Showing posts with label internalisation of cruelty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internalisation of cruelty. Show all posts

11 Jul 2019

Guilt-Shame-Fear (Notes on the Spectrum of Cultures)

Henri Vidal: Caïn venant de tuer son frère Abel (1896)


Someone writes in response to a recent post on the subject of pride:

'I don't quite understand what your problem is. Would you prefer it if, rather than feeling proud of who and what they are, individuals who have historically been not only marginalised but victimised due to their sexual orientation or racial identity, went back to experiencing themselves in terms of guilt, shame and fear?' 

This is a reasonable question and I'm not going to pretend that any of these emotions - typically associated with negative self-evaluation - are particularly pleasant for anyone to experience.

But, having said that, it's interesting to note that cultural anthropologists have categorised three distinct types of social order founded upon the individual's sense of guilt, shame, and fear and shown how these feelings - rooted in our evolutionary history - can very successfully be refined and exploited. 

In a shame society, for example, keeping up appearances and retaining one's honour is all-important; the prospect of publicly losing face, or the threat of being made an outcast, is what maintains the smooth running of the system. This can be contrasted with a fear society, in which control is secured with overt physical force; an individual who steps out of line will not merely be shamed or ostracised, but violently punished for their actions.

In a guilt society - which for those of us living within a Christian moral culture is the type of society with which we will be most familiar - the key is to construct a subject with a moral conscience; i.e., a subject capable of knowing the difference between good and evil and who accepts responsibility for their own actions, having been endowed with a free will. Judgement comes from within and the threat of punishment exists not only in this world and this life, but in the next world or afterlife.

It's possible - and may very well be desirable - to think of a future society that isn't located on this cultural spectrum of guilt-shame-fear. Indeed, having read Reich, Marcuse, and Deleuze, I'm well aware of such possibilities. However, these days I'm increasingly sympathetic to Freud's pessimistic view that there will always be a fundamental tension of some kind between the requirements of civilisation and the individual's wish for instinctive freedom.

In other words, it now seems to me doubtful that any society can function without some mechanism of repression and that neurosis, discontent and feelings we might prefer to do without are simply the price we pay for living alonside others; that culture is always synonymous with the internalisation of cruelty.


Notes 

Darwin regarded shame, for example, as a universal human trait that speaks of our common evolutionary history as a species, even if he carefully avoided upsetting his Victorian readership by discussing the radical implications of this (something that Nietzsche certainly didn't shy away from doing, declaring that not only were our precious feelings ultimately of animal origin, but so too were our moral values). See Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872): click here to read online.

The idea of distinct social orders founded upon guilt and shame was popularized by Ruth Benedict in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Houghton Mifflin, 1946), who studied Japan (as an example of the latter) in contrast with the USA (as an example of the former). 

For Freud's views on the self and society, see his classic work Civilization and Its Discontents (Penguin Books, 2002). 


19 Mar 2017

Fish Out of Water (Notes on Evolution and Cruelty)



According to a report in the New Scientist, blenny fish - fed-up with the predatory behaviour of their aquatic neighbours - are abandoning life beneath the waves of the South Pacific Ocean and gradually relocating to dry land. It's 400 million years after others of their kind first made the move and kick-started an evolutionary process that eventually produced us. But still, better late than never and I wish 'em the best of British.

The case is interesting because scientists have never been entirely certain why fish first chose to exit the sea and crawl gasping onto terra firma. After studying several species of blenny, however, researchers at the University of New South Wales have concluded that it's most likely an attempt to avoid being eaten by bigger fish, such as flounders. This desire to escape is an understandably strong impetus.

Of course, it's not all sweetness and light up here on land and there are still dangers awaiting for the blennies as they shuffle around the rocks - such as bird attacks. But predation risk is significantly less, however, than it is underwater. In fact, once they pick up their piscine courage and make the full transition - developing stronger tail fins so as to be able to leap about more successfully - their chances of being eaten drop by about two-thirds (66%).

Further, moving onto land has additional benefits for blennies; holes in the rocks, for example, provide conveniently sheltered spaces for laying eggs. So it's really a move worth considering seriously if you're a small fish. In fact, one is surprised that it hasn't been tried more often and by more types of fish other than the estimated 30-odd families that have made the crossing between worlds. 

That said, Nietzsche reminds us in the Genealogy that it is never easy for any creature to make such a fundamental change. For fish, becoming land animals was as difficult, as painful, and as terrifying as it was for the animal man to become a creature capable of making promises; a creature restrained by a morality of custom and subject to an internalisation of cruelty; a creature made regular and predictable and weighed down by bad conscience; a creature, in short, made human, all too human.    

Like us, the blenny fish is the result of millions of years of evolution. But only man has shaped himself through thousands of years of self-torture; indeed, this is what we have had the longest practice doing and wherein our genius as a species lies.    


See:

Alice Klein, 'These fish are evolving right now to become land-dwellers', New Scientist (16 March 2017): click here to read.

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), particularly the Second Essay.