Month: July 2015

Ethics, Shame and Shamelessness

/ rewrites

index

In the past, people who were found guilty of minor crimes were placed in stocks or had their heads shaven or were tarred and feathered. Today, public humiliation tends to be dispensed through more efficient methods, like tabloid newspapers and television, websites and social media. The concept of using social shaming as corrective has been a part of our lives long before modern people could interact on the internet. Reviewers and critics, who once avoided moralistic rhetoric for fear of coming across as pious or schoolmarmish, now portray themselves as defenders of the public morality; shame is one of the strongest weapons in their arsenal. The allure of a bohemian, neo-Nietzschean stance ‘beyond good and evil’ has faded. All across the political spectrum we have writers and commentators upholding appearances and decorum with Victorian fervour (albeit with a decidedly not-Victorian set of values.) At the same time, online anonymity allows for the creation of new personas that are often indifferent to the power of shame and accountability, social pressures that have been a major part of human relationships for millennia.

Anti-social behaviour is a fact of life, particularly on the web. Websites tend to have their own mechanisms that are meant to preserve a semblance of politeness in their comments sections and forums. Online interactions become so abusive so often that they raise a thorny question: are the personas that ‘speak’ on forums just a kind of demented power fantasy that a real life person acts out? Or are they a real person speaking their mind through the one avenue where they feel it is permissible?  Comment sections and forums may be ideal spaces for trolls to vent their spleen without facing any consequences but what about texts with identifiable authors such as blogs, articles, videos? On the one hand, there are those that express an obvious sense of entitlement: “you can’t make me feel shame for things that I choose not to feel accountable for.” On the other side, there are those who have made it their mission to punish those they believe are in the wrong but who have somehow gotten away with it.

Both types – or a combination of them – are common outside of internet culture too. Working at a University for several years, I’ve come to realize that there are certain courses that actually do, for better or worse, change the way students think. One is the first-year introduction to ethics, another is a post-graduate course that teaches critical theory. After taking the ethics program, students become convinced that right and wrong aren’t simply a matter of obeying decrees passed down to them by their elders. They’re a matter of arguing well, being dispassionate and grounding their moral sentiments in solid logic. The critical theory course equips them to do two things. Firstly, they’re meant to teach them how to expose the ideological premises that underlie our practices, conventions and institutions. Secondly, they can provide a better way to engage with context, to better understand the historical roots of the present moment. Both ethics and critical theory are indispensable if we can have any optimism that the future can avoid the calamities of the past.

Where critics and moralists go wrong, I think, is when their views become a cosmology; or – just as dangerously – when criticism and ethics blend together into a haphazard synthesis. Ethics courses argue that moral judgments should be based on solid, rational principles. If they are not (or we don’t bother to explain them properly) we become tyrannical: we expect people to act the way we want them to, no back-chat. Of course, in truth, our moral points of view are often based less on dispassionate reasoning and debate than on our personal tastes and life histories as well as on the nature of the institutions that surround us. After taking a course in ethics, many students realize that no one should tell them what to do without convincing them of it first (even if the given reasons aren’t the real reasons at all.) Ethics courses empower people to take seriously the idea that it is everyone’s job to uphold moral standards (once these have been determined.) Those of us who are not willing to spend years independently developing a personal moral system tend to pick a school of thought that we basically agree with and follow its lead. We learn to repeat its ideals, its justifications and, more importantly, we trust it. It starts to shape our lives and our relationships with other people (and animals.) Similarly, critical thinking provides a sharpness that allows us to find the subtexts lurking behind the everyday things people say, do and create. It becomes instinct.

