Earlham College
Third Charles Lecture
by Richard Davis, Professor of Religion
October 2000

The Name of the Game is Shame

Introduction

When I began to write this series of lectures, I intended to end the second lecture with an account of Jesus' crucifixion. I wanted to show there how the shame of the cross was transformed into a new honor, how shame was healed there, as a prelude to a discussion of the healing of shame in our own society, in the third lecture.

But, as I worked on the lecture, I found I could not continue with my plan. What I came to see was that, while the cross did become a sign of honor, its elevation to that position had more to do with the politics of the Roman Empire than with the healing of shame. Jesus became a martyr for God's new realm, a prophet who looked forward to a time when the lust for power would no longer dominate human society, who hoped that his willing death would bring in the new realm.

But the Empire became Christian, and Christianity became imperial. Christian institutions now took control. With their newly acquired power, Christians suffered the temptations of power. The Hebrew prophets had criticized the Jerusalem Temple for preferring ritual to justice. Late in the first century Roman soldiers destroyed the Temple. In the coming centuries, the Church, like the Temple before it, often became the place for insiders, with a new class of the unclean, a new rabble, outside, among them the Jewish people who had given birth to the Christian movement in the first place. Christians became responsible for a history of attacks upon the Jews, and violence against outsiders, which repeated, even augmented, the lust for power which Jesus had gone to the cross to oppose. Where in this was the healing of shame which I wanted to talk about?

I decided that I still had to look at the crucifixion, and to see if there really was a bridge there between Jesus' acceptance of death on the cross and the healing of shame. So that is where we will begin today.

Shame, Honor and Crucifixion

Crucifixion

In the 65 years before and after Jesus' death, the Romans, in order to preserve order in the provinces, crucified thousands. What was crucifixion, and how does Mark make sense of it?

In the best book I know on Crucifixion in the ancient world, Martin Hengel calls it "an obscene invitation to watch a man die." Later, he renders it "voyeuristic sadism." Crucifixion was public humiliation. Inflicted on the lower classes exclusively, it was directed to three groups:

1. runaway or disobedient slaves
2. violent criminals, and
3. political dissidents.
   

As it was intended to be a deterrent, the Romans spared no effort to humiliate its objects. It was deliberately cruel. The victim was stripped and beaten, sometimes blinded. Then, his battered, bleeding body was put on public display . . . and then crucified. The typical cross nailed its victim 9-12 feet above the crowd. So the principal focus was public display of the totally naked body, stinking from its own excrement, and possibly lingering alive for two days. [I have not seen this last feature in any major Christian symbols of the cross. The Roman Catholic tradition displays a loincloth covering the body, and the Protestant and Orthodox traditions display an empty cross. The Quakers have vacated the playing field.] Hengel again, ". . . the imagery of crucifixion left no room for a positive interpretation."

In addition to the physical suffering, Mark's description brings out Jesus' isolation. While Luke describes a poignant exchange between Jesus and a thief next to him, Mark's account indicates no positive human connection from the trial onward. Jesus' is an experience of utter abandonment by the human community.

God's Love

Mark sees in the crucified one a powerful revelation of God. We must return to chapter 9- 10 and the dispute over "Who's the greatest" to understand Mark's view of the cross. Recall, "Let the one among you who would be great be your servant . . . " Jesus refuses James and John's request for places of honor and power. He will not confirm the lust for power. Instead he urges upon his followers a lust for love, for a new life. He claimed as father the God who sends sunshine and rain for both the master and the slave.

To his adversaries, perhaps the most frustrating thing about Jesus was the way he dealt with authority. The source of his authority to act did not come from a desire for honor or a fear of shame. In following his experience of God's love to the point of death he was willing to give up what appeared to others to be his authority and power: his power over demons, over crowds, his authority with his disciples. However, shame and suffering were not Jesus' goal. They came as a terrible implication of trusting God. Also, by his accepting them they lost some of their power to coerce.

