It is commonplace within social science to see early state structures as local warlord entities who uphold the social order by threats of violence and physical dominance. The main emotional regime is hence based on fear. If you remove the fear of the warlord, or the fear of outside threats the warlord is protecting you from, society falls apart—as has happened many times throughout history. The earliest state structures can therefore be said to be governed by the fear-regime . If you consider the gruesome dictates of early codes of laws, such as Hammurabi’s code (dating back to about 1754 BCE, in Babylonia), you find all sorts of grim corporal punishment and death penalty for relatively small transgressions—the fear-regime in action. Grim as it is.
At the time of Hammurabi, fear simply remained the most efficient means available to governments to regulate people’s behavior. But as societies grew larger and more complex, new social technologies came online—such as honor codes, ethics and organized religion. Fear and violence as regulatory means thus got supplemented by abstract ideas of right and wrong, pure and impure. Beginning in the 1st millennium BCE, in both the Abrahamic religions in the West and the Buddhist [43] and Confucian traditions in the East, we see an increased emphasis on moral purity and hence upon guilt . Then, the heroes were no longer proud warriors and conquerors, but saints and sages: those who are free from sin and who serve higher, often divine, purposes.
Supplementing a fear-regime with a guilt-regime offers notable competitive advantages to the governments who master it competently. Guilt is, first of all, more “cost-efficient” than fear. Coercing people into following the law and paying their taxes requires expensive weapons and soldiers. Paying a priest to tell folks they’ll accumulate bad karma and go to hell if they don’t behave nicely can be done rather cheaply. In addition, since people generally do what they please if they believe they can get away with it, fear of physical punishment will only be efficient as long as the risk of being caught is sufficiently high. No spear, no fear. And since it’s impossible to survey and patrol all of society all of the time, there will always be areas and situations where fear is less efficient. A guilt-regime, however, doesn’t require the continuous presence of soldiers to be efficient. If the socialization process of a person has been successful, emotions of guilt arise automatically from the judgments of others whenever they do something prohibited—all without any direct interference by rulers. All that’s needed is our own guilt-stricken soul.
The guilt-regime also has another perk up its sleeve: It can increase the likelihood of people treating each other better. Fear is a rather rudimentary means of regulating behavior: “do this, don’t do that, or else!” Given the high costs of maintaining the trustworthiness of the “or else”, it’s only economically viable to limit its use to things such as ensuring that people don’t kill each other or steal each other’s property. Threatening people with force if they won’t treat one another kindly or help each other in times of need just isn’t very likely to work.
Religious leaders like Jesus and the Buddha argued against the rule of sheer force and recast the theologies of their times in more egalitarian and forgiving terms: The God of the New Testament is less fear mongering and more forgiving than the one in the Old Testament—Yahweh was originally the deity of war in the pre-Judaic Hebrew pantheon. But the God of the New Testament is still more demanding when it comes to honest devotion and purity of intentions. And the Buddha places greater emphasis on personal responsibility for one’s own enlightenment. The fear-regime is thus supplemented by a guilt-regime, which partly diminishes the logic of fear in everyday life.
The guilt-regime can even be militarily advantageous. The traditional Japanese warrior code, the Bushido, let the minds and bodies of the Samurai be trained to let honor and loyalty trump the fear of pain and death. Such codes of honor and valor work by disciplining the mind and letting guilt (and shame) defeat the more basic emotion of fear. This leads to military strength and social cohesion, which makes for collective competitive advantages.
The transition to the third stage, the shame-regime , which is tied to the emergence of modern society, has been extensively described by the social theorist Norbert Elias (who never employed this terminology, but whose sociology certainly feeds into this model). When Elias lived in London as an exile (a German Jew who fled the Nazis), he sat down to work in the British Museum. There he came across a wide array of etiquette guides from different epochs and noticed a striking pattern: The etiquette became increasingly refined as Western Europe modernized. Whereas the early guides contained rather crude suggestions, such as not wiping one’s nose in the table cloth and not burping in public, the later ones revolved around more subtle things such as the correct use of cutlery and how to entertain exquisite conversations.
From these observations, linked to an analysis of the political developments at the courts, Elias formulated his theory of the civilizing process (presented in a 1939 masterpiece with the same title). [44] What you see here is that modern life entails a transition into a behavioral self-regulation at the royal courts, into sophisticated “manners” instead of knightly “valor”. These ideals later spread to the bourgeoisie (as these sought to emulate the nobility), and then to society as a whole as the middle class grew, emphasizing qualities of personal propriety and a “dignified” or “cultured” or “civilized” demeanor of ordinary citizens in urban life.
Elias shows us how the strong norms of cleanliness (showering, showing up at work in a ironed shirt every day, eating carefully, avoiding to let out bodily sounds or odors, keeping our homes neat and tidy) make an entrance and take root as modern society emerges. The fact that these norms hold people so firmly in their grip today can be seen as a result of this civilizing process. And the way we keep a polite distance, respect the privacy of strangers and generally keep our neurotic thoughts to ourselves can also be seen as outflows of this emotional regime.
