Over the weekend, Peter Foster, US editor for The Telegraph, made an anguished pronouncement: “This was the week that the concept of shame finally seemed to die in American public life – as if the basic filters that everyone had assumed separated what is acceptable from unacceptable, had suddenly been removed.” What provoked this striking conclusion? In Mr. Foster’s words, “the low point in the lowest of weeks came when Mr. Weiner dragged his wife in front of the cameras to confess that he'd still been up to his creepy old ‘sexting’ tricks for months after he resigned from Congress in June 2011 vowing ‘never again.’ “
As a social scientist and keen cultural observer, my natural instinct is to ask: but what has caused this striking cultural and moral transformation? Needless to say, it is a question which typically evokes some sort of conspiracy theory. From the “conservative” right, moral decline is usually explained by the massive brain-washing of impressionable youths by liberal college faculty and propaganda by the liberal intelligentsia (including feminists, gay rights activists, etc.). From the “liberal” left, the problem seems less acute – and to the extent it is acknowledged, it is attributed to the self-serving efforts of the superrich to tear the social contract and appropriate shamelessly the lion share of economic output (or whatever asset bubble they seem to be inflating at any particular moment).
Since, for some reason, I have a natural aversion to conspiracy theories, I am inclined to see the Zeitgeist shift Mr. Foster decries in a different light. I am, in fact, wondering: could it it reflect a broader psychophysiological syndrome akin to the altered state of consciousness suffered by the LA-based “bling” gang”? Neuropsychiatrist Peter Whybrow has argued so, focusing primarily on the unhealthy neuropsychological effects of excessive material abundance. Factoring in the amount of non-stop infomanic stimulation made possible by web-connected computers (including tablets and “smartphones”) could hardly make the picture he draws more reassuring. On the other hand, as I have noted before, in some cases shamelessness can really work for you...
