Shame Games

In which we talk to Sophie Lewis about Shame

We appear to be living in a moment when the most shameless dirtbags in human history have seized power. Far right demagogues proudly boast about their abusive, insulting and degrading behaviour. Not only that, they seem to benefit from the condemnation and outrage they provoke. They and their allies have painted the most modest demands for respect and decency in the world as some kind of “woke” conspiracy to silence and repress them and their supporters, a shadow of a more nefarious plot to “replace” or enslave the already-privileged…

Meanwhile, shame seems to be getting in the way of meaningful action for collective liberation.

Many “privileged” people feel such immense shame about their fortune (relative to others) that they are completely confused.

Most people who have been oppressed by race, gender or sexuality have been made to feel shame for being who they are. But is resistance through personal or collective acts of pride (like parades) enough?

Many people have been led to believe that “the left” is scolding and judgmental. Is that impression entirely due to hostile disinformation?

In the penultimate episode of What Do We Want, our podcast about the weird, wild and wonderful things that bring social movements together (...and tear them apart), we dwell with SHAME.

How does it (de)motivate us? Should we wield it? Can we get rid of it?

Cancelled

We start with a postmortem for so-called “cancel culture,” a phenomenon that was named (and to some degree hallucinated) by the right wing media sphere. It is a nebulous idea that impugns “the left” for being punitively and often hypocritically judgmental, using moral authority to silence those who might disagree. As with other reactionary moral panics about “political correctness” and “wokeness,” the defamatory myth comes to overshadow the reality of what’s actually going on in movements and the culture that surrounds them. It also serves to distract from what really is a threat to freedom of expression: a media sphere controlled by a handful of corporations, notably, or laws and prohibitions passed by reactionary governments to “protect” society from things they deem dangerous or offensive like racial equality or the existence of trans people.

At the same time, activists would need to be very deluded or very lucky to claim that the risk of strident moralism is absent from the reality of social movements for collective liberation. Perhaps this is because strident moralism is common to all humans, but it often seems more of a problem for movements that implicitly or explicitly call for humans to act better, more benevolently and more fairly.

Part of the problem is that most of our movements are not succeeding, at least not to the degree we’d like. As a result, it can be very tempting to look for some feeling of agency, affirmation and movement by trying to change or focus on something closer and smaller: the behaviour of our comrades. We may be very far from rooting patriarchy, racism or transphobia from our world. It’s agonizing. But we can find some tiny solace in doing what we imagine will uproot it in our movements or among our comrades, developing processes for questioning and critiquing ourselves and our comrades and changing our habits, relationships and structures. In the worst case scenarios, this can become a distraction and total fixation.

This can often lead to situations where people are or fell as if they are being shamed. And in reality, there isn’t a lot of functional difference between feeling like you’re being shamed and actually being shamed: they operate the same way on the psyche.

When we do this, we’re often reaching for one of the oldest and most important aspects of human social psychology: our fear of shunning and ostracization. We are, of course, a social species, and being shamed and excluded is one of our most profound fears. Social psychologists have a kind of folk theory that’s summarized in the formula s>d: the vast majority of people fear social death over actual physical death. There’s plenty of evidence from literary and cultural history, from high school and from our daily life that, because we all fear social death, we get a certain sick relief when it happens to others, not to us. Some perverted but also pretty normal part of us delights in watching others cast down and cast out. We also fear being associated with outcasts, lest we, too, be ostracized. We should not be so high-minded to assume that just because most activists would decry this aspect of our psychology we’re therefore above it.

It’s perhaps for this reason that the debate around so-called “cancel culture” is so murky. We tend to want to believe we ourselves have never been or never will be part of such an ugly process (unless someone really deserved it!) The canceller is always the other, the bad activist. But we perhaps need to be a little more reflexive.

Reactionaries and the corporate media, who have a vested interest in making “the left” appear as shrill, punitive zealots. The reality is that, “the left” is no more apt to “cancel” people than any other group (and perhaps significantly less), but if and when we do it appears conspicuously at odds with our espoused values of fairness, compassion, justice, diversity and equality.

Could we and should we live in a world without shame? Is that our goal? Is that possible?

Should(n’t) we wield shame?

If shame is such a profound force, could we wield it more effectively?

On the one hand, there’s something dark and snarly about this question - it feels like using the masters’ tools. On the other, wielding shame is not new and often gets the goods. Trade unions often have to use shame to make sure that workers or customers don’t cross a picket line. Boycotts also often work using the same methods. A lot of activism focuses on trying to shame those in power, pointing out that their actions don’t match their boasted values or promises. In general, middle-class and global north activists often implicitly use shame when they try to mobilize people around caring about the plight of others.

The problem is that the evidence seems to suggest that shame is a great demotivator, but a poor motivator. In other words, it can be quite useful to get people not to do something (especially if there aren’t huge consequences to opting out), but it doesn’t work so well to get them to do something. A picket line that shames people for shopping at a certain store uses shame very effectively to discourage shopping; but shaming people into participating in the picket line itself is unlikely to work.

