Shame and Modernity

Abstract

If shaming is crucial to crime control, then is not the task of controlling crime hopeless in modern urbanized societies? It is argued here that any such pessimism must be qualified by a broader understanding of shame in human history. First, the article considers the arguments of Elias that shame became more important in the affect structure of citizens with the demise of feudalism. Elias did not consider the movement away from shame and towards brutal punishment in crime control directed at the lower classes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This period culmintaled in a demonstration of the failure of stigmatization and punitive excess, opening the way for reinlegralive ideals to gather support in the Victorian era and beyond. Finally, drawing on Goffman, it is argued that there are some neglected ways in which shaming can have more power in the city than in the village. Overall, there is no structural inevitability about the impotence of shaming in industrialized societies; there is no inexorable march with modernization towards a society where shaming does not count. My recent book, Crime, Shame and Reinlegration (Braithwaite 1989) advances the theory that nations with low crime rates, and periods of history where crime is more effectively controlled, are those where shaming has the greatest social power. For shaming to attain its maximum effectiveness, it must be of a reintegrative sort, avoiding stigmatization. Stigmatization is shaming which creates outcasts, where 'criminal' becomes a master status trait that drives out all other identities, shaming where bonds of respect with the offender are not sustained. Reintegrative shaming, in contrast, is disapproval dispensed within an ongoing relationship with the offender based on respect, shaming which focuses on the evil of the deed rather than on the offender as an irremediably evil person, where degradation ceremonies are followed by ceremonies to decertify deviance, where forgiveness, apology, and repentance are culturally important. The