Near the start of Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage," the nine-year-old Philip Carey enters King's School, Tercanbury, and discovers that it is a house of torment. Philip suffers from talipes (clubfoot), a deformity that fascinates the other boys and turns them into mimics and voyeurs. On his second day at school, Philip is assigned to be "pig in the middle" during recess, a role that calls for him to roam the center of the playground, tagging boys who dash across it. Philip tries miserably to tag some of them, but they are quick and he is clumsy. Worse, after watching Philip struggle, one of his classmates gets the brilliant idea of clumping exaggeratedly across the playground, adopting just the right degree of awkwardness so as to be able both to mock and elude Philip. This spectacle sets off the others. Soon they are all limping and hooting their way past the frightened Philip, dragging one foot and then the other, "screaming in their treble voices" and choking with merriment.

That night in the dormitory, a boy named Singer approaches Philip: "I say," Singer whispers, "let's look at your foot." When Philip refuses, jumping into bed instead and balling up the bedclothes around his legs, Singer calls for another boy, and the two of them pin Philip's arm and twist it. They ask again: "Why don't you show us your foot quietly?" After a third boy appears, adding more pressure, a gasping and horrified Philip finally thrusts his foot out from underneath the covers. The three boys then take their time to inspect it, remarking how "beastly" and "rum" it looks. Singer touches it with the tip of one finger, curiously tracing the outline of the deformity, treating the foot as if it were a thing apart from Philip.

When the headmaster appears, the boys scamper back into their own cubicles, and Philip turns into his pillow, clamping it with his teeth in order to contain his storming soul. Maugham says this: "He was crying not for the pain they had caused him, nor for the humiliation he had suffered when they looked at his foot, but with rage at himself because, unable to stand the torture, he had put out his foot of his own accord."

Philip Carey was ashamed of his foot, but he was even more ashamed of having shown it. As a nine-year-old human being, he already had enough core in his character to think, no doubt too harshly, that by joining in his own humiliation-done by so iniquitous a burlesque--he had himself thrown off the last rag of his dignity.

ORIGINAL DISTRESS

Maugham presents one of the most primitive of human emotions, and one of the most potent. Human shame is a feeling of distress at our deficiencies, deformities, or absurdities--real or imagined--and especially at the uncovering of these things. It is also a feeling of distress at the uncovering of our mere privacies.

As generations of Bible readers have recognized, Genesis 3 suggests the confluence of these sources of distress with a few words of great sorrow and mystery: after they had sinned, Adam and Eve "knew that they were naked." For the first time in their lives they could not stand scrutiny. It wasn't merely that they flinched when their partner's gaze dipped southward; it was also that they had trouble looking into each other's eyes. Looking into the eyes of a sinner, as Bonhoeffer remarks in his Ethics, requires almost an act of violence. After their sin, Adam and Eve didn't know where to look anymore. The approach of God caused them particular consternation since it prompted them to look down at selves that were now guilty and threadbare.

At the heart of shame lies a painful sense of having been exposed. Our poor, vulnerable self--a self we think is fat or stupid or guilty or deformed or merely private--gets undraped before the eyes of others and, crucially, right in front of our own eyes, and the result is that we want to flee, to hide, to pull the bedclothes over us. In the worst cases, we want to die: we want the mountains to fall on us and the hills to cover us. This is especially likely in those cases, such as Philip Carey's, in which feelings of shame arise from multiple sources--guilt and assault upon privacy and social unacceptability all layering themselves on top of dismay over one's disfigurement.

For the last 20 years or so, psychologists, psychiatrists, pastoral care experts, theologians, sociologists, culture critics, and gurus of the popular self-help circuit have been talking less about guilt as our major negative emotion and more about shame [see insert on the literature]. In fact, work in shame and in such shame-related industries as self-esteem has been booming.

According to Robert Karen, whose masterful essay in the "Atlantic Monthly" summarizes the trend, one reason for it appears to be the fading of psychoanalytic theory, with its heavy emphasis on guilt-based neurosis. Another is the proliferation in clinical settings of people with shame-based narcissistic disorders. Still another is the sharpening awareness on the part of various practitioners that a lot of contemporary people, whether narcissist or not, feel ashamed much more often than they feel guilty, and that if the helping professions want to do their job they will have to address what actually troubles people. Robert Schuller, for example, whose theology of sin and grace needs a battery of good defense attorneys, nonetheless understands one thing very well, namely, that what eats at a lot of people these days is not their guilt but their shame, and that if you want to get at people's guilt, you might have to work your way through their shame. That is one reason why the difference between guilt and shame matters.

But what is this difference? The distinction centers on culpability: to put it roughly, guilt, whether an objective status or a feeling, is always somehow hooked to blameworthiness. (This is true even if the guilt feeling is false, since its subject nonetheless feels blameworthy.) An objectively guilty person is one who is actually to blame for a transgression or shortcoming, and who normally feels bad about it, too--bad enough to want to pay recompense. The standard name for this feeling is remorse, the capacity for which is a classic sign of spiritual health and, incidentally, a comfort to our neighbors.

A MORPHOLOGY OF SHAME

But shame is only partly about blameworthiness. Of course, we do feel ashamed of ourselves when we are guilty, and we should. Sin is, after all, a disgrace. Like Peter, who wept bitterly after his betrayal of Jesus, we rightly feel simultaneously guilty and ashamed of our sins. But often--according to the experts, very often--our feelings of shame attach to things that have little to do with our moral or spiritual deficiencies and have everything to do with a whole array of other areas in which we think we fall short.

