Last Saturday’s disastrous performance by the Secret Service detachment assigned to President Trump has evoked huge amounts of commentary. Some opinioneers are claiming that the evidence can’t point to anything but a Secret Service tasked to permit Trump’s assassination. Others are of the opinion that it was merely a demonstration of the low estate to which this institution has fallen. And of course, virtually all are calling for investigations…but by whom?
Secret Service Director Kimberley Cheatle has come in for a great deal of criticism – in my not particularly humble opinion, all of it deserved. Notably, Cheatle has not tendered her resignation, nor has her superior, Alejandro Mayorkas, demanded it. Concerning which, Ace has this to say:
Kim Cheatle is refusing to resign — of course. Leftwing girlbosses have no shame, nor any sense of what excellence or merit is. Resigning in shame is for Republicans only.
Which has triggered some thoughts about shame, guilt, and the tenuous connection between them.
Let’s imagine that Cheatle is guilty of something objectively demonstrable in a court of law. (I’m not saying that she is; I’m proposing an exercise in emotional analysis.) Incompetence isn’t legally actionable, so it would have to be an actual criminal offense: perhaps malfeasance. When the guilty verdict is delivered, Cheatle’s reaction would tell us something significant about her standards:
- Were Cheatle to display contrition, it would express the understanding that what she’d done was not just legally but morally wrong. Contrition is the proper reaction to learning that one’s moral judgment was flawed, and that it brought about the act(s) for which the guilty verdict was rendered. It says that the guilty party has learned better. And of course, much of the time a display of contrition is entirely fake, just an attempt to get leniency.
- But were she to display an absence of contrition, there could be at least two interpretations:
- She is morally indifferent to the verdict. That is: she committed her offense for personal reasons and is unhappy only about having been caught.
- She regards the law under which she was convicted as morally irrelevant. That is: she believes she had a higher duty which supersedes the binding effect of that law.
In case 1 above, contrition might be accompanied by shame: the sense of having been revealed as responsible for damage to others. But in neither case 2.1 nor 2.2 would shame factor in. One cannot be ashamed of something that’s outside or beneath one’s moral standards.
Shame is a motivator. Guilt isn’t, at least not if unaccompanied by shame.
We expect an individual who’s displayed shame to change his ways. Perhaps we expect something penitential from him. At the least, we expect him to promise not to do the shameful thing again. But reasoning backwards, we would infer that an individual caught in an unacceptable act who refuses to change anything at all in the aftermath doesn’t feel shame for his deed. Shame would have moved him to do something, after all. At the very least he would have promised not to repeat his offense.
The past century has seen a diminution of the shame response among public officials. Now and then, one such might simulate it. But these days they seldom actually feel it.
There could scarcely be a more savage indictment of the political class.
Speaking in a wider context, the domain of shameful behavior has been chipped away until there’s hardly anything left in it. Time was, it was shameful to be observed intoxicated in public. Time was, it was shameful to be indecently exposed in public. Time was, it was shameful to be an irresponsible, spendthrift head of household who scamped his responsibility for the well-being of his dependents. When an individual was revealed as any of those things – and many others – he was expected to change his ways. Today?
Andrew Breitbart has told us that politics is downstream from culture. The American culture has all but eliminated shame from our responses to moral indictment. The watchword is no longer that “God is watching.” Today it’s “Whatever floats your boat.”
It may be that earlier Americans overused censoriousness to limit behavior of which they disapproved. But whatever the case, today there are practically no standards under which one may be shamed, and thus none under which one may be expected to feel and exhibit shame. Being found guilty of an offense against the criminal law won’t reliably do it, else why would recidivism rates be so high?
With that, I suggest an intimately personal, entirely silent exercise to my Gentle Readers:
- Get yourself a pad and pencil.
- List all the actions, or categories action, that would make you feel shame.
- Ask yourself, in complete candor: Have you ever done any of them?
Then burn the list. You wouldn’t want to leave something like that lying around where others might find it, would you?
Have a nice day.
