Two Headed Sheep
There was a joke current in the early stages of the great depression of the 1930’s in the United States. ‘For God’s sake please don’t tell my mother I’m a banker, she thinks I play the piano in a brothel.’
The joke I think no longer works. Just last week I witnessed a London based banker justifying the return of large scale bonus payments in the City. This in an ‘industry’ responsible for catastrophic failures in both judgement and risk assessment. Of course payments of large sums to people of mediocre talent are not new, however there existed at one time a mechanism by which outrageous behaviour could be controlled, and it was called ’‘shame.’ To conduct one’s affairs with avarice amidst, to put it no stronger, the odour of venality, was one thing, never uncommon, but to emerge exposed in the full light of day and to feel nothing more severe than irritation is I think something new. We now have the phenomenon of the truly shameless.
Shame, embarrassment, a feeling of one’s frailties exposed has always been a factor in social control, enabling complex societies to enforce norms of behaviour in subtle and often sophisticated ways. During my own psycho-therapeutic training there was a fad for conceptualising shame in a wholly negative light, much talk about ‘toxic shame’, a process by which, usually, the nuclear family, indoctrinated children with unhealthy, even poisonous doctrines about sex, or self expression. And it is of course true that certain ideas about what constitutes shameful behaviour can be extremely damaging. So called honour killing, after all represents a response to a perceived shame brought upon the family. We are also so much better off freed from the puritan attitudes to sex and whenever possible from the restricting conformity of the protestant work ethic.
However to abandon the phenomenon of shame altogether seems to me to be a wholly retrograde step, the emergence of the truly shameless individual, one who cannot accurately be described as a sociopath, but is representative of the age in which we live is I think as monstrous a phenomenon as a two headed sheep.
The joke I think no longer works. Just last week I witnessed a London based banker justifying the return of large scale bonus payments in the City. This in an ‘industry’ responsible for catastrophic failures in both judgement and risk assessment. Of course payments of large sums to people of mediocre talent are not new, however there existed at one time a mechanism by which outrageous behaviour could be controlled, and it was called ’‘shame.’ To conduct one’s affairs with avarice amidst, to put it no stronger, the odour of venality, was one thing, never uncommon, but to emerge exposed in the full light of day and to feel nothing more severe than irritation is I think something new. We now have the phenomenon of the truly shameless.
Shame, embarrassment, a feeling of one’s frailties exposed has always been a factor in social control, enabling complex societies to enforce norms of behaviour in subtle and often sophisticated ways. During my own psycho-therapeutic training there was a fad for conceptualising shame in a wholly negative light, much talk about ‘toxic shame’, a process by which, usually, the nuclear family, indoctrinated children with unhealthy, even poisonous doctrines about sex, or self expression. And it is of course true that certain ideas about what constitutes shameful behaviour can be extremely damaging. So called honour killing, after all represents a response to a perceived shame brought upon the family. We are also so much better off freed from the puritan attitudes to sex and whenever possible from the restricting conformity of the protestant work ethic.
However to abandon the phenomenon of shame altogether seems to me to be a wholly retrograde step, the emergence of the truly shameless individual, one who cannot accurately be described as a sociopath, but is representative of the age in which we live is I think as monstrous a phenomenon as a two headed sheep.