Some theories key us into the importance of economic forces, some highlight the self-serving construction of racial and gender-based ideas of otherness. Some simply draw attention to our habits of thinking, to the invisible torrents of information that our brains bathe in at every moment. These subtexts are concealed and concretized in the objects we study which, like a good-natured drunk, always tell us more than they intend to. Now – anybody could see that these two intellectual ‘tools’ represent a kind of intellectual power that we hand over to our students. This is their purpose. They are meant to liberate us and, at the same time, they’re supposed to make us more accountable. Kept separately they allow us to see what is really happening in the world and to live principled lives. That said, a suitable system for determining what ‘is really happening’ is not automatically a good way for deciding ‘what ought to be done.’ When critical thinking and ethical judgment are mixed together carelessly, we begin to reduce all the nuances that we can discover through critical theory to simplistic value-judgments.

Marx and Engels wrote polemics that explicitly attacked other intellectuals and public figures. These articles often employed a combination of corrosive wit, philosophical rigor and insults to tear their opponent’s position to shreds. Yet, I doubt their purpose was merely to repeat the age-old religious practice of dividing people into categories of good or evil. This would have seemed feeble or boring to them; an appeal to the values of watered-down liberal humanism. In its heyday, Marxist criticism was not moral (at least not in the regular use of the term.) Instead, it intended to show how the things they wrote about were merely symptomatic of structural problems that face humanity. Likewise, for generations, feminists took aim at larger targets than the problematic individuals, books or films that they discussed. They weren’t content with apologies, they demanded that we either re-imagine or destroy many of our longest-standing, patriarchal institutions.

In many cases, modern critical thinking has become handmaiden to our ethical impulses. Today, we have many writers employing using Marxist or feminist or psychoanalytic concepts just to arrive at old-fashioned moral censure of individuals that we disagree with. Many writers and academics see no problem with this. Once a racist or misogynistic point of view is uncovered, why should those that hold it not be judged as well? Surely, they have brought this upon themselves. We should concentrate on protecting and supporting those who are hurt by their toxic vitriol. Most offenders refuse to learn from polite discussion anyway. They will continue to pollute our culture with their unacceptable statements and noxious ideas until they are decisively dealt with.

Unfortunately, the process of deliberating between right and wrong, though crucial, is only the first step in ethics. The second part lies in the question of how to enforce moral standards. Actual authority is needed to discipline someone in a concrete way – for instance, by taking away their property or freedoms. But what if we don’t have the authority to punish others? We can try to change them by influencing them. We can attempt to engage in debate with them.

More often, though, we resort to praising and shaming, the emotional version of petting or smacking a puppy. Being shamed can cause severe psychological and emotional damage but, just as commonly, it can bring about a desired change in someone who is reluctant to change. In shame-based religions like Judaism or Catholicism, is understood to be part of the development of conscience. The conscience takes the place of the original shamer, be it a parent or rabbi or priest. However, in many cases, shaming serves no function at all. It is just a form of bullying people into submission, making it painfully clear that their opinions are not acceptable.

In order to circle around to the modern trend of shaming others via the internet, which is an issue of increasing urgency, it might be best to briefly consider the supposed role that shaming plays in spiritual life. ‘The Crooked Cucumber’ is the name of a book by David Chadwick about his experiences at the famous San Francisco Zen Center, which was famously run by a Japanese Roshi in the 1960s named Shunryu Suzuki. The SFZC was one of the first Buddhist monasteries established outside of Asia. Chadwick’s website is an interesting collection of anecdotes and articles about the history of the Zen Center. Although I am not particularly interested in Buddhism, I have read and enjoyed all the interviews, especially those that shed light on this period where relatively conservative Eastern religions became a part of the American counterculture. The personalities and quirks of the individuals shine through in the informal interview format.

Recently, I read a two-part interview that Chadwick conducted with a man named Niels Holm. (Full interview part two: http://www.cuke.com/Cucumber%20Project/interviews/niels.html)  Holm, now deceased, was a Danish carpenter, sailor and (to some extent) Zen Buddhist. He spends a great deal of the interview discussing the concept of shame.

