Does shame have a future?

[jdnation]

Interesting Article:

Does shame have a future?
*by Roger Kimball *
No society can do without intolerance, indignation, and disgust.
—Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals

[A] liberal society has particular reasons to inhibit shame and protect its citizens from shaming.
—Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity

I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
—Genesis, 3:10

In Masaccio’s great fresco depicting the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden (ca. 1426), the Angel of the Lord hovers, sword in hand, above and behind the First Couple. Adam strides forward, naked, his face buried in his hands. Eve, however, a look of wailing misery on her upturned face, covers her breasts and privates as she walks. She is ashamed of her nakedness and strives to conceal it.

I thought of Masaccio when I stumbled upon Martha Nussbaum’s essay “Danger to Human Dignity: The Revival of Disgust and Shame in the Law,” which appeared last month in The Chronicle of Higher Education. How Nussbaum would disapprove of Eve!, I thought. For Martha Nussbaum—a classicist who is currently the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics in the Philosophy Department, Law School, and Divinity School at the University of Chicago—does not approve of shame. She is not too keen about disgust, either. Both emotions, she thinks, impede “the moral progress of society.” And here we have Eve, ashamed of her body, modestly shielding her sex from view: how very unprogressive. “Danger to Human Dignity” is an oddly vertiginous work, as is the new book from which it is drawn, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law.[1] (It is appropriate that the book should feature on its cover a fleshy, unpleasant nude by Otto Dix: how different it is—morally as well as aesthetically—from Masaccio’s Eve!) Professor Nussbaum begins “Danger to Human Dignity” with the following show-stopper: “The law, most of us would agree, should be society’s protection against prejudice.” Really? I thought “most of us would agree” that the law ought to be society’s protection against crime. But perhaps Professor Nussbaum thinks that prejudice is itself a crime—though surely not all prejudice. Edmund Burke said that prejudice “renders a man’s virtue his habit.” He meant that if we have a predisposition—a prejudice—toward the right things, they more easily become second nature. Surely Professor Nussbaum would not wish the law to protect us from that sort of prejudice. And it must be said that she herself is clearly prejudiced against anything she labels “conservative.” I doubt that she believes that the law should be society’s protection against prejudice directed at conservatives.

Whole Article:
newcriterion.com/archive/23/sept04/shame.htm#

 

[Lisa4Catholics]

It does in my house:tsktsk:

 

[Catilieth]

How often have we heard people talk about getting rid of guilty feelings, of how not to feel guilty, etc, etc…

I always respond to those people who begin to expound on the above subject that if one has done something wrong, it is healthy and appropriate to feel guilty. Not to feel guilt when one has done wrong is frightenly wrong.

The same for shame. If one has done something shameful, then one should feel shame.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Shame is effective as a deterrent, but fatal as a medicine. Certainly one should be ashamed of that which is shameful, but they must choose to expose their shame to the light. In the light, shame can be overcome, made subject to love.

Without love, shame is not redeemed – and therefore, terrible. The worst dysfunctional families work this way: there is intimidation; there is secrecy; there is fear; and there is shame.

But shame redeemed is wonderful. Shame is not the medicine; Christ is. Christ – who has no shame – says to the shameful: “Neither do I condemn thee; go and sin no more.” But we can only hear that message if we immerse ourselves in His light.