October 6, 2023

We live most of our days carefully keeping most of our inner life secret.  We are in hiding, as if in a witness protection program.  John Prine’s great song “Hello in There” says, “Old people just grow lonesome / Waiting for someone to say, ‘Hello in there, hello.’”  But, in fact, the prison we live in is of our own making.  Prine is right that we grow lonely and dream of someone rescuing us, unlocking the doors.  But at the same time, more often than not, while we pay lip service to openness, we mostly refuse to leave our hiding places, even for those closest to us.  Far from being an occasional neurosis, secrecy seems to be the human condition.  Why is this, especially since we are miserable in our isolation? 

We begin with the fact that knowledge is power.  Nations keep secrets from one another, and other nations use spies and surveillance, and nowadays also hackers, to pry open and know our secrets, which are our vulnerable places, our soft underbelly.  Those who give away our secrets, like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, provoke governmental fury: they are regarded as traitors.  However, the reason they do so is that the governments themselves pry open the lives of their citizens for the sake of controlling them, of creating a “surveillance state,” of which George Orwell gave us our first look in 1984.  No one has privacy when the government decides that it is in its interest to spy upon its own citizens, an attitude that long preceded the Internet.  The FBI had files on “subversives” who could be dangers to the state—dangerous people like Martin Luther King.   The general authoritarian drift is that the government conducts itself more and more in secret, guarding itself from criticism, while it demands more and more disclosure from individuals.  It ought to be shocking that the Supreme Court increasingly tries cases in a “shadow docket,” a cloak of secrecy.  We can imagine why.  It is not the just government.  Hackers are ceaselessly innovative in finding new ways to penetrate our private life and violate us—empty our bank account, hijack our credit card, steal our entire identity—and also hold the institution we work for hostage with ransomware.  We have to rely on ever-increasing security measures such as multi-factor authentication, not to mention endless cybersecurity drills, in order to keep our secrets.  We read of cultures in which the people have two names:  a social, public name that is merely conventional and a “true name” that is one’s essential identity, and we understand.  We do the same thing, with our usernames, passwords, avatars and the like. 

To know a secret is to have power.  That is the great attraction of conspiracy theories.  It does not matter that they are outlandish:  what they offer to the desperate people who are sucked into them, as into a powerful whirlpool, is the euphoria of being “in the know,” one of the in-crowd, the initiates.  Secret societies have initiations that always including the imparting of all the secrets that ordinary people do not know.   You think that person is a Democrat, but I know he is secretly a Satanic pedophile.  Whole scholarly books are written on “esoteric” traditions and “occult” knowledge.  Possessing secret knowledge is an intoxicating method of feeling powerful, especially attractive to losers who have little power and feel humiliated in the social world.  On the surface, it seems just bizarre that Donald Trump could not bring himself to give up all those classified documents but instead sat on them like a dragon upon a hoard, but it is actually not a mystery at all—hugging them to himself gave him a feeling of power like nothing else, especially when he had just lost the position of being the most powerful person on the earth.  Why were sophisticated people taken in by all the crypto currency con men?  The word “crypto” says it all.  A secret new currency, and one that promised privacy, freedom from having one’s transactions monitored.  How very, very cool.  You are probably a genius, better than all those poor schmucks, if you are into that.  Another way of feeling powerful is to be secret: online trolls revel in the way that they can inflict pain and ruin whole lives while knowing that there is no way that anyone can find them out and call them to a reckoning. 

The intoxication and the terror of secrecy are connected with two primary human feelings, guilt and shame.  It will be useful for our discussion to make a distinction between the two that is by no means standard, or even common in most discourse, in which the terms are often interchangeable.  Nevertheless, let us reserve the term “guilt” for remorse over true evil—that is, not just breaking social rules but violating what Northrop Frye calls “primary concerns,” concerns that are cross-cultural and perhaps universal because they are based on needs and desires common to the human condition.  There was quite the vogue during the years of post-structuralism, postmodernism, and the theory wars for denying that there are any universal human needs, let alone values.  However, that was not a logical conclusion but the striking of a political stance.   It really meant “You aren’t going to tell me what my values are, you arrogant cultural imperialist. You’ve been doing it for hundreds of years, always with the result that your values are ‘universal’ and mine are provincial and inferior.  Universal values are what the white Europeans and Americans use to ‘prove’ themselves superior, and therefore fit to decide everything for everyone else.”  Nonetheless, despite the power, not to mention the partial justice, of such a rejection, human social life is impossible on any scale, from the local to the global, without the prior assumption of some common values.  Primary concerns are very simple.  Life is better than death; freedom better than slavery; food, safety, and shelter better than Poor Tom out on the heath in the middle of the storm; love better than hatred; safety better than fear.  “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is more than mere Enlightenment arrogance.  Freud said that conscience is only the superego, and the superego only a projection of the authority of Big Daddy and Terrible Mommy, who scared us into saying “Yes, sir; yes, ma’am” when we were young.  However, such a superego is not true conscience but only the projection of “secondary concerns,” the concerns of ideology or social order.  Ideological secondary concerns are a matter of power and control, not true morality.  Beyond them, there is, after all, a still, small voice that speaks when we have truly violated primary concern.  As Lady Macbeth found, to her cost.  The would-be supervillains would dismiss Lady Macbeth because she was weak, was only a woman, whereas they, to use her own example, could dash the infant’s head upon the rocks.  It is indeed possible to be without guilt, but to do so is to become a monster, demonically possessed, a sociopath who is no longer human.