Shame typically encourages people to avoid the issue, which can be tactically useful. But it can also lead to backlash, because it often feels like a critique of a person’s whole being and right to exist in the world. This can lead to a phenomenon known as reactance, where an individual acts out against what they feel or perceive to be a threat to their agency or sense of freedom and self.

What should we activists take away from this? While perhaps we dream of and work towards a world where no one feels shame, we may want to think strategically about how to use shame in the here and now. What we know of human psychology seems to indicate that most people will do anything to get away from shame. And so, if you’re going to use shame, don’t just tell people what not to do, also give them opportunities to do something they and you might think of as positive.

For example, if you’re picketing an employer whose workers are on strike or a business who needs to be punished, coinsider not only staging an intimidating picket line, but also having people with clipboards on the periphery who can talk to passers-by and ask them to sign a petition or letter supporting the efforts. This can transform shame into action (or at least into a contact list!).

One example we speak of in the episode is the Bay Area’s Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. That part of what is currently California was stolen from the Indigenous Lisjan Ohlone people, who have survived genocide and are fighting to this day to win back their land, not only in the name of their own interests but to manage the land based on Indigneous principles against the wave of profit-driven “economic development.”

In recent years, thanks almost entirely to militant Indigenous activism, settlers (non-Indigenous people on Turtle Island) have become increasingly aware that Canada, the US and other nations are built on stolen land. Many settlers feel ashamed of this, and about being the beneficiaries of the genocidal campaigns. But ultimately, whom does that shame serve? Often, political shame can be narcissistic: one can trick oneself into imagining that, because one feels badly about a bad thing, one is doing one’s part, that one is a good person. In the worst case, people pass this narcissistic shame onto others and gain a kind of perverse satisfaction from shaming others about what they, themselves, feel shame about. Perhaps we imagine that if enough people felt shame the world would have to change? That is a dangerous fantasy.

In contrast, the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust has little time or patience for white guilt. Instead, they suggest that those non-Indigenous people who benefit from living in the Bay Area contribute to and otherwise support their efforts to buy and win back land. The Shuumi Land Tax advises those who live on the stolen land how they can make an annual contribution based on Part of their effort is to use monetary donations to establish a trust that would manage it based on Ohlone principles and priorities. Money, private property and the legal institution of a trust are all colonial institutions, and Sogorea Te’s vision is too radical to be satisfied with these as ultimate goals - they aim for true decolonization.

They write “No amount of money will undo the damage that’s been done, will bring back the lost lives or erase the suffering of the people. But this is a step in a long-term process of healing, a small way you can, right now, participate in a movement to support the self determination and sovereignty of the local Indigenous community.”

This is one tactic by which they transmute settler shame (which is useless and indeed taxing for Indigenous people, who are often conscripted in conversations and meetings into caring for sad white people) into something that is actually useful for Indigenous people and the movement for decolonization.

Pride is not (alone) enough

In our preparations for this episode, we interviewed Toronto-based OG queer, anti-capitalist and Palestine solidarity activist Gary Kinsman. He was one of the original organizers of Toronto’s Pride parade in 1981. He’s also a prolific author of many important books on sexuality and capitalism, including The Canadian War on Queers and The Regulation of Desire: Queer Histories, Queer Struggles.

Gary reminded us that this event was very different from parades in recent years, which have included floats of major banks and corporations and the participation of the city’s police. The early Pride marches were activist events, explicitly undertaken in defiance of police harassment, repression and brutality towards not only queer people but also Black, Indigenous and other oppressed people in the city.

For Gary, the depoliticized idea of “pride,” that offers itself as an antidote to the shame many queer people are made to feel in a heteronormative and homophobic society, has easily been co-opted by corporations eager to “pinkwash” their image and appeal to middle-class and wealthy gay people. It’s also been appropriated by states, including Canada which excuses its participation in empire overseas and its abuses of migrants and colonization of Indigenous lands “at home” by preening itself on its legal and cultural “tolerance” of (some) queer people. Gary has also been at the forefront of efforts in Canada and around the world to call out the pinkwashing of Israel, which it uses to paint itself as a beacon of tolerance in the Middle East and so justify or distract from its own horrifying actions (this article is the example of pinkwashing discussed in the episode).

He turned our attention to another Bay Area group: Gay Shame, which since the early 90s has been a platform for queer activists to refuse the corporate and state pinkwashing and build deep solidarity with other oppressed people. Gay Shame actively names and shames gay property developers and personalities in the tech industry who are responsible for that city’s brutal “gentrification” (i.e. racialized and classed social cleansing). Obviously, Gay Shame is not arguing queer people ought to be ashamed of their sexuality. But some queer people ought to be ashamed of their participation in a form of racial capitalism that is destroying lives and the planet!

In a world that degrades and shames so many people simply for being who they are, the politics of pride can be important. Like queer pride, Black pride, Indigenous pride and other pride movements have been important in helping people overcome internalized shame and find a commonality that is the bedrock of radical refusal and rebellion. However, the truly radical politics reaches for a broader, collective liberation.

What would it mean to create a world we would be proud to hand down to those for whom we will become ancestors?