Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love (8 page)

Of greater interest is what distinguishes guilt from shame. These two emotions are indeed similar in that they both speak to our moral self. When we are ashamed about something, we shrink, we turn inward. We feel inferior, inadequate, unworthy. We would like to get out of sight, disappear into a hole in the ground. The very moment I feel ashamed for doing something, I actually feel as if a swift fire were consuming me. Shame, too, may lodge itself deep inside in our psyche and leave profound wounds. Shame can be destructive.

Guilt and shame also often co-occur. The friction of guilt ignites the heat of shame. Psychological research has revealed some of the significant but fine differences between the two.
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One main difference is between the public and private spheres of guilt and shame. While guilt is considered a private and solitary experience, characterized by the rumination over our wrongdoing, shame is intrinsically public, because it originates in exposure to other people’s judgement of behaviour, mistakes or transgressions from our past that we consider unacceptable or disgraceful. Basically, guilt happens in private, whereas shame has an audience.
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Perhaps the best way to distinguish guilt from shame in another person is to look at their face. Blushing will give shame away. Blushing is part of the physiological responses that come from shame, not guilt. Even if your conscience may sting you, you don’t blush because you feel guilty, you blush because of what others might think of your actions. And it is common to be more acutely sensitive to reproach and blame than to praise and admiration. Your cheeks, your neck and sometimes your ears crimson. A general tingling feeling pervades your entire body.
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Wash away your guilt

As I crossed the Sant’Angelo Bridge, I couldn’t resist gazing at the beauty of the dome of St Peter’s cathedral on the other side of the river Tiber. So perfect and dominant over everything else. So magnificently harmonious and intimidating at the same time. I stood for a couple of minutes enjoying the view, breathing in the bluest of skies, in the unusual quietness of an early morning in the centre of town. Guilt is a deeply pervasive narrative in Christianity, I would say one of its greatest instruments to instigate and shape good moral conduct. Guilt stains us. It makes one feel dirty. It is associated with feelings of impurity. The Church frequently reminds us of our sins and invites us to redeem ourselves, through confession, punishment and the reparation, where possible, of our wrongdoing. Cleansing actions are used to wipe away moral impurities. Baptism is a symbolic cleansing, the water being supposed to wash away even the Original Sin, the one shared with Adam and Eve who plucked an apple from the tree of knowledge.

But whether you are religious or not, if you are aware of your conscience, bad behaviour will make you feel guilty. And if you feel guilty, there is a chance that you will find yourself horrible, even disgusting. Guilt is intricately connected to disgust.

Evolutionarily speaking, the ability to feel disgust has offered the advantage of despising and avoiding rotten food, or food fouled with unwanted contaminants. Disgust is a remonstrating emotion that begs for a return to purity, to the elimination or separation from whatever element has contaminated it. We say, for instance, that we are ‘clean’ if we haven’t taken drugs. We are also ‘clean’ if there is no pathogen inside our bodies, for instance if a test for viral or bacterial infection proves negative.

Just as this visceral feeling of disgust is a reaction to physical contaminants, the disgust elicited by guilt is revulsion at moral violations, a kind of moral indignation towards thoughts or actions we disagree with and find deplorable. For instance, we may find someone’s opinions disgusting. We can feel moral indignation and disgust towards an entire political system or a terrible chapter in human history. Charged and palpable, the emotion of moral disgust has lately marched along the streets of many capitals in the world in protest against the greed and corruption of bankers and politicians, in light of the mishandling of the economic crisis. What all demonstrators shared was a sense of indignation.

In English, as in many languages including Italian, moral integrity is also figuratively expressed through images of purity. For instance, our conscience is ‘clean’ if we deem our conduct impeccable. If we have never had problems with the law, we have a ‘clean’ criminal record. In the brain, there is overlap between regions involved in the feeling of visceral disgust at rotten food and regions involved in moral indignation.
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There has been a study showing that parts of the orbitofrontal cortex were involved when people made decisions about supporting or rejecting charitable organizations which had views different from their own on gun control, death penalty or abortion.
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Another original and interesting study investigated the association between morality and physical purity and involved soap bars, stories and antiseptics. First, a group of researchers checked whether people readily thought of physical cleanness when exposed to concepts of moral impurity. Participants were invited to summon from their memories either an ethical or an unethical action and describe the emotions connected to it. Later the same participants were involved in a word game. They were asked to convert sets of letters and spaces into meaningful words by filling the gaps. For instance:

W _ _ H

S H _ _ E R

S _ _ P

Take a moment to think about these fragments. How would
you
fill them?

Well, according to the study the answer would very much depend on the current state of your conscience. It turned out that those who had recalled the unethical action more readily composed the words wash, shower and soap, which obviously have to do with cleansing. By contrast, those whose recalled actions were not unethical filled in the gaps to compose more neutral words such as with, shaker and ship. Next, all participants, regardless of whether the story they recalled was ethical or unethical, were offered a small gift: they could choose either an antiseptic wipe or a pencil. Seventy-five per cent of those who recalled an unethical story went away with the wipe!
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Guilt and time

On one of his regular visits to the home of two of his closest Parisian friends, the painter Avigdor Arikha and the poet Anne Atik, the Irish writer Samuel Beckett carried with him a heavy edition of Immanuel Kant’s complete works. As Atik remarks in a memoir of their beautiful friendship, ironically sandwiched between the pages of the
Critique of Pure Reason
was a short manuscript of a poem entitled
Petit Sot
, which means Little Fool. The poem dealt with Samuel Beckett’s earliest conscious feeling of guilt.
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As a child of maybe five or six, Beckett had innocently placed a hedgehog in a shoe box. He dearly loved and truly wanted to protect the animal he had found and even fed it daily with worms, but one morning, to his infinite dismay, he discovered it dead. Anne Atik says that, as an adult, Beckett told his friends this story on several occasions. This regrettable episode had haunted him throughout his life and he had never been able to repress it. It touched him so deeply that he felt the need to express it in a poem.

