Preface to Humiliation by William Ian MIller

Most of us are familiar with the unpleasant emotions that attend losing face in social interaction; we know only too well the sick feeling of being exposed as thinking we are more than we really are and the humiliation of having our poses of competence undercut by our own ineptitude. This book is about the anxieties of self-presentation, the strategies we adopt to avoid loss of face in our routine social encounters, and the emotions – namely, humiliation, shame, and embarrassment – which maintain us as self-respecting and respectable social actors. I approach these themes in a variety of ways so that this book is less one argument than a series of arguments, suggestions, and observations.

The themes emerged from my years studying the heroic society of saga Iceland. The sagas generated my consuming interest in the discomfitures that plague us in even the most conventional of social encounters. They reveal, with unusual astuteness, the behavior of a people who cared with the totality of their being about the public figure they cut and about the respect they elicited. These people could not contemplate self-esteem independent of the esteem of others.

We, in contrast, allow ourselves the possibility of self-esteem in the face of the contempt of others. But even though we can envisage self-esteem without independent confirmation, it is hard to achieve and not always a virtue if achieved, for it can be as easily the defining trait of the sociopath as of a saint, of the self-centered boor as of the self-confident person of great inner strength. In short, although we may think of ourselves as interesting and entertaining, that is not our call to make. So we, like the saga people, are not strangers to the nervousness and tensions that necessarily accompany caring about what others think of us. Like those ancient heroes , we care about honor, about how we stack up against all those with whom we are competing for approbation.

This concern is one of the central themes of this book. Honor is not dead with us. It has a hidden face, moved to the back regions of consciousness, been kicked out of most public discourse regarding individuals (though it remains available for use by nation-states to justify hostility); it can no longer be offered as a justification for action in many settings where once it would have constituted the only legitimate motive. But in spite of its back-alley existence, honor still looms large in many areas of our social life, especially in those, I would bet, that occupy most of our psychic energy. Honor is intimately tied to the idea of reciprocity. Much of the substance of honor is still rooted in a desire to pay back what we owe, both the good and the evil. The failure to reciprocate, unless convincingly excused, draws down our accounts of esteem and self-esteem.

It has long been noted that, in honor-based cultures, shame is the flipside of honor. But in our complex society the domain of shame has contracted as the domains of humiliation and embarrassment have expanded. Humiliation (or fear of it) is perhaps the key emotion that supports our self-esteem and self-respect. Humiliation is the price we pay for not knowing how others see us. Humiliation (and the fear of it) is in fact the very “power the giftie gie us” that Robert Burns prayed for. It is perhaps our most powerful socially orientated emotion of self-assessment. Humiliation cannot be avoided, having made itself, or at least the threat of it, a normal feature of most routine social interaction. Routine interaction is thus a risky and complicated business, requiring competence if we are to survive with honor and self-esteem intact. I do not mean to deny that the routine can be routine and thus easily negotiated. Surely the person who always feels panicked in the presence of others has started to develop the strangeness of a Dostoyevskian character. Never the less, most socially competent people are also routinely aware of these risks as necessary features of the monitoring systems that maintain their social competence –and at times painfully so.

The emotions of humiliation and shame construct, destroy, and recreate volatile hierarchies of moral and social rank. Shame and humiliation do not work in quite the same ways in their relation to rank (we shall see that shame requires groups of rough equals, while humiliation can work within and across stable hierarchies), but they carry out the same kind of rough work of punishing moral and social failure. Thus not infrequently honor, humiliation, and the obligation to pay back what one owes find themselves inextricably bound of with violence.

Throughout the book I am concerned to get at the extent it is possible to talk about emotions across time and across culture. The precise experience of many of our richest emotions – among which I include, of course, humiliation – is in various ways influenced by and dependent on the social arrangements that elicit them and the vocabulary used to express them. I shall give some attention to how the emotion we indicate by the word humiliation was referenced, if at all, in other times and places. . .

Language and culture have a way of cabining the thinkable, and differences in language and culture necessarily produce differences in thinking, even in perceiving and feeling. But the differences are themselves not unpredictable, nor are they unrecognizable. No, we cannot think just like others unless we become them, but we can learn to imagine quite well how they will act and what thoughts they must be having to justify and give coherence to their actions. It is surprising indeed how close we can come, if we are observant and do our homework. So I am left with interpretivism (what else do we have?), but without the religion of mandatory difference or the dogma of the inscrutable diversity of cultural and social experience.

Perhaps I trouble myself about this because I fear the trendinistas who will suspect my credentials as a social constructionist. With them, I too think it is admirable to stand against those who purport to explain social and cultural phenomena by easy recourse to that lazy tautology, human nature. But to say something is socially constructed is no explanation either unless it is seen as a promise to provide a complicated story about just how the particular practice is indeed constructed.

I believe that no culture is so purely coherent  that competing views are not available within it and that all cultures are riddled with internal contradictions and competing claims. And because cultures are not coherent, because they are riddled with contradictions, because they do not exist without some knowledge of the practices of other cultures, because they are always impinged upon from without and subject to locally originating change from within, we should not be surprised to find some fairly widespread practices and many vaguely similar styles across cultures and through time. Thus it is that many of us have had experiences with the norms of honor and may have participated in activities not unlike burning a witch.*

* “ elicitation of envy is not condemned in an honor based system as it is in witchcraft systems. The moral regime is very different. Honor say you should not fear eliciting envy and in fact rewards it by making it honorable. It was one thing to avoid flaunting your position by obnoxious behavior towards others and quite another to avoid excelling out of fear for the consequences of excellence.  Honor could have no truck with pusillanimous people in witchcraft systems where its leveling force is well known and nicely captured by then oft-cited Bemba proverb Max Gluckman put into circulation: “To find one beehive in the woods is luck, to find two is very good luck, to find three, witchcraft.”