Shame, guilt, and violence

Social Research, Winter, 2003 by James Gilligan

The first recorded wars in Western history reveal the same motivation. The Trojan war described in the Iliad was fought over the issue of shame: Menelaus was shamed when Paris seduced his wife and absconded with her, and the only means his culture provided for wiping out the shame was virtually unlimited violence--going to war, burning Troy to the ground, killing all the men, and raping and/or enslaving the women and children. In fact, sensitivity to shame, and the wish to eradicate it even at the risk of one's own death, was such a central determinant of the action of the characters in the Homeric epics that the great classics scholar Eric Dodds (1957), drawing on Ruth Benedict's (1946) anthropological concept, described the society depicted in them as a "shame culture." A virtually identical motivation is described as the cause of the first war described in the Bible. The thirty-fourth chapter of the book of Genesis tells how the sons of Jacob killed all the men of a neighboring tribe, the Hivites, because one of their princes had sex with their sister Dinah. When Jacob rebukes them for thus provoking other tribes to attack them, his sons make it clear that was much less important to them than wiping out the dishonor done to them in the only way in which it could be, namely, by means of violence. What was intolerable to them was that otherwise their sister could be considered a common whore--which in that "shame culture" would destroy their honor.

As I read further, I began to realize that this insight about shame as the psychological cause of violence had been expressed centuries and even millennia ago, not only in the great myths of our tradition, but also in the writings of the great philosophers and theologians. Both Aristotle (Rhetoric, 1378-80) and Aquinas (Summa Theologica, I-II Q. 47, II-II Q. 41), for example, clearly stated that the cause of the desire to assault or injure others is the anger that is caused by feeling that they have been "slighted" by them, and therefore feel justified in gaining revenge for the slight. Both of these thinkers make it clear that what they mean by "slighting" is exactly what I am describing here: insulting, ridiculing, disdaining, dishonoring; in short, any behavior that shames people by treating them with contempt and disrespect, as though they are unimportant or insignificant. Hegel went so far as to consider the desire for recognition to be the motor (that is, the motivator) of history, which is itself largely a story of recurrent violence.

Recognition--re-cognition--is both etymologically and psychologically related to re-spect; the former derives from Latin words meaning to "know again," to "re-know," so to speak, and the latter from words meaning to "see again," to take a second look. Both words imply that the person is important enough to be worthy of a second look, and well-known enough--renowned enough--to be worthy of being re-known, ac-knowledged, re-cognized. We have all read in the newspapers about obscure, unknown individuals who committed horrific acts of violence just so that we would read about them in the newspapers, and they would thus be recognized. But on the larger scale of world history, Hegel's principle reminds us that those who did not have the talent, the opportunity, or the temperament to gain recognition for constructive cultural achievements in the arts or sciences can gain it from engaging in the most violent and destructive behavior, as the apparently unending series of mass murderers shows--Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and on and on. Indeed, the more widespread the violence, the wider the recognition. Violent people know that violence is an effective means of getting other people's attention: you have to pay attention to someone who is coming to kill you (the German word for attention, Achtung, also means respect).