What Is Guilt?

Harvey Weinstein has no shame. Charley Rose has no shame. Bill Clinton and Kevin Spacey and Brett Ratner and Al Franken and Roy Moore clearly lack a sense of shame.

As of now they have all been called out and exposed. Most of them have seen their reputations obliterated. As we see this we ought at the least to understand that the therapy culture war on shame, its effort to rid our people of their sense of modesty, propriety, decorum and humility… among other virtues… has produced a cultural monstrosity.

Those who have promoted shamelessness believe, to the depths of their marrow, that we can regulate human behavior by enhancing our sense of guilt. And, by the by, with an extra dollop of empathy. In truth the culture of guilt is running wild in America. People are not encouraged to behave well. They are attacked, excoriated, indicted and punished for committing thought crimes—that is, for racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic expressions. Punishing people for getting it wrong tells them nothing about how to get it right.

In many ways the worst part of the current debate is how profoundly ignorant it is. I am not speaking about the man or woman on the street, who does not spend his or her days pondering arcane philosophical matters. I am thinking of psycho professionals, people like Brene Brown, a woman who pretends to be an expert on shame while knowing nothing about it. Brown knows that shame feels bad and thus that we should rid ourselves of it, and of any concern for how we look to others. Take that thought to a logical extreme and you have Harvey Weinstein dropping a bath towel in front of an unwilling aspiring actress and you have a generation of teenagers who have so completely overcome their sense of shame that they are sending naked pictures to whomever.

Of course, there is no excuse for such ignorance. After all, Ruth Benedict defined the terms clearly over seven decades ago in her masterful book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. I wrote about it myself in my books on Saving Face and The Last Psychoanalyst. As for the concept of empathy, which somehow has managed to weasel its way into discussions of shame, Paul Bloom has explained it well in his book, Against Empathy.

And yet, Dr. Perri Klass’s article about how guilt and empathy will naturally produce good behavior bristles with ignorance. She properly chooses to consult with people who are recognized as experts in the field. Yet, we discover that nearly none of them can think straight. Or better, can think at all.

To be extra specially clear, guilt is a form of anxiety. It arrives when you have done something wrong, that is, when you have broken a taboo, when you have transgressed, when you have committed a crime and when you are anticipating punishment. You can of course be pronounced guilty and suffer the punishment without feeling especially badly about anything more than getting caught. And, as I have often pointed out, anticipating punishment does not do a very good job of preventing you from committing crimes. It puts a price on transgression. And it sets down a level of risk. If you are willing to accept the risk and to do the time, you are more likely to commit the crime. Once you have paid your debt to society, as the saying goes, you are free to go out and commit more crimes. Considering recidivism rates, that is what most criminals do.

Freud understood guilt perfectly well and made it the centerpiece of his psychological theorizing. In this theory your wishes, to commit patricide and incest, were criminal. You might control them by feeling guilty but only up to a point. Most Freudian theory involves becoming more aware of your criminal impulses and paying them off by what Freud called symbolic castration… that is, a form of recycled penance. It had nothing to do with empathy.

Guilt does not tell you what you should do. It tells you what not to do. Doing the right thing involves following codes of good behavior, having good manners, being considerate in the terms that your culture dictates. It has nothing to do with empathy.

In truth, as Paul Bloom argued persuasively, feelings of empathy can turn you into a sadist. When you empathize with someone who is being unjustly injured, you will want to punish the person who has committed the injury. Your empathy will turn you into a raving sadist.

At the least, this should be clear. You cannot define the concept of guilt without understanding how it functions in our culture. And since we have a criminal justice system that determines guilt and not guilt, we must if we are to be semi-coherent assure that our definitions are consistent with the way the term is used there.

Unfortunately, such is not the case. Klass looks to child development experts and she finds nothing but confusion. She does not say it this way, but you should compare these theories of guilt with the theory I laid out above:

Guilt can be a complicated element in the parent-child equation; we feel guilty, they feel guilty, we may make them feel guilty and then feel guilty about that. But certain kinds of guilt are a healthy part of child development.

Tina Malti, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who has studied the development of guilt in children, considers guilt an emotion similar to empathy.

“Moral guilt is healthy, good to develop,” she said. “It helps the child refrain from aggression, antisocial behavior.”

No mention of breaking laws. No mention of criminal behavior. No mention of anything that makes any sense at all.  No mention of parents telling their children Not to do something. No mention, in other words, of No. No mention of a child's testing boundaries.

At times guilt can deter someone from sticking up the corner bodega, but that involves a complex calculus of risk and reward. What are the chances of getting caught? What are the advantages of committing the crime? What will the price be if he is caught?

The psycho theorists believe that guilt makes children treat people kindly. They are wrong. It might tell people not to hurt each other, or not to break the dishes, but guilt does not teach them the good manners, the considerate and tactful customary behaviors that constitute kindness. Children learn to behave well because they want to belong, because they emulate their betters and because they want to grow up.

Guilt might play a part, but the wish to grow up is far more important:

… around age 6. By then, she said, most children report guilt in response to transgressions, and that can help them treat other people kindly. “There’s lots of evidence that healthy guilt promotes children’s prosocial behavior,” she said.

It doesn’t. Guilt does deter some forms of antisocial behavior, if the price of getting caught is too high. But it does not teach prosocial behaviors.