Losing face

In case you are wondering after just three days, I have decided to devote this week to different ways in which we can experience a sense of loss. Although the feeling is generally considered a "negative" one, which typically tends to reduce your happiness and your willingness to act, I believe that it is interesting to stop for a moment and contemplate what it means: first and foremost you can only feel loss for people, objects or situation that you cherish, losing an irrelevant piece of paper or dropping a penny is, in most cases, no reason for grief. 

The second consideration is that you can only lose what you have. As the famous English poet Alfred Tennyson puts it in his 1850 compendium of poems "In Memoriam A. H. H.", it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved. Thinking about it, you are not worse than before you ever had whatever you lost, and at least you got to enjoy it for some time. Of course this neglects to consider a psychological effect called "loss aversion" whereby we suffer more from parting with an object (or even a sum of money) than we feel grateful for getting it. Although it is widely recognized as irrational it has been confirmed to be present across many different cultures (albeit to different degrees) so it can be indubitably be considered a human trait and should be taken into account when interacting with other humans.

Photo: Nenad Stojkovic

However, my main intention today was discussing the 2020 book by American professor of evolutionary biology Joseph Heinrich, "The WEIRDest People in the World", or at least the initial part which I have already read. It is a substantial volume so, in spite of the easy reading it provides, it will take me a while to get through and I just could not hold myself to discuss one of its initial tenets: how in the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies (the so-called WEIRD) guilt has almost completely replaced shame as the main means to keep individuals from engaging in anti-social behavior. Today I would like to focus just on this comparison.

Heinrich considers the two extremes of the spectrum to be the individualistic and the relation-regulated societies. In the former, individuals are judged and valued solely by their own actions, ideas and dispositions, but not by those of their ancestors, their descendants, their friends or their colleagues. In the latter, on the contrary, one's good name is inextricably linked to the reputation of all their "in-groups" and this link is stronger the closer the connection is, to the point that essentially every individual patrols their own groups to ensure that they are not punished by an infraction of one of their family members, friends or colleagues. Surprisingly, the danger that a violation carries does not lie in whether it is right or wrong in and of itself, but in the potential it has to cause shame if detected by outsiders. In other words, in this societies almost anything is acceptable as long as it remains secret, but once it comes to light it not only taints the offender, but also everyone relate to them. And, unsurprisingly, outsiders would have every reason to spread the shame of the offender and their kin, since that will provide the spreader higher regard from the rest of the society, which will have them for a dutiful keeper of the norm.

As a counterexample, Heinrich mentions the case of a WEIRD vegetarian finding themselves in a social situation where they are force to share bacon with some distant non-vegetarian acquaintances. The rest of the people are distant enough not to know that our subject is a vegetarian and will therefore have no particular expectation on the diet. Still, the vegetarian is very likely to fill guilt for breaking their own principles and not being up to their own moral standards. Notably, guilt comes into play even if the offense stays secret and, in fact, confessing to it often provides some amount of relief. (In the case of the Catholic Church where I was raised, you can even be forgiven by the priest, not by the offended, but that is an even more strange outlier.)

The relative importance of guilt and shame in the cohesion of society varies in a very wide range. Even in most Western society, where public display of the violations is not a frequent social activity anymore, shame will course as an undercurrent and, even if it would not lie in the open, it is likely to be widely known if someone has an affair, steals pencils from the company or parks their car in an illegal location, not so much as a means for leverage but more as a protection for the people in the knowing, who would modify their concept of the character of the offender based on the reports of these violations.

One aspect that Heinrich does not discuss (or at least has not discussed in the section that I have read) is the importance of the cultural uniformity in the success of this kind of social systems. When social norms and the means for their upkeep are transmitted exclusively from parents to children and have no other explicit expression they become extremely difficult for a foreigner to apprehend: not having been raised within the norms, their compliance is going to fall short repeatedly, so one can only start to wonder what the reaction of the society at large will be: will their failures be accepted as equivalent to those of a child, patiently corrected, perhaps mildly reprimanded in the hope that the outsider will eventually absorb the norm? Or will they be spurned as a lost cause in social matters, maybe tolerated as an awkward pariah, but always without any hope for successful integration?

I am not passing an absolute judgement on the goodness of any of the systems because, as it is often the case, both have pros and cons, but I will close up today feeling fortunate to have been born in a society where norms are reasonably explicit both for natives and foreigners, and where punishment is generally not extended to the next of kin. Have a nice evening.