Perhaps this might be sharpened with an example. Imagine you live in the southwestern United States. It becomes clear to you that you want to join the Sanctuary Movement, which provides a place for refugees from South and Central America. So you go to a priest of a large catholic parish, and he welcomes you. Then he asks, "Are you willing to have your phone tapped? Are you willing to have your kids ridiculed at school and rocks thrown through your windows? If you are not ready for these things, don't join us." Again, it is not your purpose to suffer, but it may be a consequence of what you do. And at some point you have to deal with these possibilities up front. Without a zealous love, almost obscene in its willingness to ignore what is respectable and safe, you had best stay home.

The Tree with No Figs
This may be the place to comment on one of the most puzzling episodes in Mark's story: Jesus' cursing of a fig tree. Not only does it contrast sharply with his acceptance of death on the cross. In this era of ecological correctness the curse on the fig tree is likely to trouble you more than Jesus' intrusion in the temple. But I believe it may help us understand Mark's view of Jesus' task. We may not see all the text says, but we may see some something commonly overlooked. Here is a quick summary:

On the day that Jesus first entered Jerusalem, he went to the temple briefly. Then he went out to Bethany with the disciples. Returning to Jerusalem the next morning, he was hungry. Though figs were out of season, he looked for figs on a nearby tree. When he found none, he cursed the tree. The disciples took note. They continued on to the temple, where Jesus expelled merchants who were selling doves for the daily sacrifices. On the way back from the city, the disciples saw the withered tree, and were impressed by Jesus' power. (Mark 11:11-26)

According to Mark, Jesus interfered with the main industry of Jerusalem. The temple was the city's major employer. The schedule of animal sacrifice there was the heartbeat of religious life. Jesus interrupted the Temple schedule, and he caused such a stir, according to Mark, that the authorities wanted him dead. The story told 'from above' sees Jesus and his crowd as a mob bent on sacrilege. It is all the more surprising, then, that this narrative of events in the Temple, which seems so important for Mark's account of the road to crucifixion, is enfolded in the curious story of the fig tree and the curse.
It seems unfair of Jesus to curse the fig tree for following its nature. A glance at another story may help us to see what the author of the gospel has in mind. The story I am going to tell you is from the oldest tradition of the Jesus communities:

A man once gave a great banquet and invited many. At the time for the banquet he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, 'Please come, for everything is now ready.' But they all began to make excuses. The first said to him, 'I've bought a farm, and I must go and see it. Please excuse me.' And another said, 'I've just [99] bought five pair of oxen and I need to check them out. Please excuse me.' And another said, 'I've just married a woman and so I can't come.' The servant came and reported this to his master. Then the owner in anger said to his servant, 'Go out quickly to the streets of the town and bring in as many people as you find.' And the servant went out into the streets and brought together everybody he could find. That way the house was filled with guests

QS51, from Burton Mack, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q. San Francisco, Harper, 1993, pp. 98f.

Each of these incidents contrasts the character of the new life of the Jesus communities with the institutions of daily life: farming, animal husbandry, marriage. The new realm, the new life, can be expected to interrupt and to interfere with all of them. Its first priority is love. But this love is neither a sentiment nor a tool. It is the vital spirit of a new kind of life together, a choice, a daring acceptance of the risk of something new and untried. As another early Christian said to those who yearned for positions of honor in the new Jesus communities. 'Make love your prey. (Or, Go on the hunt for love) There's no point in giving away everything you have, even letting yourself be burned as a sacrifice, if you do it without love.' (I Cor. 14:1; 13:3) The author of Mark sees the Jerusalem temple itself in the same light.
Farming, cattle, marriage - each could be a excuse for failing to go hunting for love. Is it unlikely that the temple, like many institutions, was more involved in its own schedule, its own requirements, than in the needs of the people who came there to purchase their sacrificial animals and offer their prayers? From below, for the ill, the insane, the poor, for all the ritually unclean, for all of the marginal and the alien, the temple was off limits. These people were internal exiles. Egypt, the land of slavery, was for them Palestine itself. For them the temple was always out of season. Like the fig tree it promised fruit. Unlike the fig tree, it never came into season for many of the people of Palestine.
For Mark, Jesus' curse on the fig tree is a veiled critique of the temple itself. The temple establishment could no more lift the weight of shame from the people who associated with Jesus, people who bore many of the burdens of the society, women, children, slaves, as well as the outcasts, the unclean, even the enemy, than the fig tree could feed the hungry when it was not the season for figs.

