Nobody is guilty when everybody carries the blame

JENNIFER Jacquet writes in her book "Is Shame Necessary?"that it's shame that nudged Bill Gates to build the largest charitable organisation in the world after Microsoft's image was tarnished by the high-profile anti-trust trial of the mid-1990s. As further proof that shame is necessary in life, she quotes from Martin Luther King that non-cooperation and boycotts were merely means to awaken the sense of moral shame in the opponent. Thus the power of shame forces an individual to see himself through the eyes of others. When he is ashamed, it means he knows he has reasons to feel embarrassed.

That knowledge of embarrassment makes a difference. C.G. Jung described shame as a soul-eating emotion. It works like the diesel generator in our apartment buildings, kicking in every time power shuts down. Any moral failure is meant to create moral compunction in a sensible mind. Orson Scott tells us in "Ender's Shadow" that suicide is not when someone wishes to die but when someone wishes to hide.

The history of public shaming goes back in time. Many countries have publicly punished criminals by stoning, public hangings, and witch trials. There were times when women, who committed adultery, were forced to wear a red letter "A" as a symbol of their infidelity. Similarly, during World War II, the Jews were forced to wear gold stars. Back then shame was when people had to wear their sins on their sleeves.

Even to this day Sharia courts in our distant villages continue to issue fatwas, largely limited to sexual aberrations and primarily targeting women. The accused get their heads shaved and they are flogged; in several cases aborted attempts were made to stone them to death. Cutting through the clutter of prejudices, the underlying principle of this miscarriage of justice is to enforce the rule of shame. People going against social norms are compelled to do public penance.

But the most shameful shame of our time is that shame itself has gone shamelessly out of style. While it's still available in limited edition for adulterers and fornicators, shame as an emotion has been banished from our lives. If shame is taken by its lexical meaning, where do we find anybody around us who is troubled by his or her consciousness of guilt, shortcoming or impropriety? The entire concept of right and wrong has been turned into a casino business. The only thing that matters is winning, losers having no moral ground.

It's perhaps redundant to identify any particular group of people to prove that point! We have got criminal cops, jaundiced journalists, jumpy judges, derelict doctors, esurient engineers, treacherous teachers, banal bureaucrats and bodacious businessmen, all of whom are convinced that shame is nothing but a useless fig leaf to cover naked ambitions. Adventure comes to them from ambition as naturally as rivers begin in mountains.  

Like beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, shame lies in the soul of the repentant. Repentance comes from the admission of guilt, if not in public but in one's own private reflection. And that reflection arises from honesty, which hunts down moral lapses inside the conscience of an individual like a posse goes after an outlaw.

Conscience is the gravitational force of the moral universe, and it gives weight to scruples to keep them grounded. Shame and guilt are its two components, where the former reflects how we feel about ourselves and the latter involves the awareness that our actions have injured someone else. These two emotions, more or less, cover the entire moral spectrum. He who doesn't feel ashamed doesn't feel guilty, equally true the other way around.

Neither of these emotions works in us. We are living in a country where doing wrong and being wronged aren't part of the social discourse anymore. In this country, fake freedom fighters sit in the government, bribe-takers strut and fret like peacocks, 5,000 alleged fake master's and doctoral certificate holders work in the top echelons of public and private sectors, and loan defaulters dominate politics and finance. Nobody is accountable for his or her speech or action, as convenience sublimates conviction.

Instead of shame, we wear our shamelessness as a badge of honour. Living beyond means and pretending to have more weight than worth, the emphasis is on packaging but not on product. We flaunt our mischief, ignorance, and incompetence in everything we do or say as ludicrous as someone covering the head when his bottom is exposed.

In the 1998 Hollywood movie, 'Dr. Doolittle', a young boy asks why the dogs sniff each other's behinds, and his own dog replies that it's their version of a handshake. That handshake now pervades our society where nobody feels guilty because everybody carries blame. Each of us is zealously guarding the guilt of others to deflect his own.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is the editor of the weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star. You can reach him at badrul151@yahoo.com