Emotions in general entertain a special relationship with memory. Episodes void of emotional importance are easily forgotten. On the contrary, those laden with strong emotions, positive or negative, grow strong roots. Guilt punctuates our autobiography. It dots it with memories that reach far into remote moments of our past. I still remember several childhood episodes that induced a sense of guilt, even those children’s ‘little crimes’ – as Darwin called them when describing guilt in his son. For instance, I can’t forget the time that I whipped away the chair as my sister was sitting down, causing her a somewhat painful landing and a huge bruise, even though it happened long ago. My parents scolded me and punished me for that.

Several studies have investigated the autobiographical recollection of guilt-linked memories. One in particular looked at their distribution across time.
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Are memories connected to moral actions different from other kinds of emotional memories? In other words, can the burden of blame weighing on an event, an action or an omission of an action influence their memorability?

A team of psychologists elicited moral memories in a group of people by cueing them with words connected to moral feelings or actions, positive as well as negative: for example, ‘honest’, ‘responsible’, ‘virtuous’ and ‘compassionate’ as well as ‘stealing’, ‘unfaithful’, ‘cheating’ and ‘sneaky’. It turned out that their memories of positively moral feelings or actions mostly related to the recent past, while the memories connected to negative moral events were mostly confined to more remote periods in their lives. These results, while they give added evidence that morally heavy actions, including those associated with guilt, can’t be easily forgotten and that we are capable of recollecting them even if they took place in the remote past, also raise another interesting point. There is a certain bias in the recollection of morally problematic memories. It seems that we have a tendency to re-create our autobiographies, associating with our recent past mostly actions that make us appear as ‘good’ people, whereas the negative deeds are pushed back into the remoter past. It is as if we acknowledge the fact that, yes, we have been bad, but we prefer to believe that we are currently a better person than we used to be. A preference to believe that we are improving accords with the idea of moral feelings such as guilt having a reparative role in our lives.

Choices and more choices

Consider the following dilemma. It’s a fresh, sparkling spring Sunday afternoon and you are attending a friend’s wedding celebrations in a beautiful house out of town.
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While everyone else is hovering over the buffet indoors, you decide to take a breath of fresh air and check out the surrounding gardens until the queue for the food recedes. As you are walking around, you notice that in a small shallow stream, a child is about to drown. Desperate, she is waving her hands to demand help, as she struggles to keep her head out of the water. What do you do? Your first impulse is to save the child as fast as you can. You know that you could do this very easily, but you also realize that in doing so you would ruin the new designer suit that you bought for the occasion and that cost you over £2,000.

For almost everyone, there is truly no hesitation. There is absolutely no item of haute couture that is worth the life of a child. It would be a morally terrible, hideous and deplorable act to let the child drown just to preserve a piece of clothing, however precious and elegant that may be. Letting a child die would make you feel guilty for the rest of your life and there is something inherently wrong in it.

Now, consider the following. One evening when you come back home you find a letter from an international charity organization reminding you that, in some parts of Africa, children have no access to drinkable water. By donating a small sum of money – say around a couple of hundred pounds or less – you could easily save the life of at least one of these children. Again, you could rush to pull out your credit card and complete the online form on the charity’s website to send the money in the direction of the child in need. But again, you realize that by not making the donation you could put the money towards a trip to Bond Street to buy an Armani suit or other luxuries – unnecessary for your survival – you have always wanted to wear. What would you do in this second case?

Moral philosophers point out that there is no moral difference between the two scenarios. In both cases, at stake is the life of a child. Yet, when confronted with the second set of choices, most people find it acceptable and morally impeccable to put the charity letter aside and ignore the plea to save a child in a remote part of the world. Most people can do that without experiencing a nagging sense of guilt. They might on occasion feel a sense of guilt after a wild shopping session, but usually this doesn’t prevent them from doing it again.

The philosopher and neuroscientist Joshua Greene, who has used the above scenarios for his research, argues that the difference between them lies in how closely they touch us emotionally. Discovering the child in danger of drowning directly stimulates our emotions. Our proximity to the child, the immediacy and urgency of the risk of death, the fact that we hear her cry and see her waving her hands, that she is desperately asking for help, all send a direct message to our emotional networks in the brain. By contrast, receiving a letter in the post that tells us about children who are also in danger of dying, but who are far away, does move us, but probably not to the same extent. If we don’t donate the money, maybe someone else will.

As we have seen, there is no doubt that emotion affects moral judgement.

We learnt from the colourful stories recounted in the last chapter that damage to the prefrontal cortex, in areas overlapping the orbitofrontal and the ventromedial sections, makes individuals disinhibited and irresponsible, unable to control their social conduct, insensitive to social norms and standards of appropriateness and more prone to violations of values. In some cases, both among those where the damage is due to an incurred injury and those where it arises from developmental abnormality, these individuals can’t contain aggression and manifest violent behaviour. Some display sociopathic behaviour and are not capable of feeling remorse. The gambling experiment with the cards showed that emotion guides our actions and decisions.