The Legacy of the Cross
Jesus died on the cross. What then? Some people, what one writer calls the "nuisances and nobodies of society," were affected profoundly by Jesus' bearing the shame of the cross - and by the manifestation of God's love in Jesus' refusal to seek revenge.
Jesus was willing to go to the cross rather than deny his kinship with God. To his contemporaries his familiarity with God was shameless, obscene. It is hard for us today to imagine how shocking his language was for his contemporaries. He called God, Father. And he taught his people to do the same. Rather than claiming honor through the accustomed hierarchies of the Palestinian world, Mark's Jesus claimed the dignity of a son of God. And he extended that dignity as far as God's sunshine and rain. He extended it to all as children of God. Jesus' acceptance of the cross, as Mark tells the story, enabled many of the marginal people we have just seen engaged with Jesus to make history, to live the stories which we find in these strange writings called 'gospels'. Here they begin to transcend shame.
One place we can see this - and it is subtle - is in the character of some of Mark's narratives. Recall the account of the hemorrhaging woman, "She had endured much under many physicians, had spent all she had, and was no better, but rather grew worse" (5:26). As we have seen, this description is crafted "from below." It is not the way the authorities would have described the situation. [Add language form above] This is an astonishing shift in the center of gravity.
Here is another shift: the story does not take place at the center of Palestinian religious life, in Jerusalem, and at the Temple, but on the fringe, outback, on the margins. But the center is changing. The willing death of Jesus gathers around itself other stories about justice, about wisdom and courage in the face of tyranny: Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Maccabees, even perhaps Antigone, and Socrates. It is no longer a story only about places of honor, or shame, within, or outside a social hierarchy. It begins to be a story about the dignity of the whole human family.
I must add something here which I did not anticipate when I began to write these lectures. In the gospel of Mark, I have painted a picture of a Jesus who rejected the temptations of power and prestige. He not only made his life with the poor and the outcast. He raised them up to a new sense of dignity. But I have also found, in the gospel of Mark, and throughout the Christian writings of the New Testament, a spirit of revenge. The people who had been outcasts now move to center stage, and create their own outcasts.
I wanted to find in the spirit of Jesus, and the new Jesus communities, a way of life that would put an end to revenge. I found it, but I found it mixed with a spirit of certainty, of having got it right, that calls for revenge, that makes outcasts of all those who don't have it right. I can see now that I was foolish to expect an end to revenge, once and for all. Such an expectation breathes the same atmosphere as the confidence in being absolutely right.
At the beginning of the Enlightenment in Germany, a wise man said, "If God were to offer me in his right hand the truth unveiled, and in his left hand the always fallible search for the truth, I would choose the left hand. Let God alone have the Truth."

"Voyeuristic sadism": a transition

A few minutes ago I cited historian Martin Hengel's description of death by crucifixion as inviting "voyeuristic sadism." I want to look now at a specific case of that sadism as a way of shifting our focus on shame, honor and dignity from the ancient to the contemporary world. In the fourth book of his dialogue on the Republic Plato introduces us to an Athenian named Leontius. He tells us that one day Leontius was down at the Piraeus, the port of Athens. He was walking back up to Athens, along the city walls which ran from the port to the upper city, and he noticed the corpses of men who had been crucified, piled near the wall. He had long been curious, and now he wanted to take a good look at them, but something held him back. He had the time to do it; no one was watching him, yet he hesitated. I am going to leave him standing there for the moment. We'll get back to him.

Views of Self and Society
A Twofold Self
In the first lecture, I said that shame has been invisible in American culture for some time, eclipsed by guilt. There are many reasons for that, and the literature on the subject grows richer day by day. One important reason for the neglect of shame is the way we have come to see ourselves and others. I suspect we think of ourselves something like this:

 

We want things:

Food, shelter, sex, and change. We are easily bored.

 

We figure out how to get what we want:

We need to earn, beg, or borrow -

x dollars for food,
y dollars for shelter,

z dollars to at least appear attractive enough to interest someone in a sexual relationship.

