Liberated From Shame
Photo by Rosalind Chang on Unsplash
In 1950, Erik Erikson published his extremely influential book, Childhood and Society. In this publication, Erickson argues that a child should not be governed by shame that will evoke dysfunction. Erikson’s analysis is no doubt correct and on target. But there is a second, very different dimension of shame that I wish to pursue here. Shame in this second sense is the capacity to be repulsed and repelled by evil, destructiveness, or unseemly social reality, and so to develop an aversion to such conduct and habits. The loss of shame as a social restraint opens the way for unbridled self-indulgence that holds the possibility for great destructiveness of the self, others, and the social environment. Thus, at the other end of the spectrum from Erikson, children may and must be taught to feel revulsion to what is anti-life in order that energy may be deployed on behalf of personal, social, and planetary wellbeing.
This sense of shame as social restraint is voiced by the prophet Jeremiah as he characterizes the wonton and destructive behavior of his contemporaries in seventh century Jerusalem:
From the least to the greatest of them
everyone greedy for unjust gain;
and from prophet to priest,
everyone deals falsely.
They have treated the wound of my people carelessly,
saying “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace.
They have acted shamefully, they committed abomination;
yet they were not ashamed,
they did not know how to blush (Jeremiah 6:13-15).
The oracle is reiterated as the traditionists recognized its acute importance:
Therefore I will give their wives to others
and their fields to conquerors,
because from the least to the greatest
everyone is greedy for unjust gain;
from prophet to priest everyone deals falsely.
They have treated the wound of my people carelessly,
saying “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace.
The acted shamefully, they committed abomination;
yet they were not at all ashamed,
they did not know how to blush (Jeremiah 8:10-12).
Elsewhere the prophet indicts his contemporaries:
Like a cage of birds, their houses are full of treachery;
therefore they have become great and rich,
they have grown fat and sleek.
They know no limits in deeds of wickedness;
they do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan, to make it prosper,
they do not defend the rights of the needy (Jeremiah 5:27-28).
Because they have lost their capacity to be ashamed by their violence and predation, they are free, without restraint, to engage in exploitative, destructive behavior. They no longer have any capacity for care for the needy and the vulnerable. They willingly engage in deeds of wickedness without any remorse. Their greed is unchecked; they are unmoved by social suffering as the measure of a just social order. They are propelled by selfish greed that knows no limit or curb. Nothing makes them blush. This second sense of “shame” suggests that a viable society must have a capacity for embarrassment about policy and practice that is destructive and self-serving. Without a capacity for embarrassment, every greedy selfish action is accepted as legitimate.
These lines from Jeremiah occurred to me as I read A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to take over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them (2023) by Timothy Egan. Egan’s book is an expose of the KKK in the early twentieth century with particular attention to the Grand Dragon of the Klan in the Midwest, David C. Stephenson (“Steve”). The book traces the rise to power of Stephenson; he assumed absolute control of the Klan; the Klan was politically so dominant in the Midwest that Stephenson controlled large numbers of government officials, so that he could entertain the prospect of his own election as president of the United States.
Ultimately, Stephenson reached the pinnacle of his power in 1924 when the Klan helped to enact the most restrictive immigration policy in US history. Egan’s verdict is that Stephenson “was liberated from shame” (p. 154), so that he presided shamelessly in his exuberant exercise of immense power marked by indulgence and violence. He came to his abject demise in 1925 when a woman he had abducted poisoned herself as the only escape from him. He was eventually brought to trial in the small Indiana town of Noblesville after his trial was moved to a venue outside of Indianapolis. The jury of twelve quite ordinary citizens, many of whom had Klan connections, convicted him of murder. He filed many court appeals and served a long prison sentence. He finally died in 1966, a despised loner.
In Egan’s compelling chronicle, Stephenson is indeed a model example of what it means to be “liberated from shame.” In his aggressive, indulgent life, Stephenson perfectly reiterated the shamelessness of Jeremiah’s contemporaries. It is noteworthy that the US judicial system could finally contain him, as the twelve jurors rose above their own biased commitments in the interest of social justice. While the US judicial system meted out its punishment, Jeremiah in an earlier time had appealed to the God of justice to cope with the shamelessness of the covenant violators.
In the wake of Jeremiah and Stephenson, I could think of two other dramatic performances of shamelessness. Amid the “red scare” of 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted Senate hearings to identify Communists in the US government. McCarthy claimed to have a long list of such Communists, but of course he refused to make his list public. In his hearings, he was harsh with witnesses and reckless in violation of their rights. In his aggressive questioning in such a hearing on June 9, 1954 his harangue was interrupted by the soft-spoken attorney, Joseph Welch, who rejected the Senator’s aggressiveness:
Until this moment, Senator I really never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Have you no sense of decency, Senator, at long last?
