What Happened to Shame?
When President Trump tweeted a video of himself body-slamming a wrestler whose head had been replaced by the CNN logo, many of his supporters cheered. Though some others charged him with behavior beneath the dignity of his office, the president felt no shame.
Sadly, this is just one data point on the graph of shamelessness. New Jersey governor Chris Christie recently spent time on a beach closed for lack of a state budget. Upbraided for doing so when state residents could not, he fired back: "Well, I’m sorry, they’re not the governor.”
Shamelessness among the powerful is not limited to politicians. Angelo Mozilo, co-founder of Countrywide, the mortgage giant whose subprime lending practices contributed to the Great Recession, got a severance package worth more than $100 million when he sold the firm after it tanked. His 2010 settlement with the SEC allowed him to admit no wrongdoing. In 2015, Martin Shkreli, the now-former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, raised the price of an AIDS drug from $13.50 to $750 per pill, winking at his shrewdness.
Nor is such shamelessness recent. President Clinton, caught for having sex with a White House intern, defended himself by parsing the definition of "is." Catholic priests abused young children for decades under the protection of their leaders' silence. Talk radio hosts have viciously insulted others to gain notoriety. Masters of social media have launched trolls that threaten the psychological - and sometimes physical - health of their victims, reveling in their cleverness.
Feeling shame results from failing to live up to one's own standards and/or those of society. Shamelessness is thus the result of a moral deficit and/or social indifference.
While shamelessness also characterizes many who lack great influence, it is the latter who can powerfully exemplify and shape the boundaries of behavior. When a very public person acts shamefully, it can sanction the same behavior in followers. When a banker, business executive or media maven abuses the public's trust, and gets away with it, it signals that social responsibility is the behavior of saps.
Those who are shameless dismiss that they are. Denial of their acts, blaming others for what they cannot deny, and contempt for the standards they violate are common responses. So is narcissism, the result of an over-abundance of self-esteem, a self-image so inflated it can find no fault with itself.
Shamelessness demands an antidote. Laws with teeth will help but will never be enough. The defense that their shameful behavior was legal dismisses the fact that it was unethical as irrelevant. When legality becomes the predominant standard, the only choices are excessive legislation or uncontrolled licentiousness.
Shame - and dishonor, its concomitant feeling - must be strengthened as social tools to restore the community's moral force against those who weaken it. Public sanction and the withdrawal of the professional right to practice are needed. A private hand slap which hides the transgression from public view in order to avoid lawsuits and protect the "dignity of the profession" often does neither.
Moral education of the young and the young professional in all fields must become a vaccine. We must confront the moral vacuum in which some powerful people live. Even their occasional apologies, seeming designed more for public relations than personal remorse, display a deficit in character development.
Aristotle argued that moral behavior develops by doing the right things and having the right feelings when doing them, over a period of years. Character education in the home is certainly the foundation for moral development, but is not enough. Our major institutions have a role to play, though sadly they are the subject of so much distrust for their own shameful behavior that their legitimacy has weakened. The need for better moral education in schools, the professions, and the pulpit is essential. A society that leaves its moral values to the sole discretion of what happens at home ignores the power of what happens outside it to either strengthen or corrupt those same values.
Nor does moral education stop when a child leaves home. University educators must acknowledge that their students' moral development is neither finished nor off-limits. The prevalence of sexual assault, racial animosity, and political intolerance on campus should be evidence enough for university administrators. Further, inattention to ethics in professional education leads to the conclusion that its sole purpose is to produce smart people who can get rich. Until good people, not just good grades, are viewed as an outcome of higher education, we will continue to get shameful behavior in too many students and graduates.
When George Washington left the presidency in 1796, he still considered character his most prized possession. At the start of his Farewell Address he pleaded for acceptance that in stepping down he was not shirking his duty as a citizen. Toward the end, he acknowledged "I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors." He begged his nation's indulgence. Washington retired to Mount Vernon, where a key task became correcting spelling mistakes in his old correspondence, lest future generations think ill of him. Washington's lifelong desire to avoid shame and seek his nation's honor is a standard worth admiring. It is also a standard in need of strengthening.
Photo Credit: Kevin Hoogheem
