'Learning a discipline is hard, passing an exam is easy.'
This point is somewhat tangential to the spirit of the article, but your dictum reminds me of a Paul Graham article on 'bad tests'. Essentially, 'grades/passing an exam' is to 'learning' seems to be what 'shame' is to 'guilt': a measure we use to gauge an unknowable interior quality which is really easily hackable - subject to Graham's Law like any other measure. So rather than learning anything, people try to appear like they've learned something (the degree of actual learning this involves depends on the quality of the exam, but I think it's widely recognised to be quite low); in the same vein, rather than acting morally, people try to appear like they're acting morally (which may require a certain degree of acting morally 'for real', depending on how observant other people are).
Perhaps there's a broader problem of which shame and pseudo-learning are only manifestations. To the extent that the two are both instances of an individual choosing identity maintenance over reality, I guess we could call that narcissism. But I'm not sure whether there is some broad social/economic/politcal factor at the root of it all: why do institutional incentives seem to favour 'appearing' to do X rather than actually doing X?
As an aside, what would you think of the idea that rather than guilt and an internal moral compass being predominant over shame in the past, shame was just a better proxy for guilt, so to speak - people were simply more open about calling out bad behaviour, and smaller communities meant they were in a better position to see it in order to call it out? I've always been sceptical that the neurotics and hysterics so common on psychoanalytic couches in the early 20th century were representative of their societies; was there ever a time when people really internalised moral codes to a much greater extent than they do now? I mean, all of political theory from Hobbes seems to rest on the idea that if people get an inch, they'll take a mile, and the only reliable means of ensuring they behave pro-socially is to threaten them with punishment.
'Learning a discipline is hard, passing an exam is easy.'
This point is somewhat tangential to the spirit of the article, but your dictum reminds me of a Paul Graham article on 'bad tests'. Essentially, 'grades/passing an exam' is to 'learning' seems to be what 'shame' is to 'guilt': a measure we use to gauge an unknowable interior quality which is really easily hackable - subject to Graham's Law like any other measure. So rather than learning anything, people try to appear like they've learned something (the degree of actual learning this involves depends on the quality of the exam, but I think it's widely recognised to be quite low); in the same vein, rather than acting morally, people try to appear like they're acting morally (which may require a certain degree of acting morally 'for real', depending on how observant other people are).
Perhaps there's a broader problem of which shame and pseudo-learning are only manifestations. To the extent that the two are both instances of an individual choosing identity maintenance over reality, I guess we could call that narcissism. But I'm not sure whether there is some broad social/economic/politcal factor at the root of it all: why do institutional incentives seem to favour 'appearing' to do X rather than actually doing X?
As an aside, what would you think of the idea that rather than guilt and an internal moral compass being predominant over shame in the past, shame was just a better proxy for guilt, so to speak - people were simply more open about calling out bad behaviour, and smaller communities meant they were in a better position to see it in order to call it out? I've always been sceptical that the neurotics and hysterics so common on psychoanalytic couches in the early 20th century were representative of their societies; was there ever a time when people really internalised moral codes to a much greater extent than they do now? I mean, all of political theory from Hobbes seems to rest on the idea that if people get an inch, they'll take a mile, and the only reliable means of ensuring they behave pro-socially is to threaten them with punishment.
Thanks for the article and best wishes