What We’ve Lost

Tom Friedman’s New York Times column today is a lament for the qualities our society once had but no longer does. He refers to them as “mangroves”, large trees along the shoreline that protect it, filter toxins and pollutants, and nurture wildlife.

To my mind, one of the saddest things that has happened to America in my lifetime is how much we’ve lost so many of our mangroves. They are endangered everywhere today — but not just in nature. Our society itself has lost so many of its social, normative and political mangroves as well — all those things that used to filter toxic behaviors, buffer political extremism and nurture healthy communities and trusted institutions for young people to grow up in and which hold our society together.

Most of the column is devoted to the decline of shame, something he characterizes as one of those mangroves, with a focus on the New York trial of Donald Trump. My reactions to the column are multiple including:

• He’s got the wrong end of the stick
• What did he expect?
• He’s about 30 years late

and I will try to explain why.

Cultural anthropologists have multiple ways of describing societies. Among them are the “guilt-shame spectrum” for identifying the different ways in which societies constrain the behavior of individuals. In general terms some societies do so by exploiting internalized guilt while others do so by using externalized shame. Historically, Western European cultures (including the United States) have been considered “guilt cultures” while most of the rest of the world have been considered “shame cultures”. I know that anthropologist Ruth Benedict contrasted American culture with Japanese culture using that distinction.

My key point is that historically we’ve never been a shame culture, we’ve always been a guilt culture. The question Mr. Friedman should be asking, rather than asking what has happened to shame, is why isn’t guilt restraining individuals from doing bad things in the first place?

Over the last 50 years dramatic changes have occurred in American culture. The role of mothers as the key individuals who inculcated cultural values in the young has eroded. Schools, which have been assumed to be picking up the slack, no longer do. That’s the implication of the cult of self-esteem that has overtaken them. If what you do is always just fine, you’ve abandoned both guilt and shame as means of constraining the behavior of individuals. in our present culture nothing has replaced guilt. Constraining individual behavior itself is apparently suspect.

I could list other factors. The decline of what I might call orthodox organized religions, e.g. Catholicism, Episcopalianism, High Church Lutheranism; that the overwhelming preponderance of the immigration to this country for the last 50 years has been from shame cultures, e.g. Mexico and Central America, China are among them.

Finally, to my last bullet point, where was Mr. Friedman when President Bill Clinton engaged in sexual activity with Monica Lewinsky in the White House? My recollection is that he was unconcerned about an erosion of norms but focused on the political implications and the implications for the presidency. That’s exactly how norms are eroded.

I didn’t vote for Bill Clinton and among the reasons that I didn’t was that I thought he was a low character, a view fully borne out by the scandal. I don’t expect presidents to be paragons of virtue, the worse for us. I think that paragons of virtue to not rise to the presidency but in my opinion cheating on one’s wife is disqualifying. Furthermore, my notion of contrition differs so radically from Mr. Clinton’s as to be irreconcilable. I believe that actual contrition means doing penance and an actual commitment to avoiding re-offending and the circumstances that could lead you to re-offend. Mr. Clinton comes from a very different tradition, apparently one in which you claim to be sorry and that’s that.