The terrible thing about guilt is that it does not stop with actions but includes intentions, impulses, dark wish-fulfilment fantasies.  The decent people of the world feel guilty about having such impulses and fantasies, even though they would never, ever act on them.  In the West, the Catholic Church, through troubled geniuses like St. Augustine, pioneered in the understanding of the psychology of guilt.  What the tradition stemming from Augustine called “original sin,” the sin of the Origin, is the streak of depravity running since the Fall through every human soul, even that of an “innocent” newborn.  There is no such thing as an innocent baby, as baby’s first temper tantrum amply proves.  If decibels could kill.  Protestants understood the phenomenon in their own way, as Calvin’s “innate depravity.” Milton illustrates it brilliantly in Paradise Lost.  The first effect of eating the forbidden fruit upon Eve is to provoke a soliloquy in which she fantasizes about at least a dozen sins, from lying to blasphemy to lust for power to jealousy.  To be a true Christian is to live with a perpetual guilty conscience—not just about what one has done but about what one could do.  We are presently witnessing tens of millions of people cheering Donald Trump when he calls for revenge upon “enemies” and says that military generals should be killed if they do not obey his orders. These followers think they are good people.  They were never taught what we are all capable of, and so not only had no resistance to temptation but did not even recognize it for temptation.  They do not recognize that they are slowly, step by step, becoming monsters—respectable people who may pay their bills and do not kick their dog, but monsters nonetheless.  Christ faced such a mob, intoxicated by hate and screaming, “Crucify him!”  

One of the great short stories of the 20^th century is about such a failure to realize one’s capacity for evil.  The protagonist of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a grandmother who has no idea that she is selfish, snobbish, and  racist.  To her, a “good” man is a socially respectable one, and she gets her entire family killed by an escaped convict that she is sure must be a “good” man because he wears wire-frame glasses and addresses her politely as “ma’am.” Jung’s concept of the shadow as our capacity for evil, repressed but appearing in dreams and in various projections on other people in waking life, was deepened and darkened by the Nazi phenomenon.  So was Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and C.S. Lewis’s various books preoccupied with the reality of the demonic.   Last year saw Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, published in 1937 as darkness loomed over Europe.  By the time the film ends, the murderer has been identified and caught, but, in a tour de force of ingenious plotting, the façade of social respectability has been ripped from every single one of the affluent passengers of the tour boat cruising the Nile.  Every one of them has revealed something ugly under the respectable mask, something that made it possible that they were the murderer.  This is a more concentrated version of the pattern underlying traditional mystery stories, which often take place in a genteel social setting.  Catching and punishing the murderer at the end of the story means expelling a scapegoat who psychologically carries the hidden proclivities for evil of the entire community along with it.  The difference between the mystery story and the hard-boiled detective story or thriller is that in them the mask is gone and the ugliness is basically what there is.

Much of modern literature could be called variations on a theme by Lady Macbeth.  Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?  The Shadow knows, but many famous modern characters find out the hard way.  Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness transgress because they think they are Homo superior, “beyond good and evil.” Both learn otherwise.  Something there is that does not love a secret.  Secrets will out: children compulsively blurt them, unable to contain themselves.  The mind tries to purge itself of secret guilt, the way a finger swells with infection until it pops out the splinter.  If the impulse to confess is restrained by force of will, the mind reacts by obsession, the way that the narrator of Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart” becomes obsessed with the imagined beating of the titular organ.  Or the figurative splinter will remain, becoming painful and increasingly infected, so to speak.  This is the condition of Arthur Dimmesdale in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which symmetrically contrasts Dimmesdale’s guilt with Hester Prynne’s shame, two responses to the same adulterous situation.  The need for relief, release, catharsis, led to the Catholic sacrament now called reconciliation but which used to be called confession.  I used to wonder when young what it must be like to be a priest, listening to people confess their dirty secrets week after week—people whom the priest must surely in many cases be able to identify despite the screen between priest and the person confessing.  Does it darken the priest’s mind, this constant revelation of what people are really like? Especially because, while the ritual may provide relief for those confessing, the burden of the sins is shifted to the priest: they become his ugly secret, and he may not reveal them, even if someone confesses to a murder, the plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s film I Confess! (1953). The sense of intolerable guilt and the need to expiate it led to the interpretation of Christ’s death and resurrection as an Atonement, providing relief from the universal guilt of humanity.   The agonized guilt over having betrayed Jesus himself led to Judas’s suicide. 