So we see ourselves as twofold beings, composed of desires, our needs and wants, and reasoning. We want, and we figure out how to get what we want. We possess, to use today's language, economic rationality. It's a pretty fair picture of the liberal political philosophy which most Americans assume. Yet I think it misses something vital to all of us.

If you remember anything from my first lecture, you may recall Protagoras' story of the gifts of Zeus which made it possible for humans to live together in cities: the sense of justice, or right, and the sense of shame, which led persons to pay attention to what others thought and felt. Prometheus had provided for economic rationality by giving the humans technology and know how, but without justice and shame they destroyed one another. I think Protagoras, or at least Protagoras as Plato depicts him, was right to say that both justice and shame were needed to make social life possible.

The liberal analysis of human beings as composed of desire and reason is sufficient to account for a society with a kind of justice, a society with laws governing broadly economic transactions. It even allows for the kind of guilt you and I experience when we are caught and given a traffic ticket. We feel it when we cheat the system which orchestrates our common life. We know the rules, and we know the penalties for breaking them.

What the liberal analysis does not explain is the emptiness, isolation, and dissatisfaction many of us in affluent Western societies feel, even when we have been very clever, very efficient, very rational, and have gotten what we wanted. We may still be deeply dissatisfied - with ourselves.

A Threefold Self

Deeply dissatisfied - that, you may remember, is where we left Leontius back there in Plato's Athens. There he stands, too far from the corpses along the city wall to see them well, wanting to get a good look, like one of us at a traffic accident or a plane crash, yet stuck in the far turn lane. Let's imagine him more closely. He is moderately rich. He is a man admired by many. He has rich and powerful friends. He can get what he wants, and he is used to getting what he wants. Now, though, what he wants does not fit his view of himself and his own worth or dignity. He wants to look at the bodies of crucified criminals. He doesn't just want to look at them. He wants to stare at them. He is Martin Hengel's "voyeuristic sadist." Or is he?
Something in him protests.

Something in him is indignant - angry. It says, "This isn't you! Leave those bloody corpses where they are."
Desire says: "Come on now; get out of your rut! This is something new. Do it!"
And Reason? Reason has no objections. It reflects, "Well, you've got the money. You've got the time. There's nothing inefficient about it." It doesn't say, "Go for it!" But it doesn't say, "No!".
Yet something in Leontius still protests.

Where is the protest coming from? Here Plato uncovers a third aspect of being human, something he calls thumos, anger, indignation. It is the element in me which makes my cheeks flush red, with anger, or with shame. It comes from the heart, and we might even dub it hot heartedness. Here, I think, is the home of the senses of justice and of shame. My face burns when I do something which I think is beneath me. Smoke comes out of my ears when I am indignant over some slight to my sense of worth. I burn with rage, and bypassed shame, when others ignore me, or whatever I identify as mine.

Leontius is halted by shame, but only for the moment. He rushes forward, stares at the corpses of the crucified, then damns his eyes for getting him into the situation. The lust of the eyes leads Leontius to act against his own view of himself, his own estimation of his worth. We can see here vividly what Carl Schneider calls the two faces of shame: the modesty or discretion shame which deters Leontius from staring at the crucified dead, and the remorse, or disgrace shame, which assails him when he goes against himself, and stares his fill.

What Plato saw in Leontius was the demand to judge himself, and to be judged by others, by criteria that are hard to pin down, but nevertheless real and very powerful. Evidently they are not the criteria of efficiency in getting what we want which we have just been examining. Or they are not only those. Leontius judges himself, and anticipates being judged by others at his own estimate of his worth. Where did Leontius get this view of his own worth? Earlier we said something about his social situation: wealthy, admired, with many powerful and influential friends. In Athens' civilian military he would be a knight, supply his own horses and equipment. Perhaps he's not yet been in battle. He wants to stare at death. He imagines one of his friends watching him. And he imagines him sharing the contempt he feels for himself. Other knights, battle scarred and war weary will think him foolish, undisciplined, even impious to risk polluting himself by getting so close to the crucified criminals. That is how he thinks of himself.

