Though an ancient idea, there are few concepts that have thrived and proliferated so well in the digital age as shame. First cousin to pain, shame marks the ethical boundaries of civilisation in a way pain can demarcate the physical ones.
Cathy O’Neill, author of the algorithm-focused Weapons of Math Destruction (2016), argues that while shame can be valuable at times, its modern iteration fails to unify communities and instead simply delivers pain and division. Her latest book, The Shame Machine, begins with a series of shames which predate the internet, including weight, drug addiction and ageing. O’Neill’s writing about her personal experiences of shame around weight — and wrongfooted efforts of authority figures including parents and medical professionals to help — are a reminder that self-proclaimed rationalists can buy into pseudoscience.
An early anecdote from O’Neill’s childhood, in which she rigged her parent’s scale to appear to be losing weight, is placed in the context of the uncaring diet industry, with a former finance director of WW (previously known as Weight Watchers) saying that 84 per cent of users cannot keep their weight off. O’Neill encourages us to think about the impact on the overweight of a diet industry that relies on methods with a high failure rate to make cash (although WW’s share price is 90 per cent down from its peak in 2018).
The book then goes on to pursue a number of other examples of shame including drug use and homelessness. The “shame industrial complex” is a primary target for O’Neill. She quotes a private email from Richard Sackler, former chair and president of OxyContin developer Purdue Pharma, describing those who became addicted to the dangerous product his company pushed as “reckless criminals”.
The author also calls out those who consider themselves good citizens but whose actions reveal a desire to shame those less fortunate than themselves. Particularly striking is her case of apparently liberal inhabitants of New York City’s Upper West Side calling for physical attacks — such as with wasp spray — on homeless people who were temporarily housed in an upmarket hotel there.
O’Neill also rightly pushes back against the appeal of outrage for the sake of self-satisfaction — rather than changing people’s behaviours, it often causes them to double down, while providing social media companies with a rich seam of data to drive advertising revenues.
The section on what O’Neill calls healthy shame, or “punching up” against powerful elites and corporations is the most interesting, although it feels rushed. A section on Mahatma Gandhi’s 1930 salt march, for example, somewhat squashes the Indian independence struggle into an effort to shame Britain.
O’Neill herself notes it took more than a decade and a half after that march for the British Raj to stumble to an end. This period also involved a second world war, an economic crisis and a wider anti-colonial movement against British rule, intersecting with any shame of the treatment of imperial subjects.
Continued debate over the deleterious impact of empire on the colonised — and continued racial issues across the west — also suggests that if shame played a role in world events, it has a half-life.
O’Neill concludes that forgiveness is the key to ending the “shamescape”, and our mistakes require an expiration date. Detoxifying shame is easy enough, she says, so long as we fight for all people to be treated with trust and dignity. In general terms, this is an easy ask — after all, many of us already at least say that this is what we desire. But the calculus of forgiveness is never an easy one — how long should we shame someone for flouting Covid restrictions, for example?
Nevertheless, as O’Neill argues, shame is a valuable lens through which to view our own actions and the systems we live under. Considering whether we are punching down on the vulnerable or up against an unfeeling industrial complex dressed up in fluffy corporate PR is a first step towards a healthier sort of shame.
The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O’Neill, Allen Lane, £20, 272 pages
Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan is the FT’s banking and fintech reporter
