In 2018, my mother was cancelled by a Twitter mob. “Katie Roiphe can suck my dick,” one user wrote. Others called her “human scum,” a “ghoul,” and a “harridan.” Enraged by the hypothetical contents of her not-yet-published Harper’s Magazine article, they preemptively took to their phones, brandishing metaphorical pitchforks at the mere speculation that she might name, and thereby endanger, the writer of the 2017 Shitty Media Men List. At 14, I saw the public shaming ritual—the bloodsport of cancel culture—through the eyes of the shamed.
Nowadays, the phrase “cancel culture” prompts an automatic tune-out. But personally, I am less concerned with cancel culture as a phenomenon and more intrigued by the morality of public shaming. In aggregate, isn’t it an act of moral hypocrisy? To what extent is public shaming productive, and when does it become gratuitous?
Throughout history, communities have used public shaming to punish and theoretically deter moral offenders. Imperfect analogies to cancel culture abound, from the Salem witch trials to Mao Zedong’s China—all the way to McCarthyism. In the 17th century, public shaming took the form of stocks, pillories, and Hester Prynne’s symbolically degrading scarlet letter. In the 21st, it manifests as X retweets and Instagram graphics chronicling whoever’s perceived missteps. Whether termed bullying or accountability, whether government-sanctioned or not, the instinct to socially castigate is not new. But modern-day shaming is readily enabled by social media, where speed, ease, and anonymity breed a new form of recklessness. @RandomUser3478 can be as vitriolic as they desire.
Public shaming rituals often devolve into scapegoating. In the Book of Leviticus, there is a literal scapegoat—the sa’ir la’aza’zel—ritually burdened with the community’s sins. The goat, a living repository for human depravity, is banished to the wilderness. Today, we have modern scapegoats, targeted in the recesses of X or the mutterings on college campuses, who bear the outsized weight of moral judgment. In our unceasing hysteria, we seem to have forgotten that the scapegoat, however obliquely, is merely a proxy for our deeper, more personal moral conflicts. Guilty or not, the targets of cancel culture are ascribed a shame that is not entirely theirs to shoulder. In turn, their exclusion and our proclivity for one-dimensional moral judgments expose the moral erosion of society writ large.
As part of its shaming, cancel culture seeks to stigmatize moral transgressors—an ineffective practice that inflicts psychological harm. Stigmatization is defined as shaming where the wrongdoer is treated as an “outcast” or “bad person” beyond simply being held accountable. Herein lies the distinction between necessary and gratuitous shaming. On the one hand, it would be socially irresponsible not to shame harmful behaviors, not to uphold moral boundaries, or not to at least try to elicit remorse. On the other hand, shaming, especially when accompanied by stigmatization, is not a harmless approach.
Not only does shame-proneness (which, unlike guilt-proneness, is positively correlated with anger, hostility, and the propensity to blame external factors for one’s own misfortunes) lead to psychological symptoms like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, but, at its core, it is a non-adaptive emotion. Shame’s inherently ego-centric focus on the “bad self”—rather than the bad behavior—derails the empathic process, leaving individuals unable to direct their emotional and cognitive resources toward the harmed other.
While guilt prompts confessions, apologies, and redemptive efforts, shame leads to denial, hiding, and attempts to escape the situation that induced it. If the broader culture erases the nuance of your character, why wouldn’t you get angry, retreat inward, and externalize blame? When accountability crosses into performative punishment, it is no wonder that the shamed party clings to anger, resentment, and whatever cocktail of emotions arises from others going too far. As a collective, we should be cognizant of when we are punishing or shunning too harshly, as this overreach reflects our own morality, or lack thereof.
Writing from the stacks of a Brown University library, where I am at risk of sounding preachy, I believe it is a matter of human decency to protect others from excessive shame and humiliation. In college, I am surrounded by sophisticated thinkers, in awe of my fellow students’ minds except when it comes to moralism. Perhaps my peers and I just draw the line differently, but when it comes to social punishment and redemption, it’s as if all complexity dissipates. Why, I wonder, is moral judgment the exception to our extensive training in intellectual rigor?
American philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that stigmatizing behavior, or the impulse to stigmatize, is an aggressive response to infantile narcissism and shame rooted in our own incompleteness. Less abstractly, when we feel insecure or shamed, we affirm our own normalcy by casting others as deviant. In this sense, the urge to shame others is a projection of our own unresolved psychologies—and should not be easily trusted.
As a case study in merciless public shaming, I interviewed former Congressman Anthony Weiner. The subject of three major sexting scandals, Weiner resigned from Congress, ran for mayor of New York City, returned to digital exhibitionism under the pseudonym “Carlos Danger,” got caught again, sexted a minor, accidentally included his young son in the background of a photo, and served 18 months in prison. Naturally, Weiner was publicly shamed, excoriated for his repeat offenses, and memed into infamy. And rightly so, to an extent.