Shame and Guilt in the Formation of Society and Individual
Shame or Guilt?

This gets us closer to the phenomenon of shame. Many students of shame in the last half century have thought they could make a clear distinction between shame and guilt. They would have argued that Leontius experienced shame, but not guilt. They would have said he was concerned only with what others would say about him. "Guilt" was supposed to describe societies where individuals had adopted the moral rules of the society and made them their own. They were moved by conscience to act in conformity with the rules, or to have a "guilty conscience" if they went against the rules they had internalized.
This description was meant to form a sharp contrast with societies where behavior was controlled by shame. Even the concept of "individual" was thought foreign to such societies. Rather, each member of the society was thought to be so dominated by the presence of important others, ancestors (dead and alive), parents, extended family, patrons, peers, that the society itself could be said to be present in each member. There was no individual conscience. If you acted as your group expected you to act, you felt pride. When you did not, you felt shame. And you did everything you could to avoid shame. In the end, the society was in control. You were a puppet controlled by your society with the strings of pride and shame.

By contrast, when students of shame sought to characterize American society, they almost always saw a guilt society. They saw it as a society of individuals, acting on internalized rules, monitored by conscience, where shame played a minor role. On this view, children, as they grew toward individual maturity, lost their susceptibility to shame and became independent judges of their own worth. The less they relied on the views of them held by family and peers, the closer they were to the ideals of self-reliance and independence. Here, maturity meant being your own judge. You would weigh the views of others, and you would adjust the scales to give each view its proper weight. In the end you should either be in control, or have a large share in control of your own future life. As current slang puts it, you would "have a life," or be urged to "get" one. In this context, feeling shame is itself shameful. If I am not in control, and autonomous, I am weak and diminished.

Shame and Guilt

Like many dichotomies, the dichotomy of shame and guilt has been more useful to set people thinking than it has to give us adequate categories for studying society, the individual, or social behavior. The more we have studied shame and guilt, the more we have come to the view that the sense of shame is a fundamental element in all societies, our own as well.

When I called this lecture "The Name of the Game is Shame" I had in mind a story which a colleague in psychiatry tells about his daily commute in North Philadelphia. Every day he queued in expressway traffic and crawled to work over a ghetto where one wall of a large old house had become the billboard for local complaints. Day after day the graffiti changed, but their burden of misery and anger never changed. Until - one day someone wrote, in neat and legible letters, a new slogan. That slogan remained on the wall for ten years, surrounded by other graffiti, but never effaced, never changed.

Only when the neighborhood had rehabilitated itself . . . did anybody dare to replace or deface this particular slogan.

 

There have been no graffiti on that building since that neighborhood rose in status. . . .But I still see what is no longer there, the message of another day. It had stared at us for too long to be forgotten, stared at its neighborhood for nearly a decade, demanding change. Neatly written . . . its very neatness in stark contrast to the ugly violence of the other spray-painted messages that came to frame it . . . it told us that "the name of the game is shame."

 

Did the sign change anything? Yes, I think it did. I draw significance from the fact that for years no one altered or defaced or removed or supplanted this slogan. It hit home, reached its target, maybe even awakened people to the fact that they lived in shame. Nobody had to tell them that they lived with anger. When shame is identified as shame there can be change, however subtle and slow.

Donald Nathanson, Shame and Pride. New York: Norton, 1992, pp. 457-8

I agree with Donald Nathanson that shame can be healed when it is identified, but my aim in borrowing his slogan is different. I want to say that "The Name of the Game is Shame" even when no one has been driven into a ghetto, when no one burns with the misery of helpless indignation and fruitless anger. I want to say that the sense of shame, which makes possible the disgrace of shame, as well as the enjoyment of pride, is really the name of the game of social life, and of human life as human.

