I’m Puzzled by the Death of Shame in our Culture (posted 11/6/23)

Because crooked politicians have been up to no good, as usual – creeps gotta creep – I could write my usual Monday column on their sleazy behavior.

I could write about how Sam Bankman-Fried, probably the largest donor to Democrats in the 2022 election cycle, was convicted on a raft of fraud charges, which the execrable MSM managed to report on without ever mentioning his huge donations to Democrats.

Or I could write about how Stacy Abrams (D-irigible) says that anybody who doesn’t like Que Mala is both racist and sexist.

Or about how the mortal remains of Joe Biden (He’s pining for the fjords!) has been linked to thousands of emails he sent under various pseudonyms (such as Cornpopslayer@aol.com,  Flatline@ukraine.com, and c’monman@whereamIrightnow?.com.)

But I’m not going to do that.  Because for the last week I’ve been in a contemplative mood, and I’ve been struck more and more by how inexplicably shameless our prominent people and public institutions have become. 

Day after day, I see people caught in shocking scandals, and nothing happens to them.  The squad members blatantly support terrorists who have just committed acts so vile they’d make the Nazis blush, and their party – with majority Jewish support in elections – makes no move to censure or expel them.  The president’s son Hunter is filmed taking hard drugs while cavorting with hookers – the videos are available anywhere! – and admitting to scores of felonies, and his dad still takes him to public events.    

On the right, too, we’ve known for almost a year that George Santos is a ridiculous conman and sociopathic liar, and he’s still in congress.  Lauren Boebert is filmed giving a stranger a handy in a movie theater, and nobody says boo.  

So today I have a few rambling thoughts on the subject of shame. 

I’ll be the first to admit that shame can be destructive.  In Victorian times, many people were driven into self-hatred after they engaged in what we now call “Toobin-ing.”  (And if you know Jeffrey Toobin’s biography, that incident probably wasn’t even in the top three behaviors that he has to be ashamed about!) 

In cultures such as Japan, businessmen whose companies have a bad quarter have been known to kill themselves out of shame.  Similarly, one of the darker aspects of social media has been revealed in stories of adolescents whose tormentors bully them online, making them feel ashamed to the point that they commit suicide.  (And for those bullies, Uncle Jesus had strong opinions, involving millstones tied around necks.)

But even though mis-directed or undeserved shame can be destructive, appropriately felt shame is a necessary response – and corrective – to bad behavior.  I believe that we need more shame in our national life. 

It fell out of fashion for a long time, roughly coincident with our loss of a predominantly Judeo-Christian ethical framework.  In its wake came Freud and a therapeutic culture that saw shame mostly as an unhealthy inhibition on our instincts, and something to resist and overcome.   Too many therapists in recent decades adopted a goal of raising a patient’s self-esteem, but they reversed the natural cause and effect involved.

Rather than seeing self-esteem as something that comes as a result of achieving goals and behaving properly, they believe that instilling unearned self-esteem in a patient will then cause him to behave well and become successful.  (Some revealing psychological studies predicted the kind of bad outcomes this approach would produce, when they revealed that one group of people with unusually high self esteem is criminals.) 

A focus on this same kind of self-esteem building in our schools and media has exacerbated the problem by adding two other mutually interacting dysfunctions: nurturing and rewarding a sense of victimhood, and medicalizing most bad behavior.

You can see the results everywhere.  When a criminal is caught, he immediately starts playing victimhood bingo: the deck was stacked against him because of his race, or his sexual orientation, or his poverty.  He never knew his dad, and his mom was never around, and all of the influences in his neighborhood were negative, and he was high or drunk when he committed his crimes, and he had a low IQ. 

There’s a little bit of truth in all of those points, but they all avoid the central truth of personal responsibility. 

Lots of people of all races grew up in bad neighborhoods, but most of them didn’t become career criminals.  Lots of people are poor, but they don’t become thieves.  Lots of people have low IQs, but they just run for congress. 

