Shame and Punishment
For much of human history, we have opted to shame and punish aberrant behavior, and it seems to make it go away. That tactic works for teaching children what is socially acceptable and what is not, and it can prime and constrain people to behave the way we want them to. But when it is a deep-seated tendency, these surface-level tactics don’t work. They are like lopping off the top of a weed while its root system grows underground.
It is lazy parenting to shout and threaten to get what you want. It may work for a while, but in the end, your children grow up to avoid your anger and resist you tactically. Michel Foucault explains in his book, Discipline and Punish, how public humiliations and executions were very popular for centuries — stockades, hangings, and beheadings — but eventually they began to be seen as barbaric and reflect badly not on the punished but the punisher — the government. Nowadays we still conduct executions in some states, but do so quietly behind closed doors with less painful and less gory procedures.
What have we lost with the removal of public ridicule and execution? Perhaps the impulsive desire of human beings to hate others. We seem to do it naturally enough on social media. We project all the evil in the world upon a billionaire or a politician and if they were being tarred and feathered, we would probably join in on kicking them. But what’s the difference between this behavior and lynching or a witch-burning? We don’t trust the trial process, we want blood, because without punishment, without that symbolic destruction of the sin of the world, we are left with this anxious feeling that there are broken things in the world that might not only be my responsibility but partially my fault.
With no such release of pressure, we brood; we look for new targets who deserve to be sacrificed to the gods. “There’s a rich guy who seems to benefit while others suffer; I think he must benefit BY the suffering of others and is therefore evil. What other dirt can I dig up on him? Oh, look! This person says he’s a pedophile! That feels good to declare! It must be true! Oh, this person wants to defend him? He must be a pedophile too! More people to lump together with the evil in society that must be destroyed.”
This is such a universal mental pattern that it shows up over and over again in world history — wars, genocides, holocausts — motivated or justified by this myth of cleansing our sins through the blood of another. The Romans used to do this every winter solstice with the celebration of Saturnalia, a harvest festival of great indulgence that included the wining and dining and pleasuring and, eventually, the killing of a stranger to symbolically cleanse the people of their excess. When Constantine combined the Christian holidays with the Roman ones, Saturnalia morphed into Christmas, and the crucifixion of Jesus is now celebrated under the name of the Roman goddess of spring and renewal, Easter. It is a deeply pagan myth that has existed in world cultures for millennia. Many Christians today believe that Jesus died to cleanse us of our sins. And many non-Christians still operate on this myth subconsciously, seeking out a symbolic savior and a sacrifice to do the work for us. We still indulge and we still project our collective evils upon others and symbolically destroy them. The latest iteration is cancel culture, in which the accused is publicly destroyed without a trial, and we feel like we are making progress without evidence to prove it.
The sad reality is that it doesn’t work. After the blood has been spilled, the evil in the world remains, and we still haven’t taken responsibility for it. Racism is systemic, showing up in policy, culture, psychology, history, and economics. You can’t just shame it away. Sexism is built into our cultural conceptions of masculine and feminine. Homophobia is built into our fears around sexuality and identity, loss of power, and a history of violence and murder. These are wicked problems because their root systems stretch deep into the soil of humanity. To properly weed this garden, we have to do a lot more than blame others. We have to bravely learn what could turn our lives upside down. We have to be willing to have painful conversations with people who we might have been wounded by our actions. We have to be willing to see that we are not the good guy in some stories, and that is deeply against our nature. Perhaps if we started seeing in shades of gray we could recognize that no one is evil incarnate, and projecting evil upon them is just emotional masturbation.
We lock up dangerous people and we attempt to heal those who are simply misguided. But no longer should we allow ourselves the temporal relief of responsibility during the public execution of another. Focus that energy and responsibility instead strategically on the root system of problems and we might stand a chance of actually changing something. Gather everyone together, including the offender, and discuss the feelings and the issues in a form of restorative justice, and we might stand a chance of changing the system. But keep blaming and shaming and punishing like we have for millennia and we will not evolve.