Shame in the New Gilded Age

Sitting with my father after fleeing the multiplex, I thought back on the many colorful stories he had recounted about his four years of jungle combat with the Bushmasters, the 158th Infantry Regiment, which he had joined the day after Pearl Harbor when he was a 17 (he lied about his age). A natural storyteller, my father had regaled my sisters and I on our long car trips with accounts of landings and battles, and the friendships he had made with the many Mexicans and Indigenous Americans—from the Papago, Apache, Navajo and Pima tribes —in his company, men with names like Jaime Tichea and Everett Rhodes. I realized he had been able to

depict everything but his own trauma, which today would be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder. Details from the background of those stories—the assignment he was given to stack of dead bodies of his friends after a battle in Noemfoor, the sight of soldiers cut in half by machine gun fire in New Guinea—suddenly moved to the fore, bringing with them an awareness of just how young he was at that time—eighteen, nineteen years old. In a flash I also understood something about my father’s emotional remoteness, and the violence of his terrifying rages, factors that had loomed large in my childhood, and the role shame played in my sense of myself as I grew. In my own life, it seems to me now, these two red lines converge into a seam and connect to my heart, explaining my own relationship to the very particular kind of suffering known in dharma practice asdukkha.

As a child I encountered my father’s remoteness as a kind of indictment—what was it I was missing that would cause him to avoid me? The question gave form to a deeper effort—a kind of greed, actually—to achieve for myself the kind of distinct boundedness I saw in others. Had I been more sensitive, perhaps I would have been able to detect a profound vulnerability in my father’s remove. For someone with PTSD, I now understand, the deeper affects of loving connection can threaten to destabilize critical coping mechanisms, flooding the psyche with the overwhelming somatic reservoirs of gutteral panic. I saw my father often in those states of overwhelm, particularly during the years following my parent’s divorce a few years after the axe incident. Splintering furniture, shattering china and the exhausted, bewildered rage of a bull unable to de-code the matador’s intricate choreography—easily mastering the various tasks he had engaged in life—musician, conductor, carpenter, scholar—my father had met his match in a crisis he could not comprehend, much less surmount. I watched his dissolution from an uncomfortable remove; winning the Oedipal contest, analysts would always tell me, is among the worst fates for a young man, and until recently I would not have argued.

The effort to redress imaginary lacks, and to hide from equally unreal failures, particularly the failure to attain the groundedness sensed in others—while my case might have had a certain intensity, these are fundamental mechanisms of individuation, and they are rooted in shame affect (aka lack, original sin, alienation). And if shame affect is the inner seam of the separate self, ressentiment is its outer, social skin. Coined by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the term ressentiment is often translated into English as “cold jealousy,” but this feels reductive in the extreme. One way to view our challenge as a species, in fact, is to see the operation of ressentiment as a dire threat to our survival. Sigmund Freud, in his important late textCivilization and Its Discontents uses different terminology to describe our basic pickle—how to derive social rules without triggering the kind of shame-based repressions that lead toward a calamitous “return of the repressed.” When Freud published the book, his readers would have instantly identified the two world wars as precisely this kind of calamity, wars that together claimed close to 90 million lives, and left millions of others, like my father, deeply scarred. The Victorian era that produced that series of crisis seems like remote history now, but, in fact, we have arguably entered a second Victorian era—a neo-Victorian age, if you will—and the oligarchs who have seized control of our political institutions are searching for ways to renovate shame andressentiment as active social instruments. Sometimes this attempt at shame infusion is cartoonishly ineffective —witness the tone-deaf clumsiness of America’s religious right. But other efforts are more effective and much harder to track. In many ways the competition-infused neoliberal culture organized around corporations, such as Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, run on shame and ressentiment. In an insidious mechanization of ressentiment, the company’s Orwellian “Anywhere Feedback” function, which has been getting some press lately, encourages Amazon employees to denounce each other on a real time basis. This is only an extreme version of values infusing our culture since the 1980s.

And yet I also join with those who find the Freudian account of development and history over-determined. In many ways Freud is the child of Nietzsche—so much so that he once commented that he needed to stop reading the German philosopher in order to have ideas of his own. But somewhere in the transmission Freud dropped a crucial point—for Nietzsche ressentiment is the affect that, through its prodigious capacity for negation, delivers most effectively the delusory sense of ourselves as psychic unities, separate and apart from all others and continuous in time. It is as if, in order to promote the fledgling science of psychoanalysis within a repressive Victorian culture, Freud had to reconcile Nietzsche’s deeply anarchic view of the self with a set of common sense delusions about the fixed and permanent nature of identity. In Freud’s account of individuation, the Oedipal construct starts to seem like a trap without escape, a view that, among other things, caused his split with Carl Jung.