Shame, as I am defining it, is the experience of social disapproval, which can be internalized and become disapproval of ourselves.  In Frye’s terminology, guilt results from the violation of universal primary concerns, whereas shame derives from the violation of secondary concerns, which are ideological and specific to a certain society at a certain period of time.  In the 20^th century, some social scientists made a distinction between “shame cultures” and “guilt cultures.”  In a shame culture, people are controlled by their status in a peer group. In a guilt culture, people are controlled by an inner conscience.  Shame is thus extraverted while guilt is introverted.  In Western literature, the best-known shame culture is that of Homer’s Iliad.  The aristocratic male warriors on both sides of the Trojan War fight according to what scholars sometimes call the heroic code of honor or glory.  But the Greek word translated “honor” or “glory,” kleos, actually means status or reputation within the peer group of warriors, and that status is gained and maintained by competition.  If a warrior loses honor, he suffers shame, aidos.  Such shame is not just mild embarrassment, but rather a complete devaluation of the individual, not just as a warrior but as a man, for there is a gender component to shame.  In a culture based on a male code of honor, pride is not a deadly sin but a defining trait of manhood.  To suffer shame is to lose pride, to be unmanned, and a man who feels shamed may react either with suicidal despair or with rage.  After the death of Achilles, there is a contest for his wonderful armor, fashioned by Hephaestos himself.  When Ajax loses to Odysseus, shame drives him temporarily mad.  When he recovers and realizes he has slaughtered a flock of sheep thinking them to be Achaeans, his shame is multiplied tenfold and he commits suicide. 

However, the ultimate contest is not over armor but over a woman.  The enormous tragedy of the Iliad is initiated when one man shames another by taking his woman.  When Agamemnon appropriates the woman who is Achilles’ “war prize,” it provokes a shouting match and very nearly a fight.  Students rightly look askance at the spectacle of two supposed heroes acting like drunks in a bar on Saturday night, starting a brawl when one hits on the other’s girlfriend.  But you are not a man if you let another guy steal your woman.  This is why I make the case for differentiating shame from guilt.  No primary concern is at stake here, only the secondary concern of male pride.  And yet, neither Agamemnon nor Achilles can afford to back down: the shame would be too great.  It is difficult to get students to understand why the men cannot just shrug and walk away.  Our society is liberal enough to allow for individualism and non-conformity, but to go against peer pressure in a shame culture means ostracism.  The Internet seems to be re-inventing shame culture in the form of “cancel culture,” where “We may agree to disagree” is no longer an option.  Cowardice is another cause of shame in the male code of “honor.”  A man might feel guilt if he fled from battle because he is selfishly abandoning both his fellow soldiers and the country and family he is fighting to defend.  But he ought also feel shame because courage is a criterion of the male code.  You are not a man if you run away from a fight, even if the odds are hopeless.  Gary Cooper must face a whole gang of outlaws alone in the showdown of High Noon.  If you run, you must find out how to redeem yourself, as in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.  

What we are ashamed of may or may not actually be harmful, and it is by no means always easy to decide whether an action is evil or merely socially nonconformist.  Take, for example, Hester Prynne’s adultery in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.  Adultery is the breaking of a contract that stipulates monogamous exclusiveness.  The scarlet letter Hester is forced to wear is the mark of shame imposed by Hester’s society, which is puritanical in more than one sense.  But anyone not possessed by self-righteousness knows how difficult it is to judge in any particular case of this sort.  Hester’s husband is a cold and loveless man aptly named Chillingworth.  Fidelity can be enforced contractually, but love cannot.  How much guilt Hester should feel is a complex question, but her society is at any rate determined to make her feel ashamed.  In fact, women are “supposed” to feel shame.  Women who do not dutifully acquiesce to social shaming commonly provoke the fury of both males and of other women who accept shame as the method by which women are kept in their place, which is always a subservient one.  Women are not even supposed to be confident, let alone proud, and unfortunately a good number of women internalize this ideological message.  A confident woman is always a castrating you-know-what, “castrating” not because she is arrogant but because female confidence scares weak men.  Women like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert get away with their arrogance by hypocritically spouting the ideology of female subservience while acting otherwise; it is also tacitly recognized that they have no real power, despite their position, but are just there for entertainment value. Confident women like Michelle Obama get away with it by staying out of politics.  But confident women who dare to play with the boys in the arena of power, like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, are “feminazis.” 