NH: For a while I talked to everybody about shame. I talked to all my friends, people I meet, how was your relation with your dad? Did he shame you, or your mother shame you, or how was it with shame. It was very interesting. The two people that had been shamed the most, and one of them, his dad shamed him. . . were both psychiatrists, which I think is very interesting. I found that one psychiatrist that I knew myself in Port Townsend was very much of a shamer. He shamed his wife – it’s interesting how that is. And then I could see in – I look at religious leaders, even Zen masters, shaming the students. And then I asked the students and they say, well, that’s a technique he has, it’s a good way… I say, what is going on here? (Slightly edited for brevity.)

A quality that many of the interviewers show in their conversations with Chadwick is the ability to adopt a religious point of view that’s nevertheless open-ended and exploratory. Holm is not simply insisting on his conclusions but relating his discoveries. He goes on to explain his view that while shaming others (especially children) will usually have a harmful effect on their view of themselves, the ability to accept feelings of shame from within is a rare and important thing:

DC: But you speak about shame sometimes as being a good thing.

NH: Yes it is. It’s a good thing when you’re willing – the willingness to experience it is a good thing. That’s the bodhisattva vow. The willingness to experience shame is the Bodhisattva vow. The unwillingness to experience shame will lead you to evil.

DC: In what way?

NH: It’s like scapegoating. It’s blaming. It’s all the life-alienating things that you do to avoid feeling shame. Feeling shame is the same as being conscious of who you are. To admit who you are. When you see who you are, that’s like going through the doorway.

The act of shaming another person is, in this way, naturally linked to the refusal to endure shame. We often think of shaming another person as a powerful action or the act of a person with legitimate authority (moral or otherwise.) When it takes the form of punishment or rebuke it is supposed to be part of a process of educating and guiding others. At the same time Holm’s description makes a lot of sense when we consider both the feelings of the person being shamed and the person inflicting shame upon them. How can a person deliberately shame another without degrading themselves at the same time? Certainly the experience of shame must be unpleasant in order to dissuade people from transgression.

Yet, the person who inflicts shame suffers too, for they displace their shame onto others rather than acknowledge it. For Holm, being ashamed is not simply self-hatred or low self-esteem. He is not interested in self-help. Accepting feelings of shame is part of becoming responsible. It is the act of facing up to what we have tried to ignore:

NH: When you feel shame, be glad. I say that to myself when I feel – when I have been out doing something that is shameful. Sometimes it takes me two days, or maybe it takes a week, or maybe ten years, before I will look at it, it’s so shameful. Now, if you’re really willing to feel shame it wouldn’t take so long. And if you’re truly willing, truly practicing willing, you will be ashamed before you do it. That avenue, that opening to yourself and who you are, is so open that you never feel shame because you have nothing to be ashamed of. There would be no reason to be ashamed because you already are open there.

DC: And you don’t have something to protect.

NH: Yeah, there’s nothing to protect.

DC: You know who really had the least resistance to feeling shame was Suzuki Roshi. I’ve seen him a number of times, say start off a lecture by apologizing for having gotten angry and say I’m ashamed of myself, or apologize to people for something. Or very quickly at the snap of a finger he could say, oh, I see, I was wrong.

The willingness to experience shame or admit ignorance is not often thought of as a virtue. In fact, all too often it’s considered self-flagellation or self-involvement. No doubt, the kind of genuine shame that Suzuki Roshi was able to feel surely differs from phony displays of contrition but it’s often people who make the most of feeling remorse that are the first to repeat the same behaviour. Nevertheless, Holm’s remarks suggest at another point. Being critical is less important than being self-critical – although one does not necessarily preclude the other, it may be that our insistence on taking up moral positions (however righteous or altruistic they may be) is a way of deferring self-examination. Holm suggests that we can gain another form of power once we drop our aversion to failure:

NH: The sense of self as a failure – like I said the last four years, when this woman rejected me, then I really failed, completely. I let myself go down and feel it completely. Being a complete failure, and I went to hell with that, and felt I’m one-eighth of an inch tall, and there I was being nothing, worthless. I didn’t want this feeling my whole life – this thing about feeling shame, just feeling, through and through and through. All my life I tried not to feel that. And then, just accept and feel it, just accept yourself as a total fuck-up, a total failure, and just cry and grieve it. Grieve that feeling. And then when you express it and you tell somebody, they love you.

