Peter S. N. Stearns, Shame: The Emotion of Discipline, is published

Chinanews.com, Shanghai News, April 24 (Li Qiuying) was named by the teacher because of poor test scores, dragged the team back because of poor performance in the competition, was discriminated against because of obesity or old age, was shown to the public for committing a crime, and was "cyberbullied" for careless speech...... There are many reasons why we feel ashamed, and we tend to avoid it as an unspeakable feeling. In fact, shame and various forms of humiliation play an important social role in many fields, including family, education, penal punishment, sports, and politics. How should we understand this emotion, and what is its significance? N。 Stearns's book Shame: The Emotion of Discipline reveals how shame has disciplined us in social life over the centuries by interpreting how shame has changed over the past two or three centuries.

Spanning three centuries, revealing a pervasive social discipline

Shame is not only a humble feeling hidden in each of us, but also a means used by society to regulate our behavior and maintain order. Back in pre-modern societies, rituals of shame and humiliation were often used to maintain order and moral standards in a community. For example, public demonstrations of shame and flail parades not only punish the perpetrators, but also strengthen moral and legal norms at the social level. In schools and at home, unruly and underbehaving children are also disciplined by corporal punishment and isolation until they become decent "social beings" who behave in accordance with the norms of the community.

With the spirit of individualism and respect for the individual brought about by the modern Enlightenment, Western societies began to rethink shame. From the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, urbanization, changes in the concept of honor, and new forms of social discipline did weaken the status of shame, and the methods of humiliation were resisted in the fields of punishment, childcare, education, etc., and shame seems to have declined in modern society, and may even become a "taboo" emotion. In the United States, with the new ideas of individual freedom brought about by the American Revolution and the diverse communities brought about by immigration, the perception of "decency" and integrity also changed. In the area of criminal law, the rise of modern prisons and other punitive measures have replaced traditional public displays, and in the family, parents have begun to adopt positive encouragement rather than punishment in raising their children.

Of course, Stearns points out that shame has not gone away and continues in different areas: for example, in sports, players who do not perform well are verbally abused by coaches, in business, capitalism has developed a "shameful poverty" discourse, and on the battlefield, soldiers who do not fight their way are humiliated......

New media ushers in a new era of shameful history

In contemporary society, on the one hand, the anti-shame movement continues, and nowadays the use of demonstrative punishment in schools to humiliate children who do not obey discipline or do not achieve good grades is becoming less and less common, and prisons are beginning to pay attention to the shame and mental condition of offenders, and even psychotherapy to overcome shame has been born. And on the other hand, shame is revived in the form of a makeover. It has been used by campaigns such as environmental protection and anti-smoking to restrain people's behavior, such as the "drought shaming" of California's drought, when authorities encouraged people to report water conservation violations and expose them in the media. "Obesity shaming" and "age shaming" are more common. Beginning in the 50s of the 20th century, the new aesthetic standards advocating slimness made obesity equivalent to ugliness and undiscipline, and the rise in obesity rates made more and more people become the object of ridicule or condemnation, and even some universities in the United States openly refused to admit obese people because they did not have enough willpower to "resist the temptation of carbs".

In particular, Sterns analyzes how contemporary new media and social networks have become new platforms for the spread of shame, and even a shift in shame. From reality TV shows, candid paparazzi shots, public statements by celebrities, to everyday records posted by the public on social media, exposing "privacy" has become an increasingly common and effortless behavior. A resurgence of public humiliation ensued. The book cites several cases in which individuals have been publicly humiliated online for inappropriate behavior, which not only causes long-term psychological harm to individuals, but also sparks widespread discussion about the culture of online shaming and the right to privacy.

The author points out that the contemporary humiliation frenzy on the Internet poses a new challenge to us: in this era of fragmentation, whether shame can still be used to construct community identity and play a positive role, how to re-evaluate the role of shame in society while promoting self-acceptance and mental health, and how to use shame as a means to maintain social order while protecting individual dignity is an increasingly controversial and urgent issue.

World historian Peter N。 Stearns's foundational work on the history of emotion

Professor Peter N. Stearns is a well-known scholar in the field of world history, particularly in the field of the Industrial Revolution and the history of emotions. He is a graduate of Harvard University and has taught at Harvard, Chicago, Carnegie Mellon, and many other universities. During his tenure at Carnegie Mellon University, he developed cutting-edge methods for teaching world history and edited Routledge's book series "Themes in World History." In addition to serving as the founding chair of the AP World History Committee and vice president of teaching at the American Historical Association, he founded and edited the Journal of Social History for 50 years. Earns has written and edited more than 130 books, including the Encyclopedia of European Social History, the Encyclopedia of World History, Emotions and Social Change, and 1848: The Wave of Revolution in Europe, and is active in many groups such as the American Historical Association, the French Society for Historical Research, the Association for the History of Social Sciences, and the International Society for the Study of Emotions.

Stearns is one of the founders of contemporary research on the history of emotion. In 1985, together with historian and psychologist Carol Stearns, he coined the concept of "emotionology," which refers to the attitudes or standards of a particular group in a society towards basic emotions and their expressions that change over time and in a cultural and social context. Taking this as the object of historical research, Sterns also published books such as Anger: A History of Emotional Control in the United States, which had a profound influence on later research on the history of emotion.

Shame: The Emotion of Discipline was named Book of the Year by Choice magazine and received many acclaim from the international historiographical community after its publication. The Journal of Social History commented that the book "weaves together fragmented analyses of shame across cultures." Stearns's long-term, historical study of shame breaks down the boundaries of classical, medieval, early modern, and modern periodizations common in the history of emotion." Psychologist Juan M. P。 Downey praised "Stearns for his masterful sketching of continuity and discontinuity between different eras and cultures, integrating important perspectives from psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and more...... The application of shame in various fields such as education, parenting, penal punishment, and international politics was discussed. For better or worse, shame is with us – past, present, and future."

In addition to Stearns, Enlightenment History of Emotions has published Emotional Learning: How Children's Literature Teaches Us to Feel Emotions and Stories of Pain, as well as other important studies in the field of emotional history research, including William Reddy's Making Romantic Love, Barbara Brown, and the Romance of Emotion. H。 Rosenwane's "Five Fantasies About Love", Ute Fredford's "Fight for Honor: A History of Bourgeois Duels", Alain Corban's "Cannibal Village", etc.

Editor: Li Qiuying