Sunday’s (Mar. 27, 2022) New York Times ran two major stories on its front page: One about Vladimir Putin and the other about Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. Putin’s power and ideology are summed up as a journey “from Statesman to Dictator,” culminating with his war in Ukraine. Virginia Thomas has been known as a rightwing conspiracy theorist and ardent Trump supporter, and one of her text messages sent to Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff, two days after the Capitol attack, is quoted on the front page thusly: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators . . . are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition. I hope this is true.”
Putin worries me with his nuclear threats and angers me with his military carnage in Ukraine; but, thankfully, his evildoings are physical and temporary (his misinformation war can be countered with ours), and he will vanish soon, either biologically or politically, freeing the world from his threats. Yet, Virginia Thomas scares me with her calm and matter-of-fact insanity. The woman — like Trump and most of his followers — is so cynical, sinister and surreal that she is simply beyond human ignorance, social stupidity or intelligent conversation. We have no idea how to deal with people like Virginia Thomas, or her “America,” and both are here to stay. In her shamelessness, we witness America’s sickness in its most glaring autopsy.
In every society, its moral shield depends on one cardinal virtue — its sense of shame. Today’s moral landscape in America is so shameless that conservative critic Charlie Sykes notices the irony that “(For people like Thomas) shamelessness can be a kind of superpower.”
In all known societies, “self-control,” restraining by the people themselves, makes much of police work unnecessary. This self-control is normally possible by a strong presence of shame, knowing what’s right and what’s wrong, even before the law or a judge tells you. Only two generations ago in America, the idea of shame was the foundation that still held up our public morality, sui generis. Those accused of wrongdoing used to defend themselves by claiming, “I haven’t done anything wrong!” (implying moral wrong); now they claim, “I haven’t done anything illegal!” (implying shameless technicality).
In all aspects of American society — in business, in politics, in religion, in culture, in citizenship — every moral battle has to be fought to the bitter end simply because so few ever plead guilty to crime, admit shame in sin, or suffer the pain of remorse and contrition in immorality. Everyone in America fights for their self-interest, tooth and nail, wholly without shame and without humility. None are sorry for their misdeeds and nobody feels sympathetic for the other side.
The nonchalant reception of Trump’s infamous Big Lie is more indicative of what America has become than their existence or production by Trump. Politicians say and do shamelessly whatever their supporters want or tolerate. Trump’s followers, like Thomas, accept lies and Trump gives them what they would accept. The most telling revelation of shamelessness is not in Trump the liar, but in his followers who accept such lies with no moral pangs of shame. Trump lied 25,000 times because America accepted them 25,000 times, spoken shamelessly and accepted shamelessly.
Not that we as Americans have become “immoral” in the traditional sense: We just don’t know as a consuming society what “moral” means, which is much more dangerous than simple immorality. You cannot make a shameless person a morally conscious citizen. Immorality assumes that there is some morality as its opposite, resisted or suppressed somewhere; but amorality is a state of non-morality, a vacuum of the mind that is empty of human consciousness.
What the Jews feared the most at Auschwitz death camps was not so much the immorality of the Nazis, which they could understand and deal with, but their amorality, which they could not. Immorality is still part of humanity; but amorality is neither human nor inhuman: It’s just not human. And, as a nation, we are at a loss as to how to understand it or deal with society or people that are not human. Just recently, a 15-year-old boy shot and killed four schoolmates and injured scores — for no reason. The boy was neither angry nor immoral, no emotional substance that was understandable. With no shame to anchor our actions, we express anger as tantrums, like children, without reason. How are we to understand the likes of Virginia Thomas whose train of thought does not include shame?
Shamelessness is a state of moral death: Where there is no shame, there is no inner moral awareness that’s self-generating; where there is no inner moral awareness, there is the death of the soul. And with no soul in it, the nation has now entered an era of mental blank that is neither morality nor immorality: Half of America is not human in this sense and the other half doesn’t know what to make of such an alien encounter in their lifetime. Modern history has never seen a state of society quite like this.
How do we explain our persistent belief that America is a moral nation? Simple hypocrisy. Then, we combine hypocrisy and shamelessness, and we witness the most inexplicably self-congratulatory society in human history.
Shame is possible only when there is something larger than oneself — such as God, Community or Humanity — as a self-judging concept. But, when the “self” is at the very center of its own moral universe, as in America’s consumer society where “freedom of choice” dictates, shame cannot exist. Nor can morality.
That’s why America’s shameless turn of history scares me to death.
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and a retired professor, lives in Greenfield.