21st-century Christian Philosopher

Back when I poked about in cultural anthropology, I came across a classification that split cultures into guilt cultures and shame cultures. The goal of a guilt culture was to internalize the rules, and restrain ourselves by the guilt that we build up when we think about going against the cultural mores.

In contrast, the shame culture worked by external pressure. One felt little direct remorse over breaking the rules, and so the crowd would just have to show you how serious it is about those rules. The curious thing about a “shame culture” is that the undetected villain is roughly equal to the virtuous man. He mostly fears being “found out” and facing shame.

It might be just the bias of a person who is brought up in what tries to be a guilt-culture that everything that I have read about this division suggests that guilt-cultures are in some way better than shame-cultures.

Not very culturally relative of me to say this, but I already know that.

I also think that the two are knotted together in some way. Members of “guilt-cultures” have slapped on the shame, and I’m not dogmatic enough of a thinker to deny that the shame-cultures lack all traces of guilt feelings. But I think there is some substance to it.

I have to, when I observe that a young woman can be gang-raped in Pakistan and the society looks not on the acts of the men, but on the shame that this young woman has “brought upon her family” by lacking the legal means to avoid being sentenced to a locked into a room with rapists and the physical means or weaponry to force them to do other than what the law allowed.

That concept of shame is alien to me. Yet these me are so confident that it means the same thing to their community that they can undertake such dispicable acts, and sate themselves without any guilt. Without feeling that that shaking finger can be turned back on them as the people who could have done something else but have been as bestial as they please.

In a similar story about shame, a man marries a woman under false pretenses so that he and his friends can rape her, as a payback to her brother. She is told this to her face by the matriarch of the family; the matriarch had planned the wedding as a trick to shame the bride’s family. The marriage is dissolved and they send her walking home.

There we have it: Shame apart from any dispicable actions. Dispicable actions and machinations apart from any shame or guilt. The conditions for shame are whatever the culture thinks they should be. The image of a loose woman covering up her promiscuity with a charge of rape is too attractive to these people. The woman must be shamed because she may have been willing. She may have enjoyed it. And they are so absorbed by the possibility that this is an invitation to loose morals that they ignore the men who took actions to cause it. (At least that’s the only dim rationale I can make out.)

In our culture, you must be out of your mind if you go to such lengths to take revenge. Something is not right with you. You have to be out of your mind to think that the court should sentence a young woman to be locked in a room with you to do whatever you want. That’s just not justice to us. We would examine our own motives for asking for her to be ravished by us.

We ask “What were you thinking?” It doesn’t apply to the victims of rape, except in the fevered imaginations of those who would strain gnats and swallow camels. But their society does not ask this of the men, and really can not ask it of the women. “What were you thinking when they sentenced you?” “What were you thinking going into a room with your husband on your wedding night?”

It doesn’t make sense. The men really didn’t care what the convicted woman thought. They made no pretense of asking her. And the bride was probably thinking what any number of brides in that culture have. Shame is not about what you thought or what you did but what you are associated with.

At the top of this piece, I thought of the Japanese who kills himself long before anybody has seen what he has done. Is this not guilt? Well, yes and no. And I think I now have a good answer for the “no” part: Japanese men used to kill themselves when they failed. Does it make sense to ask what they were thinking—what motivated them to fail? In some cases, perhaps, but not all cases where someone has chose to “save face.” It lacks a concept of what role we played in the failure, it just concentrates on the fact that I have failed, and my family is stuck with somebody who has failed until I can change the situation.

Shame looks at the fact. Guilt makes us examine our role.