The Man without Shame

To drive home this point I want to make one more trip to the ancient world. We have spent a lot of these three lectures in caves of one kind or another. In the first lecture we followed the first humans as they emerged from under the earth, to get from Epimetheus, Prometheus, finally from Zeus and Hermes, what was needed to make them human. In the second lecture we looked into the cavernous tomb where Jesus had been buried, only to find a young man telling us to look for Jesus in Galilee. Were we to read further in Plato's Republic we would find that education too is about caves. Plato describes education as the painful experience of being torn from the womb of habit and familiarity and thrust, protesting, into an unimagined world of change and surprise. Well, I have one more cave story, of sorts. Before we leave Plato, I would like to tell his story about the man without shame. Plato says he was the ancestor of Gyges, king of Lydia. To make it simple, let's call him Gyges:

This Gyges was a shepherd, in the service of the Lydian king. One day, when he was at work, a sudden rainstorm, followed by an earthquake, opened a chasm in the earth. Gyges rushed to the spot. There he saw, at the bottom of the abyss, a horse made of bronze. The bronze horse was an ancient tomb. There were windows in it, and Gyges could see inside the naked body of a giant man. Gyges worked his way down to the tomb, broke it open, and found on the giant's finger a golden ring. He took it, and fled the place.

 

Later, at a gathering of the king's shepherds, he was fiddling with the ring, when he chanced to turn its gemstone toward the palm of his hand. He thought nothing of it, but before long he heard the other shepherds talking about him as if he were not there. He turned the gemstone outward, so that he could see it again, and the other shepherds stopped talking about him. Clearly, they could see him. Gyges tested the ring repeatedly, and it soon became apparent that with the ring he could make himself invisible whenever he wished. Promptly, he went to the palace of the king of Lydia, where he seduced the queen, murdered the king, and made the kingdom his own.

This haunting story is a question Socrates' friend Glaucon sets for Socrates: "would humans act morally, even if no one was watching?" Glaucon doubts it. He invents Gyges to test Socrates. In effect, he says, "if we were invisible, we would do just as we pleased. We would be moral monsters." In the language I used earlier in talking about Jesus' ethic in the gospel of Mark, we would dominate, 'lord it over' everyone we could reach. Only the fact that others can catch us in the act deters us.

What Glaucon has described sounds like the picture of shame-dominated societies which we were looking at earlier. On that view, Gyges is, as you and I would be in such a society, a puppet guided by the strings of pride and shame. Take away the onlookers, let each of us appear without that social control, and we would get away with whatever we liked. Those of us who have grown up in guilt dominated societies, as most of us have, are taught to look down peoples guided by shame. We suspect, or claim to suspect, that when no one is looking, they will do just as they please.

But one of the many things we students of shame are discovering is that this is not true. To put it in a way that I will have to unpack in a moment, we are discovering the vital elements of shame in our own guilt. I am going to argue that in shame others are always present: we imagine how others see us. We picture ourselves as we suppose we look to others.

The French philosopher and novelist, Jean Paul Sartre, imagines a man staring through a keyhole at a neighbor. This voyeur blushes with shame when he imagines someone watching him in his invasion of the neighbor's privacy. He is embarrassed because others have caught him in the act, or because he imagines the situation where others catch him in act.

This is partly right, but something is missing. I believe the situation is better described like this. You experience shame when you imagine me seeing you, as you, for a moment, see yourself. What you cannot endure is that I see you as you see yourself. It is not my actual view of you which deters you. It is your own view of yourself, and your fearful imagining that I share that view.

The author of the story of temptation, shame and exile in Genesis 3 understood this. The woman expects that tasting the forbidden fruit will open her eyes, and it does. She sees herself naked, exposed, and imagines that the man sees her as she sees herself. In turn the man and the woman see themselves naked, and imagine that God sees them as they see themselves. The gifts of Zeus and Hermes, the senses of shame and right, are a tricky wisdom indeed. They keep us on the right path, when they do, by opening our eyes first to ourselves. We see our nakedness - then we shudder as we imagine others who see what we see, and judge as we judge.

The Sense of Shame

Shame as Innate and Learned

What, then, is this sense of shame which I consider so important, even for us today, in our sophisticated, mature, independent, guilt oriented society? I hinted in the last lecture that it was a form of social gravity. Let me try to develop that. Listen to one contemporary analyst of shame:

What does the infant feel who looks up eagerly and smiles at her mother, but then looks down, with furrowed brow and pinched lips, when her mother fails to meet her gaze?

