THE DIGITAL DARK AGES

When did shame become the defining feature of our generation, asks Deborah Hill Cone

Last year, fashion designer Dame Denise L’Estrange-Corbet mislabelled some T-shirts. The swing tag said they were made in New Zealand when they weren’t. But from the vitriol online you could be forgiven for thinking she had drowned some kittens or was a war criminal. “People are gonna have fun with this. I might even feel sympathetic towards her after the public evisceration,” salivated a charming person called New Zealanders 4 Trump in a post online when this major story broke.

Okay, so, then a random Invercargill teenage girl with issues did actually throw stones at a kitten. She received death threats after the video was shared by Paw Justice online and she was so brutally shamed and threatened she needed police protection.

The thing is, you don’t have to be famous or torture animals to be shamed online. The online pitchfork mob can come for anyone. Telling an insensitive joke, sitting with your legs too wide on public transport, taking a silly picture in front of a monument. No one had ever heard of New York woman Justine Sacco until she tweeted an offensive joke about Aids on a flight to South Africa and blew up her life. An Auckland woman was shamed for reading a book at the traffic lights. A Mount Maunganui beach-goer was shamed for having the audacity to wear a bikini with a puku. I’ve been shamed online for saying something that was provocative — I didn’t like Clarke Gayford — fair enough, I got a kicking. But I’ve also got in trouble for simply being honest about how often I give my kids chicken nuggets.

And don’t think you’ll be safe if you live an exemplary life from now on. With the click of a keyboard, people can now “search and shame”. A slip-up made 10 years ago could turn the outrage machine on you if it’s dug up later. No wonder we are all so scared to put our heads above the parapet.

It doesn’t take much to become the repository of our society’s collective loathing and the target of the baying mob’s rage. Although it seems this one powerful and incontrovertible truth — that the shit that rained down on L’Estrange-Corbet could just as easily fall on you — is still too pungent for us to admit.

On some level we must know the logic: there is no one who has not done some ill-advised or embarrassing thing that would be deeply humiliating if revealed under the full glare of public scrutiny. So every time we see someone being pilloried, our unconscious mind knows: “That could be me.” Whether we are aware of it or not, we become a little more terrified. And it’s that terror that drives us to carry on doing it to others: “Not me man!” We are perpetuating the very thing we are most afraid of. It’s all a bit of a muddle really.

There are two apparently contradictory things going on here. On the one hand, our supposedly enlightened age is characterised by an anti-shame zeitgeist. If you go online there will be no shortage of people declaring they are not ashamed about being fat, hairy, gay, divorced, depressed, spotty, introverted, perverted. It’s agreed: social shame is a thing of the past.

Public relations expert Deborah Pead, who helps major corporate clients stay out of trouble, notes this contradiction. “In my mother’s day being unmarried and pregnant would be very shaming but now it’s nothing.”

But this is only half the story. Renowned psychologist Joseph Burgo has just written a book on shame. As part of his research, he set a Google alert for the word “shame”. He found many people who proudly declared they were not ashamed but was unprepared for the far larger number of hits insisting that other people ought to be ashamed. “Day after day Google Alerts sent me links to authors pointing an angry finger at bigots, misogynists, xenophobes, doctors who fat-shame their patients, greedy industrialists, shameless tax evaders, uncaring politicians, criminals without remorse, neglectful parents, and so on.”

It seems we have taken all the pious-chintzy-churchy shame of yesteryear and now we are projecting it on everyone else, like a game of dark object hot potato. As my mother used to say, when you point at someone else, three fingers are pointing at you. (Not sure where your thumb goes. Mum?)

“In medieval times they used to put people in stocks and throw things. Now we have digital stocks. It can be terrifying,” Pead says.

Perversely, by shaming others we often seem to be trying to express our support for the values of tolerance, compassion and fairness. We don’t seem to realise the result is quite the opposite. I know, right? The people who do that are morons. Damn! See what I did there? The very thing I am criticising. That’s why this is so hard. It all comes from our unconscious.

Ultimately, we need a new social norm against online publicly shaming, one not enforced by shaming. Because we think the monster is not inside us, it’s in “them”, we have found ourselves in what seems to be a new sort of Dark Ages.

Back in medieval times there was severe punishment and public humiliation for crimes that

In medieval times they used to put people in stocks and throw things. Now we have digital stocks. It can be terrifying.

Deborah Pead