays we were to see a woman being led down the street wearing a scold’s bridle, we might assume that there was a very odd sort of party going on; we might even intervene or phone the police. Why? Because these are not the scenes of 21st century Britain. We don’t do public shaming anymore – at least, we like to think we don’t.

But the truth is we very much do; in fact, shame is essential, at least to a certain degree. For a group to survive with any sense of collective identity and purpose, something has to prevent each person within that group from becoming too greedy, or too lazy, or too dishonest. That something is often the fear of being shamed, not even punished – just shamed. It doesn’t feel nice to be judged and found wanting, or to fear that you might be.

Think back to the last windy day when your recycling bin blew over – did you experience a passing moment of concern about the public pavement acrobatics of your wine-bottles, cake boxes and ready-meal trays? No need to blush – your neighbours probably rushed out ahead of you to hide their own multifarious sins. Studies have long shown that installing self-checkouts at supermarkets dramatically increases the purchase rates of “stigma items” such as alcohol and unhealthy foods. Oh, the things we do when we think no one is watching…

So, shame is, on one level, a functional tool which does the essential job of guarding the life and boundaries of a community. Perhaps one or two of us still eats a little too much and drinks a little too much, but shame is one of the things that keeps most of us from going too far, too often – or at least the threat of shame tends to discourage. As Graham Tomlin has recently explored – we still live in a society that equates over-indulgence with a lack of virtue.

It’s one thing for shame to guard certain moral boundaries (as long as we can all agree what they are) but we’re in a troubling place with the social ones.

However, when an individual does step out of line, then the shaming process has two modes of presentation: exposure or exclusion, sometimes both. This is most clearly seen in a court of law, where an offender is first ceremonially declared to be guilty (exposure) and then is subsequently sentenced (exclusion) – often “removed” from society, at least for a while, via a custodial sentence or a curfew. In this very clear way, shaming plays a functional role for the well-being of society as a whole.

But these two prongs of the shaming process can also happen in rather dysfunctional ways, some of which are dangerously subtle. We fear the recycling bin disgorging its contents because there is a certain social shame in being seen to consume too much junk. Fine. But what about the teenager who is compelled into a cycle of disordered eating because a schoolfellow has pointed the finger and said the dreaded word, “fat”? Likewise, many people love a chit-chat, and the fear of being excluded from a social group usefully prevents most of us from being too fixed on one topic, or from appearing inattentive or impolite. But in my research with autistic people, some have shared that they feel shamed out of social groups entirely simply because “chit-chat” is not right for them. Some have a language processing delay, others find “small talk” a bit confusing and inane and would rather talk about something specific. It’s one thing for shame to guard certain moral boundaries (as long as we can all agree what they are) but we’re in a troubling place with the social ones. Some of this shaming doesn’t sound very functional, not if the wellbeing of society is supposedly the goal.

The inverse of shame is empathy. Where shame excludes, empathy shows attentiveness.

Perhaps the saltiest example of this problem is the now infamous “cancel culture”. I know – even I can’t believe I would risk bringing that up as a writer, that’s how charged this debate has become. But de-platforming, boycotting, or publicly castigating someone for the views that they express – these are shaming activities, an attempt to render an individual exposed and excluded. It can be a very tricky argument as to whether this counts as functional shame, guarding the wellbeing of society, or dysfunctional shame, guarding little more than social norms.

We ought to try and take it on a case-by-case basis, but even then, sometimes what one person takes as a moral absolute another person sees as a social choice. At the same time, those who hold dearly to certain moral absolutes sometimes lose sight of the societal impact of what they say. The result can be a strange kind of war, one where there is virtually no engagement between two opposing factions, and the only weapons are a string of press releases and a whole lot of contempt. Eventually, often regardless of there being no engagement and no progress, both sides vigorously declare themselves to be the winner.

Jesus once said a strange thing when he was talking to a crowd. He said: “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still together on the way.” In other words, “Just have a chat first,” says Jesus, “and see if you can’t come to terms.” It was part of a much longer discourse where he also told the crowd to “love your enemies” – and this with the kind of love called agape, a love which favourably discriminates and chooses someone – very much the opposite of shaming them.

For my own research I have looked in depth at the shaming experience, and one of the conclusions that I come to is that the inverse of shame is empathy. Where shame excludes, empathy shows attentiveness. Where shame exposes an individual, empathy draws them into discussion. To empathise with someone is not to agree with them, but it is to recognise they are human just the same, and that through openness and dialogue it is possible for people, even those who have very different experiences of the world, to explore each other’s perspectives. The end point of that exploration may not be agreement – it might still be everyone back to their corners. But in the process no one has been shamed, no one exposed or excluded, no-one othered or dehumanised.

