Stigmatised Shame and Cancel Culture

The weaponisation of shame and the rise of cancel culture is preventing people from realising their potential and leads to anxiety and self harm. By Tanveer Ahmed.

The term covidiot emerged online first as a hashtag. It has since been used multiple thousands of times, a marker of the rise of pandemic shaming. Such shaming has been used to expose errant behaviour from drunk spring breakers flouting advice in America to those attending a large Stereophonic concert in Manchester. Public officials have been forced to resign after not living up to their own advice, including the chief medical officer of Scotland and NSW minister Don Harwin, who was exposed holidaying at his beach house ­(although he subsequently successfully appealed).

Rugby league players, already well known for scandals involving sex or violence, were branded covidiots on the front page of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph after flouting health protocols. While critics might argue the restrictions imposed by public health authorities can be described as tyranny, those very officials hold sway. Social distancing and ­appropriate hygiene have fallen into the realm of public law and order.

Police prosecute those walking too closely or in excessively large groups. The act of targeted coughing is a form of assault. ­Epidemics have changed the course of history by reshaping our worlds, physical and existential. Nothing compares to staring bald-faced at our mortality when it comes to raising moral and philosophical issues. The coronavirus has acted to prick a moment in Western civilisation that Israeli historian Yuval Harari calls a combination of incredible prosperity combined with a lack of purpose.

Shame is a proxy for our relationship to groups and a moral language. Its diffuse re-emergence in recent decades is a function of political tribalism reinforced by online information flows. It implies transgressions where we ascribe fault not just to an act, but also to the self, what is known in psychology as a global attribution. We treat shame as a primitive emotion, a remnant of our animal selves. Shame lies in the origin story of Western mankind; the story of Adam and Eve in their naked, shameful selves is at the heart of the notion of sin. Shame is consigned to be hidden. Jung called it the swampland of the soul.

Western societies have underplayed the role of shame. We are ashamed of shame, portrayed as the inner demon responsible for a range of psychopathology. On the other hand, our belief in the individual at the heart of the civic state has elevated the role of guilt. In their academic research about the difference between shame and guilt, American psychologists Tangney and Dearing give the predominant view in our culture: “Our lives as individuals, as social beings, and as a society can be enhanced by transforming painful, problematic feelings of shame into more adaptive feelings of guilt. Recognising the distinction between shame and guilt is an important first step in making ours a more moral society.”

However, guilt does not easily translate into many traditional cultures. There isn’t a word for it in many Asian languages. Guilt is barely mentioned in the Old Testament. Shakespeare used the term only 33 times, whereas “shame” is used over 300 times. Guilt is to a large extent a construct of the modern West.

But the belief in the role of guilt as a superior emotion to regulate transgression is under threat with the declining role of Christianity’s moral axis of sin and redemption. There is a yearning for group identity as the traditional tent poles of nationalism and religion have been diluted. In such an environment, poorly understood shame is an unnamed undercurrent that leads people to avoidance and isolation. What we call social anxiety is steeped in shame. The emotion hides in plain sight while we pretend we have superseded it. As Salman Rushdie writes: “Dear Reader, shame is not the exclusive property of the East.”

In its modern, public iterations, the left focused shaming on those who transgressed boundaries of political correctness whereas the Right preferred targets like welfare fraud. Public health advocates had a greater tolerance for fat shaming or ostracising smokers. Meanwhile, shaming associated with sexuality became increasingly rare.

Discussions around shame indicate a yearning for a moral ­language. We remain morally inarticulate and existential despair has been poached by the more medicalised language of mental health, the sector in the background of both the health and economic crises we face.

Within this context of a more united resistance against a collective threat, the usefulness of a gentle shame is being highlighted. This is especially true in a multicultural society where a focus on expressive individualism and self esteem will not translate for many ethnic groups. Shame can also be scaled, which can be significant when behaviours are unacceptable but still within the law, especially when it comes to corporations or governments that are not capable of feeling guilt.

But recent outbreaks of pandemic shaming also expose the limitations. There is a tension between appropriate enforcement of acceptable behaviours to the trashing of individual dignity with no path to forgiveness. This has been especially pronounced in the past decade through online shaming, where a host of figures both prominent and otherwise have been cancelled due to some kind of inappropriate action.

Healthy shaming involves a brief period of stigma combined with an associated ritual of re-­integration. This is exactly what happens in group therapies for addiction or dieting. When members admit to failings in staying abstinent there may be a brief shaking of heads from other members or a pause to acknowledge the important information. For the act to be useful, the confessing member must feel a small amount of shame in letting the group down, but there is an immediate signal of encouragement from the other members.

If a patient feels too embarrassed or humiliated they may not attend. Alternatively, they merely become defensive and blame others. But if they don’t feel they have formed any bonds at all, they won’t feel any shame. The power of group therapy in helping people heal is a great example of shame’s usefulness, as a proxy for group identity and cohesiveness. In contrast. modern cancel culture is narrowly about retribution.

The combination of online activism and permanent marks on the internet, shame’s digital shadow, also hamper the path of reintegration.

When discussing the world of social media, religious leaders have raised the prospect that without the concept of sin, our society lacks the structure to allow for forgiveness. The alternative is ostracism and exile without a route for reunion. Even groups such as those for weight loss or drug addiction contain ­aspects that incorporate Christian concepts of forgiveness.

Pandemic shaming is likely to be limited to this period whereby coronavirus is the dominant force shaping our lives. But it’s re-emergence is a pointer that shame has never really left, but just lurked with alternative names or iterations. The challenge is to harness it effectively.

Our current circumstances are challenging us to renew our inner lives, just as we strive to avoid the threat to our physical bodies. In the wake of a shared threat to our species, we are bonded together in a mutual dread, imagining the implications for a better future.

A better understanding of shame and its reintegrative ­potential offers promise to enliven both our emotional selves and social relations.

This is an edited extract, first published in The Australian, from Tanveer Ahmed’s book In Defence of Shame: Why We Need Negative Emotions published by Connor Court, out now.

Click here to listen to Nick Cater’s MRC podcast interview with Tanveer Ahmed.