James Wilson on Lack of Shame

* Re “Have You No Shame?” by James Q. Wilson, Opinion, June 25:

Wilson, in his jeremiad on American shame and/or lack of same, certainly reflects the shared fear and burgeoning despair that contemporary politicians hope they can parlay into big box office, election-wise. However, his suggested tut-tut of a finger-wag, something along the lines of, “Would you want your mother to know what you do for a living?” as a lever to induce self-controls on popular culture output is at least naive, and more probably, wholly disingenuous.

As if the titans of television, recording and film somehow keep secret from their families the ubiquitous, indeed, absolutely inescapable, fruits of their labors. And why for any reason would they want to, or, more to the point, need to! The product in question is stone-cold mainstream, not a still-stigmatized (although increasingly acceptable) category such as hard-core pornography.

It’s true that what these men at the top think we should see and hear from popular culture is largely what we do see and hear. But I think it is fatuous to ask these same barbarians to become national moral arbiters. I do not presently take their advice on how to live, and have no plans to do so in the future, no matter what they may be selling.

PRISCILLA MAYFIELD

Orange

* Re Wilson’s article on the lack of shame in America as the cause of all our problems: Sweeping statements like this are notoriously difficult to validate. “Glittering generalities,” if nothing else, simplify to the point of gross distortion. It is implausible to me that there exist in the West huge numbers of people with no feelings of shame at all. It is more likely that there are lots of people who do not believe that some actions are bad that Wilson presumably would judge as bad.

Additionally, if Europeans are so shameless even compared to us in the U.S., how does Wilson explain why the European teen-age pregnancy rate is so low relative to ours? Even on the level of raw data, Wilson’s facile “theory” about our lack of shame doesn’t hold up. The world and the humans in it are much more complicated than Wilson seems to want to believe. He strikes me as a very naive man.

ANDREA BALZANO

Claremont