Does shame have a future in our society?

COMMENT | One index that shame is alive and well is the frequent appearance of press photographs of the accused, following their arraignment in the courts, emerging from their ordeal for that brief walk to the waiting Black Marias, cowering and hiding their faces with the upper part of the garments they are wearing.

That it's an excruciating moment for them is obvious from the physical contortions they are willing to subject themselves to avoid what for them, clearly, is the shamming glare of publicity.

These are the reactions of some Malaysians enmeshed in situations where they are accused of actions considered violations of laws clearly phrased.

But what about the reactions of other Malaysians, more loftily perched on society's totem pole, who are indelicately placed in situations that might be seen to be in violation of rules, which though not comprehensively and carefully phrased, are there in the Federal Constitution for the protection of values felt as paramount for the health of civil society?

Back in the 17th Century, Hugo Grotius, the father of modern international law, quoted with approval the advice which Euripides, famed dramatist of classical Greece, put in the mouth of Agamemnon addressing Pyrrhus in Trojan Woman: “What the law does not forbid, then let shame forbid.”

Though his theories on the rise and fall of civilizations have lost their traction in academia, the British historian Arnold Toynbee's dictum – “Civilizations (read societies) die from suicide, not from murder” – continues to be regarded as salient about the human condition.

When Toynbee's conclusion is seen together with his theory of how civilizations wax and wane, to wit, that a society's fate depended on how its elite responded to the challenges posed within it, you could infer that the state of this delicate subject called 'shame' is a matter of overriding importance to the health of a polity...