It's Awash

Three kabuki actors, by Toyohara Kunichika, 1868, via Wikimedia Commons.

David Brooks writes ("The Shame Culture", New York Times, March 15 2016) [PARODY ALERT]:

In 1987, the University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, which argued that American campuses were awash—awash, I tell you—with moral relativism, or the decadent new idea that one should not judge lest one be judged, closing their minds, as his title suggested, to the rich traditions of intolerance and self-righteousness, and dogmatically insisting that everybody ought to be morally open-minded.

"If it feels good, do it," they proclaimed, unmooring people from their traditional ideas of right and wrong and thereby depriving them of those fascinatingly varied peaks and valleys of wickedness and virtue and making life flatter and emptier.

He was right, of course, but now he's wrong, because everything is totally different. Campuses today are still awash, but they're awash in judgmentalism.

Students now live in continual fear that they might say the wrong thing and break one of the new social norms. They watch their words, afraid they might inadvertently expose some incorrect thought and face ruinous consequences, like being disinvited from a gig as commencement speaker, something that could even happen to me. When some new moral crusade begins to spread across campus, they hasten to support it in their Facebook status updates, because if they don't they could be noticed and condemned.

A new moral system is coming into existence, with new criteria for defining correct and incorrect action, which I won't mention specifically by name, because they are mostly about discouraging speech that belittles or insults the members of less powerful racial or religious or sexual groups, which sounds like it might be a good thing. That would distract you from the important question I want to address, which is, what is wrong with this new moral system?

A helpful approach might be that taken by Andy Crouch, the author of The Good Beer Guide to New England (2006) and Great American Craft Beer (2010). No, I'm kidding, it's Andy Crouch, a former campus minister at Harvard and sought-after speaker on university campuses and to organizational leaders and the executive editor of Christianity Today, where he has run a nice review of my The Social Animal (2011). I learned about him when I was Googling myself the other day and found that BobOnBooks listed him for best 2015 Christian book (Playing God) in a list where my The Road to Character was no. 2 for nonfiction.

So anyway Crouch wrote an essay on this very subject just last year, starting with the dichotomy popularized by the American anthropologist Ruth Benedict between "shame cultures" such as those of Asia, where people don't know whether they're good or bad until their community tells them, and "guilt cultures", whoever they are, where they have consciences...

No, that's really enough. It goes on and on. Our campus culture today is a "shame culture" like the Japanese culture described by Benedict in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), based on her research for the Office of War Information. This no doubt accounts for the plague of lads disemboweling themselves in the dorms after they have been caught sending homophobic Tweets.

Or not. Benedict's analysis (an early stab at the discussion of what might better be called "face cultures", written without fieldwork—there was a war on!—on the basis of readings and interviews with a single, deeply biased Japanse-American informant) hasn't been exactly respectable for some decades now. One of the kindest critiques is by Clifford Geertz (Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, 1988), who loves the book but thinks it should be read more as satire (like The Mikado and Gulliver's Travels) than anthropology, telling us more about Western than Japanese culture. Others you might look at include Millie R. Creighton's 1990 Revisiting Shame and Guilt Cultures (JSTOR link) and  C. Douglas Lummis's wonderful Ruth Benedict's Obituary for Japan, which he wrote and rewrote obsessively from around 1980 until this final version of 2007:

After some time I realized that I would never be able to live in a decent relationship with the people of that country unless I could drive this book, and its politely arrogant world view, out of my head.

And if Benedict's work is a problem, the hash that has been made out of it by Orientalist vulgarizers like Brooks, into a charter for distinguishing the primitive, naturally tribal collectivists whose behavior is wholly dictated by the community, from the civilized, pale Ingmar Bergman characters who torture themselves over their failings in dignified, secret grief, as if guilt and shame didn't pervade every culture intertwined, is worse.

Then its application to the politically correct college atmosphere is absurd, as you can see from the example with which Crouch begins,

Doxxing can be a drive-by prank on most anyone who draws attention. But more often its targets are singled out for humiliation. In a series of events last year that came to be called GamerGate, certain active video gamers targeted journalists, mostly women, who had criticized the outright misogyny found in many popular video games. The backlash began with the bilious insults that have become astonishingly common online. But it quickly escalated to “revenge blogs” purporting to reveal those journalists’ past indiscretions, and doxxing attacks.

This wasn't about shaming rebellious community members into obeying the common moral code, but about terrifying the members of a different community by which the gamers (virtually all male, of course, though Crouch and Brooks don't seem to think it needs to be mentioned) felt their honor to have been offended. The "revenge blogs" weren't attempting to make their victims ashamed of the actions the gamers felt hurt by, but merely to get revenge, and threats of rape and violence, and doxxing enabling your online enemies to stalk and harass you in real life, aren't "shaming" at all but pure terrorism.

You can see the reason for the choice of example. It's to make the claim that Crouch's and Brooks's attack isn't on people of the "left", but just a both-sides-do-it unpleasant atmosphere, But what it unveils is something quite different, that ought to be obvious: that the informal ethical codes of life on the Internet and in the college campus, not the written-out codes of conduct supplied by administrators but the rules of discourse enforced spontaneously by the Facebook friends and Tweeps, are about a situation that is diametrically different from the context of a traditional shame-and-honor system.

Namely, the traditional system belongs to a small and homogeneous and highly hierarchalized community in which the rules themselves are not controversial, and punishment is as clearly and unambiguously codified as crime. A very different place, in fact, from urban Japan since 1867 and probably centuries longer than that (though I think it's very common in Japan to live with a conservative fantasy of that kind of place as an ideal, which is a big part of the reason why the concept of a "shame culture" is a thing there, where Benedict is read much more nowadays than she is in the US), but very like the towns of the New England Puritans of the 17th century or the biblical patriarchs whose codes they tried to emulate (in a Pauline, not-too-Jewish way)—which Crouch is well aware of, actually proposing that Christians ought to make use of shame and honor concepts in devising their own devotions and in proselytizing to others.

But the world of American youth, online and off, is broad and radically heterogeneous and short of hierarchy. It's great! And the concept of moral relativism still holds, in spite of Brooks's nonsense. (I'd like to note in passing that Ruth Benedict and her mentor Franz Boas were the great founding figures in the ideas of cultural relativism in which 1970s-style moral relativism is grounded, and I don't think she'd be amused to be cited as a kind of proponent of a "guilt culture", as Brooks suggests.)

With so many groups, each with their own codes, coexisting, and overlapping in very complex ways (everybody belongs to one or more classes, ethnicities, gender identities, religious/irreligious practices, and so on), there's one universal imperative, to show respect to those who are different from yourself, and especially to those who are lower on whatever hierarchy of powerfulness still exists: white to black, male to female (the rule the GamerGate boys couldn't live with), rich to poor, old to young, straight to gay, local-born to foreigner. The ideas of "political correctness" are a way of working this imperative out and putting it into action, a bottom-up invention, awkward and painful at times, but they're really the marvel of contemporary cultural evolution and ought to be applauded.