Barbelith Underground > Head Shop > The West, the Arab world and shame/guilt culture

There are interesting implications if we see reason following guilt, developing out of a need to remain in society during social punishment.

If we can see guilt and shame as diverging cognitive presentations of a Kantian need to avoid behaviour that damages the collective, I agree (with the blogger who sparked the thread) that shame seems the more primitive version. Guilt requires not only the ability to predict that others will disapprove of one's action when they find out--as shame requires--but also the ability to beat oneself up over something nobody knows about. As such, it is a more internalized method of control.

Guilt is desirable over shame for two reasons: 1) shame requires getting caught, or at least the threat of it, while guilt can operate in a totally isolated individual (literally or socially); and 2) shame ostracizes, resulting in the loss of the person's productive capacity (in the extreme cases of exile, incarceration, or execution), while guilt can function independently of action (barring the personal consequences of an individual's guilt-ridden schema, and the actions it affects).

Therefore, a society using guilt for social control has a productive advantage over a shame-user. It seems tenuous but not absurd to surmise that reason itself (as we know it) could have arisen from the internalization of the shame process. It is impossible to feel guilty without reason, and it is advantageous to feel guilty instead of shamed. If that isn't collective benefit at the expense of the ego, I don't know what is.

The philosophical ego(t)ism of Western culture could itself be a meme-defense. Cognitively, the defense could arise from the guilty party's obsession with the "rational" ego-collective paradox (as ego and society vie for control). An individual in a shame-based society channels their angst into the collective where it is dissipated through whatever shame rituals are appropriate to that culture.

I'm not suggesting that Arabs are incapable of reason. I agree that all societies use both guilt and shame, and that each one has advantages. What I'm suggesting is that guilt should not be seen to correlate with individualism while shame correlates with collectivism.

I'm not sure if my next point follows from the above; it is in response to Persephone's quasi-claim that groups are incapable of reason.

If groups can reason, they would presumably reason to their own advantage, which would be at the expense of the individual, or at least the individual's reason. This would manifest (cogni-fest) as a disparity between individual reason and collective reason. I think we are seeing such a phenomenon in Bush's war. Bush isn't a mindless puppet of big oil, he's a mindless puppet of the American collective! While the collective's reasonable motives may or may not be readily apparent to all, I refer you to this article. It is probably familiar material to most here, but it covers what I need it to and it was readily available. It discusses the theory of Iraq as a US vs. EU economic conflict. If the facts are true, that the US faces economic collapse without desperate measures, the war seems reasonable. Even murder is sanctioned when one's life is in danger. (After all, Bush has been telling us that the war is about self-defense, and Bush tells the ironic truth with disquieting frequency.)

Of course, this requires the equation of the collective with the economy, which may or may not be a good equation. But we can't deny that money is among the most powerful memes in the world. In 2003, its control is vast enough to destroy nations. This is true whether you believe the US vs. EU argument, or the big oil argument, or the distraction-from-tax-cuts argument.

Persephone's three topics deserve exploring in this light (reason in the individual, the individual as collective, and individualism vs. collectivism). I'm not the one to do it, though I hope I have sparked something in her.