Pick Your Battles: a Shame Story

It’s Lent! Bookended by feasts, and far slacker and less conspicuous than Ramadan (which, by the way, mubarak!). Historically, Lent has been taken as a time to contemplate our guilt, but to look forward with hope.

In a few recent years I’ve written Lent reflections on every one of the season’s forty days (plus Sundays), so this seems an apposite time to look at the damaging impact guilt has on all of us – particularly, for some reason, those of us with politics on the left and/or care for our fellow humans – these are often but not always synonymous.

So, how are your guilty pleasures, guilty treasures and filthy habits? Do you berate yourself for enjoying luxuries in a world of poverty and suffering, or for taking a holiday while others in the world have back-breaking labour every day? Too much perspective can make anything we do feel trivial, and anything we don’t, negligent.

The History of the Rod

I found an old book in a second-hand shop named “The History of the Rod” by William M. Cooper. It argued that rods (or, rudimentary weapons which cause pain) have two histories, and it’s unknown which history is longer: firstly, almost all power structures in history involve the powerful person hitting the powerless person with a stick to maintain order, or at least threatening to. From the early patriarchies to the largest empire, power is held in place because the powerful have sticks, or employ squads of stick-wielding brutes.

Secondly, there’s the rod of the flagellant. The stick we use to beat ourselves, in shame, in penitence, to try and mete out justice against our own perceived inadequacies. (It also had a chapter on using this kind of rod in the bedroom, “Birch in the Boudoir”, but the book was expensive and I needed to catch a train, so I never read quite that far). Few of us today hit anyone with anything, unless we're in a job where the stick comes with the uniform. Still, there's a temptation to beat ourselves up where we fail, and berate others who don't match our standards. Use the wrong software (be it Chat-GPT, Threads, or simply Microsoft), drink the unethical coffee or buy the bad pants, and you may find yourself harshly j'accused!

But is there right software for your purpose, unambiguously moral coffee for your energy, pants which edify your fellow humans? It's easy to bash and easy to be bashed, and easy, too, to bash yourself. I'm beginning to believe we are all too bashful!

Beating yourself up is a destructive act. The rod of the flagellant soon turns outwards. We berate ourselves for unethical consumption, then pride ourselves on abstaining from it, and then start to condemn others who are still using whatever we've moved on from. Joyful Militancy, by Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery speaks of “the pleasure of feeling more radical than others and the worry about not being radical enough”. We wound ourselves with guilt, then turn it on others, and nobody is helped.

The Sins of the Sims

I love The Sims. It’s one of the greatest game series in history. It delights me. It bores me sometimes. But mostly it gladdens me heart, and gives me a canvas on which to design homes, assemble outfits, and play out lives. Deaths too!

The Sims is made and owned by Electronic Arts (or, EA Games) which was recently bought by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, an organisation notorious for human rights abuses. I saw much hullabaloo over this on Tumblr – that to support the game would be to prop up bigotry and horror. I took this to heart, deleted the game and its many gigs of mods, and for a while bewailed the thing I had loved.

I mentioned this, rather mournfully, to a friend. (After all, what’s the use of suffering in silence if nobody knows you’re suffering in silence?) She found my actions extreme and unhelpful. Who gained from me cutting off one of life’s pleasures for the sake of ideology? After all, if I wasn’t paying anything more to EA, who was suffering in this arrangement except myself?

I’ve subsequently seen various arguments in favour of continuing to buy expansions for this remarkably progressive game, which has included gay relationships without judgement since The Sims 1 back in the year 2000, and pride flags, pronoun selection, thoroughly customisable gender, and even polyamory in its recent years. Evidently new ownership hasn’t led to ideological changes.

I’m in two minds here. Moral relativism could let me rationalise and excuse most everything, depending on my starting terms – though that might be a misunderstanding of how relativism works. I could (if I tried) justify it and find an uneasy kind of comfort. On the other hand, my propensity for guilt-led moping has sometimes led me to beat myself up over anything at all. I could (with very little trying) berate myself for playing, for not playing, or any other combination. (I've sometimes called this philosophy ‘prevenge’, cleaving tightly to woe, just in case. It’s an unhealthy mindset).

Pick Your Battles, Not Your Wounds!

Been to a Wetherspoons this decade? Watched Amazon Prime? McDonald's? Barclays? Tesco? Ikea? YouTube? Google? Consumed soya? Palm oil? Quinoa? Pistachios?

Like Chidi Anagonye from The Good Place, a lot of us berate ourselves for falling short by any measure from a kind of ideological purity. (Like Chidi, we may have big hearts, and/or be remarkably neurodiverse). We find that the list of the ethically disgusting is long, longer and (if we research enough) maybe even longest, encompassing almost every choice we can make, every company. Some are better, some are worse, but few can give us peace.

