Shame and Other Civilizing Emotions

I had an epiphany recently. I was reading an article in The Atlantic about Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It recounted how he’s strengthening his nation and making progress in repelling Russia’s atrocious, unprovoked invasion. Apparently he’s pivoting away from the US and toward more reliable partners in Europe and among the Gulf Arab States.

But my epiphany wasn’t about Zelenskyy’s and his people’s heroic defense. His pivot was natural, a matter of both desperation and reason. Instead, my epiphany was about my own emotions.

Like everyone else, I had looked on, through the “miracle” of TV, as our president had publicly rebuked and humiliated Zelenskyy during a 2025 press conference in the Oval Office. He had shouted at Zelenskyy, “Without us, you don't have any cards!” in defending against Russia’s unprovoked invasion. And then he had rejected Zelenskyy’s most important pleas for help.

Like many other viewers, I immediately went into rational mode. I began calculating Zelenskyy’s chances for getting help elsewhere and his likelihood of doing so before Russia closed in.

It was over a year later when I read again of that outburst in The Atlantic—and in particular a reader’s comment about emotional responses—that I even thought about how I had felt. In retrospect, my strong feeling was crystal clear. It had been shame.

Did I hold myself personally responsible for Trump’s Oval Office atrocity? Not really. I had voted against him every chance I got. I had even spent enough to buy a small car, donating to Democratic-leaning GOTV organizations working against him the second and third times he ran for office.

So my emotion wasn’t guilt. It was shame. Shame that our own national leader had treated perhaps our species’ single greatest living national leader—an international hero, really—as shabbily as an unwanted itinerant peddler. Shame that our own idiot “leader” could have been so catastrophically and abjectly wrong. As it turned out, Zelensky did have “cards:” an estimated 7 million of them in this new year. They’re called “drones,” the world’s smallest, most agile, most adept and most autonomous, and therefore the most effective and deadly. Our own nation is now copying them and hoping to improve them in the course of updating its woefully outdated arsenal.

I was and am ashamed, deeply ashamed, to be part of a nation whose top leader could so brusquely, rudely and illogically dismiss and humiliate a foreign leader who, in my judgment, was and is a wiser and better man and a more effective leader in every way. As I later recalled it, my shame was a hot burning ember in my psyche. I was and am ashamed merely because I am an American and I had been taught to, and mostly do, love my country despite its flaws.

In our modern, commerce-obsessed, supposedly “rational” capitalist society, we don’t think much about the “civilizing” emotions any more. We think much more about science, engineering, commerce, politics, money, and profit and loss. And, of course, we think about simplistic, “them or us” ideology. The epitaph of our society, graven on our collective gravestone, will likely read “Here Lies Shareholder Value.”

But when we think that way, we neglect a large part of what makes us human. We ignore what has made us humans the dominant species on our small planet.

Individually and unarmed, we are no match for a lion, tiger, leopard, mountain lion or even a bobcat, let alone an elephant, gorilla or humpback whale. Yet collectively, and with the arms and armor we have built for ourselves and each other, we have dominated our planet to the point of driving many other species close to to extinction.

What gives us this power? It’s not just our not-so-big brains. Elephants’ and whales’ brains are much bigger. Many other species’ brains are not only comparable in size, but also coupled with much more acute senses of smell, sight and/or hearing.

Our much-vaunted opposable thumbs are useful, but much more useful are our language skills and ability to cooperate in making things (and in fighting). We are the only species on our planet that can even imagine making an airplane, an MRI machine, an automatic weapon, a drone, or a nuclear device. And we can do these things only because our abilities to communicate through language, and to control our baser instincts, let us cooperate in detail, en masse, in depth and for an endless series of entire workdays.

So what keeps us working together, in large groups like armies and corporations, and in nations, despite centrifugal emotions like resentment, hate, rivalry, envy, jealousy and lust? The best antidotes I know are countervailing emotions like shame, embarrassment, guilt, regret and remorse.

I call these, among others, the “civilizing” emotions. They can be as strong, or nearly as strong, as our survival emotions—fear and love—which promote our survival, respectively, as individuals and as families, groups, and (eventually, one hopes) our whole species.

When they work properly, these civilizing emotions can internalize and promote our norms of civilization as much as our survival emotions assist our individual survival. In that way, our civilizing emotions are as much a part of our social evolution as our survival emotions are part of our individual, biological evolution.

Are our civilizing emotions innate, like fear and love? I don’t know for sure, but I doubt it. I think they are mostly cultural artifacts, which have to be taught.

What I’ve noticed as I’ve reached my present age of nearly 81 is that these beneficial, limiting emotions seem to be disappearing, slowly and surely, from our American news, from our collective consciousness, and even from our increasingly violent entertainment. We seem to be casting them off like obsolete relics, when in fact they have been the hidden secret of our Western civilization, our Enlightenment culture, and our nation’s and Europe’s economic and military success.

To someone my age, they now seem mostly creations of strong religions, like Roman Catholicism. When was the last time you heard a friend, let alone a public figure, confess to feeling shame, guilt, embarrassment, regret or remorse?

I’m a Jew, albeit mostly assimilated and not very religious. Through loves in my life, I’ve learned a lot about Roman Catholicism, and I’ve attended more than a few Catholic services. So I have some respect for its influence on Western history.

It’s one thing to have laws against crimes like murder, theft and rape and harsh punishments for committing them. But individual human hubris, calculation and self-deception are endless. It’s easy to delude yourself that you can hide your crimes or somehow get away with them. (Have you noticed how so many of our modern male politicians seem to have tried to do this with sex crimes?) This is especially so if your circumstances, through no evident fault of your own, are desperate.

It’s harder, but still not impossible, to convince yourself that wrong is right, like the private-equity mavens who buy up, loot and destroy nursing homes on the pretext that accumulating capital and eliminating “waste” and “inefficiency” are good for society. But it’s much harder to get away from your own conscience and self knowledge, if properly inculcated.

If you are taught to know right from wrong and to feel shame or guilt when you do wrong, you are far less likely to do wrong than if the choice is solely a “rational” calculation based, for example, on profit and loss or the risk of getting caught. And as physical blushes show when people are shamed or embarrassed, well-inculcated moral values can be as much physiological and psychological, as rational and “legal.” At least they can have visible physiological manifestations.

So maybe we should listen more to Pope Leo and less to the likes of J.D. Vance, let alone to an idiot, “mad” leader clearly suffering from advanced senile dementia. Maybe we should try harder to give our kids an innate sense of shame, embarrassment, guilt, remorse and regret, when appropriate, as they grow up. And maybe all of us, regardless of our own religion (or our atheism) should show more respect for institutions like the Roman Catholic Church, especially when they express convictions drawn from centuries of dismal history and monastic thinking about causes and effects.

The modern Catholic Church no longer conducts Crusades. The last of its history’s vicious conflicts with modern Protestantism seems to have ended with the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, signed on 10 April 1998.

Lessons like these, learned the hard way, are especially valuable, even if they come late. And what other institutions in our society have literally had millennia to contemplate their own mistakes and the best way to make progress from the Dark Ages to the light?

At this worldwide—indeed species wide—historic crossroads of good and evil, isn’t it far better to listen to people who’ve made a career of assessing good, evil and historic mistakes, than to those whose most salient personal characteristic seems a precipitous, opportunistic lunge for secular power, territorial conquest or obscene wealth? Might not today’s Israel and Iran, let alone our own nation, learn something useful from Pope Leo?

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