A variation on Welch’s great puncturing question is “Have you at long last no sense of shame?” (I was a college junior at the time; our well-beloved history prof., Paul Crusius, dismissed our class so that we could watch the committee on TV, my first exposure to television). Welch’s quiet, stunning question was the beginning of the end of McCarthy who subsequently became a despised and abandoned lost soul. Welch’s question has lingered in the body politic. It is a firm reminder that public life and public officials must adhere to measures of decency in order to sustain creditability. McCarthy fully embodied an absence of shame (and of self-respect) in his hunger for fame and influence.
Second is the instance of Richard J. Daley, the long-running mayor of Chicago. Daley exercised enormous, nearly absolute political power as the head of his party in Cook County. He had massive control over every civic enterprise and used his power to reward his allies and to punish his opponents. His brusque, outrageous conduct at the 1968 Democratic convention (held in his city) exhibited “democratic power” at its most brazen and shameless. On one occasion, he committed an especially egregious act of exploitation. A reporter asked him at a press conference, “Are you not embarrassed, Mr. Mayor?” Daley’s callous and candid reply was, “Nothing embarrasses us.” Indeed he governed in a high-handed way, without restraint or reservation. He was so powerful and so much in control that he felt no tilt toward honesty or decency. He had been, like the contemporaries of Jeremiah, like Stephenson, and like McCarthy, “liberated from shame.” It remained for his son, Richard M. Daley who became mayor after him, to redeem the reputation of his family by governing well and responsibly. But the legacy of Richard J. Daley, in his shamelessness, lingers as a monumental example of public power that is not inimical to gross public exploitation, unimpeded by any moral restraint.
The sequence of Jeremiah’s contemporaries, Stephenson, McCarthy, and Daley presents a recurring pattern of ruthless, aggressive self-serving political-economic players who never blinked at shameless self-promotion. And now us! It requires no great study to see that some political leaders t replicate and reiterate the same shameless self-aggrandizement. And, in our present day, this sustained practice of shamelessness has a powerful appeal for those who live in fear or resentment.
The work, as always, is to counter such shamelessness, a task that is best done through full exposure and resistance:
-Jeremiah was a point-person in his time who exposed and resisted the economy of greed in ancient Jerusalem that was committed by the royal-priestly establishment. He led a modest counter-movement that included his scribe, Baruch, and the family of Shaphan, a political player (see Jeremiah 26:24).
-Stephenson was finally brought down from his exploitative role by a jury of ordinary citizens who did not flinch from their civic duty in upholding norms that refused his obscene performance. That jury, however, was in the wake of brave critics including George Dale, a journalist, who for a long time had done the work of exposure and resistance.
-McCarthy was exposed and disempowered by Joseph Welch, a courageous attorney, whose confrontation with the Senator evoked political leadership that was ready and waiting, but that lacked a trigger that could initiate action against the senator.
-Daley as fully exposed by the newspapers in Chicago, including the columnist, Mike Royko, who made Daley’s self-indulgent performance a target of ridicule and eventually dismissal.
-And now this election. It remains for the moral leadership of our national culture to articulate the elemental norms that refuse politicians’ outrageous self-serving. That moral leadership may make its case because there are norms of decency that cannot be voided with impunity. These norms are neither conservative nor liberal, because they are more elemental than our partisan differences. Those norms include:
respect between genders;
equality between races;
dignity and respect for every member of the community; and
rejection of violence as a way to adjudicate social disputes.
This is the proper work of the moral community that can usefully make clear the non-negotiable requirements of decency that are more elemental than all our ideological differences. The norms are mostly tacit and left unspoken. But they are real and must be cherished, often reiterated, and sustained. Some forms of conduct are unacceptable, even legal. It remains to be specific about norms that rightly bring shame for some actions.
A counter-thought: Imagine, that Paul could assert,
For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek (Romans 1:16).
Paul makes this declaration in the face of the fact that death by execution (crucifixion) by the empire was an act to bring immense shame on the one executed. Paul contradicts the usual judgment of society. Such bold, critical thinking provides a basis for detailing the lack of shame on the part of Stephenson, McCarthy, Daley, and what we encounter in this election. Jeremiah, and after him Paul, discovered the high cost of such a life of truth-telling that saw clearly the shamefulness of the shameless. Jeremiah was brought to trial (Jeremiah 26), subsequently imprisoned (37:11-21), thrown into a cistern because of his treasonable words (38:1-6), and eventually carried away to Egypt against his will (43:1-7). Jeremiah serves as a model for the long procession of brave witnesses who have lived upstream against a culture of shame. The work continues as our moral leadership is summoned to courageous truth-telling.
