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Spectator
a day ago
- General
- Spectator
The importance of feeling shame
In several homilies, the late Pope Francis spoke of the 'grace of feeling shame'. What a strange idea! Nobody wants to feel shame. Adam and Eve, after all, first felt shame only after being expelled from the Garden of Eden. Shame was God's punishment: they felt ashamed of what had never troubled them before, namely their nakedness and their sexual desires. But what the Pope meant, I think, is absolutely salutary for our age. Shamelessness is ubiquitous. It is the accelerant of social media that encourages us to narcissistically fire up our victimhood to a gimcrack blaze. It is why so many of us are chained to the brazen idea that we can never be wrong. It's the seeming life strategy of the most powerful man on Earth. In our fallen world, very few pray to God for the grace of shame, or otherwise come to feel ashamed. But for the French philosopher Frédéric Gros in this elegant book, it would be good if more did. Being a secular Parisian penseur, of course, Gros doesn't think we need God-given gifts. But we do need grace of some kind to confront our shame. He writes: The decision to confront [shame] amounts to a commitment to inner transformation. And this is where grace comes in, for it can be extremely difficult to completely eradicate the temptation to be lenient on oneself… We need external assistance, because otherwise it is too easy to downplay things. Without the help of others, that's to say, it's hard not only to develop a conscience but also to shine the light of that conscience on oneself – to expose what one might downplay as a peccadillo and instead see it as shameful. Both Christian spiritual advisers and Freudian shrinks, Gros notes, have delighted in the human capacity to blush. To feel a burning sensation in your throat and cheeks suggests something about you is wrong. That may well be the first step to purification, or at least ethical compunction. Instead, what most are happy doing is shaming others, revelling in schadenfreude. Hence the story told in Jon Ronson's harrowing look into the social media abyss, So You've Been Publicly Shamed. The PR executive Justine Sacco, before boarding her flight from London to Johannesburg in 2013, tweeted: 'Going to Africa. Hope I don't get Aids. Just kidding. I'm white!' By the time she landed 13 hours later, what Gros calls 'a deluge of digital hatred was raining down on her'. Staff at her hotel threatened to strike if she was allowed to stay there. Her South African family shunned her and she lost her job. Even though Sacco deleted her tweet and account, someone posted: 'Sorry @JustineSacco, your tweet lives on forever.' True enough. One stupid, racist and otherwise hurtful message defined this woman for all time. One might feel sorry for Sacco (as well as hoping she has the grace to feel shame), and wonder why so many who joined the Twitter pile-on didn't look into their own hearts. Maybe those jonesing for the hit of another's misfortune should better do the hard work of developing humility, restraint and shame. Gros, best known for his delightful A Philosophy of Walking, has written another lovely little book that might start toxic haters on a different path. But I boggled at its subtitle: 'A Revolutionary Emotion.' One might think that experiencing shame isn't revolutionary but a terrible thing to feel. Consider rape victims, whose testimonies included here show how we feel shame for things of which others should properly feel ashamed. Or think of poor Annie Ernaux. The Nobel Laureate recounted in her memoir A Woman's Story how at school a fellow pupil recoiled because her hands smelled of bleach. Little Annie, you see, had washed her hands in the kitchen sink, only to learn that bleach was a marker of social class. The life she once took to be normal turns shameful. Her schoolmates consider that she lives in a shabby grocery-cum-café frequented by drunks and that her diction needs work. Sensitised to shame, she averts her eyes when her mother uncorks a bottle of wine, trapping it between her knees. 'I was ashamed of her brusque manners and speech, especially when I realised how alike we were.' Shame is different from guilt, Gros explains. One feels guilty about what one has done. By contrast, shame is 'the state of being able to conceive oneself only within the constraints… imposed by another'. That is to say, shame is catalysed by others, particularly voyeurs – a very French theme. In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre imagines a Peeping Tom looking in at the keyhole of somebody's apartment. He only feels shame when he finds himself observed by a third party. Shame is a mirror others hold up to us to make us realise what we are. Or what they think we are. How, then, can feeling shame be a good thing? In his fabulous book Shame and Necessity, the late philosopher Bernard Williams gave us a clue. He cited Ajax rousing his friends to battle in the Iliad: Dear friends, be men; let shame be in our hearts…Among men who feel shame, more are saved than die. Ajax regarded shame as the desirable compunction that stopped one from fleeing battle like a coward, that steeled one to fight and perhaps die honourably before the approving gazes of one's comrades. The Greeks called shame aidos and made it a goddess whose name also means modesty, respect and humility. But we aren't ancient Greeks. They lived in a society of honour; we in one of shameless disinhibition. Gros writes that shameless behaviour is 'an absence of reserve. I flaunt myself, my qualifications, my personality, my success, my private life and my body'. We all know people like that. Perhaps you voted for them. Contrast such shamelessness with what James Baldwin felt one day strolling past newsstands on a Parisian boulevard. A single image screamed from the world's papers: 15-year-old Dorothy Counts being spat on and reviled by a white mob as she became the first black pupil admitted to a North Carolina high school. 'It made me furious, it filled me with both hatred and pity,' wrote Baldwin. 'And it made me ashamed. Some one of us should have been there with her!' Gros glosses Baldwin's fury, suggesting it was not just the feeling of shame of a black American looking back to his hated homeland and wishing he were there to support the poor African-American girl (which is what I took Baldwin to be saying), but as a stain on humanity, shaming each of us. 'What did I do to prevent this?' Gros writes. 'Nothing.' We should blush for shame. Nietzsche thought shame was a poison, and his Übermenschen were utterly shameless (no wonder Hitler liked Thus Spake Zarathustra). We have become too Nietzschean. We need the wisdom of the ancient Greeks and of the late Pope, or to read this elegant book. In any event, we need to blush more.
