Jon Ronson's book "So you've been publicly shamed" is the current choice of my book club. I confess to almost giving up on it after sixty pages but I tend towards the "I've started so I will finish" school of readers. It deals with the social media and the ways in which people, through little fault of their own, (Max Mosely aside) become the victims of hate attacks via the internet. It reads a little like a Panorama programme and documents a number of high profile events that brought shame upon various persons. It would seem that Flickr and Facebook have become the modern day equivalent of the stocks.
Stocks were meant to inflict shame on those convicted of petty crimes that were not worthy of the hangman's time, and brought attention to individuals who in the eyes of the law had inflicted criminal acts on the local community. There are arguments that favour the return of such devices but it would seem that the social media are there first and are inflicting horrible punishments on some people.
It also seems that some are immune to the shaming process. Take the Tory front bench for example, or in Ronson's book, Max Moseley, who was discovered in a BDSM, Nazi themed club, enjoying himself enormously. The fact that his father was a well known Nazi supporter probably had a lot of bearing on the way that the press went for him. It would seem though that the exposure and the judgements made of his behaviour fell off him like water from a duck's back. He confronted the attackers and bore no shame of what he was doing.
It appears that human beings fall into two categories when it comes to shame; those who have none and those who find the experience mortifying. Those in the latter category have frequently been driven to suicide as the result of mass personal attacks. The attackers of course are part of a mob and remain anonymous. They have no notion of the harm that they do and are easily whipped up into a feeding frenzy like sharks given the smell of blood. Crowd behaviour is a scary phenomenon. The Nuremberg rallies, Tory party conferences and football crowds all demonstrate the way in which masses of people in the same place can behave like one organism with only one identity. A crowd has no conscience and no capacity for shame, it allows the baser instincts of normal individuals to take over.
Do people experience little shame today? It seems that most behaviours, as long as they are legal are publicly accepted and that shaming is an externally inflicted thing based on the prejudices of others and the capacity of humans beings for hatred and shared bigotry.
Stocks were meant to inflict shame on those convicted of petty crimes that were not worthy of the hangman's time, and brought attention to individuals who in the eyes of the law had inflicted criminal acts on the local community. There are arguments that favour the return of such devices but it would seem that the social media are there first and are inflicting horrible punishments on some people.
It also seems that some are immune to the shaming process. Take the Tory front bench for example, or in Ronson's book, Max Moseley, who was discovered in a BDSM, Nazi themed club, enjoying himself enormously. The fact that his father was a well known Nazi supporter probably had a lot of bearing on the way that the press went for him. It would seem though that the exposure and the judgements made of his behaviour fell off him like water from a duck's back. He confronted the attackers and bore no shame of what he was doing.
It appears that human beings fall into two categories when it comes to shame; those who have none and those who find the experience mortifying. Those in the latter category have frequently been driven to suicide as the result of mass personal attacks. The attackers of course are part of a mob and remain anonymous. They have no notion of the harm that they do and are easily whipped up into a feeding frenzy like sharks given the smell of blood. Crowd behaviour is a scary phenomenon. The Nuremberg rallies, Tory party conferences and football crowds all demonstrate the way in which masses of people in the same place can behave like one organism with only one identity. A crowd has no conscience and no capacity for shame, it allows the baser instincts of normal individuals to take over.
Do people experience little shame today? It seems that most behaviours, as long as they are legal are publicly accepted and that shaming is an externally inflicted thing based on the prejudices of others and the capacity of humans beings for hatred and shared bigotry.
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