On the elimination of shame

[nancylebov]

A comment I wrote to Obsidian Wings.

Imho, American culture has become more blatantly nasty in the past decade or so.

I'm inclined to think that Rosseau and/or other romantics bought the dynamite and Limbaugh lit the fuse.

The problem (and I think it's a very real problem) is that the classic ideal of a good life is one of restraining a lot of impulses. If you accept the romantic idea that there's a lot of truth and value in those repressed impulses (and I agree that there is), you're eventually thrown up against the fact that not all of those impulses are anything you really want to live with.

In effect, it's ok to come out of the closet about wanting to humiliate people. We have smug, unshameable bullies. In public. I don't think the US used to be like this.

I don't know what the way out is. I believe that some of the repressed impulses (frex, for gay sex) are actually better allowed out in public, so it's not just a matter of going back to some past set of standards.

Further thought: The whole troll/American Idol thing is dependent on some people still being vulnerable to shame.

Comments

[demonspawnmom.livejournal.com]

Limbaugh didn't light the fuse - DeSade did. I've been reading the unabridged version of "Juliette."

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

I find De Sade fascinating, because his works are almost like a Rorschach test, with critics working up almost compeltely opposite interpretations equally well. My current tentative conclusion is that as much as he aspired to a philosophy, De Sade wrote largely from the subconscious, so in fact he may, at the same time, have been doing such wildly different things as (1) shoving Romanticism's nose in reasonable extrapolations it would want to deny, (2) advocating freedom, human dignity, and choice, and (3) getting his jollies and inviting others to get theirs from denigration of the human spirit and filthying what he ostensibly glorifies.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Honestly, you need to find a library with a good selection of old papers and see how they treated (say) Adams and Jefferson. Much of the 20th Century was an abnormally civil period in those terms. Now things are getting back to normal -- alas!

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

That's right--I'd forgotten. And they had tarring and feathering, not to mention the pillory back then, too.

I wonder how the era of unusual civility happened.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Re my comment below, one could argue that seeing people treated badly by some aggressive TV and radio shows is the new pillory. Ostensibly edifying, but really or at least also bad-tempered fun.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Joining our conversation this morning, Sturgonslawyer's comment,and more thought: I think the main change in the late 20th century has been becoming more egalitarian about releasing nastiness.

Really, publicnastiness has pretty much always been acceptable from those with privilege and/or those who do it cleverly enough to entertain people. I mean, at the c. 18th century height of Classicism, look at Pope and "The Dunciad"!

I see what you are saying re Romanticim, and to some extent I agree. However, the impulses one is to release freely in Romanticism constitute a more limited set, based in the belief that man's basic nature was good. Even William Blake is in favor of energy and roiling change, but not nastiness. (His poem "The Poison Tree" shows this and seems to me amazingly in keeping with current sound psychological doctrine.) De Sade deliberately explored the dark side of this, but in a way most Romantics would reject.

So the question to me becomes, what changed from "express your natural benevolence freely" to "express everything freely"?

First, I blame Freud! Because I'm thinking of 1960s "let it all hang out"--and the rise of therapeutic nastiness, say in the Synanon Game--and I trace it back to Freud and ideas of repressed feelings causing neurosis.

Second, I blame the neo-pre-literate aspects of our culture, the future Andy Warhol predicted in which the mass media are so widespread and so egalitarian that anyone can indeed be a star for 15 minutes. And a lot of people are going to choose that 15 minutes to be nasty without any skill or charm to it. In an agar-dish of overflowing id like this, one might argue, anyone with any talent, no matter how small, can have the position once held by an Oscar Wilde or Alexander Pope. (*cough* Rush Limbaugh *cough*)

I'd say the no-talent celebrity bully is a relatively new phenomenon, but not really new, as seen by Joe Pyne. And let's not even get into insult-comics, hardly a very recent development.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Freud himself was hardly in favor of letting it all hang out; that was the vulgar Freudian version.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

You are right of course about the Romantics -- which is why I have very little use for them. The "Noble Savage" (which I realize is not even really their term) never existed. We as a species evolved to compete, with each other and with other species, in a (literally) brutal world; we didn't survive by niceness.

This isn't an encomium on nastiness or a paean to social Darwinism, but I do think that any attempt to make a better society has to begin with a very realistic evaluation of the material we have to work with, i.e., us. And we really aren't very nice naturally.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Intraspecies cooperation is also a good evolutionary strategy, I believe in original sin and original goodness, and mainly original variety.

[fallenpegasus]

In Seattle, the "smug, unshameable bullies" are not the national conservatives.

In San Francisco, again, they are not the national conservatives, and in addition to being smug and unshamable, they are also carefully and constantly "outraged".