A few weeks ago I read Jon Ronson's recent book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed. The title pretty much cuts to the heart of the matter: the book addresses the frightening phenomenon of public shaming in recent years.
I'd never read anything by Ronson before, although I have a friend here in China who highly recommended his work. When looking through Amazon for something to read a few weeks ago, I spotted this and the concept intrigued me.
I knew I wasn't the only one to have realized this perverse obsession with public shaming that has arisen since, as Ronson points out, around 2012. I'd noticed a few people commenting on it through social media. Bizarrely, or not, these same people tended to be guilty of that same crime.
Personally, my observations on it stemmed from growing tired of liberal outrage. Now I realize that conservative outrage is also a horrible thing, but I tend to tune out conservative rhetoric, whereas most of my friends are liberals, so it's harder to ignore. And, for some reason, I still read the Guardian.
It seems that we're addicted to being upset. It seems that we settle all disputes in the modern day by demonstrating who has been offended the most. It seems that we are no longer capable of rational discourse, forgiveness, or justice.
If those seem like vague complaints, then I am guilty. However, perhaps that's because I'm not tearing into each one as well as Mr Ronson does in his excellent new book. What impressed me the most is that he could easily have done a book-length version of what my friends would do - and simply state why it's wrong to publicly shame a person, by going through several examples and demonstrating just how vicious we have become as a culture.
Instead, Mr Ronson has taken the high ground. He has explored the issue from a personal standpoint, as well as objectively, and has looked back through history. He comes at it from all sides, offering a surprisingly mature and reserved view of the issue.
He begins with his own experience - publicly shaming some people who had wronged him, and acknowledging that in his life he had participated in shamings, including many that he simply could not remember. He moved on to a few high profile examples, but rather than jump into the story in defense of the person who was shamed - the shamee, as he calls them - or even take the other side, he is very cautious and balanced.
Throughout the book he even delves into the murky world of 4chan to talk to several trolls, attempting to find out what it was the made them trolls. He examines the history of theories and psychological ideas about crowds and groups, essentially debunking supposed truths.
In the end he largely concludes that we shame out of an attempt to do good. Isn't that, after all, the liberal way - to attempt to do good, but have our heads lodged so firmly up our own asses that we instead just cause untold damage?