The dynamics of shame unfortunately control many women’s careers in pop music.  Bluntly, women cannot become superstars except by breaking out of the persona of “nice girl.”  They have to prove that they are shameless by dressing in slutty and outrageous outfits, singing songs with provocative lyrics, and either dating “bad boys” or at least having dramatic breakups that become the subject of angry breakup lyrics.  Maybe it's just me, but it seems so disheartening, especially because the woman often gets blamed for it.  Yet such performers are rebelling against the social pressure, enforced by shame, that asserts that it is unfeminine to strut with confidence, to go after what you want, to be openly sexual and even provocative, not to take men’s shit or be their babysitters, to refuse to listen to those who would put you in your place—a place where it is guaranteed that you will be ignored.  A generation ago, Madonna took this tactic to its logical extreme.  Lady Gaga is very talented in several ways, but how far would she have gotten if she had remained Stefanie Germanotta and retained her natural look as she appears in A Star Is Born?  She, however, escaped the trap in a unique way, basically by surrealism, by becoming a “monster.”  In some of her early performances, she is more or less naked, but the last thing she comes off as is provocative.  These are new variations on a very old story, indeed on the oldest story of them all.  It is not just what a woman does: she inherits her shame as one of the daughters of Eve, the woman who would not be properly subservient and humble. 

The vehicle of shame is humiliation.  Colonial methods of public humiliation were straightforward:  scarlet letters, duckings, the stocks, scold’s bridles.  The Victorian age was more subtle about it:  women were shamed into being “ladylike” by other women, who called any free woman a “shameless hussy,” and ostracized her from polite society.  These days, it seems that slut-shaming does come from mean-girl other women.  But there are also the tirades of the male trolls and incels, who recently have been attacking Taylor Swift for dating a football player, who is blamed for allowing a dynamic woman to unman him.  A primary method of shaming is to stare.  Being stared at can make anyone feel uncomfortable and self-conscious, which is why so many people cannot speak or perform in public.  Chief among the torments of Milton’s Samson in his drama Samson Agonistes is being stared at as a spectacle by the Philistines when he is their prisoner, without even being able to stare back because he is blind.   Psychoanalytic feminism adopted the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s idea about the power of the Gaze.  We say, “If looks could kill,” but in fact the Gaze is a weapon, one regularly employed against women.  Voyeurism is not just sexual: the voyeur desires power over the woman by “knowing” her, knowing her secrets.  Catcalling and other forms of leering are not flirtation but a form of harassment through intimidation, fully intended to make the woman feel flustered and embarrassed, to feel shame for no reason.

A common enough way of coping with shame and humiliation is through fantasy. This type of fantasy transvalues the humiliation so that it becomes a turn-on.  Humiliation fantasies are common enough in porn, and some anti-pornography crusaders are so horrified by them that they pretend that all porn is humiliation fantasy, which is not true.  But there it is, and what I think is misguided is condemnation of anyone who responds to it as somehow sick, poisoned by the patriarchy.  There was a famous issue of Ms. magazine in the 70’s in which a number of feminist women confessed to being turned on by “rape fantasies”—by which, we hasten to add, they did not mean real rape, which is a total horror, but rather of surrendering to a stranger who has his way with them.  The problem is not with the fantasies—the problem is with immature and selfish men who use the fantasies as excuses to abuse women without their consent, pressuring them to give in to such games as choking.  The fantasies are in fact a way of feeling in control, at least in otherwise normal women—and men as well, for role reversal fantasies of female domination also have their popularity.  We are not in an era in which it is possible to talk very openly and honestly about these things because—well, because we are ashamed, and know there are others who will love to feel the thrill of power by shaming us if we admit to any “taboo” fantasies.  Despite all the apparatus for sale in Ambience outlets.  The tactic of psychological reversal is employed sometimes outside the area of sexuality.  The “confessional school” of poetry in the 1960’s employed it in order to break out of the secrecy and shame of the repressed 1950’s.  Robert Lowell wrote about his mental breakdowns; Anne Sexton wrote about her period, to the outrage of the guardians of decorum. 

