Perspective: Shame culture holds heavy consequences

One of the most important social issues of our time has been driven off the national radar screen by the events of Sept. 11 and the war it ignited. It may be time to start paying attention again, now, while national resolve is high, and before another murderous incident in a school overtakes us.

I've spent 30 years working with children, as a father, teacher and soccer coach. I remember an incident from 1993 that I now see as a portent, the day my 13-year-old soccer girls were engaged in vigorous practice when one of the local boys on the sidelines starting cracking sexual insults.

I stopped the practice and pointed the boy and his chums (a geezer word for posse) off the soccer field. That night my daughter said, "You shouldn't have done that to him." "Why?" I asked. "Because he said he was going to kill you."

In today's language, I had "dissed" the little punk, shown him disrespect. Worse than that, I had dissed him in front of his friends. Even worse, I had dissed him in front of the girls.

This moment came back to me when a 13-year-old Florida schoolboy shot and killed his favorite 8th grade teacher. The boy had been suspended from school on the last day for some minor prank. He returned to class with his grandfather's gun. His teacher would not let the boy enter a classroom to talk to some girls he liked. In the next seconds, many lives changed forever.

The young man who threatened me and the one who pulled the trigger are both products of a "shame culture" -- an ancient warrior code that can be traced through the literature of West and East. This code transcends class, nationality and ethnicity. It fueled violence in ancient Japan and the American West. It energizes the ethos of organized crime, Italian, Russian, Chinese. Its devastating effects can be measured in body counts in street gangs and suburban high schools.

The overriding imperative of this culture is to "avoid shame," an impulse more powerful than finding the gold or getting the girl. If those achievements built reputation, then suffering insults, failing to avenge wrongs, losing battles of arms or words brought shame.

Turns out, there's an escape hatch. Cultures mitigate the power of shame with the counter-force of guilt, a conflict we can see taking shape, for example, when medieval Christianity tries to absorb and modify the forces of pagan heroism. The lost violent boys of our culture demonstrate an inability to use guilt to anticipate the negative consequences of their actions. The boy who killed his teacher would be hanging out with his girlfriends today if, when he reached for the gun, he could see the chain of bad consequences that would follow, and the burden of guilt it would impose.

As a high school junior, I was elected homeroom president (Go Mustangs!) and called a summer meeting of class officers to plan for the school year. We worked for about seven minutes and then headed off for a night of white suburban fun and frolic.

One clever fellow (that's geezer talk for thug) decided it would be fun to steal a Dead End sign, which we did. We carried it through the streets and sneaked it up the stairway to my bedroom, where I hid it in a closet.

The "crime" weighed heavily on my conscience as I began to think what might happen if a car, not seeing the sign, would crash into the barrier. I could imagine all the horrible consequences: student prank causes fatal accident; stories on the news; expulsion from school; not getting into college; parents shamed. In other words, guilt trumped shame.

My mother told me recently -- 36 years after the event -- that she and my father knew I was morally straight when I confessed to them what I had done and set in motion the sign's restoration. It stands there today.

Where did my sense of guilt come from? I recall the confluence of several powerful streams. I had (still have) two loving, attentive, no nonsense parents who praised values and achievement, and punished misbehavior usually by yelling and occasional hitting.

My parents were not alone. A tight community stood behind them, the Scout leaders and Little League coaches, the adults from miles around who knew our names and shared responsibility for our welfare.

The parochial schools of the 1950s scrubbed our consciences until they were scrupulously clean. The nuns and brothers didn't use much in the way of corporal punishment, but we kids knew that they could, and that acted as a deterrent. Besides, they had hellfire as backup.

Rock 'n' roll showed us the wild side, but most of our television and movie culture was populated by clean living and charismatic heroes, from the Lone Ranger to Zorro to Marshall Dillon to Eliot Ness, who used violence only for the protection of the weak against the criminal element.

In describing these influences, I'm trying hard to avoid a simple-minded glorification of the past. Some of the engines of guilt were oppressive and repressive. Those of us who endured them have paid emotional and spiritual penalties -- including our image of God as Mean Cop, ready to bust our heads for the slightest transgression.

That said, it must be noted how many of these formative influences have been drained from the culture. We are left with the absent or distracted parent; a reluctance to punish; a fragmented community; a gentler theology; a gangsta culture (white and black); a depletion of social capital.

In some cultures great shame can only be expiated by ostracism or suicide, so we should listen with fear to the testimony of young people so demoralized by bullying that they've considered taking their own lives. In the West, we're less likely to fall on our swords than we are to crack the skull of our nemesis with a baseball bat. The balm for our shame is other-directed: bomb the school. Easy access to weapons makes the temptation worse.

When I was in the seventh grade, I inspired the dislike of a sturdy older boy named Terry. He'd look for chances to humiliate me. On two occasions he lifted me off the playground asphalt, turned me upside down, and shook me until the change fell out of my pocket. Each time it happened, my regular friends shunned me for a while, to avoid a similar fate and to give me a moment to recover.

I could feel the blood on fire in my face, not just from the physical inversion, but also from my deep embarrassment -- my shame. I was too intimidated to strike back, but I can still remember the desire for revenge that rose up in my heart. I can only imagine the pain and fear caused by more sustained, more violent bullying. Or what I might have done had I had a weapon.

Any remedy to the ills of school ultra-violence will have to recognize the poison of the shame culture -- and the potential of the guilt culture as an antidote. The old ways can not be restored. But the old ways can remind us that any hope of change must flow from family, school, neighborhood, church, social institutions and enlightened government. Not Big Brother, but more men volunteering as Big Brothers.

A colleague of mine argues that the flip side of shame is not guilt but pride, instilled by grown-ups who remind kids that they are somebody, the inheritors of a legacy, the torch bearers of certain standards and values. Perhaps the restoration of that sense of pride will be part of the collateral progress to emerge from Sept. 11. Young people, especially young men, now have serious role models in their own communities -- firefighters, police, emergency workers, construction workers, soldiers -- who use their physical strength and their moral courage to preserve, protect and defend.

-- Roy Peter Clark is a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in St. Petersburg.

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