1 Alienation and Hidden Shame: Social-Emotional Causes of Conflict Thomas Scheff (9.2k words) Abstract: It is possible that war and peace in modern societies are driven by social relationships and emotions, but in a way that is mostly hidden from sight. Modernity leads to alienation between individuals and nations and to disguising basic emotions, especially shame. As a result conflict can be caused by sequences in which the hiding of humiliation leads to vengeance. This essay outlines a theory of the social-emotional world implied in the work of C. H. Cooley and others. Cooley’s treatment of overt shame is clear, but it only implies hidden shame and the link to alienation. Drawing also on Ervin Goffman, Norbert Elias, my own work and that of others, this essay proposes that interaction between alienation and secret shame can lead to feedback loops (spirals) with no natural limit: shame about shame is only the first step. Emotion backlogs can also feedback when emotional experiences are avoided: avoiding emotion to avoid stored pain leads to more stored pain. To the extent that these propositions are true, our civilization is in grave danger unless fundamental changes occur. The last section outlines some preliminary steps toward change. Theories of the rise and fall of civilizations seldom consider the social-emotional world: the interplay between social relationships and basic emotions like grief, anger, fear and shame. They focus instead on the material world, behavior and thought. The sociologist Norbert Elias (1939) was a heroic exception: over hundreds of years of European history, his work shows that shame was becoming increasingly important, but, paradoxically, it was also becoming invisible. Even today, few general approaches focus directly on the social-emotional world. Many consider it only indirectly, in a way that continues to hide shame and alienation. Apparently Elias’s description of the invisibility of shame was all too accurate, even when applied to his own work. In the seventy two years since the publication of TCP, there have been few responses to his hidden shame thesis: my essays that focus on Elias, and the very powerful study of family violence by Websdale (2010), that refers to the entire literature on shame (See also Lacey 2009). Indeed, most of the hundred or so citations of TCP don’t mention shame at all. Those that do make no comment about it or its significance. All three of my essays (1992, 2001, 2004) promote Elias’s shame thesis, yet there has been only one response (De Haan 2011), which, like Websdale, is quite recent. In the indexes of the two Elias readers (Salumets 2001; Quilley and Loyal 2004), except for my chapters, shame is listed in only one other chapter. The mention in the 2001 chapter is only in passing, and I could find no mention on the page (36) listed in the 2004 reader. Most scholars, like the public, continue to uphold the taboo on shame. The taboo is also implied in the many studies of shame that do not use the forbidden word at all. Instead, the focus is on one of the many shame cognates (Retzinger 1995, lists hundreds). These substitutes serve to hide the underlying unity of the various terms. One way of hiding shame is to behaviorize it: there are many studies of feelings of rejection, loss of social status or, as in two of the titles below, search for recognition. For example, Rosen’s 2005 book on the causes of war mentions anger and fear, but not pride or shame. As a substitute, “status attainment” is suggested as a cause of war.