The Guardian
16-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams review – a former disciple unfriends Facebook
Shortly after her waters broke, Sarah Wynn-Williams was lying in hospital with her feet in stirrups, typing a work memo on her laptop between contractions. Facebook's director of global public policy needed to send talking points from her recent trip to oversee the tech giant's bid to launch operations in Myanmar to her boss Sheryl Sandberg. Then she would give birth to her first child. Wynn-Williams's husband, a journalist called Tom, was livid but, as men tend to be in labour rooms, impotent. The doctor gently closed her laptop. 'Please let me push send,' whimpered Sarah. 'You should be pushing,' retorted the doctor with improbable timing. 'But not 'send'.' This incident typifies how, in this 400-page memoir of her seven years at Facebook from 2011 – as it mutated from niche social network to global power able to swing elections, target body-shamed teens with beauty products and monetise millions of humans' hitherto private data – Wynn-Williams had become part of what reads like a diabolical cult run by emotionally stunted men babies, institutionally enabled sexual harassers and hypocritical virtue-signalling narcissists. The cult vibe of this birthing story is made stronger by Wynn-Williams channelling Sandberg's 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. She quotes Sandberg's injunction to pregnant working women – 'Don't leave before you leave' – taking its implication to be that she should work right up to the point that the baby's head emerges into this fallen world. It doesn't occur to her that Lean In feminism might serve as a fig leaf covering self-exploitation and soul-depleting workaholism. A couple of pages earlier, Wynn-Williams writes like a wide-eyed convert: 'It still feels exciting and important to spread this tool around the world and improve people's lives.' An evidently clever former New Zealand diplomat, she was ideal fodder to help spread Facebook's secular gospel, as her backstory reveals. After surviving a shark attack as a teenager, she resolved to spend her working life helping humanity. Upon witnessing how the nascent Facebook kept Kiwis connected in the aftermath of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, she believed that Mark Zuckerberg's company could make a difference – but in a good way – to social bonds, and that she could be part of that utopian project. Her naive faith reminds me of what Jon Ronson wrote about in So You've Been Publicly Shamed: at their inception both the internet and social media seemed, to some, unalloyed good things. It's instructive for someone like me – who disdains social media and sees in tech giants the lucrative weaponising of hate masquerading as free speech, and the asphyxiation of democracy by the enabling of post-truth populists – to encounter such cockeyed optimism. The 'tool' Wynn-Williams talks about is not Facebook per se, but Zuckerberg's cherished app (which has operated under the name Free Basics since 2015), devised to deliver the internet to connectivity-deprived countries, such as Myanmar, as part of what sounds like a system upgrade of Britain's oxymoronic imperial mission to civilise black and brown persons. What involves for countries that adopt it is a Facebook-controlled monopoly of access to the internet, whereby to get online at all you have to log in to a Facebook account. When the scales fall from Wynn-Williams's eyes she realises there is nothing morally worthwhile in Zuckerberg's initiative, nothing empowering to the most deprived of global citizens, but rather his tool involves 'delivering a crap version of the internet to two-thirds of the world'. But Facebook's impact in the developing world proves worse than crap. In Myanmar, as Wynn-Williams recounts at the end of the book, Facebook facilitated the military junta to post hate speech, thereby fomenting sexual violence and attempted genocide of the country's Muslim minority. 'Myanmar,' she writes with a lapsed believer's rue, 'would have been a better place if Facebook had not arrived.' And what is true of Myanmar, you can't help but reflect, applies globally. Before she was disabused, Wynn-Williams fawningly adored Sandberg, as the pair crisscrossed the globe in private jets, bringing the good news of Facebook to foreign leaders. 'The tears streaming down her face,' Wynn-Williams writes unctuously as she reports on Sandberg's meeting with Shinzo Abe to convince the then Japanese premier to allow politicians to use Facebook in political campaigning, 'somehow make her even more impossibly lovely.' She approvingly quotes another Lean In message, that you should 'bring your authentic self to work'. But what that means in Facebook reality becomes clear when, in her first performance review after giving birth, Wynn-Williams is told that co-workers are uneasy that her baby can be heard on business calls. The poor poppets. 