How can this acceptance of the self as total fuck-up not become yet another way for us to obsess over ourselves? Perhaps the best solution lies in an example from the past. We can turn to the first essayist Michele De Montaigne (who possibly invented the modern word “embarrassment”) for insight. Bodily embarrassment is a theme in Montaigne’s work. He wants to pin down the anxieties that prevent us from revealing our naked minds and bodies to the world. Montaigne was a committed Christian but he was sceptical of the intolerant ideology behind France’ religious civil wars. His cheerful, inquisitive, sincere personality seems completely at odds with the close-minded world of his time. Montaigne prioritized self-criticism above all else. He practiced it as a kind of inverted Socratic Method. The point of the essais was to record and consider what has happened in his life, and to contrast his findings with the wisdom of the ancients and other great writers. The essais discuss human problems but without becoming dogmatic. The concept of ‘epoche’ is a matter of suspending final judgment or certainty. Here is Emerson’s account of Montaigne’s method:

But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot see. I know that human strength is not in extremes, but in avoiding extremes. I, at least, will shun the weakness of philosophizing beyond my depth. What is the use of pretending to powers we have not? What is the use of pretending to assurances we have not, respecting the other life? Why exaggerate the power of virtue? Why be an angel before your time? These strings, wound up too high, will snap. If there is a wish for immortality, and no evidence, why not say just that? If there are conflicting evidences, why not state them? If there is not ground for a candid thinker to make up his mind, yea or nay,- why not suspend the judgment? I weary of these dogmatizers. I tire of these hacks of routine, who deny the dogmas. I neither affirm nor deny. I stand here to try the case. I am here to consider, to consider how it is. I will try to keep the balance true.

This is not to say we should not condemn bad institutions, bad theories, bad language, ‘bad’ people. Montaigne and Emerson and all great theorists would be horrified at this conclusion. Rather, we should speak against wrongdoing as ourselves, as the flawed people we are, not from the point of view of the flawless people as we would like to be. True change in our natures, if it is at all possible, I think, is possible only for those who voluntarily accept responsibility for how they use their words, deeds and time.

The Book I Read (2): Clothing in Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers.

/ rewrites
index

Hermann Broch

Items of clothing from Can Themba’s suit to Gogol’s overcoat serve a number of purposes in    fiction. Elizabethan drama famously used costumes as a means for actors to transform into characters and for characters to turn into other characters. While this kind of costuming relies on popular stereotypes (a man can only dress as a woman if there’s such a thing as ‘women’s clothing) it affirms the idea that a clever actor with a well-stocked closet can change identity as easily as he or she might change shoes. Modern literature tends to take a more Althusser-like attitude towards costumes: fashion is but one of many social practices that inculcate ideology into a subject, tailoring us to suit dominant social values.A good story takes details seriously, whether the character are using their clothes to express something or whether their clothes are using them. In ‘The Romantic’, the first part of Hermann Broch’s trilogy ‘The Sleepwalkers’ there is an passage that considers the importance of military uniforms occupy in Prussian ideology:

A generic uniform provides its wearer with a definitive line of demarcation between his person and the world; it is like a hard casing against which one’s personality and the world beat sharply and directly and are differentiated from each other; for it is the uniform’s true function to manifest and obtain order in the world, to arrest the confusion and flux of life, just as it conceals whatever in the human body is soft and flowing, covering up the soldier’s underclothes and skin, and decreeing that sentries on guard should wear white gloves. So when in the morning a man has fastened up his uniform to the last button, he acquires a second and thicker hide and feels that he has returned to his more essential and steadfast being… Yet this does not mean that the man in uniform has become blind, nor that he is filled with blind prejudices as is commonly assumed; he remains all the time a man like you and me, dreams of food and love, even reads his newspaper at breakfast but he is no longer tied to things, and as they scarcely concern him any longer he is able to divide them into the good and the bad, for on intolerance and lack of understanding the security of life is based. (Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir.)