 

Studies based on observations of interaction between infants and their mothers strongly suggest that an inborn, biological form of shame exists.

 

Of course, we can never truly know the inner experience of an infant, but we can make inferences from body movements and facial expressions. . . . Were the infants experiencing shame? Although we can't be certain that the infant experiences shame as we know it, the physical expressions that we correlate with shame are convincing testimony.

 

Is this response a product of nature or nurture? That is, is shame inborn . . . or the result of interpersonal experiences . . .? It is likely that both biology and experience are involved.

Andrew P. Morrison, The Culture of Shame. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966, pp. 58-9.

Here, in the behavior of infants at the age of three months, there is a least a prototype of disgrace shame. Both mother and child are engaged in monitoring the social bond between them. Much of their necessarily wordless interaction consists in the infant's babbling, the parent's often silly noises, their attempts to mirror infant sounds and gestures. Here, the prototype of pride is the pleasure which the baby shows when the bond between parent and child is solid and dependable. The prototype of disgrace shame is the weakness and unreliability of that bond. What I am calling social gravity is the sheer weight of that social tie in our sense of dignity, our estimate of our own worth. We take it with us, almost literally, from cradle to grave.
The weight of that social exchange between parent and child shows up already in a medieval chronicle. Listen for a moment:

. . . [The King] wanted to find out what kind of speech and what manner of speech children would have when they grew up if they spoke to no one beforehand. So he bade foster mothers and nurses to suckle the children, to bathe and wash them, but in no way to prattle with them, or to speak to them, for he wanted to learn whether they would speak the Hebrew language, which was the oldest, or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perhaps the language of their parents, of whom they had been born. But he laboured in vain because the children all died. For they could not live without the petting and joyful faces and loving words of their foster mothers.

Shame, Language and the Interpersonal Bridge

Most of you know, at least from the movies, something of the story of Helen Keller. She was blinded, and made mute and deaf, by an inflammation of the brain at the age of 18 months. At the age of seven she learned how to communicate in the language of touch, finger-signs tapped and stroked in the palm of her hand, and in the hand of her teacher. In an autobiography written much later she describes what happened:
[23] "It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life. I have, as it were, a superstitious hesitation in lifting the veil that clings about my childhood like a golden mist. The task of writing an autobiography is a difficult one. When I try to classify my earliest impressions, I find that fact and fancy look alike across the years that link the past with the present. The woman paints the child's experiences in her own fantasy . . . The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrasts between the two lives which it connects. It was the third of March, 1887, three months before I was seven years old. . . .

 

The morning after my teacher came she led me into her room and gave me a doll. . . . One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan [36] put my big rag doll into my lap also, spelled 'd-o-l-l' and tried to make me understand that 'd-o-l-l' applied to both. Earlier in the day we had had a tussle over the words 'm-u-g' and 'w-a-t-e-r.' Miss Sullivan had tried to impress it upon me that 'm-u-g' is mug and that 'w-a-t-e-r' is water, but I persisted in confounding the two. In despair she had dropped the subject for the time, only to renew it at the first opportunity. I became impatient at her repeated attempts and, seizing the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor. I was keenly delighted when I felt the fragments of the broken doll at my feet. Neither sorrow nor regret followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved the doll. In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness. I felt my teacher sweep the fragments to one side of the hearth, and I had a sense of satisfaction that the cause of my discomfort was removed. She brought me my hat, and I knew I was going out into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure.

 

We walked down the path to the well-house, . . . Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my band under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten-a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my band. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.

 

I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house, every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; [37] for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow. [emphasis added]

 

I learned a great many new words that day. I do not remember what they all were; but I do know that mother, father, sister, teacher were among them - words that were to make the world blossom for me . . . with flowers. It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come."

Helen Keller, The Story of My Life. New York: Doubleday, 1954.