We see that X (née Twitter) is a cess-pit of Nazism, so we get off it, but we also see that Meta (for instance) is hell-hole of capitalism, but it's a lot harder to leave, if that’s where the friends, contacts and audience are. There are ethical reasons to flee Google and Apple, but practical reasons not to. Amazon, Uber, Coca Cola, Nestlé and the BBC are all infamous for their failings (some would say their villainy), but few of us find the energy to boycott all of them. Perhaps we should, but perhaps we can't, or can't reasonably. The more disabled of us are often reliant on systems we'd rather not be! But most of us pick our battles, and live with a niggling conscience, rather than living without a smack of comfort.

Is comfort something we need? I’m sure it’s somewhere in the hierarchy of needs, if only for our sanity. But even that famous triangle has ethical strings attached.

Let me give you another personal tale: in autumn, I was berating the villain du jure, AI, that horrid gulper, because of its use of electricity. A friend who has a more even-handed view of AI told me that video streaming services like YouTube and Netflix use up just as much electricity as AI does – that, if this is the measure of a service's malignity, AI shouldn't be treated as any more inherently malign than our world of streaming media.

I did not like hearing this at all! Yet cursory research seemed to back it up. I felt I either had to take it easy on AI, or else cut streaming video out of my life entirely. Otherwise I would be a hypocrite. (I can cope with hypocrisy when I do it unwittingly, or think I can get away with it – but I'd had a conversation, and that sharpens all shames. This would be hypocrisy in the worst degree)

So I cut out all streaming. I wouldn’t go near YouTube or its ilk for almost two months, unless I urgently needed a tutorial video on how to fix a washing machine. It was a pretty miserable pair of months, but I discovered some great music on second-hand CDs. (It was my Mamas and the Papas/Pet Shop Boys era). Eventually I realised my self-imposed sorrows were not saving the planet. Nothing was getting better, and my depression was getting worse. So I went back to the life I had known. (I still won't go near AI, but I have dialled down the fury with which I speak against it to just a moderate level, chiefly reserved for AI art.)

Perhaps I had fixated on electricity use as the measure of morality. Like BMI or carbon footprints, it was an arbitrary obsession. Carbon footprints, as helpful as they sound, were devised by British Petroleum to shift the burden from of ethical responsibility from corporations onto the individual consumer. It may have led a lot of us to make drop-in-the-ocean shifts in our consumption, but it probably drew our attention to a personal idea of guilt, and away from the companies which profit and prosper.

Rebranding Sin

I'm too protestant to have Catholic guilt, but as a child I was influenced a little too much by a verse of an old hymn:

“Let holy charity
Mine outward vesture be,
And lowliness become mine inward clothing,
True lowliness of heart,
Which takes the humbler part
And o’er its own shortcomings weeps with loathing.”

The idea we should strive to do what is right and then weep with loathing at our shortcomings is what people these days call a ‘headfuck’. Even from a Christian point of view, berating oneself for being imperfect doesn’t seem like the action of someone who is forgiven and has been freed from the curse of sin. It feels like a one-way flume to big-time anxiety!

Sin is an unpopular idea these days – largely because Christianity itself gets little thought outside of debates and holidays, but also because nobody but the devout thinks of what they do as ‘sin’. I heard of one church which stopped using the word altogether. Instead, they said that shame is the burden which weighs us down, that shame is the curse that we were freed from at the crucifixion.

This is actually an excellent rephrasing. Which of us isn’t burdened by some feeling of shame, when there’s no ethical consumption in the land? Which of us doesn’t bear a litany of small shames for our problematic faves, the evil companies we use of necessity, and the small unethical compromises we make in the interests of basic comfort and social connectedness.

Much is wrong in this Century. Much is cursed. Much is exploitative. Much is impure, but that’s the society we live in, and, short of becoming a nun or a hermit, or joining an anarchist commune, we cannot exist untouched by it, and un-complicit in the tangled web of the modern world.

We want to build a better system. At GFSC we’re actively trying to, but I think we all need to become more comfortable with not getting everything ideologically perfect – and extend that same peace and patience to others as well. We need to get off the guilt train and surrender our shame, so we can just get on with things, using the resources we currently have available, malignant though they be.

“But what about…?” – you’re not hearing my point. Well, perhaps you are – you proabably have legitimate objections and well-founded lists of companies and methods which are absolutely beyond the pail. But other people draw the line somewhere slightly different.

Yes, we use bad systems and services. Yes, these are bad corporations. But until we build something which is better, and which works, and which people come to of their own volition, we need to tolerate some compromise. You decide where your limits are. As the good book says, “all things are permissible, but not all things are beneficial.” (1 Corinthians 10:23). If we live with that in mind, and we might be able to work together long enough to make things actually better. Even if I eat meat and you buy from Disney.

(You should still keep off X and Harry Potter, though.)