If anyone breaches any of these codes without a good excuse (I’m a comedian; this is a bachelor party; this was a social media experiment or flashmob; you’re on Candid Camera!; this is a therapy session, etc.), they do so at the risk of being viewed as weird, creepy or at least very unreliable. Instead of fearing the warlord, or feeling guilty before God or the community, modern people self-regulate according to a large host of mechanisms of shame and embarrassment. The obsession we have with embarrassment, in everything from movie comedies to reality shows to radio talks where people call in to share their embarrassing stories, serves to underline just how pervasive the shame-regime is in modern society.
Of course, shame exists in pre-modern societies as well, but it does not have the same degree of pervasiveness and importance as a regulator of everyday life interactions. For this reason, it is hardly surprising that the great sociologist of modern everyday life, Erving Goffman, focused so much on the role of shame and embarrassment in our interactions—as have many of the contemporary students of the sociology of emotions, notably Thomas Scheff. [45]
Again, it’s not that fear and guilt entirely disappeared; it’s just that they have been pushed further into the background. Fear and guilt are still the means used by the justice system to prevent people from breaking the law, but this plays a minimal role in most people’s lives. In functional modern societies, violence and public condemnation are simply minor concerns to the majority compared to that of being seen as a loser, a slob, a hypocrite, being fat and ugly, not being sufficiently refined and cultivated, etc.
That modern people spend so much time and energy on such concerns may appear petty and unnecessary, and to a large extent it is. However, the shame-regime does regulate a multitude of subtle behaviors that are needed for society to run smoothly.
Modern society depends on a much greater amount of daily interactions among a higher number of people than in any earlier soci
ety. For this high level of social complexity to be possible, it is required that people interact with each other as little friction as possible, with little external regulation. In such a setting it is crucial to have a shame-regime that impels people to be more considerate: to treat one another with a minimum of respect and politeness, respect other’s personal space, not saying offensive things, not to smell, not making a lot of noise, not showing anger, not throw garbage around, and so on.
This is quite important when millions of strangers with different beliefs, values, social status and interests must go about their daily business with one another in a hectic and stressful urban environment without ending up in quarrels and fights all the time. And it is something the fear- and guilt-regimes just aren’t suitable for. After all, sending in the cavalry or issuing a fatwa every time someone burps or says something offensive simply isn’t feasible.
So once again we see a clear progression: fear is capable at regulating the most fundamental behaviors needed for society to function (preventing murder, theft, etc. make people pay taxes), guilt can make people treat each other in more benign way, and finally we have shame which can make people more considerate towards each other. Again, we also see how the later emotional regime is more cost-efficient than its predecessor: from the very expensive monopoly of violence of the fear-regime, over the less costly religious institutions of the guilt-regime, to the almost free-of-charge social norms of the shame-regime.
The transition to the shame-regime became much more pronounced in the general population during the 20th century. Shame and embarrassment may ultimately be less powerful than guilt and fear, but they are certainly easier to elicit in people in a world of mass media and an ongoing debate in a public sphere. During World War One, for instance, there was a clear difference between the propaganda posters of the Germans (emphasizing loyalty, honor and sacrifice) and those of the slightly more modern British and Americans (emphasizing the shame of being the only man not at the front, being a girlish coward “Gee, I wish I were a man, I’d join the navy!” or asking “Are you a man or are you a mouse?” or showing a picture of people contributing to the war effort, asking the viewer “What are you doing?”). These examples all speak to the esteem of the self, to shame. The British propaganda proved especially efficient, and there was even a problem with young boys pretending to be older than they actually were so that they too could go to war. As a result, whole cities and villages all over Britain were emptied of young men at the beginning of the war even though conscription had not been introduced yet.
The way the British government used the shame-regime to bolster its military capabilities during the First World War is actually similar to how modern companies make us buy their products. Commercials often rely upon an elaborate balance between eliciting desire and shame. Because self-esteem is such a prevailing concern in the lives of most modern people, we’re flooded with commercials targeting our insecurities and emotional need for social recognition by tuning into the prevailing shame-regime. We’re thus taught to feel ashamed about a bit of dandruff, being a little fat, having unfashionable clothes, even our hairy armpits (if you’re a woman).
And with that, we enter the new battlefields of modern society: the many struggles to reconstitute the shame-regime; to change which behaviors and identities can and should be shamed, and which to be liberated from it.
You see, the struggles for “freedom” change at each stage. Initially, the fear-regime was contested by various monopolies on violence that challenged each other in mortal combat to determine who should be feared, who’s freedom should prevail: the independent Greek city-state or the Persian Empire, Roman law or Attila the Hun, the Islamic caliphate or Genghis Khan—at stake is the kind of “freedom” that Mel Gibson yelled about at the top of his lungs in the movie Braveheart (disregarding the fact that Braveheart is notorious for being one the most historically incorrect movies of all time).
