INVEIGHING AS I GO -- NUMBER ONE -- GUILT IS NOT SHAME, SHAME IS NOT GUILT!

INVEIGHING AS I GO – NUMBER ONE – GUILT IS NOT SHAME, SHAME IS NOT GUILT!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 27, 2011

We are familiar with the institutional idea of being innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.  The United States takes this to heart and is known as a litigious society.  We litigate for a hot cup of coffee spilled on us at a popular food franchise or a fence constructed inches on our property. 

In the corporate world, guilt dances between what are legal and ethical.  A corporation can walk away from a community and leave it economically in ruins, legally, but is that ethical?  Is there any sense of guilt associated with that common corporate practice?  You be the judge.

GUILT

When guilt was a legitimate deterrent, it kept us on the straight and narrow.  We felt painful self-reproach irrespective of whether anyone found out, if it was wrong to do.

In my late twenties successful in work, a veteran in my company asked to partner with me for a project I had in mind to buy a piece of commercial property in Indianapolis, Indiana, and build a medical professional building.  The realtor agreed to sell the land for $30,000 ($300,000 in 2011 dollars).  On a Friday, I put $3,000 down, all the money I had saved, with my partner to pay the balance of $27,000 on Monday. 

Monday came and he backed out.  I went to the realtor, and told him my plight.  He said I had just lost $3,000.  Rather than panic, I offered a proposition where I would pay him  $3,000 each quarter over the next year, giving him a total of $12,000.  If I hadn’t sold the land by then, he would have protected his investment and be $12,000 ahead for his trust.  Obviously, I was confident I could sell the land.

It was a busy period in my life in civic, political and church activities.  I was Secretary of the Zoning Board of Appeals of Lawrence Township in Marion County (Indiana), President of the Young Republicans, and a writer for the Catholic Messenger. 

A buyer wanted to build a factory on the land when the land was zoned for commercial not industrial use.  He had a foreign contract and was willing to pay $50,000 cash if I would expedite the zoning problem.  The 27 acres, which had a railroad spur, required a three-foot setback from a road that needed to go through the property.  Such a setback was not required for industrial zoning, which was crucial to the purchase.  It was the difference between a designation of suburban commercial (SC) and suburban industrial (SI).  The man in charge of zoning for the county could be induced to make this change posthaste for a “gratuity.”  

This is where guilt played its role with me.  I tried to rationalize that it was “for my family” and that gratuities were a common practice, sometimes higher than the five figures required here.  Besides, I could be out of $12,000 if I didn’t sell the land within the year.

While I was going through this moral dilemma, no one was aware of it not even my family.  I thought of how lucky I had been in work, in life, and how my da had struggled all his, which was stopped short as he turned fifty.  Then a thought came into my head, what if no one ever finds out?  My life would be a lie.  I called the prospective buyer and told him he would have to look elsewhere.  The land was not zoned for his purposes.

In the eleventh month, I sold the land for $30,000 paid directly to the realtor.  In turn, the realtor refunded my $9,000, as I had made two payments as well as the initial payment of $3,000.  Later, having forgotten that I sold the land for $30,000 when my contract was for only $27,000, the realtor’s CFO sent me a check for $3,000 after discovering the error. 

You might ask how could this happen?  I can’t explain it, I simply did forget.  I learned then that integrity was more important to me than money, that I couldn’t be bribed.  That was precisely what was attempted when I was working in South Africa.  No, I didn't take the bribe. 

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Guilt is self-directed.  It is the very nerve of sorrow.  Guilt rides on the abandonment of self-trust.  It is a deviation from a sense of dignity, integrity and duty.  It is a shrinking from the person we are to the brute we can become.  The guilty mind debases truth to a lie.  It acts like rust on iron, defiles and consumes, gnawing and creeping into all our crevices until it eats away all that is vital to us until we are only waste.  Fraud and falsehood are guilt’s treacherous allies, lurking in the dark afraid of the light of discovery. 

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SHAME

Shame is other-directed.  Shame is the painful feeling of letting others down, operating outside the code of what society condones to behavior it condemns.  It is the loss of communal respect in behavior that community most fears. 

When visiting my wife’s parents, we would go to church in Cambridge, Minnesota on Sundays and holidays.

The minister of that church was delightful in his sermons showing a familiarity with the existential philosophers of which I have a fondness.  He was also quite knowledgeable about Saint Paul, another interest of mine.  The minister didn’t back away from Paul’s complexity or contradictions.  In that sleepy little community, he pointed out how Paul was a fanatic, epileptic, visionary, and architect of the phenomenon of shame. 