Of course, it is far easier to point the finger, to expose someone to the court of public opinion, and then to turn one’s face away, nose in the air, mouth clamped shut in an apparently dignified silence. On the surface this seems like the elegant response – live and let live – but in fact it is not: to designate someone as not worthy of attention is to very publicly inflict shame. We might as well clamp them into a scold’s bridle and lead them down the street. And, as we do so, let’s hope it’s not a windy day – or if it is, let’s be sure that we have firmly tied down the lids of our recycling bins.

Article

Comment

21 June 2024

4 min read

It's our mistakes that make us human

What we learn distinguishes us from tech.

Silvianne Aspray

Silvianne Aspray is a theologian and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge.

A man staring at a laptop grimmaces and holds his hands to his head.

Francisco De Legarreta C. on Unsplash.

The distinction between technology and human beings has become blurry: AI seems to be able to listen, answer our questions, even respond to our feelings. It becomes increasingly easy to confuse machines with humans. In this situation, it is increasingly important to ask: What makes us human, in distinction from machines? There are many answers to this question, but for now I would like to focus on just one aspect of what I think is distinctively human: As human beings, we live and learn in time.

To be human means to be intrinsically temporal. We live in time and are oriented towards a future good. We are learning animals, and our learning is bound up with the taking of time. When we learn to know or to do something, we necessarily make mistakes, and we take practice. But keeping in view something we desire – a future good – we keep going.

Let’s take the example of language. We acquire language in community over time. Toddlers make all sorts of hilarious mistakes when they first try to talk, and it takes them a long time even to get single words right, let alone to try and form sentences. But they keep trying, and they eventually learn. The same goes with love: Knowing how to love our family or our neighbours near and far is not something we are good at instantly. It is not the sort of learning where you absorb a piece of information and then you ‘get’ it. No, we learn it over time, we imitate others, we practice and even when we have learned, in the abstract, what it is to be loving, we keep getting it wrong.

This, too, is part of what it means to be human: to make mistakes. Not the sort of mistakes machines make, when they classify some information wrongly, for instance, but the very human mistake of falling short of your own ideal. Of striving towards something you desire – happiness, in the broadest of terms – and yet falling short, in your actions, of that very goal. But there’s another very human thing right here: Human beings can also change. They – we – can have a change of heart, be transformed, and at some point in time, actually start to do the right thing – even against all the odds. Statistics of past behaviours, do not always correctly predict future outcomes. Part of being human means that we can be transformed.

Transformation sometimes comes suddenly, when an overwhelming, awe-inspiring experience changes somebody’s life as by a bolt of lightning. Much more commonly, though, such transformation takes time. Through taking up small practices, we can form new habits, gradually acquire virtue, and do the right thing more often than not. This is so human: We are anything but perfect. As Christians would say: We have a tendency to entangle ourselves in the mess of sin and guilt. But we also bear the image of the Holy One who made us, and by the grace and favour of that One, we are not forever stuck in the mess. We are redeemed: are given the strength to keep trying, despite the mistakes we make, and given the grace to acquire virtue and become better people over time. All of this to say that being human means to live in time, and to learn in time.

So, this is a real difference between human beings and machines: Human beings can, and do strive toward a future good.

Now compare this to the most complex of machines. We say that AI is able to “learn”. But what does it mean to learn, for AI? Machine learning is usually categorized into supervised learning, unsupervised and self-supervised learning. Supervised learning means that a model is trained for a specific task based on correctly labelled data. For instance, if a model is to predict whether a mammogram image contains a cancerous tumour, it is given many example images which are correctly classed as ‘contains cancer’ or ‘does not contain cancer’. That way, it is “taught” to recognise cancer in unlabelled mammograms. Unsupervised learning is different. Here, the system looks for patterns in the dataset it is given. It clusters and groups data without relying on predefined labels. Self-supervised learning uses both methods: Here, the system uses parts of the data itself as a kind of label – such as, for instance, predicting the upper half of an image from its lower half, or the next word in a given text. This is the predominant paradigm for how contemporary large-scale AI models “learn”.

In each case, AI’s learning is necessarily based on data sets. Learning happens with reference to pre-given data, and in that sense with reference to the past. It may look like such models can consider the future, and have future goals, but only insofar as they have picked up patterns in past data, which they use to predict future patterns – as if the future was nothing but a repetition of the past.

So this is a real difference between human beings and machines: Human beings can, and do strive toward a future good. Machines, by contrast, are always oriented towards the past of the data that was fed to them. Human beings are intrinsically temporal beings, whereas machines are defined by temporality only in a very limited sense: it takes time to upload data, and for the data to be processed, for instance. Time, for machines, is nothing but an extension of the past, whereas for human beings, it is an invitation to and the possibility for being transformed for the sake of a future good. We, human beings, are intrinsically temporal, living in time towards a future good – which machines do not.

In the face of new technologies we need a sharpened sense for the strange and awe-inspiring species that is the human race, and cultivate a new sense of wonder about humanity itself.