Have You No Shame?
It depends on your commitment to honor, duty, and accountability.
“I am no longer good through deliberate intent, but by long habit have reached a point where I am not only able to do right, but am unable to do anything but what is right.”
— Seneca, 65
Every day, I’m amazed at how many people view the world in absolutes.
We have so much information at our fingertips, accessible through a few swipes or clicks on the supercomputers we hold in our hands.
Gone are the days that required a trek to the local library, thumbing through the card catalog, where thousands of cards held the secrets of our collective knowledge, held in a warm embrace by shiny oak drawers and cold a metal spindle.
No longer do we need an understanding of the Dewey Decimal System.
And yet, with the ability to connect to individuals and information anywhere across the globe in the blink of an eye, we seem more clueless than ever.
Social media, once the promised land of digital discourse and avowed “public square” of conversation, has devolved into shouting matches, untamed trolls who no longer live only beneath bridges, and personal attacks that range from merely cruel to outright dangerous and even illegal.
In the digital world, familiarity—passing or otherwise—does indeed breed contempt. This is unfortunate, as it ought to breed empathy, with our awareness that there are billions of individual stories and perspectives out there, each with its own set of struggles.
But it’s simply easier to sort and categorize in one of two buckets. Pro or con. Good or evil. My side or your side.
Somewhere out there, we need to be seeking common ground.
Shame Requires a Conscience
This week, President Biden tried to find common ground in a speech on voting rights that are supposed to be afforded to us all under the Constitution (and under subsequent legislation). In doing so, he appealed to the better angels of those who seek to restrict voting by asking,
“Have you no shame?”
That phrase stood out to me.
It is reminiscent of the phrase used by Joseph Welch, a Boston lawyer representing the Army at the hearings in the Senate, led by the crusading Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin.
On June 9, 1954 Welch stood up to the bullying senator live on national television, saying,
“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
Keep in mind, this was four years after Margaret Chase Smith made her famous speech “A Declaration of Conscience,” in which she denounced “the Four Horsemen of Calumny — Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”
Whether asking about shame or decency, it is an arresting question. It pierces the veil of any argument and asks us to consider the dignity of our fellow citizens.
Here’s the thing about shame: it requires you to have a conscience — to feel as if you are breaking a code, whether it’s personal or collective.
“It is not for outward show that the soul is to play its part, but for ourselves within, where no eyes can pierce but our own; there she defends us from the fear of death, of pain, of shame itself”
— Michel de Montaigne, 1580
A sense of shame is the mirror image of a sense of honor. If you fall short of your ideal (or the ideal of a community), you feel shame.
If you have a sense of virtue or integrity, that is.
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