There is no such thing as healthy public shaming

On July 15, 1742, a Boston woman named Abigail Gilpin, her husband at sea, had been found “naked in bed with one John Russell.” They were both to be “whipped at the public whipping post 20 stripes each.” Abigail was appealing the ruling, but it wasn’t the whipping itself she wished to avoid. She was begging the judge to let her be whipped early, before the town awoke. “If your honor pleases,” she wrote, “take some pity on me for my dear children who cannot help their unfortunate mother’s failings.”

This story is an excerpt from Jon Ronson’s 2015 article, How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life. 

(Ronson later turned the article into something of a manual on how to survive cancelation, and he has become one of our leading commenters on public shaming. I have found grim solace and recognition in many of the stories he tells.)

Ronson was unable to discover whether the court granted Gilpin’s request to be punished in private. Based on what we know of Colonial New England, it seems unlikely that the judge looked kindly on the convicted woman’s plea.  For our Puritan forebears, as for ourselves, shame is an essential part of punishment – both for the extra pain it causes the accused, and for the cocktail of moral satisfaction and fear that it arouses in the witnesses.

I thought of the Abigail Gilpin story last week, as this post popped up on my Facebook feed.

  I’m the one who has edited the post to make both the license plates and the name of the posting parent unreadable.

I shared this image on Facebook, again with identities obscured, and lamented a culture in which the parents of my children’s friends would think it acceptable to try to identify and shame folks who’ve made selfish driving decisions. This is a matter for the traffic police to deal with, I suggested; it might be acceptable for a parent following the rules to roll their eyes in annoyance at the scofflaw, but to attempt to embarrass them was a bridge to far.

To my considerable surprise, several folks pushed back — suggesting that this kind of mild public shaming was not only justified, but essential. My friend Karin wrote that shaming is the socially essential function of the “community coming together to agree that the conduct is bad and deserving of a public telling-off.” Her argument, in which others joined, is that we cannot wait for the law to deal with every mild infraction against the social code. Perhaps, she suggested, a cop could write one of these bad drivers a ticket — but if it happened in a queue of people standing, rather than driving, there’d be no technical violation of the law at all. If we take shame out of the arsenal, what recourse does society have against rudeness?

When I was a child, mama took us to have dinner with a friend of hers. During dessert, as a cake platter was being passed, I took the largest helping for myself, and announced, “I gotta have all of this.” The hostess laughed politely, and mama smiled — and dug her fingernails into my arm. I blushed, apologized, and everyone reassured me I was fine.

Afterwards, I complained to mama that her nails had hurt. She replied that she had done what she could to save me from embarrassment. “Would you rather I had said something to you in front of everyone?” Of course not, I said — public humiliation was far worse. She had given me a quick, private, and effective reminder that I had stepped badly out of line. She had protected my dignity while sending me a message I needed to hear, and I was grateful she knew my face needed more protecting than my forearm. I still am grateful.

It is true that public shaming can be effective. The problem, of course, is that embarrassment tends to embitter rather than enlighten. If a parents’ group roasts the line-cutters, it’s true that they may not be as selfish on Olympic Boulevard again — but it’s also true that they are likely to be mistrustful and distant from those that shamed them.

If the post in the Facebook group had simply said, “We’ve seen some cars cutting the line in a way that’s dangerous and unfair,” that might have sufficed without putting the offender on the spot. The alternative to public shaming isn’t acquiescence to rudeness; the alternative to public shaming is an oblique reminder that we all ought to live by the same code.

It is true that I am inclined to filter many things through the lens of my own experience. I was publicly shamed, and badly so — and it has been enormously traumatizing in ways that I still do not fully understand. Some might think that makes me a poor candidate to speak against the social function of shame; I am too close to the subject, too fragile, too invested. Yet my objection to a culture of shaming isn’t just because it causes inordinate and lasting pain to the shamed. My objection is also that shaming does damage to the humanity and empathy of the shamers.

To believe that one has a right, even a duty, to shame others is to confuse one’s own latent juvenile sadism with one’s commitment to upholding community standards. It is to mistake cruelty for civic virtue. In our Puritanical age, the most destructive impulses come not from our unrestrained desires for pleasure, but from our certainty that the fierce urgency of the moment requires us to call out others for their transgressions. We all have some memory of schoolyard humiliation; for many of us, those traumas have lingered into adulthood and shaped our choices. We know how powerful shame is, and instead of forswearing it forever in horror, we tell ourselves we must deploy it as an essential weapon in the fight for harmony and justice.

תני תנא קמיה דרב נחמן בר יצחק: כל המלבין פני חבירו ברבים כאילו שופך דמים.

One who embarrasses another in public, it is as if that person shed blood.

-- Babylonian Talmud, Baba Mezia 58b.

The early American Puritans and the contemporary cancelers insist there’s a distinction between embarrassing someone out of maliciousness and the necessary shaming that the righteous direct to the transgressors. That’s a distinction that the Talmud rightly rejects, and it’s one we should dismiss as well. The great temptation of the modern age is to repackage our bitterness and our fears into ejaculations of self-righteous indignation, even as we worry we might be the next to be called out. This is true in matters large and small — and though mocking those who cut the school pick-up line might seem like a trivial shaming, it’s corrosive and dangerous.

Of course, it would be rude to shame the shamers — but I did send the parent who posted those pics a private note, written in a very affable tone. They have not responded.

I think a lot about Abigail Gilpin. I know what it is to want to spare one’s children from witnessing one’s humiliation. I like to think that somehow, someway, the judge agreed — and she was whipped just before first light. I can imagine her enduring the awful lashes, giving thanks to God that her agony was private.

There is a time and place to gently call another to account. There is no healthy social function to mockery or shame, and those who believe otherwise have dressed up their own unresolved pain in the rhetoric of protecting the community. I implore them to think again.