Controlling Crime in Urban America

Writing in the City Journal Derek Lux recommends that we try to get control of our national crime problem by shaming criminals. It is, dare I say, a good idea. It is so good, in fact, that I recommended it in my book Saving Face, in 1996. I further elaborated on the subject in my book The Last Psychoanalyst. I have added some pertinent analysis in my new book, Can’t We All Just Get Along:?

We owe the distinction between shame and guilt cultures to Ruth Benedict. Her book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was commissioned during World War II, by the War Department. At a time when we were preparing to occupy Japan, our leaders thought it a good idea to learn more about Japanese culture. They turned to Benedict and received some cogent analysis of cultural differences, although, as I remarked in my book on Saving Face, she was wrong to consider America to be a guilt culture. 

In a shame culture the ultimate sanction is ostracism, expulsion from the group. In a guilt culturethe ultimate sanction is incarceration and imprisonment, along with various forms of corporal punishment.

As I defined the terms, shame involves not doing what you are supposed to do. Guilt arrives when you do something that you were not supposed to do. Shame involves following a myriad of rules, from good table manners to proper diction. Guilt applies when you transgress a prohibition or taboo, when you break the law. 

Benedict argued that America is a guilt culture while Japan is a shame culture. As I replied in my book on saving face, this is incorrect. 

The closest Western equivalent to Japanese shame culture exists in Great Britain. After all, both have formal and ritualized tea ceremonies. A television show like Downton Abbey showed us a shame culture in action. And that does not just mean shaming criminals and other miscreants, but it more importantly involves following strict codes of decorum and propriety. 

We shame criminals, but we also shame people who have bad manners, as we are currently doing to the hapless and pathetic Pennsylvania senator, John Fetterman. In a shame culture people follow dress codes; they follow rules. They do not consider that their attire and other aspects of their appearance should serve the purposes of self-expression.

In a shame culture group membership matters more than individual expression. After all, you cannot dread ostracism if you do not belong to a group. And yet, if you define yourself outside of all groupings, you will be largely immune from public shaming. Which is the point.

Belonging to a group involves conformity and uniformity; it involves following a dress code and having good manners. The result is a cohesive society.

But, it also involves reputation, how others see you. If you do not care about your reputation you do not care if you are considered a pariah by your community.

Of course, Benedict might have been a prophet before her time. Of late, America has lost its way. It has lost its good manners and sense of decorum, replacing them with permanent political psychodrama. The aberrant urge toward multiculturalism proposes that different cultures practice different manners and follow different customs.

The result is social disaggregation; it would be like running an army where each individual had the right to wear his own uniform. 

So, we have largely lost our sense of shame. When people are not governed by their sense of shame, that is, their moral sense, the default is policing. That is, guilt culture.

In truth, our very own therapy culture has rejected shame culture. Freudian theory is based on a guilt/punishment narrative. Therapists routinely tell patients that they have nothing to be ashamed of, that they should let it all hang out, that they should advertise their sexuality, openly and honestly.

Having a sense of shame does not just mean following the dress code. It also means keeping your private matters and your private parts out of public circulation. In a shame culture people do not display their intimate feelings in public. In our culture they are excoriated if they do not do so. If they do not do so they are said to be lacking in empathy.

In a shame culture people take pride in their country. They are happy to belong. In a guilt culture they read American history into a guilt/punishment narrative, one where America is an organized criminal conspiracy, where its victories are crimes that require penance, and where those who failed were really crime victims.

One would like to say that the woke left has a monopoly on the notion that America is a criminal conspiracy, but certain Republicans are promoting the same idea with their notion that elections have been stolen.

People who hate America reject its heroes and its history. They reject patriotism and pride in their  country. They end up joining a faction where their actions become part of a grand historical drama. 

Lux is quite right to suggest that today’s criminal gangs have no sense of shame. He is right to suggest that the only way to gain control of this organized thievery is for community leaders to shame the miscreants. Of course, if people do not care about being proud Americans, they cannot be shamed.

And yet, certain communities consider that criminal gangs are like factions, doing it for justice. Shaming would only work if the criminals and the communities that spawned them felt like part of the country. Since they do not, it will not work. 

People who believe that they have a right to steal, because they are victims of American bigotry, will not be deterred by shaming. They can only be deterred by force, by incarceration. The fact that the local authorities refuse to crack down on these crimes tells everyone that they are not breaking the laws. They are taking what should rightfully be theirs. Their crimes are not crimes, but are justice. 

It is not so much that these criminals are not considered to be shameful. It is rather that they are not considered to be criminals.

When a Barack Obama tells them to stay angry, he is telling them not to conform to social customs, not to practice decorum or propriety. He is telling them to join the vanguard of a revolutionary elite, and to take what white America has stolen from them. 

Before we try to get a grip on the urban crime wave by shaming miscreants, we need to recover our social cohesion, our sense of belonging to a great nation, our practice of respecting the flag and the nation’s heroes. If such is unrealistic, then the best solution to urban crime is more effective policing.

And yet, even that now seems to be a pipe dream.

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