On Shame and Shamelessness: Locke’s Democracy and the Death of Shame

A cross contemporary life, calls pronouncing the death of shame abound. In the domain of criminal justice, a lack of shame is thought to explain disobedience to the law; hence the renewed interest in “shaming punishments.” In popular media, writers point to rudeness, incivility, and the eroding boundary between public and private as proof that shame no longer governs civic discourse. In political theory, some scholars defend the need for shame in democratic life, formulate “healthy and respectful forms of shame,” and articulate its progressive potential (9). By contrast, in Democracy and the Death of Shame, Jill Locke persuasively argues that these different accounts speak less to shame’s decline than to its widespread and enduring appeal. Locke reads these various narratives as instances of what she calls “The Lament That Shame Is Dead,” a lament for a time in which shame was believed to have regulated and structured social interactions, in which it operated as “a moral rule that governed collective life in ways that appeared to serve everyone with outcomes of which we approved” (175). Locke doubts that such a time ever existed—she describes The Lament as “a nostalgic story of an imagined past” —but she demonstrates how it continues to have a hold on our collective imagination and generate salient effects in political life (91).

The Lament operates by identifying a problem in the world—such as environmental degradation, corruption, or police brutality—and positing a lack of shame as partly to blame for it. If people were less individualistic, so The Lament goes, or if they had a stronger sense of what is right, they would uphold their shared commitments and act in the interests of the common. What is needed is thus a renewed or revitalized sense of shame, “a process of moral awakening whereby people struggle… to live up to their shared theoretical commitments” (175). While the experience of shame is unpleasant, “much deeper and more self-lacerating than embarrassment,” it provides an ethical framework for engaging with others, one that fosters “the sense of right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, the relation to oneself as a particular individual and one’s relationship to specific and generalized others” (9, 19). Shame works through the emotions “as brake and prod,” prompting citizens to interact with one another in respectful ways and to fulfill their obligations to others and themselves (21). This “felt ethic of obligation and regulation” relies on an internalized social script, departure from which would generate a set of negative feelings about oneself (18, emphasis in original). Shame operates in and through the social, in “the mediating sphere between public and private,” but is also thought to play an important role in political life, forming citizens who are able to collectively govern themselves (10). It instills and encourages those manners and habits that are thought to bind citizens to one another, teach them how to work across differences, and orient them to a common purpose. For many democratic theorists, shame makes collective life possible.

From the perspective of The Lament, the declining power of shame is a civilizational threat—it risks calling every hierarchy into question, challenging every anchoring tradition, and corroding the bonds that hold the demos together. The real target of The Lament, therefore, is not shameful actors but shameless ones, those who flaunt rather than downplay their actions, either because they do not know or do not care about the norms they have transgressed. The distinction is important—someone who is shameful acknowledges the legitimacy of the social norms he or she has breached, and in experiencing shame, shores up largely agreed upon codes of conduct. By contrast, shameless citizens unabashedly depart from the traditions and institutions of the past. The Lament casts these actors as “lacking reflection, judgment and regard for others,” and as operating with an “unfettered and unregulated desire to fulfill their own needs above and beyond any concern for...