Hiding Shame in Science and Scholarship

Modern societies tend to ignore emotion, especially the emotion of shame. But for that reason, shame especially may become important to understand. Beginning with Norbert Elias and Helen B. Lewis, there is a literature on shame that might help see its' influence, especially how hiding shame may generate anger and violence. There seem to be many recent systematic empirical studies of shame that use other terms, such as rejection, exclusion, loss of social status, social suffering, search for recognition, honor/dishonor, vengeance/ revenge etc. This practice may be hiding the crucial importance of shame as a cause of violence and many other problems. From his study of five hundred years of European etiquette and advice manuals, the sociologist Norbert Elias (1939; 1978) proposed that shame and its close kin (embarrassment and humiliation) have been gradually replacing physical punishment as a way of upholding cultural conventions. But at the same time that shame has become more dominant in modern societies, it is less and less mentioned. Elias's thesis is that there is a difference between shame that is felt, the basis of morality, and shame that is hidden not only from others but even from self. The hiding of shame seems to occur not only in the public but also equally in the world and science and scholarship. Shame is frequently studied in social/behavioral, political and medical science, and history, but under different names so that the term shame is almost completely hidden. Perhaps shame is taboo, not only in the public at large, but also in serious studies of human behavior. There are many studies in anthropology of “cultures of honor”: how insults to honor lead to humiliation and revenge. Most of these studies however, assume that this sequence causes violence only in traditional societies, where shame is out in the open. It is not considered to occur in modern societies. Although the word honor has gone out of style, the emotion of shame has not. It seems to be socially and biologically based, so that it is probably a historical and cross cultural. The taboo on shame has many weakening effects on knowledge, because it cordons off into separate groups what ought to be a single field, reinforcing the existing taboo. For example, it hides studies that support's Gilligan's (1997) conjecture on hidden shame as a cause of violence, such as rejection, status attainment, loss of social status, social suffering, search for recognition, honor/dishonor, vengeance/ revenge, and so on. It also slows down the process of replicating studies that support it, and testing a broader hypothesis extending to causes of both violence and silence. If the shameviolence/silence hypothesis is even partly true, it carries a crucial message for our civilization.