This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, for absolute clarity and precision: In probing his case, I do not mean to minimize Weiner’s offenses or the magnitude of harm they caused. This is, solely and methodically, an intellectual inquiry into the question, “What comes after cancellation?”
Fourteen years after the first scandal, Weiner has grown used to talking about it. Before our conversation, I had thought, hoped even, that Weiner would be irritable and easily provoked. Perhaps we would commiserate over the profligacy of public shaming—he, an emblem of its ruin, I, a critic of its effects. Maybe he would yell at me when I asked about those headlines (“Weiner Roast,” “Erect Me Mr. Mayor,” “Too Hard to Stop!”), mimicking his outbursts toward strangers and newscasters in Weiner, the documentary.
What I got instead was a highly therapized, post-hoc version of someone who used to be more resentful and dispositionally cantankerous. “There’s this expression in twelve-step recovery,” he explains, giving me the vaguely apologetic look of someone about to regurgitate a therapeutic platitude. “It’s ‘what others think of me is none of my business.’ You take your own inventory, figure out your own actions, what amends are due, and then you basically say, ‘My side of the street is clean.’”
Weiner is an enigma in that he recently ran for public office again. But his bid for New York City Council wasn’t some post-cancel-culture, Trump-era shift—it was just him. When he was first accused, Weiner lied repeatedly to his friends, family, campaign staff, and the general public. He throttled through nearly every dimension on the Compass of Shame Scale (COSS-4)—attack self, avoidance, attack other, and withdrawal—except for the last. Since then, he has lost his job, his wife, and his privacy. He has served time, undergone intensive therapy treatments, and lived, highly supervised, in a halfway house.
Now, he has a sponsor for sex addiction and self-describes as someone who is “constantly touching wires” to see if he will feel something. It’s as if Weiner has been publicly shamed to the point of no return, numbed into a state of catatonic unfeelingness. “My situation is so sui generis,” he says almost proudly. Of course, his case sits at the extreme end of the spectrum, revealing tensions familiar to more run-of-the-mill campus cancel-culture debates but also pushing far beyond them.
Apropos of this piece and the moral decay of shamers, Weiner recounts, “When someone yells at me, and it’s always from across the street…When they’re talking to me, they’re not.” Rather than conversing with him, in goodwill or not, passersby chastise Weiner from afar. “If you’re yelling from over there, that means you’re performing your outrage,” he explains. “You’re performing for everyone else that you’re not a sex offender, or whatever it is.” Weiner’s anecdote, along with the almost sadistic creation of the Weiner documentary—a chronicle of scenes from his torpedoing marriage and gradual-but-thorough alienation of his supporters and staff—proves Nussbaum’s point about mankind’s need to other. Why else would we want to watch Weiner’s life fall apart in such excruciating detail?
Public shaming has a distinctly unflattering, voyeuristic component, one that parades a false moralism and reflects poorly on shaming culture. It’s unethical—or, at least, morally ambiguous—to alienate others point-blank, but shamers justify doing so through moral disengagement. By downplaying the psychological pain and humanity of moral offenders, and thereby disengaging from them, participants in shaming culture distort reality to absolve their actions.
The very crux of moral disengagement is this false reality: a world where bad people feel pain differently or not at all, where there’s a one-to-one ratio of malfeasance and retribution—a world we have collectively inhabited and tried to prettify. Unfortunately, though, it’s not real. For those who resist this cultural charade and prioritize their own moral integrity (why tarnish it for the counterproductivity of public shaming?), a way forward exists.
With conscious effort, we can rework public shaming into a reintegrative process, mitigating its moral and psychological harm. In reintegrative frameworks, as opposed to stigmatizing ones, the wrongdoer is treated with respect and empathy. They are ascribed something closer to guilt, which attaches itself to an immoral act or behavior, rather than the self as a whole.
We can take inspiration from Japanese culture, where the evil part of the self—symbolized by mushi, meaning bug or worm—is excised through an act of remorse. We can allow for the possibility of nuance, of multi-dimensionality. We can end the absoluteness of cancellation, the fantasy of banishing someone entirely from society, and focus instead on their reassimilation. We can lower our metaphorical pitchforks, even for someone like Anthony Weiner.
Therapy, prison, social support networks, codes of conduct, and rehabilitation programs all exist, controversial as they may be, to safeguard moral standards. So why must we—the self-appointed guardians of morality, who seem to have complete faith in our own purity—step in beyond these systems? A messier, more complicated, more tolerant view of human nature and transgression would elevate our personal integrity and help make us a more moral society. What say you, Brown University?
