Shame, Reticence, and Common Goods

• In Event: Shame and Other Political Emotions: From Cohesion to Dissent

Abstract

When commentators complain that the youth today do not care about privacy, they seem to mean that so-called “digital natives” are often keen to publicize parts of their lives previously considered private. The is some irony to the fact that at the same time, the pervasive silence of victims of sexual assault is rightly noted as an impediment to justice. The first claim is that reticence, as a norm and practice, is losing or has lost its hold on society; the second is that society is not open enough. Conservative critics lament the former development, calling contemporary society “shameless,” while political progressives and feminists see moving beyond a culture of shame as a requirement of justice and “shamelessness” as a form of liberation. Meanwhile, the use of public shaming as a form of discipline and political action is more pervasive and, thanks to social media, more democratic than ever. This essay seeks to shed light on this state of affairs by examining the relationship of shame, reticence, privacy, and agency, and by developing a normative account of the importance, but also dangers, of reticence and shame.

Liberal accounts, like Thomas Nagel’s, understand shame and reticence as twin guardians of a civil, neutral public sphere. But, as Jill Locke has argued about previous eras, these norms and concomitant complaints of “shamelessness” are often inegalitarian reactions to an increasingly democratic public sphere. (Nagel’s examples of Monica Lewinski and Anita Hill as breakers of the valuable norm of reticence have not aged well.) Communitarian accounts, like Bernard Williams’s, also begin to look inegalitarian when applied to liberal democracies, or else so individualized as to be without meaningful normative application. This essay proposes to deliver an egalitarian account of how an individual may have non-instrumental reasons for reticence, and likewise what reasons a society has in principle to care about the quality and quantity of personal disclosures in the public sphere. I propose an account, based in agency, which suggests that reticence is not just an individual, instrumental good, but rather a common good whose sufficient availability is a necessary condition for personhood. As with an absence of reticence, an absence of shame also means an absence of persons. This in turn has implications for theories of distributive justice, and suggests an overlooked critique of the spread of publics into all corners of our lives thanks to Web 2.0 and mobile technology.

Author

• Lowry Pressly, Brown University