Stigmatic Thoughts

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Stigma is a funny thing.  Almost a superstitious mindset.  Especially when it concerns a non-contagious agent.  When a person becomes a victim of such an agent, the tendency is for others to withdraw from them, as if afraid they might catch it.  One such instance of this is cancer.  When someone is diagnosed, many people either keep silent or distance themselves from the person who received the diagnosis, as if even saying the word might put them in harms way.  Being married to a cancer survivor, I have experienced that firsthand.  Another instance, I recently discovered, is when you’re the victim of a scam.  Not only do you feel bad for your loss, but others tend to step back silently, as if they too might contract scam germs.  In both these cases, and many others, it’s easy to feel isolated.

As social animals, humans long ago learned that shunning is an effective tool in controlling social behavior.  A shunned person leaves a community or withers and dies within it.  As much as we value individualism, it means nothing if there’s no social group to acknowledge it.  Stigmas can lead to a kind of shunning.  A perhaps more lighthearted example is the person who tells others they’ve seen a UFO.  There’s adequate documentation that, beginning in the forties, the US government instituted a policy of ridicule to prevent such reports from proliferating.  It worked.  I remember growing up in the sixties and seventies that anyone who’d claimed to’ve seen such a thing was socially stigmatized with ridicule and claims of insanity.  We crave the approval of others.  Stigma and the associated shunning are among the most effective forms of social control.

As an introvert, I think quite a lot about this.  I’ve moved several times in my life and it takes quite a long time for me to get to know people.  Even now, having lived in my current town for over seven years, I know only four others in town  by name and none of them socialize.  One of the reasons I keep at this blog is that it develops a sense of community.  Those who are really successful on the internet develop followings of thousands, or millions.  My posts tend to be thoughtful (I hope) and often deal with stigmatized subjects.  (Although it’s starting to gain some respect, horror is a stigmatized genre.)  I very much appreciate my readers.  These thoughts are in my head and I let them out to roam on this blog.  I do hope that this post on stigma doesn’t lead to any shunning.  It’s just something I’ve noticed over the years.

Shunned

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Belonging is important for our species.  As much as some of us may be introverts, we still need other people.  Given the wide divisions of human interests and activities, one way people have traditionally come to know one another is through religious organizations.  Let’s face it, getting to know your neighbors can be dicey.  People from work may not be those you want to spend off-hours with.  Joining an organization is a great way to get to know people and, if you’re seeking like-minded friends a religion has been a time-honored way to find them.  Of course, many religions are now becoming as polarized as our society, but even despite that one religious practice seems especially insidious—shunning.

Shunning has been used in Christianity from the beginning.  One of the real issues, verging on torture, is when someone is raised in a tradition and has made all their friends in it.  Many sects encourage this, some overtly, other less so.  Those within the fold will not, it is emphasized, lead you astray.  If you are shunned, then, you lose not only your welcome at social gatherings or worship, you also lose your friends.  For separatist sects—consider the Amish, for one example—integrating into another society is extremely difficult.  You were raised to live one way and how would the shunned even begin to know how to live like other people?  This applies not only to small sects; being part of the group is a major draw for everyone from Catholics to members of an evangelical mega-church.  It’s a means of having a community.

Moving accounts exist of Mormons or other believers being excommunicated or disfellowshiped.  The world they knew is gone.  Religions create community and the lost of that community is a cruel punishment to invoke.  Particularly since the offenses that lead to such exclusion are often doctrinal—matters of personal belief.  People are naturally curious, and the desire to learn more frequently leads into uncharted territory.  Some traditions will then invoke sacred texts—more specifically a certain interpretation of sacred texts—to justify the exclusion of the curious.  Those texts, however, are interpreted by other fallible human beings.  Still, the fact that religions continue to use shunning (call it excommunication or any other name) is an indication of the inherent cruelty that religions can express.  What could be more hurtful, especially among those who separate themselves from the world, than to throw them out of the only enclave that they know?

Clean Living

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One of the fun things about the Oxford Dictionaries blog is that you learn unexpected things about words. In fact, you can often find something profound in a matter of a couple of seconds that will make you stop and scratch your head. A recent post by Gary Nunn titled “Good clean fun? The shaming language of food and disease” makes the point that English, like other languages, shames by default. That’s worth considering. Religions are engines of social control, and many of them have highly developed techniques of shaming people into adherence. One of the most famous is the shunning practiced by some Anabaptists, but it certainly isn’t the only tradition that brings guilt to bear.

Some people, psychologists say, suffer from high levels of personal guilt. Shaming is particularly painful to such people and language, it seems, might not be their friend. Others, however, can take quite a verbal hiding and still not feel any remorse. In other words, shame doesn’t seem to work on them. If some people don’t need it and others are immune to it, why do languages excel at inducing shame? The article by Gary Nunn is looking at how “clean,” which was generally used to mean tidy, healthy, free from vermin, came to mean “standard behavior.” From its original usage, “clean” moved to describe—often by its antonyms—things that really don’t fall into that category; foods and sexual behaviors, for instance, can be labeled unclean or dirty, even if they are hygienic and natural. The purpose of this evolving usage seems to be another way to shame someone.

Human beings are social creatures. Although fascinated by violence, most people do not like to use it unless it’s necessary. We’d rather settle things civilly. One way to do that is by using words instead of weapons. Our languages are built for that. We all know individuals who can bring us down with a few harsh words. No physical pain has to be induced, or even threatened. Collectively, the will of the people—at least, so I’m told, outside the United States—influences decisions that governments make. I’ve mentioned before that even non-literate creatures, such as the great apes, will not tolerate injustice in their communities. Sure, alphas may be a necessary evil, but when they abuse their station the collective brings them down. In our culture where nearly all the wealth—by far the vast majority of it—is controlled by 20% of the population, and among them, the majority in the top 1%, we need some stronger words for shame. Or it may be that some people are simply immune.