TRUMP VS. SHAME CULTURE PT. 1

I've often discussed the problems of "victimage addiction" here, as in this 2015 essay. However, I confess that until recently it never occurred to me to relate the ultraliberal penchant for victimage to the concepts of "guilt culture" and "shame culture."

Wikipedia opines that Ruth Benedict's 1946 THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE SWORD did not originate the terms, but popularized them at a time when postwar Americans became curious as to how the culture of defeated Japan differed from that of the United States. Benedict observed-- admittedly on incomplete evidence-- that America was dominantly a guilt culture, in that its citizens were expected to feel internalized guilt if they did wrong, while Japan was dominated by shame culture, in that its citizens were expected to subordinate their personal desires to society's view of what was shameful.

I find this distinction useful in a general sense, and not only with respect to Japan and America. This HUFFINGTON POST essay provides this broad summation:

Shame cultures focus less on individual responsibility and abstract legal transactions, and more on how one’s betrayal of the community creates estrangement and stigma. In a guilt culture, if I do something wrong and the public does not know about it, I am still expected to feel guilty and to seek to make amends by being punished. This is not the case in a shame culture. In a shame culture, if I do something wrong and there is no public knowledge of it, then I experience no shame, and have no motivation to seek amends.  Shame is all about public identity, and whether or not one is honored or dishonored.

However, there is one particular arena in which American culture seems entirely governed by the shame ethos, and that is the arena of race relations.

For roughly three hundred years since the colonization of the U.S., there seems to have been little doubt regarding the supremacy of Caucasian Americans over that of "persons of color," as well as certain Caucasian groups regarded as "outliers," such as immigrants from Ireland. A representative example of the cultural distance between Whites and Others appears in Fenimore Cooper's "Natty Bummpo" novels of the early 1800s. Natty, despite frequently hanging out with various tribes of Indians, summarizes his separation from the Red Man by occasionally stating that "there is no cross in my blood," by which he means no interaction with non-whites. The clear implication is that to have sexual interaction would be shameful to a white person. There were certainly exceptions in which certain romantic entanglements were viewed through a sympathetic lens, as with Cecil B. DeMille's 1914 THE SQUAW MAN (which DeMille remade twice). Yet shame was still the dominant response to the idea of "mixing the races." Even simple interaction with non-white persons could be viewed as eroding the distinctions between the ruling white race and those not so privileged, and this emotion too would evolve not from personal guilt but from socially imposed shame.

During the 19th and 20th centuries assorted philosophical and literary works put forth the case for the equality of the races and for the necessity of equal treatment, but in the United States the case did not gain any ground until the 1950s, marked by the legal ramifications of Brown vs. Board of Education. Having myself been a liberal of a slightly later period, I would assert as civil rights continued to make advancements, most liberals celebrated them, in the belief that true parity would evolve. The only exception would seem to be the hardcore Marxists like Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote this sentence in a prologue for a 1961 Franz Fanon book:

To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remains a dead man and a free man.

About forty years after Brown vs. Board of Education, though, Sartre's ugly nihilism became emblematic of the Left's politics of ressentiment, as I summarized in COMBAT PLAY:

This mood of continual ressentiment leads, ironically enough, to its own form of "lynch law," in which the ideologues can condemn anybody for anything, without providing any sort of internally consistent proof. 

Now, without making the assumption that the Left deserves total credit for the valorization of "people of color," it can be fairly said that liberals were most known for attempting to turn the earlier shame culture's priorities around. Natty Bummpo's assumptions of a beneficent whiteness gave way to portraits of white supremacists as either entirely vile, as seen in popular films like the 1951 anti-KKK film STORM WARNING, or as harmless by reason of sheer stupidity, as with Norman Lear's Archie Bunker. But even in these liberal attempts to reverse reactionary thought, one does not see the extremism of the Sartrean POV, in which ultraliberal pundits view "whiteness" to a source of shame as a *bouleversement* of the way non-white races were formerly treated.

And it's because of that massive reversal that Donald Trump came to power.

More in Part 2.