17-05-2025
Do you often feel ashamed? Maybe you should
Do we live in a 'post-shame culture'? And whether we do or not, should we? In A Philosophy of Shame, a neat and erudite little book, Frédéric Gros tackles the paradoxes of this most excruciating of feelings.
On the one hand, progressives argue that the shame someone might feel at being, say, gay or overweight is a legacy of historical accusations of deviancy or intemperance, and we should sweep it all aside. 'There is a pride in being oneself,' Gros writes. On this side is everyone from lifestyle gurus ('stop being ashamed of yourself!') to feminist campaigners against male sexual violence. Think of the emotion captured in 'the shame isn't ours to feel, it's theirs', as Gros's countrywoman Gisèle Pelicot recently declared of herself and 'all other women who are victims of rape'.
Many conservatives, while accepting some of this, nonetheless suggest that there's value in everyday shame: that people in the 21st-century West have become too shameless in their dress and manner, their selfish and anti-social behaviour. On this view, the gradual erosion of shame, a consequence of individualism, has resulted in a degeneration of culture, and the damaging display of unbounded behaviour, particularly online, where one's public image, Gros writes, 'can now be quantified and fluctuate up and down like share values'. Gros understands this conservatism as the desire to return to the 'ethics of antiquity, where shame (aidos, pudor) was a lever of political obedience, a social watchword and a part of people's inner make-up.'
Gros beautifully describes how modernity has rendered us members of 'societies without honour'. 'Channels of private vengeance', predicated on family and clan codes, have conceded their power to 'a public body of laws (the state), commercial transactions (capitalism) and the interplay of individual freedoms (liberalism).' In this post-honour culture, in which we live today, shame becomes impossible to avenge: when we're wronged, vigilante action remains unacceptable, because we're all supposedly equal in the eyes of the judicial system. Most of us frown, for instance, on families who for religious reasons murder their daughters in the name of some lapse of 'honour'.
Even so, we can't fully transcend the fear of social shame, or the allure of schadenfreude. Think of the glee when a celebrity is caught overstepping some invisible hedonistic line, or of the demonic revelry of a good internet mobbing. Shame is alive and well, then, but we don't know exactly where it lives – and so it falls awkwardly somewhere between inward opprobrium, post-religious hangover and political battering-ram.
Gros, crisply translated by Andrew James Bliss, wears his learning lightly, but he draws on an extraordinary range of literary, religious, historical, cinematic, psychoanalytic and philosophical descriptions of shame, from John Cassavetes to Franz Kafka, the rape of Lucretia to Primo Levi's exploration of the shame of surviving the concentration camps. Gros breaks shame down into three kinds: shame after an event, the shame of 'why me?', and shame for the world.
Like Marx, who declared that 'shame is a revolution in itself', Gros sees in the third type, shame for the world (as exemplified by Levi), astonishing potential. Yes, shame, being a mixture of 'sadness and rage', can lead us into depression, self-resentment and 'solitary resignation'; but Gros argues that it can also forge 'a fiery and luminous path that transfigures us and fuels collective anger'. For those castigated for their identity, and made to feel ashamed of their poverty, race or sex, shame can reveal the outline of a potential political community. 'We need imagination,' he writes, 'to be ashamed.'
But while Gros makes a great theoretical case for the revolutionary potential of shame, it didn't leave me any more sure that, in reality, alchemically converting one's shame into collective anger is the most effective mode (or mood) for bringing about social change. At one point, he suggests, rightly, that shame is often simply 'the expression of a desperate, naked desire to be liked'. In which case, having the courage to speak freely and to defend the truth, however unpopular it might make you, is the best way to confront shame – and any individual with sufficient bravery already has the power to do that.
