Back in 1946 the anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote a study of Japanese culture entitled, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. She made a distinction between two sorts of cultures: ‘shame cultures’ and ‘guilt cultures'. She labelled Japanese culture a shame culture - as you can imagine, it won her few friends in Japan. However, subsequently, anthropologists have liked to use this terminology in categorising how societies exert power and psychological control over their members. Both are perceived as a means of coercion for maintaining the behaviour of human beings to conform to social norms within a culture.
In a shame culture control is exerted by inculcating the notion of shaming an individual, whose behaviour or circumstances have breached the community’s social expectations so that they are shunned by society. It is the pressure of their peers’ judgement - how that person appears to the rest of society - and the recipient's own sense of pride and honour that are key in controlling an individual’s behaviour.
In a guilt culture control is exerted by creating a sense of guilt for behaving outside the society’s moral code. The sense of guilt is sustained by reinforcing expectations of punishment upon the individual’s mind, often through religion and the invisible hand of a deity who will punish in this life or the next. As well as the legal power of the state to condemn certain behaviours, an individual is asked to examine their own conscience as to whether their behaviour is immoral, correct or not.
To generalise, shame cultures focus on self-denial and conformity as ways of maintaining social order, whereas guilt cultures stress punishment and forgiveness as the means of sustaining moral expectations. In reality, there is often a spectrum of both shame culture and guilt culture within societies so that law and order, public opinion, along with a code of moral behaviour, maintain obedience and conformity.
Although Western societies are traditionally described as guilt cultures there has been evidence, mainly now due to social media, of a growing shame culture in modern society and this came to mind while reading a BBC article this morning, JK Rowling joins 150 public figures warning over free speech: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-53330105.
The report concerns a published letter, signed by writers, academics and activists that reflects a concern over the so-called ‘cancel culture’, which refers to the removal of support, including the boycott of individuals, usually a celebrity or public figure, who has expressed an opinion that is perceived to be offensive to those who want to be offended. To quote from the article, “In recent months, a number of figures have been shamed (my italics) online for making comments considered offensive by some, including issues of race, gender and sexuality...the letter suggests: Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity, journalist are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are perceived as clumsy mistakes.”
There is a link between the ‘cancel culture’ with another modern concept, that of ‘groupthink’: the shaming and suppression of individual (heretical) thinking to the conformity of the group, which is particularly apparent on social media where the vilification of usually public figures for expressing views which are perceived as incompatible with moral orthodoxy - is this a dangerous intolerance of other people’s opinions which are not compatible with ‘political correctness’, or merely holding people of influence accountable for their (erroneous?) views and actions?
I have always argued that one of the most important factors in the moral progress of humankind is our ability to dispute, argue over different views and opinions. However, there has to be a basis for disputation in rationality: just shouting that you have been offended by another person's point of view and that they have ‘no platform’ merely indicates a totalitarian attitude to different opinions and positions, which is often counter-productive. The way to expunge offensive attitudes and behaviour is to defeat their exponents through reason, rational argument, not to just close down debate where those deprived of a forum may well come back to bite society (see my blog on, Tribalism versus the Global Village: https://timboatswain.wixsite.com/website/post/something-big-is-coming ).
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