Society’s Ride From Babbittry to Bobbittry : To deter miscreants, shun them. We need to restore a collective sense of shame.

In 1922, Sinclair Lewis wrote the novel “Babbitt,” in which he satirized the life and times of one George F. Babbitt. Lewis so brilliantly captured the smug narrow-mindedness of pre-Depression America that “Babbittry” entered the lexicon as a noun to describe bourgeois conformity. This eponym is still used, but not often, because narrow conformity is not a big problem any more.

Much more common today is “Bobbittry,” the phenomenon in which people such as John and Lorena Bobbitt are accused of crimes but plead their case to the media before they even see a jury. In shamelessly seeking sympathy for their sins, they often strike it rich.

Mr. Bobbitt was acquitted of raping his wife, but subsequent revelations do not show him in a flattering light. No sense of abashedness, however, kept him from appearing on Howard Stern’s New Year’s Eve show to hawk T-shirts.

Mrs. Bobbitt’s future is less clear, pending the outcome of her trial. But whether she is convicted of assaulting her husband or not, her star turn in the pages of Vanity Fair suggests that she realizes that her story also has salability.

Americans will undoubtedly second-guess both Bobbitt juries for years. But more important than the legal questions is a larger one: what we do about Bobbittry? That is, how do we satisfy our natural fascination with the lurid and the bizarre without letting that interest spill over into the encouragement, even the subsidization, of destructive behavior?

It’s doubtful that the celebrity treatment afforded the Long Island Lolita, Amy Fisher, and her Lothario, Joey Buttafuoco, did anything to inspire either of the Bobbitts. But after getting way more than her 15 minutes of fame, the mild sentence meted out to Fisher for shooting another woman in the head is not exactly the maximum deterrent imaginable. And Buttafuoco, who surely was an accessory to something, has done well since his wife was shot; he too has been lionized by Stern.

We live in a country where Oliver North is running for the U.S. Senate, where G. Gordon Liddy has a highly rated radio talk show, where the Mayflower Madam has been transformed into a maven of manners, and where even the satanic Charles Manson gets royalties from his own line of apparel. One can only speculate about the career prospects for Heidi Fleiss and the Menendez brothers, and wonder what would happen if fugitive Nazi Martin Bormann were to emerge from the hinterlands of Argentina. Would his first stop be Nuremberg or “Nightline”?

Nobody wants to be a killjoy and prohibit adulation for criminals and crackpots. And it wouldn’t work anyway, just as the highway patrol never dissuades anyone from slowing down to rubberneck as we pass a traffic accident.

What can we as a society do? Let’s bring back shunning. People have long known that not every problem has a legislative or judicial solution, so they developed the idea of excluding miscreants from their company. Way back when, this was effective: Socrates chose death over separation from his beloved Athens.

Ostracism--expulsion from the group--can be cruel, but it works. If conscience doesn’t stop the individual from doing the wrong thing, there’s still the hope that peer pressure will. Half a century ago, the great sociologist Ruth Benedict made the distinction between “guilt cultures” and “shame cultures.” Benedict argued that Americans are driven by a personal sense of right and wrong, of repentance and salvation. The Japanese, she said, are more concerned with “face,” honor and obligation to the collective. Both systems can restrain bad impulses, although lately it seems that the Japanese are doing better. Too many Americans feel neither guilt nor shame, leaving the law as our last, cumbersome, line of defense.

We don’t need to force adulterers to wear a scarlet letter, but it wouldn’t hurt to send a stronger signal that unacceptable behavior is . . . unacceptable.

The Bobbitts will test our resolve. But if we want to deter harmful conduct, we’ll have to shun the paperback and the made-for-TV movie. And when John Bobbitt starts selling armor-plated jock straps, we’ll have to just say no. When Lorena Bobbitt pitches her new line of cutlery on the Home Shopping Network, we must change the channel. It’s a small price to pay for restoring a much needed sense of shame.