'Be smart and hire a Filipina nanny,' counsels Sandberg. Wynn-Williams does just that, but then something shocking happens. One day, Tom is checking the home camera when he notices a firefighter in their living room: the nanny has locked herself out and the baby inside the flat. But when Wynn-Williams later relates this disturbing event to colleagues, she feels as though she has made a faux pas – distracting them from their noble mission with personal guff. 'The expectation of Facebook is that mothering is invisible,' she writes. Facebook cannot tolerate too much authenticity. The book's title comes from F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: 'They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.' For Wynn-Williams, Zuckerberg's 'move fast and break things' philosophy is just such entitled carelessness, leaving Facebook staff and their customers to sweep up the wreckage. But the Facebook she describes is not run by careless people, not really, but rather by wittingly amoral ones who use technical genius and business acumen to profit from human vulnerability. For instance, she claims Facebook – now Meta, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp – identified teenage girls who had deleted selfies on its platforms, and then supplied the data to companies to target them with ads for putatively tummy-flattening teas or beauty products. Wynn-Williams's shtick, often presenting herself as the only conscience in the room, does wear thin. I tired of reading of how shocked she was at some Facebook policy, while continuing to spread its values worldwide. 'I'm astounded at the role money plays in elections in the US,' she writes at one point, as the 2016 Trump campaign gears up with political ads and targeted misinformation from which Facebook massively profited. Are you really so naive? I wrote in the margin. 'I'm also against exporting this value system. But Facebook is effectively bringing this in globally by stealth.' And you're part of it! I wrote in the margin. If only she'd taken to heart the critical messages of, say, David Fincher's movie The Social Network or Dave Eggers's novel The Circle, she might have leaned out earlier. And yet her memoir is valuable, not just as indictment of the Facebook cult but of bosses' entitled behaviour that will resonate for many. She depicts Zuckerberg as a tech-bro Henry VIII, a thin-skinned angry child whose courtiers let win at the board game Settlers of Catan during flights on his private jet. She charges him with lying to Congress about the extent of Facebook's compromises to woo China and allow it to operate there, suggesting that his company was developing technology and tools to meet Chinese requirements that would allow it to censor users' content and access their data. He was, she claims, much more in cahoots with Xi Jinping's authoritarian regime than he let on to US senators. On another private jet, relates Wynn-Williams, Sandberg imperiously invited her to sleep in the same bed. Wynn-Williams declined, but thereafter worried that she had upset her boss by not yielding to a presumably sexual demand, which she depicts in the book as the ex-Facebook COO's entitled modus operandi with several women subordinates. And then there's what Joel Kaplan, currently Meta's chief global affairs officer, allegedly did to Wynn-Williams at a boozy corporate shindig in 2017. She claimed that he called her 'sultry' and rubbed his body against hers on the dancefloor. This wasn't a one-off incident, she claims: indeed, there was a group at Facebook called Feminist Fight Club, whose members compared notes on such reportedly prevalent cases of sexual harassment by execs. An internal investigation cleared Kaplan of impropriety and soon after Wynn-Williams was fired for making misleading harassment allegations. Last week, Meta responded to this book, calling it 'a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives'. The company has denounced its former employee, claiming that she was not a whistleblower but a disgruntled activist trying to sell books. Most likely she is both. Wynn-Williams notes that Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021. 'But leopards don't change their spots. The DNA of the company remains the same. And the more power they grab, the less responsible they become.' That culture of irresponsibility and carelessness should worry us more than ever, she suggests at the end of the book, as Zuckerberg's Meta is at the forefront of artificial intelligence, a technology even more potentially calamitous than the one he dreamed up in his Harvard dorm a couple of decades ago. Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams is published by Pan Macmillan (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
