Shame and Grace

We sometimes hear certain cultures described as "shame cultures."  By this, anthropologists mean cultures that seek to compel conformity through shaming, imbuing people with a sense of worthlessness when they fail to live up to the social norms of the community.  Japan is considered a shame culture, as are many African and Middle Eastern cultures.  By contrast, Western cultures are thought, by dint of their embrace of individual freedom, to have transcended the abuse of human shame and to celebrate the individual, with all his idiosyncrasies and foibles.  But if this is so, why the high level of suicide and depression in Western cultures relative to the rest of the world?  Why are so many of our counseling centers and psychotherapy couches filled with people with so little sense of self-worth, haunted by their inadequacies, by a conviction of their own "failure"?  Why do people report themselves happier in Nigeria than in France?

In his brilliant but unfinished work, Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer argues that shame is a consequence of our disunion with God.  He points to Genesis 2, the story of the Fall, as the mythic revelation of this truth.  He says that shame demonstrates an awareness of this fractured union, driven by the human desire to become "like God,"  i.e., to make our own choices utterly apart from God, to define our own good.  The impulse to cover up, to hide, that is intrinsic to shame, is a indicator of our sense that we have broken something vital.  Perfect intimacy has been destroyed.  Judgment has been introduced.  What is "good" and what is "bad" must be discerned and separated out, now that we know good and evil.   

In many cultures, this discernment is made by a group of elders adhering to longstanding tradition.  Anyone who fails to conform with their judgment is shunned  and those who have transgressed are not easily reconciled back into the culture.  He or she carries a black mark that taints the family, clan, or tribe.  Reconciliation and forgiveness are unlikely.  Second chances are nearly impossible, unless one leaves the group completely.  The burden of shame is huge.  Occasionally the stain is seen as so great a blight upon the family name that it can be removed only through some form of "honor killing." 

In the West we have convinced ourselves we are too "advanced" to submit ourselves to such treatment.  We argue that human dignity won't allow it, that human beings are redeemable, that forgiveness is always possible.  Those who transgress, rather than hiding in shame, sometimes make public and open confessions as a way of "working through" the whys and wherefores of their actions.  They often are welcomed back into the fold once they have "come clean" and admitted their fault, especially if they pledge to reform.  Quarterback Michael Vick, President Bill Clinton, and former D.C. mayor Marion Barry all demonstrate the point: few transgressors remain beyond the pale forever.  There is almost always a road back to respectability. 

And yet, huge sectors of our population, crossing all ages and income levels, report feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy, a kind of shame that seems unrelated in any direct way to a specific action in the world, but rather to who they are... or, more accurately, what they have become.  These people describe a sense that somehow they have not "made the grade," that they have not lived up to their own best expectations for themselves.  They see themselves as failures in a culture of success, a culture that says you can be anything you choose to be.  Not infrequently they are, by any objective, external measure, actually quite successful, but internally they are convinced that they have not measured up, that they have been judged wanting, if only by themselves.

Perhaps this is the dark side of a culture that dares to assert the limitless possibilities of individual achievement without an adequate understanding of human frailty.  Disunion with God cannot be overcome through human effort.  It can only be transcended by grace, by God's free gift of himself.  We cannot "achieve" our way back to Eden, but yet, somehow, we have convinced ourselves we can.  As long as we believe this to be true, consciously or unconsciously, we will continue to be haunted by a sense of failure that is rooted in shame, in an innate awareness that we are not who we should be.  We tell ourselves we are not the professional success or the lover or the parent we should be, but the problem goes deeper than that.  And paradoxically it is only by recognizing the depth of our predicament that we find the freedom to forgive one another, to forgive ourselves, and set ourselves in a position of openness, so that God can find us again.