Paul, he said, composed a lexicon of what was honorable and dishonorable, moral and disgraceful, desirable and regretful, celebratory and outrageous.  By doing so, Paul created precepts designed to cause those in violation to feel shame.

The minister pointed out that Saint Paul did this by the forceful drive of his rhetoric compelling believers to feel shame in violation of the "Word.”

On a subsequent visit, I was disappointed when the minister was not in the pulpit.  I asked my mother-in-law what had happened to him.  “Oh,” she said, “he resigned.  He was caught by a member of the church in a pornography bookstore.”

“He resigned for that?” I asked in disbelief, sensing that the person who found him there had some explaining to do as well, but that was apparently not at issue.

“Oh, yes, immediately," she said. 

It was from her tone that I surmised the action was considered proper.  Pornography is a multibillion business in this country, and I’m certain a good number of Cambridge citizens have an intimate knowledge of the little x-rated bookstore.  Shame is doubtlessly held to a higher standard for the minister when it is conspicuous. 

To my mother-in-law, the minister should not only feel shame but act precipitously when shame was uncovered, which is precisely what he did.   The congregation thus lost a brilliant spiritual leader found to be human, and the minister a promising career, a lose-lose proposition for all.

*     *     *

Shame is like a corrosive element that comes out of nowhere.  It finds us hauling a burden of shame about on our backs with self-loathing.  Shame can eat a person up from the inside.  It drives a lot of people to self-destructive behaviors such as promiscuity, doing drugs, drinking to excess, committing crimes, or exposing society’s double standards by being gay and failing to be ashamed.

Pulitzer prize journalist Murray Kempton wrote this after America’s 1984 Olympic diving gold medallist, Greg Louganis, suffered abuse for admitting to being gay:

The almighty is presumed to pass His judgments and dole out His penalties to individuals, which allows us to suppose that nations are spared painful sessions with the Recording Angel.  But if ours is ever so summoned, we may suppose that the inquiry into its cardinal sins might begin with the question: “And why, America, did you, in your arrogance, teach so many of your children to hate themselves?”  (New York Review, 1995)

A person may think he knows who he is at heart, and may decide he doesn’t want anything to do with that person, that the last thing he wants to know is the real person he is, because he is ashamed of that person.  Who is responsible for the cultivation of this self-rejection?  That is Kempton’s question. 

What complicates the matter is that we are unlikely to know why we are ashamed.  What’s more, we want to stay far away from that self-knowing.  So, we retreat into behaviors that throw us off stride into a bad light or bad company to shut the door on shame.     

*     *     *

Shame is a great restraint upon anti-social behavior, but that soon disappears, and when it does innocence falls off with it.  Modesty is no longer troublesome.  Impertinence follows, then disrespect, rudeness and calloused behavior finding sanctuary in vice. 

Am I saying shame is good?  The self comes to mind.  Neurobiologist Antonio Damasio claims consciousness is a subjective state of feeling, a sentience or awareness of qualitative experience.  Shame is nature’s hasty conscience.

When we have the heart to do very bad things, either to others, or ourselves we are dead to conscience.  Bob Larson in “Extreme Evil: Kids Killing Kids” (1999) gives example after example of children doing horrible things to other children without remorse. 

Violence is the timber of our culture with our ability in electronic games or television and other media to vicariously dispatch our aggressions on some entity for the mere sport.  This can quickly translate into real violence.  Recently, a man beat another man nearly to death in front of the man’s children after an argument in the parking lot of a San Francisco Giant and Los Angeles Dodger baseball game. 

*     *     *

Guilt and shame are the polar coordinates of civility.  They are increasingly missing in modern society.  Those who do not fear guilt start with shame. 

One can remember the Diaspora of a people forced to roam the world, turning that guilt into art, literature, science, philosophy, music and economics.  One can also remember the 2,000-year history of Catholicism that locked love out, and controlled its minions with the shame of departure from dogma.  Western civilization was built on its cultural architecture. 

The paradox is that a modicum of guilt and shame increase our humanity while too much can destroy us.  Those who do not appreciate the power of guilt can be waylaid with shame.  Irish author Jonathan Swift put it this way: I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.

It is not my premise that there is more wickedness in the world, nor more promiscuity, lechery, or dehumanizing behavior than in my youth sixty years ago.  What appears different is a deadening of conscience as the controlling norm of society.

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