For Shame : Are pride and honor still American values? : SAVING FACE: The Politics of Shame and Guilt, <i> By Stuart Schneiderman (Alfred A. Knopf: $25, 336 pp.)</i>

America is awash in guilt. On the talk show circuit, among the celebrated and the obscure, pseudo self-awareness is the order of the day. Best-selling authors reveal unspeakable crimes ranging from drug abuse to sex addiction. The pop-folk singer Loudun Wainwright has recently promoted a new CD full of songs that recount his many failures as a husband and father andwinning applause for his “painfully honest” lyrics--without a hint that he plans to alter his behavior. The pretense of baring one’s soul, it appears, can relieve the guilty party of any further obligations.

According to Stuart Schneiderman, these cheap rituals of expiation are evidence of American cultural decline. A New York psychoanalyst, Schneiderman believes that our current immersion in a “guilt culture” has left us sinking in a bog of decadence. “Instead of fearing being caught with their pants down,” he writes, “people take their pants off voluntarily and demand to be respected for their candor.”

Schneiderman’s critique is understandable and sometimes even profound: He recognizes a “quality of sadness” behind the vision of a society of autonomous selves; he sees the anxiety animating the cult of free-floating personhood. And he sees an alternative model for our culture: It is--are you ready for this?--shame.

The most economically powerful peoples in modern history, Schneiderman argues, have been “transnational tribal cultures--the Jews, the Chinese in the 18th century, the Anglo-Americans in the 19th century, the Japanese in the 20th. All these groups have been “shame cultures”--hierarchical, meritocratic, pragmatic. Maintaining boundaries between public and private, “they do not tolerate failure; they do not expose loss: They see no dignity in poverty.”

Choosing civility over confrontation, “they seek pride and honor, not innocence and soulfulness.” The United States used to be a shame culture, Schneiderman claims, but we have slid into being the sort of culture that elevates the individual over the group, honesty over tact, the nobility of failure over the compromises required for success--the sort of culture, according to Schneiderman, that characterizes primitive or decadent societies.

Schneiderman offers some viable solutions, both clinical and cultural. He makes a good case, at least in some instances, for the value of cognitive therapy rather than psychoanalysis in enabling a patient to overcome phobias and reconnect with everyday life. Cognitive therapy treats phobias as bad habits that can be overcome by changing behavior; psychoanalysis requires a (sometimes endless) quest for the buried trauma that allegedly lies behind the neurotic behavior.

In general, Schneiderman wants to reassert what he sees as the lessons of shame culture: that roles, rules, and conventions are not tyrannical constraints on the individual but essential social lubricants; that boundaries between public and private are not instruments of repression but a key foundation of personal dignity.

The problem is that these timely and useful reminders of the lessons of a shame culture are lost in a maze of Schneiderman’s own making. Part of the difficulty is conceptual confusion. His fundamental mode of argument obscures human agency; the book is full of statements like: “People function best when they are working to achieve what society requires of them.” Who actually is requiring what of whom here? The refusal to ask this kind of question has always been a strategy of social scientists seeking to avert their eyes from inequalities of class and power--indeed to avoid the muddle of historical circumstance altogether.

But Schneiderman is not interested in complex transformations. His historical explanation of American guilt culture begins about 1968, and he tells a wearisomely familiar story. The villain of the piece is (surprise!) the baby boomer, the hippie turned yuppie.

The rise of a rampant guilt culture, according to Schneiderman, can be traced directly to our failure as a nation to face the shameful trauma of Vietnam--not only to our leaders’ refusal to take responsibility for a mistaken policy ( which is a plausible enough argument), but to our young men’s inability to face “the shame of having ducked a fight, of appearing to have chickened out.”

The most egregious example of Schneiderman’s approach to recent history is the parallel he draws between the American anti-war counterculture and the Chinese Cultural Revolution--an absurd and offensive idea that sprang originally from the fevered brain of the neoconservative mandarin Samuel Huntington in “American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony” (1981).

According to Huntington, the antiwar counterculture (like the Chinese Cultural Revolution) released an unprecedented flood of moralizing abuse on governing elites, challenging their legitimacy at every turn, driving them from office, and ushering in a reign of revolutionary virtue, when political leaders had to toe the line of leftist rectitude or sacrifice their careers. For Schneiderman, this bizarre account aptly characterizes the triumph of guilt culture in American politics.

To accept Huntington’s claim, one has first to ignore the roots of the American counterculture in oppositional religious and ethical traditions, which have periodically fostered waves of revulsion against entrenched authority--beginning with the rejection of British rule in 1776, continuing through the antislavery movement, the Populist campaign for a democratically-managed currency, and various “progressive” crusades against alcohol, drugs and government corruption. Moralism is as American as apple pie.

To make any sense of the parallel between Chinese and American politics, it is also necessary to forget that the Chinese cultural revolutionaries were backed by the power of a totalitarian state, while the American “revolutionaries” were relatively powerless and quickly demonized by the government as well as by the corporate-sponsored mass media. Schneiderman (like Huntington) fails to notice this fundamental distinction, though he does acknowledge that “no officials suffered the fate of the victims of the Red Guards”--adding lamely that “many of Nixon’s men had their lives destroyed by public humiliation and prison sentences” after the exposure of the Watergate affair.

This is ludicrous hyperbole: Ehrlichman, Colson, Liddy, and other Nixon henchmen have done quite well for themselves. Schneiderman writes as if these criminals were languishing in old hotels for busted and marginal men, as if they were the victims of misplaced ideological fervor, as if they had not violated the very principles of honor, decency, and civility he claims to champion.

For Schneiderman, the anti-war counterculture was little more than a crowd of anarchic, mindless ranters in flight from their own shame, perpetually stoned and copulating like rabbits. This cartoon comports nicely with contemporary cultural fashion, but it grossly distorts recent history.

No one would want to deny the central role of the Vietnam War in shaping the last quarter-century of American history, but we need a far more careful account than the one presented here. We need a recent history that refuses to blur government and corporate elite interests by merging them with the needs and demands of “the society” or “the nation.” We need a cultural analysis that encompasses the globalization of capital and the export of skilled industrial jobs as well as the obscuring of class issues by sexual and racial controversy. We need critics who recognize an obvious but fundamental fact: Some groups have more power than others. Social diagnoses that ignore that fact become little more than portentous trivia.

This is not to deny that Schneiderman may be onto something important. A clarification of the elusive differences between shame and guilt may well be central to an understanding of our current moral predicament. We will never know without a skillful sorting out of the interplay between culture and psyche, between fully articulated ideas and half-conscious yearnings.

Schneiderman tries but fails to accomplish that task. His clinical observations are insightful, but his sense of social change is stunted. His revulsion at the excesses of contemporary guilt culture is understandable: The man with his pants down, wallowing in pseudo self-revelation, is not a pretty sight. But by linking this behavior solely to the ‘60s, Schneiderman overlooks its origins in Protestant and therapeutic ideals of self-scrutiny and sincerity, ideals that preceded the “American cultural revolution” by nearly 200 years.

The consequences of this failure are political as well as intellectual. By joining the chorus of moralists scapegoating the anti-war counterculture, Schneiderman has done a disservice to historical understanding--and to the many fundamentally decent Americans who tried to stop the slaughter in their own imperfect ways. He should be ashamed of himself.