For a few Australians, the prospect of life free from shame or guilt would be attractive. I could be too optimistic, as many more might like to be shameless, but I hope not.
After all, shame and guilt are always unpleasant and sometimes quite irrational. We might have felt guilty as a child on breaking grandma's vase, even though we were not careless, while an adult can feel guilt at being unemployed. Even today some people are plagued excessively with guilt over sexual failures, even minor lapses.
Some conclude from such examples that guilt and shame are wholly and completely bad, instruments of repression, stifling the satisfaction of our instincts. We need to loosen up and be natural, they claim.
As relaxed and unrepressed personalities we are unlikely to be intolerant or oppressive. At least this is the theory!
But even this is not the end of this story. One or two psychotherapists claim that ideals such as complete honesty, eternal love and perfect happiness are impossible and humiliate us. Those dedicated to such impossible ideals will experience life as continuous failure, leading to fanaticism and conflict. The purposes of life are to survive, reproduce and be happy, just like insects and rats, but at a higher level! Moral progress is achieved by reducing humiliations.
Similar mistaken views of human nature have flowed into education where some theorists believe children should never be told that they have failed a task or been unable to reach a required standard. Of course, no one, especially the adolescents involved, is deceived by these false affirmations in the long run.
Neither does it follow that because shame and remorse are unpleasant and sometimes disproportionate and obsessive, that shamelessness is a desirable goal.
Shame keeps our baser instincts in check and is part of what distinguishes us from animals.
It is appropriate that those who were violent at last Christmas' Cronulla riot feel their shame. Terrorists who kill innocent civilians are less than human if they have no shame, just as soldiers who kill families in wartime travelling under a white flag should feel ashamed of their actions, whatever their orders were.
Genuine erotic love also needs to be surrounded by conventions of dignity and restraint. A drunken orgy should be followed by shame, while the dubious merits of "Big Brother" have very little to do with any higher human love.
While standards will continue to change, a society with no shame for e.g. dishonesty, sexual infidelity, cowardice, racial violence, poverty and degradation would be much closer to hell on earth than we are. We need standards.
A decent society needs balancing doses of shame because each of us has to battle regularly for freedom from the tyranny of ungoverned instinct. Some shame is a pre-condition for self respect among imperfect people.
