![]() ![]() In that book, she contrasted Japan’s “shame culture” with America’s “guilt culture” as a complex of behaviors that explain certain attributes that, with a nod to the shameless Johnny Rotten, we’ll call cultural tendencies: Shame idealizes the ritualized suicide called seppuku, while a hyperactive sense of guilt overstuffs our prisons today.Ī later generation of psychological anthropologists located shame and guilt along a continuum that extends from the semantic cluster around “sadness,” making the two closer, emotively, than Benedict might have liked. ![]() Ruth Benedict, author of a wartime study of the Japanese mind, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), is often credited as the source of that distinction. I am old enough-for which I feel perhaps a bit of survivor’s guilt, given all those who fell by the wayside in my generation, but certainly no shame-that in my undergraduate field of study, anthropology, I was schooled to believe that a sharp distinction could be drawn between cultures of shame and cultures of guilt. In the case of shame, conversely, the emphasis is on the intrinsic rottenness of the person who committed it. Put another way, punishment in the case of guilt is a judgment on bad behavior. In that light-or, perhaps better, that darkness-a person who has committed an offense need not worry about being punished by an external agent, since he or she is doing plenty of self-punishing. Etymologists hazard that it connects to the Old English word hama, a covering of the sort that one might wear in order to signal penitence. In strictest terms, then, the phrase “Catholic guilt” describes the view that the fear of God, and not the counsel of one’s inner better angel, is what’s going to make us behave-for when God collects on a debt, the vig is always massive. That punishment, externally imposed, thus hinges on a social debt not for nothing does the Old English gylt gloss the Latin debitum, “debt,” in the Lord’s Prayer. “Guilt” has a distant cousin in the Old English word gelt, “money.” It stems from a crime or offense that requires some sort of payment in atonement. Which one depends on who you are and where you came from. If you’re not, you’ll feel one or the other of these systems of admonition. If you’re a sociopath, you won’t feel either. You drink too much at a party, then drive home, merrily exceeding the speed limit.ĭo you feel shame for your behavior, or do you feel guilt? Looks like a hound caught slipping a chop from the table -T.You borrow a book from a friend, knowing full well that you’ll never return it.Looking behind me … as guilty as a murderer whose knife drips blood -Ann Beattie.Looked as guilty as if he’d kicked his grandmother -Raymond Chandler.The heat of shame mounted through her legs and body and sounded in her ears like the sound of sand pouring -Nadine Gordimer. ![]()
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