A few years ago I stumbled across some of the writings of whom I now know to be one the foremost philosophers of the twentieth century, Ágnes Heller. Born in Hungary in 1929, Professor Heller lived through the ravages of World War II, losing her father, who actively opposed the Nazis by helping people emigrate out of Europe, seeing him disappear into the horrors of Auschwitz. Railing against authoritarianism, including the post-war communist regime in Hungary, Ágnes spent the majority of her life trying to understand morality.
Ágnes Heller was one of those troublesome, outspoken women to whom subsequent generations of women owe so much. Her formative years spent in the pressure cooker of Eastern Europe marching toward perdition, she felt not only that she needed to understand the evil that delivered the horrors of war, but a debt to those who failed to survive. Whilst she spent time living in a kibbutz, she left to study chemistry and physics at the University of Budapest, but changed to philosophy after hearing her mentor György Lukács deliver a lecture. Enticed by the equality espoused by Hungrary’s Communist Party, she joined, only to find it a ruse for dictatorship. Silence was never in her nature, and she found herself expelled from the party in 1949, rejoining in 1954 only to be again expelled in 1958 following the Hungarian Revolution. Unable to accept the uniform nature of communism thrust on each country by the Soviets, instead advocating for variations across the Soviet bloc, she soon found herself unemployed when she stood by her mentor Lukács who had been implicated in the revolution.
Outspoken she may have been, but Ágnes was also openminded, willing to consider alternative points of view. This saw her political views and opinions shift substantially over her lifetime. She grew in a different direction to her mentor, abandoning the rigid communism of the Soviet era for a more pluralist view of the world. Democracy, in her opinion, would fail without the strength of protections. One must wonder what she would think of the world now.
A key element of her philosophy was the concept of shame, which she argued was culturally bound. Unlike fear and joy, both primal emotions, shame is conditioned by the society in which we live. To feel shame is to believe that we have failed to meet a part of the social contract of our chosen – or imposed – society. Shame is a reflection of the expectations of others, rather than belief in our personal values. Shame is a moral regulator that directs our responses to events.
Shame can also be felt indirectly, for events in which we have not been involved. Watching a horrific event but being unable to stop it can leave a person feeling residual shame. For some, this could extend to survivor’s guilt. Again, one must wonder what she would think of events across the world today, in particular in the Middle East where the indiscriminate killing of people becomes progressively more ignored the longer conflicts continue.
This concept that shame is a culturally conditioned response indicates that it will vary with ethnicity and with tradition. The animosity between Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Middle East is driven by racial and religious difference. If the conditions were the same, there would be no variance in the expression of shame. This understanding is crucial to placing the actions of others in context. Comprehending that our own feelings of impotence in the face of abuse of human rights in Gaza can translate to a sense of shame, as can the disillusionment at the indiscriminate attacks on immigrants in the United States, or the disgust at neo-Nazis in Australia. Shame is a response to both a failure of our moral compass and of a societal ethos. It is an emotion regulated by what we value, and what we value can be corrupted as much as negotiations and contracts.
We could do with the commentary of a luminary like Ágnes Heller today. Someone who can hold the mirror to our souls, challenge our choices and behaviours. But it seems we are on a path to unlearn everything our forebears learned through such painful episodes of the past century. Shame is the inevitable result.