We may feel ashamed of being incontinent, for instance, or paunchy, or of having sung a solo badly, or of being an unsuccessful social climber. People feel ashamed for all sorts of reasons. Impotent men feel crestfallen. People feel ashamed of having been adopted, or divorced, or used up by a lover. They feel ashamed that they have been duped by a con artist or betrayed by a friend. In these cases they feel not only indignant, but also humiliated. Some of us fret that we are not smart enough, not rich enough, not nearly accomplished or beautiful or mesomorphic enough. Our breasts are too flat and our thighs too thunderous. We are boring, foolish, outstandingly mousy. People belittle us because we are little. They ridicule us because we are a joke. We belong in good company about as much as a dead cigar belongs in a punchbowl.

As these examples suggest, some shame is mild and some devastating. Indeed, feelings of shame lie along a spectrum from mere embarrassment (you discover in a host's mirror that your smile has lately been featuring a wedge of spinach between your lateral incisors) through middleweight humiliations (at age 54 you lose a good job and then cannot find another) all the way to a deep, desperate, and persistent sense of mortification that is the residue of parental neglect, or of vicious mockery at school, or of assault--particularly of sexual assault, with its violent invasion of privacy.

We might observe that at the mortification end of the shame spectrum people sometimes pass from self-contempt and self-accusation (You jerk! You loser!) to a qualitatively different posture of self-despair. Self-contempt sometimes blends pride with scorn (If I'm not elected mayor, which I deserve to be, I'm a damned loser) and expresses an inner life that is still active--in fact, still adversarial. But in self-despair we may, so to speak, shun ourselves, silence ourselves, give up on ourselves as a lost cause. Here is the nadir of pathogenic shame, a fearful misery and a cause of miseries.

According to experts, shame in its stronger surges is so powerful an emotion that once we feel it as children--and nobody feels this emotion more keenly than children--it can motor us through the rest of our lives, even as we seek to escape it, suppress it, or compensate for it. How many personal fortunes have been built over the top of childhood shame? How many ambitious marriages, Stanford educations, prestigious career choices? How many shame-driven persons have made up their minds to bury their inadequacies under 60-hour work weeks or perfectionistic obsessions? How many dissolve their shame in alcohol or take revenge on a happier world by trying to spread their shame to it? How many desperate persons succeed in putting an end to their shame only by putting an end to themselves?

Further, it's not only our own status or behavior that shames us, but also that of others, perhaps most typically when we think these others reflect badly on us. Thus children sometimes suffer shame over parents they regard as crude or plain. Parents feel distressed by children who have strayed. Church members feel ashamed of an inept minister, and especially if he keeps deploring his failures and confessing his shame. These instances remind us that shame is contagious, at least among the empathetic. That is why we avoid the shamed. As Robert Karen says, proximity to the shamed "makes our own shame demons restive." Donald Nathanson remarks that "the very idea of shame is embarrassing to most people."

It's worth repeating that although people now use the word shame promiscuously for almost any drop in self-esteem, any failure to "feel good about themselves," what's especially notable about shame is the sense in it of being inappropriately exposed, of being painfully open to prying eyes. Ordinarily, the skin of privacy protects our dignity, our particularity, maybe even our integrity. But when we have been shamed, we feel as if our bark has been stripped off and that everybody can now see our innards.

The stripping violates our right to privacy. Philip Carey wanted to keep his foot under the covers, and he had a right to do it. Decent people want to make love privately, and they ought to have some protected space for it. As Robert Albers notes, people want to limit the spectators of their death--which is one reason why our Lord's crucifixion was so shameful. To be a human being is to have stewardship of our exposure to others. At least in our corrupted and therefore vulnerable state (Is everybody in heaven perfectly transparent to everybody else?), we have the option to keep a few secrets and, even in church, to think twice and share once. Even an ordinary choice of clothing allows us to control the kind and degree of our physical exposure. Clothing is part of our discretionary allowance.Shame, indeed, does double duty in naming a sense of disgrace, on the one hand, and of discretion or modesty, on the other. This distinction (developed especially by Carl Schneider and by Albers) explains why we hesitate in describing what's wrong with a peep show or a freak show or a tell-it-all talk show. We hesitate because we rightly want to say both that the shows are shameful and also that they are shameless. We want to say that the shows are full of disgrace but empty of discretion--and the former because of the latter.

Christopher Lasch remarked that secularization tends to disparage discretionary shame as a superstitious relic. The idea is that nobody ought to enjoy a cloak of privacy. Everything ought to be exposed, demystified, disenchanted. All of us with inquiring minds have an endless "right to know." The culture has been multiplying boys like Singer who keep prying and peeping. Indeed, to paraphrase and extend Lasch, one of the special marks of secularism is its irreverence not only before the mysteries of love and of faith, but also before the mystery of simple human dignity and particularity. Anybody who has seen David Letterman at work knows what chronic unseriousness looks like, and also knows that it is only partly funny. "The culture of cynicism and irreverence," said Lasch, "confuses delusions of grandeur, which call for moral and therapeutic correction, with grandeur itself."

(continued in Part 2)

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

Volume 2, No. 2, Page 3

bcmar96mrj6B203a634w