In my second lecture I painted a picture of Peter in the courtyard of the high priest, waiting to see if Jesus would use his powers to shame the authorities, and bring honor and glory to himself and his followers. I said that Peter craved being with others. And I added that humans carry this "being with" to dizzying heights of significance and subtlety. That world of human significance is what Helen Keller was able to join when the word water served as her bridge to the fully human world of language. Helen felt repentance and sorrow for the first time. Repentance and sorrow, not isolation and abandonment. Helen's sense of shame is hopeful. It promises new life together, and she says: "For the first time I longed for a new day to come." She had crossed the interpersonal bridge.
Writers have noticed that Helen Keller had begun to speak by the age of 18 months, and that one of the first words she acquired was 'water'. They attribute her recovery of language through the word 'water' to that experience. What they have failed to notice is the social bonds which were formed by sight and sound and touch during the same period. Language was able to put her in touch with that lost world, and to use its latent resources of feeling, enjoyment and pride, to build a new world of being with others. The sense of shame, as her sensitivity to her bond with others, made that possible. If she had never seen, never heard, or babbled, never been able to find herself mirrored in the faces and gestures of those who cared for her, her future world would have been far less rich than it was to be.

The Sense of Shame as Social Bond

We have made a long journey in these lectures, from my own experience of shame and depression, back to the sources of visions of honor and dignity which still shape our lives, to the discovery that the sense of shame is not primitive, not infantile, not something to be discarded in the search for independence, or what we mistakenly call autonomy. Rather the sense of shame is our tie to other persons. As recent research is showing, we monitor that tie continually. Subtle cues of gesture, tones of voice, facial expression, tell us when we are accepted at our own sense of worth, and when we are not. Peter's accent gave him away, and excluded him from the warmth of fire and human companions. In many scenes less obvious than this, we know when we are accepted, and when we are not. The interpersonal bridge is in a constant state of repair, now broken, now restored. Without it we are less than human.

It would be easy to dismiss this need to belong, to be with others, with contempt. It would be easy to say that we are better off without it, since it accounts for riots, lynchings, mass hysteria, all of the ills of human folly multiplied. But that would be to reject what shame teaches us. As the sociologist, C.H. Cooley put it at the beginning of the last century, "We live in the minds of others." I would amend that to say that we live for the most part as we imagine the minds of others. We can interpret those minds only as we have learned to read them. All of us seek recognition and respect. Food, shelter, and sex are not enough. Independence is not enough. If we cannot find recognition and respect among our companions, we will seek it where we can. And even when we have it, we look for more. Some study ancient societies, and look for it in the past, some become anthropologists, and look for it in an esoteric society. Some of us look for it in a future society where the true worth of our way of seeing things will be appreciated. Jesus sought it in direct appeal to a God whose respect and recognition made it possible to withstand the authorities who took his life. But we all look for it.

Conclusion

Experts were surprised by the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union. The failure of the Soviet economy was part of the picture, but they had instruments for predicting economic failure. Something else was involved. One analyst wrote, after the events,

In the accounts of the resistance in St. Petersburg to the hardline coup in August 1991, those who rallied to the side of the "democrats" frequently asserted that they risked their lives because they no longer wanted to be humiliated by the authorities or treated as slaves. They explained that they wanted to walk with their backs straight and, in the words of one participant, "did not want to trade their dignity for a piece of sausage."

Francis Fukuyama, On the Possibility of Writing a Universal History. In A.M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger and M.R. Zinman, History and the Idea of Progress. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995, 14-29.

Economics was not enough.

Jesus urged his disciples to give up seeking honors, and to become slaves. Yet he expected them to be able to find dignity in serving the real needs of others. He expected the shame of slaves to be erased by the dignity of belonging, of participation in a new community where all would have the dignity of kinship, as God's children. Today, societies which deny this dignity are finding it difficult to survive.

I have to admit that I still know very little about this sense of shame, this monitor on our own worth, and its estimate by others, which is so vital and yet so little understood in our society. The more I work to understand it, the more I discover how pervasive it us, yet how much it is denied. It belongs to the worst in us, and to the best.

Back there in Genesis we saw God molding humans from the soil, from the humus. Perhaps with humility, with a sense of shame, we can remember our origins. Dignity and humility. It is hard to keep the balance. Unless dignity is to be found in humility. Perhaps that is what Jesus sought.

 

Copyright ©2000 Richard Davis

Lecture #1

Lecture #2