Metaphors of Shame
I heard Steven Pressfield on a recent episode of the Rich Roll podcast (584). My ears perked up when Pressfield began to talk about how our culture currently lacks sufficient shame; that too many behave shamelessly. Do the powerful and well-known not supply near-daily examples of things they should be ashamed of but flaunt instead? Yet something niggled at me, Wait a sec, I thought, Doesn’t shame also keep the downtrodden down? Doesn’t it keep the addicted from seeking help when they need it most? Doesn’t it keep people from leaving abusive situations? But, how can we have both too much shame and too little of it at the same time?
This seeming contradiction can be resolved if we zoom out a bit and look at the metaphors we use to look at shame. Put another way, we need to examine the different mental models through which we look at shame. The resolution to the contradiction is to become more aware of which model we’re using when we are questioning and looking at shame. The resolution comes from the decision to look at, what Lakoff and Johnson call the “Metaphors We Live By” in their fantastic 1980 book of the same name. The mental models or metaphors we constantly invoke are typically deployed below consciousness — they are the lenses through which we have chosen to look at anything in the world, and they seem transparent. We erroneously suppose that we’re seeing reality and forget that we’ve donned one pair of specs rather than another. What are the two different models, metaphors or spectacles through which we look at shame? One is “the coin” metaphor and the other is “the vitamin/medicine” metaphor. We shall look at both presently. What’s exciting about looking at the mental models or metaphors you knowingly (or more likely unknowingly) use, is not that it’s a quest to find the ‘best’ or ‘True’ mental model but coming to see and accept that the choice of any specific metaphor or model will shine a light on some darkened corner of reality and that very act of choice will plunge some other area into darkness and obscurity at the same time. We have picked up a spotlight and have pointed it, for good and for ill, in only one direction. (The gods are presumably equipped with the latest in night vision but none of us mortals is so blessed)
The coin metaphor through which we often see shame, suggests that shame is something that has both a good and a bad side neither of which exists in the world alone. The price of one is accepting at least some of the other. To court the advantages of shame is to accept, whether consciously or not, its dark side too. Shame under this spotlight is something that, on the one hand, keeps us from taking a crap in public and strutting away with a satisfied smirk, but also feeds the cycle that keeps the addict thinking, ‘I am a piece of shit. There is no reason to stop and I actually deserve to die’, on the other. With the coin metaphor, there is no private or public solution; either we take shame with it’s good and bad sides, or we give up on shame entirely and free everyone to do what ever the hell they want just exactly when they feel like it; all the way from metaphorically shitting on the public sphere, to the abject addict’s shitting their pants and letting go that last shred of dignity.
The other very different metaphor is the “vitamin/medicine” metaphor and its corollary, ‘the dose makes the poison’. Donning this viewpoint reminds us that a little bit of shame is useful as an aid to impulse control while it also recognizes that beyond some optimal level, the medicine becomes toxic and that the other extreme, an utter lack of shame also leads to ‘disease’; a kind of moral scurvy, if you will. The metaphor in a literal example encompasses three distinct states: too little vitamin D leads to a deficiency disease, a little every day is medicinal, and an excess becomes toxic. So too we recognize some public actors with a deficiency disease born of too little shame, some folks with just enough shame to pick up their dog’s poop even when no one is looking, and those in the throes of addiction mired in a toxic excess of shame that keeps them from beginning the recovery process. It is not an “accept the good and bad” metaphor, it is rather a curve, with bad shit happening at both the low and high ends, and some optimal level of shame in the middle allowing self-regulation.
Should we abandon the coin model for the siren song of the vitamin/medicine/poison metaphor? No, since that would be like shining the flashlight stubbornly in only one corner of the basement when we hear something scuttling down there at 2 am, while your spouse is out of town and the damned dogs are crying in their crates because they know something is down there, and there you are, refusing to move the beam to that dark, damp corner you know is there, where the hole in the foundation you discovered last summer may have let something unseemly crawl inside which now scurries about seeking…god knows what.
Well. That last paragraph was a little overdramatic, but you get the point.
Whatever set of frames we choose, and choose we must, shame is certainly having contradictory effects. This is to be expected, and in fact, if our view of reality showed only the good side or only the bad side of shame -i.e. if we didn’t see the contradictory effects of shame — that might be an indicator that our view of shame is missing something important. A useful rule of thumb might suggest that we never trust a model that says, ‘It’s all good!’ or ‘It’s all bad.’ Looking for the coexistence of opposite effects should serve as a sign that you are at least awake, and as a cue to pick up a different mental model or metaphor to understand what has until now, been obscured.
If we’re in a cultural or personal basement, we ought not stubbornly shine the spotlight in one corner thinking our vigilance will save us. It might be wiser to shine the light in different corners knowing full well that we’ll be obscuring other corners in that very act of truth-seeking. There is a cost to this and the cost is giving up certainty — no mean feat in turbulent times. Perhaps compassion for ourselves, and even for the shameless ones who shit on everything would be better when we, and they, cling to certainty thus blinding ourselves by staring at the light of a single, brilliant metaphor.