Then, as the fear-regime waned in favor of the guilt-regime with the great world religions and wisdom traditions, the struggle began to define and redefine what kind of guilt-regime should prevail: who does God condemn, what should be seen as sin, whose moral teachings should we follow, and so on. This is where we find the great schisms between Sunni and Shia Islam and the Roman Catholic Church and its Greek Orthodox counterpart, the many conflicts between Christians and Muslims, the brutal crackdown on heretics during the Middle Ages, and the religious wars between Protestants and Catholics.
Today, as we’ve killed God and freed ourselves from sin, the great struggles for freedom revolve around the issue of defining the mechanisms of shame and stigma: enter the queer movements, feminism, the recent #metoo phenomenon, in which women cast off the shame of revealing sexual abuse, campaigns against slut-shaming, fat-shaming, stigmatization of people with disabilities, you name it. They all seek to alter the everyday games of shame and acceptance.
The struggle for freedom has thus shifted from what society ought to consider crimes, to more subtle and intimate aspects: not being shamed as a slut, being fat, having hairy armpits. That the gay parades gather under the banner of “pride”—the opposite of shame—is a telling sign of it being an attempt to redefine and overthrow the shame-regime.
And when modern societies hold their leaders responsible for scandals and misuses of power, it is the role of the media to publicly shame them. This form of behavioral sanction is more common than outright legal prosecution. Officials avoid social and political faux pas and getting “involved” with the wrong people, as these things can end promising careers overnight. Shame controls our leaders, even the rich and powerful.
Hence, there is a progression from fear-regimes, to guilt-regimes, to shame-regimes. At each stage it can be argued that the degrees of personal freedom grow. But at each stage you also get another struggle, another playing field—another kind of freedom.
Chapter 5:
FREEDOM’S BEYOND
Freedom, as we have now established, is not a question of either or. We will never reach the point of absolute freedom, and never will the quest for higher freedom come to an end.
Whenever we obtain one form of freedom, another kind appears at the horizon. So when it today seems as if our journey towards freedom has come to its final conclusion, “the end of history”, it is simply because we have reached a temporary plateau from where we are yet to see what lies beyond—a new and higher plateau we may fail to understand because it is another and unfamiliar kind of freedom.
Freedom is inherently a highly developmental matter. It follows, as we have seen, a pattern of subsequently obsoleted forms of emotional control we humans exercise upon one another as we interact in society.
In this chapter we will thus investigate what lies beyond the emotional regimes that prevail today; an inquiry into how the current shame-regime is gradually waning in favor of an emerging Sklavenmoral -regime.
In-formalization and Nordic Envy
Modern society entails a kind of “civilizing process”, as Norbert Elias observed, by which new forms of behavioral regulation come online. What Elias did not see coming, however, was the wave of in -formalization (i.e. customs and relations getting less formal) that takes place in late modern societies. Following the 1950s, social life has taken a distinct turn towards the “casual” and informal, but this was not apparent back in 1939 when Elias wrote The Civilizing Process .
We can all bring to mind the relaxed clothing and style of Steve Jobs and the employees at the Apple headquarters or at Google for that matter. Since the social revolutions of the 1960s, life has become increasingly informal: people addressing one another more causally, youth culture taking a more distinct and central position in society and the economy, people being more open about their personal issues, bosses becoming friendlier and recasting themselves as “leaders” who work with “support and empowe
rment” rather than direct supervision, humanities professors dressing “cool”, children being given more liberal upbringings and education.
The social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s and 70s can be viewed as a direct challenge to parts of the shame-regime. Most telling is perhaps, again, the gay movement, which named itself “Pride”—the direct opposite of shame.
In the advanced stages of modern society, people have been working to emancipate themselves from some parts of the shame-regime. This development has perhaps gone the farthest in the Nordic countries, where sexual education is relatively developed, attitudes towards sex relaxed, displays of vulnerability seen as strengths and the relationship to authorities rather casual. It should not surprise us, then, that these societies have begun to display emotional regimes at the next stage: Sklavenmoral.
A well-known feature of Scandinavian culture is the Law of Jante, first proposed by the Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose in 1933. The Law of Jante is a set of attitudes that subtly devalue and ignore people who aspire towards greater achievement, fame and excellence. It is usually taken to be a distinctive cultural trait of Scandinavians, often contrasted with the more self-expressive American culture. But I would suggest that it in fact is the beginnings of a new emotional regime, the Sklavenmoral -regime, in which people are less shamed for their weaknesses, and more for their strengths and ambitions.
The Law of Jante states as follows:
You’re not to think you are anything special.
You’re not to think you are as good as we are.
You’re not to think you are smarter than we are.
You’re not to imagine yourself better than we are.
You’re not to think you know more than we do.
You’re not to think you are more important than we are.
Nordic Ideology Page 13
