Sameer Rahim on why too much or too little shame can be bad for you
Among families from the Indian subcontinent, the only thing worse than being shameful is to be shameless. When you do something wrong, shame is automatically brought on you and your family; to be told that you are "shameful" is a reminder of this obvious truth. What really arouses general anger, however, is for a person to face his guilt without blushing: not even acknowledging his shame.
There was recent controversy over the Indian version of Big Brother (named Big Boss) when a girl massaged the feet of a male housemate. Her mother sent a message - without embarrassment - reminding her that "you only touch the feet of gods". When it became clear that the girl felt ashamed, the incident was forgotten.
Our Celebrity Big Brother fiasco is different for a number of reasons. Racism is one of the few social taboos left in British society (non-racist bullying is apparently acceptable entertainment). Since she was evicted, Jade Goody has not confessed with downcast eyes, but instead played aggressively for our sympathy. Like for Milton's Satan, another victim turned bully, pride stops her from making a complete admission of guilt.
Victims of prejudice feel the prickle of unease when they are derided for their unpronounceable names or foreign ways. But what happens if you are trying to run an empire as well? In his essay "Shooting an Elephant" (1936), George Orwell writes instructively about life as a policeman in Burma. He has come to hate colonialism, but is mocked by "sneering yellow faces" when an opponent trips him in a football match, and is laughed at by Buddhist priests on street corners.
When an elephant suddenly runs wild, a crowd of two thousand gathers behind him, urging him to shoot the animal. He doesn't want to kill the elephant - which is now calmly chomping grass - but a welling disquiet leads him to fire. Orwell admits that he shoots the beast "solely to avoid looking like a fool": something for which he is rightly ashamed. Yet what is more disturbing is that guilt and shame make him feel that "the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts".
In Salman Rushdie's Shame (1983), a novel that fantastically recreates the history of Pakistan, the narrator empathises with a Pakistani man who kills his daughter for consorting with a white boy: "We who have grown up on a diet of shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to peoples living in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the implacable altars of their pride."
Perhaps Rushdie's narrator is too quick to excuse supposedly godless societies, given that what we glamorously label a crime of passion - shooting your wife and her lover, for instance - is also a kind of honour killing. None the less, he is on to something when he writes that the "roots of violence" lie in "shamelessness, shame".
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