Shame is an all-purpose form of social control.  One definition of liberalism is belief in the freedom to act as we will so long as we do not harm ourselves or others.  The opposing conservative ideology, however, is the adherence to “traditional values,” which turn out to be mostly rules of appearance and behavior enforced by disapproval, by threat of shame.  Small-town mentality is censorious:  you must look, speak, and act in certain ways that are deemed “normal” and “healthy,” and sometimes “Christian.”  In the Middle Ages, Classical shame culture is said to have been transformed into Christian guilt culture, but in practice the more unsophisticated versions of “Christian values” have always consisted of shame-culture conventions and taboos.  Sometimes this mentality becomes fixated on one practice that becomes the root of all evil, as in temperance movements or more contemporary fixation on the evils of violent video games or rock/rap lyrics. 

But there is a deeper level of shame underneath the surface level of social custom.  Why are we so deeply ashamed of our bodies, hiding them under clothes—except when we try to cope with the shame by psychological reversal and flaunt them? 

There are two aspects of the body that all cultures have been more or less ambivalent about:  the sexual and the excretory.  Freud pointed out a long time ago that the sexual and excretory functions utilize the same organ, which increases the ambivalence.  Animals can feel shame, as when you say “Bad doggy!” in an accusing tone of voice.  But they do not feel bodily shame.  This is somehow the fallen human condition: shame began when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and then saw that they were naked, and had to invent clothing.  What are we ashamed of?  Two things, perhaps.  First, the material nature of the body, and therefore of the self.  When we say the excretory, we really should include the whole food processing system that includes the oral and one end and the anal at the other.  Food is a primary concern, and yet food is held to be disgusting, from medieval condemnations of gluttony (which you actually go to hell for) to modern eating disorders.  In the nauseated view, the body is a disassembly line, a means by which food is turned into shit. 

Second, the body is the source of all the impulses that make up the pleasure principle.  The old Catholic joke is, “If it feels good, it’s a sin,” and there is truth to this.  There is a strong element of asceticism to many forms of religion, which disapprove of the pleasures of eating and drinking, of sleeping, and, yes, of sex.  When the New York Times recently published an article about the latest study of drinking, which concluded that even one or two drinks are bad for your health, the reader responses on the discussion board were more ill-tempered than those of just about any other Times article I have read, and on both sides.  Some were testy about what they saw as a self-righteous puritanism that tried to deny them their innocent pleasure; on the other side were people who felt the article was their vindication, refuting the earlier studies that concluded that moderate drinking might even be good for you.   We are ashamed of the body.  It is undignified, unaesthetic except for certain lucky people, the source of impulses that we find difficult to control.  We ought to be disembodied—pure intellect, pure spirit.  Pure.  We are not pure.  Part of us longs to be: another part envies Shakespeare’s Falstaff, who is fat and anything but aesthetic, but who is totally comfortable with his weight and his appetites, both gustatory and sexual. 

Our secrets all seem so negative: anxious secrets harbored for personal or social safety; secrets of hidden guilt and shame.  Aren’t there any positive secrets?  Actually, in many mythologies there is a whole secret world, a realm of being on the other side of this one, whatever “other” may mean.  In The Productions of Time I call it the Otherworld, which is an alternative name for the Celtic realm of Faerie.  In fact, the Otherworld is often purgatorial, as in Dante’s Christian Otherworld of Purgatory.  What is purged are our guilty, shameful secrets, purged through transforming our fallen nature.  Some mysterious death and rebirth process may be going on beneath the ordinary appearance of our lives, a process by which we may die to our anxious, guilty, shame-ridden nature, what Paul called the natural self, to be reborn as a spiritual self, not necessarily in the sense of “supernatural,” meaning a ghost world above and beyond nature, but in the sense of nature transfigured.  This is not some kind of heretical pantheism or disguised paganism: it is essentially Milton’s view in all his works. 

The gospel “good news,” the secret we long to hear, is that there is not just a hidden world but a hidden self.  Again, the hidden self is “spiritual” not necessarily in the sense of disembodied, not some kind of “pure” ectoplasm or consciousness.  It is rather, as Paul says a “spiritual body.”  It does not abandon the body’s senses, desires, and impulses but liberates them.  Sounds good, but whatever can it mean?  In one of his late poems, “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats laments that his still-vital mind is attached to the “dying animal” of his body.  But in the final stanza of another poem of old age, “Among School Children,” Yeats provides the answer to his own dilemma:

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

But, the reader asks, where is “where,” so to speak?  Where might this wonderful unity of being happen, even if only for a moment?  To which the only possible answer is, “Here, and now.”  And that is the best kept secret of all.