This paragraph ties into a theory of the origins of uniforms that Broch articulates through the character of Bertrand (a friend of the novel’s hero.) His theory states that the military learned the power of uniforms from the church, finding it to be an excellent means of fusing the transcendent with the secular. This mix of practicality and idealism produced the particular form of Romantic patriotism that fuelled 19th Century nationalism. Ideally, uniforms reduce the world to a place where surface appearances are representations that tell us everything we want to know, concealing nothing. Of course, the real question is whether an individual person can truly become that which he represents. For Bertrand, the wearer comes to belong to his clothing more than he does to his family or community. Feelings of authority, pride, security, intolerance are enhanced. But this is not merely the result of indoctrination nor is it merely uniform fetishism.

Broch explicitly tells us that the uniform solider feels empowered for he is no longer ‘tied’ to life. This is not a total negation of the wearer’s ‘real self.’ The same person still  exists beneath. Still, the wearing of a uniform creates a double consciousness: importance is no longer invested in ordinary, concrete matters while abstractions (such as duty or camaraderie) become concrete entities, imbued with absolute importance. The novel does not set up the usual existential opposition between a soldier’s ‘bad faith’ (his acting out the being of a soldier) and his authentic being. Instead, it depicts ideology in the style of the 19th Century novel, where personal transformation is largely a matter of learning new techniques of self-narration. The solider continues to have the same boring, everyday thoughts but his experience of them is fundamentally altered. A uniform is meant to offer the solider liberation from pettiness, from normalcy. Despite its demands, it offers a different framework through which the self can be perceived. In this way, the uniform contributes as much freedom as it deducts from the soldier. In a way, Broch’s theory combines the optimism of the Elizabethan costume as a tool for self-fashioning with the Marxist sense of the uniform as an instrument of dehumanization, of shaping the person to fit its context. Broch demonstrates this ambivalence more overtly in the next sequence, which shows the protagonist, Joachim von Pasenow’s neurotic reflections on his uniform:

He could almost have wished that the uniform was a direct emanation of his skin, and often he thought to himself that that was the real function of a uniform, and wished at least that his underclothes could by a distinctive pattern be made a component part of the uniform. For it was uncanny to think that every solider carried about with him under his tunic the anarchical passions common to all men. Perhaps the world would have gone off the rails altogether had someone at the last moment invented stiff, shirt-fronts for the civilians, thus transforming the shirt into a white board and making it quite unrecognizable as underclothing.

Joachim recognizes that the appeal of his uniform lies in the fact that it provides limitations, it forces him to inflict discipline upon problematic urges, to keep things on the rails. It remains a hard casing that relieves his insecurity. More interesting is his view of the modern civilian shirt as ‘a white board.’ The civilian wears clothes that stifle his individuality, doing so even without claiming prestige as compensation. In this, the average person is worse off than the soldier: they have chosen to stand for nothing. Yet, a society obsessed with order is also one that is obsessed with arbitrary formalities and soulless ceremony. Joachim says he believes the uniform is ‘decreed by nature’, but it is clear that he doubts that this way of life truly is natural. He grows anxious when his tunic is taken off. In these moments, he does not experience a loss of self but a loss of self-knowledge. He returns to his old narrative, which is no longer satisfactory. He is reminded that military garments do not grow out of his skin. Ideology has been mistaken for natural law. In uniform, Joachim’s underlying ‘passions’ are overmastered. He finds comfort in accepting and deferring them. He knows they may be gratified later when he’s dressed in other clothes, for this is a principle around which German military ideology is built: do not deny desire, confine it to situations where it can be indulged in without guilt or loss of control. Joachim, for instance, is well aware that officers may only visit brothels when in civvies.