Rapists will tell you all about how women treated them badly and rejected them (Join the club, buddy.), and about their “disease” of sex addiction.  (Oh, you find women attractive and want to have sex with as many of them as possible? That sounds contagious!).  Obese people will tell you about their screwed up metabolism and food addictions. (Donuts and ice cream taste amazing?  The hell you say!)

Lazy people will self-diagnose their chronic fatigue syndrome, and bad students their ADD.

All of these diagnoses are lacking the same thing: an appropriate sense of shame, and the possibility of changing your ways and overcoming your flaws that come with it.

If you look in the mirror and see a victim of food addiction, sex addiction, chronic fatigue and poor impulse control, you’ll likely feel fine about yourself, and maybe seek a disability check for these conditions.

On the other hand, if you look in the mirror and see a gluttonous, horny, lazy criminal, you’ll likely feel ashamed of yourself.  But if you’ll use that shame at motivation, you’ve got a better shot at becoming the better person you could be.     

Our nation’s institutions are shot-through with this same kind of pathological and destructive shamelessness. 

Journalism can be a noble profession, with an ethical code that stresses finding and telling the truth as conscientiously and completely as you can.  So why are most members of our media such shamelessly lying hacks?

Reporters from our most prestigious papers won Pulitzer prizes for writing endlessly about the Russian hoax which turned out to be completely false.  None of them produced any soul-searching mea culpas, and none of them returned their Pulitzers.

For several years they wrote about covid: that it naturally originated from bats or pangolins, or possibly bat/pangolin orgies; that masks and six feet of distance and new vaccines stopped it dead; that new treatments which were first used 15 minutes ago were scientifically certain to have no negative long-term side-effects; that Fauci was a saintly truth-teller.

None of them resigned in disgrace, or admitted how they’d gotten everything so wrong.  Many of them are gearing up for lockdowns and mask mandates again, just in time for next year’s elections.

Our FBI and intelligence agencies used to be widely respected, but they’ve spent several years covering up obvious crimes of leftist politicians, while lending their imprimatur to ridiculous conspiracy theories about pee tapes and Steele dossiers.  Dozens of “intelligence officials” pimped out their own credibility to lie about Hunter Biden’s obviously authentic and incriminating laptop being a Russian fake.

Our universities used to be the gold standard for scholarship.  A degree from an Ivy League school connoted respect and the promise of career success.  Academia stood for free speech and free inquiry; science degrees brought technical innovation and life-improving advancements; liberal arts programs transmitted an appreciation for the great accomplishments of the West.

Now I wouldn’t send Cassie the Wonder Dog to an Ivy league school, even if she got a free ride, and even though she’d be a shoo-in for valedictorian.  Our liberal arts programs have been contaminated by tribal hatreds, fashionably contemptuous political dogma, and a disdain for America and the West.  Even hard sciences are being corrupted by idiotic identity hires who argue that math is sexist and physics is racist.  The good people trying to do honest scholarship are fighting an uphill battle against armies of mediocre social engineers. 

Our politicians used to be— Okay, check that.  Politicians have always been eyed with some distrustful wariness, and rightly so.      

But I’m old enough to remember when parents would tell their kids, “You could someday grow up to be president!”  If I heard that now, it would be damning with faint praise at best, and fighting words at worst!

Okay, that’s a lot of ranting.  But I’ll end with this modest proposal: let’s start bringing back shame.

Let’s follow the lead of that apple-eating bad-ass Canadian politician, and shame every “journalist” who tries to ask a loaded, dishonest question.

Let’s make a list of journalists who ran with Hamas’ lies about the hundreds of dead children at the Gaza hospital that was never hit by an Israeli rocket, and whenever they ask any question about Hamas’ war, require that they first admit their mistake and apologize.

Let’s bombard university presidents and regents with demands to denounce Hamas, and their own students’ anti-Semitic vandalism and attacks on Jews, and put pressure on those who have been donating to their endowments if they won’t.   

So many of our elites have been acting shamelessly, and if their consciences have become so cauterized that they’ve become numb to shame, let’s help re-train them to feel it.

It will be good for them, and good for the nation and its future. 

Hamas delenda est!