Shame on Us

"The Genesis of Shame" by J. David Velleman, in Philosophy & Public Affairs (Winter 2001), Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, Journals Publishing Division, P.O. Box 19966, Baltimore, Md. 21211.

It may be the oldest story of shame: Boy meets girl, girl offers boy a bite of an apple, and then—as it says in Genesis 3:7—"the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked." But even though the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge was supposed to make Adam and Eve "like God, knowing good and evil," it was not their nakedness itself that caused them to feel shame, says Velleman, a philosophy professor at the University of Michigan, nor was it their sudden apprehension of the sexual possibilities of their situation, an interpretation that echoes St. Augustine.

Rather, Velleman proposes, the first couple’s disobedience of God’s prohibition against eating the fruit revealed to them that they now had choices—to obey or disobey, or to "be fruitful and multiply" or decide not to procreate. This "ability to choose in opposition to inclination," in other words, gave Adam and Eve private selves, able to make personal choices. Their naked bodies caused them shame because of their "realization that their bodies might obey their instincts instead" of their newfound will, thus betraying their private selves.

Velleman believes that this new interpretation of the Genesis story has something to tell us about "the shamelessness of our culture." In his view, much of the shame humans feel is caused by a perceived loss of privacy. Everyone creates for themselves a public image, a persona necessary for any social interaction, and necessarily different from the private self. This performing self is vitally important to each individual’s social life; it is what makes one a candidate for "conversation, cooperation, or even competition and conflict." When something occurs that undermines that created image—a personal bankruptcy, for instance—the individual suffers a "failure of privacy" and, says Velleman, feels shame. Blushing, the physiological response to shame, can lead to even more feelings of shame since, again, the blush exposes the private self.

Velleman thinks that the much discussed "de-moralization" of society is more easily understood through his conception of shame. Someone who poses nude in a magazine or reveals kinky secrets on a talk show will likely not feel shame, in his view. Why not? Because the exposure is a personal choice that now becomes part of the individual’s public face. It is intentional. But a person caught changing clothes at the beach would likely still feel shame, because the exposure was unintended.

Velleman agrees with those who argue that American society is far gone in shamelessness, but he doesn’t think the solution is to "rescandalize" things such as births out of wedlock. The problem is that the public self has gotten out of control: "People now think that not to express inclinations or impulses is in effect to claim that one doesn’t have them, and that honesty therefore requires one to express whatever inclinations or impulses one has." There is no quick fix. What’s needed, according to Velleman, is a larger sense of privacy, a renewed understanding that people are not all they appear to be.