Broch endured his own struggle with German Fascism but this digression is not meant to simply point out the obvious hypocrisy of the military caste. His purpose is to establish a tension between two romantic sentiments: Joachim is ruled both by passion and by principle. He idealizes both the Appollonian and Dionysian in equal measure. The two impulses are kept in separate spheres so that a balance can be maintained. As a trilogy, ‘The Sleepwalkers’ tells three stories using the literary styles of three periods, from the romantic to the realist to High Modernist avant-garde. The second section ‘The Anarchist’ picks up on certain, similar concerns, though its emphasis is much more on constructing a realistic impression of the lives of ordinary Germans. This first story has a classic love triangle plot. Joachim must choose between his lover (a beautiful, Czech prostitute named Ruzena) and a more appropriate match, an aristocratic woman named Elisabeth. This plot is strictly conventional but Broch uses it to explore how the emotionally charged sturm undt drang movement challenge a culture based on rigid adherence to regulations. A dichotomy of sex and chivalric love is pivotal to this issue. Broch uses clothing to intensify the eroticism of Joachim and Ruzena’s sexual encounter:

“Open that.” She whispered, tearing at the same time at his necktie and the buttons of his vest. And as if in sudden, precipitate humility, whether towards him or towards God, she fell on her knees, her head against the foot of the bed, and quickly unfastened his shoes. Oh, how terrible that was – for why should they not sink down together, forgetting the casings in which they were held? And yet how grateful he was to her that she made it easier and so touchingly; the deliverance of the smile with which they threw open the bed into which they flung themselves. But the sharp-cornered starched plastron of his shirt, cutting against her chin, still irked her, and opening it and squeezing her face between sharp angles, she ordered: “put that off” and now they felt release and freedom, felt the softness of their bodies, felt their breathing stifled by the urgency of emotion, and their delight rising up out of their dread. Oh, dread of life streaming from the living flesh with which the bones are clothed, softness of the skin spread and stretched over it, dreadful warning of the skeleton and the many-ribbed breast frame which he can now embrace and which, breathing, now presses against him, its heart beating.

Joachim, Ruzena, and the narration itself, fall into disorder as symbolic surfaces are abruptly removed. The sequence relies on verbs of motion and long lines to render their urgency but its atomistic treatment of the body itself is more ambiguous. Broch’s descriptions nearly tip over into body-horror as the stitching of the human caul is traced and examined. They feel dread. Joachim wants to embrace Ruzena’s bones, forsaking the outer layers of flesh and clothing. Her body becomes an ‘it’, the outer casing that holds her beating heart. Try as he might, Joachim can only make sense of Ruzena’s flesh as a living garment not as her total being. It continues:

Sweet fragrance of the flesh, humid exhalation, soft runnels beneath the breasts, darkness of the armpits. But still, Joachim was too confused, still they were both too confused, to know the delight they felt; they knew only that they were together and yet they must still seek each other.

Is this another instance of the longstanding superstition that holds that the corporeal is a false self? Is religion or metaphysics, once again, to blame? I think the implications go further than this. If clothing unties one from the world then nakedness is a necessary condition for emotional engagement. Even in nakedness, in physical union, the complete image or texture of the other cannot be found. It resides neither in clothing nor even in ‘dreadful’ flesh. They want to feel the loved one as a totality. No amount of uncovering can expose this. Perhaps it is clothing all the way down. Broch ends ‘The Romantic’ on a bittersweet note, as Joachim lies on his wedding night watching his new wife Elisabeth, whom he has not touched, fall sleep:

She had moved a little to the side, and her hand, which with its befrilled wrist was all that emerged from the bedclothes, rested in his. Through his position his military coat had become disordered, the lapels falling apart left his black trousers visible, and when Joachim noticed this he hastily set things right again and covered the place. He had now drawn up his legs, and so as not to touch the sheets with his patent-leather shoes, he rested his feet in a rather constrained postured on the chair standing beside the bed.

This is a victory for conservative values and appearances but it is, above all, a victory for security over vulnerability. This final moment of abstinence might be endearing in a way, if we had not been asked, along the way, to consider what clothes mean.