My thoughts lately have been consumed with shunning and shaming. This chronic reflection is likely brought on by the current social/political climate, but I find myself making strong connections between the shunning and shaming that take place within families and various communities (especially religious communities) and the current breakdown of civil discourse. It's as if this familial micro practice is suddenly writ freakishly large.
Who gets shunned? Who does the shunning? What are the structures that reinforce shunning? If shaming operates as a tactic to bring "errant" folks into line, why does it so often fail?
Since we all share genealogy in the household Human, it is ironic that many of the folks who have traditionally practiced shunning and shaming are the same folks who tout the importance of family values. Parents reject children previously cherished merely because they voice religious or political beliefs that are different from their own (even when said beliefs are not harmful to others). Sexual activity/orientation becomes a particularly perilous zone, and woe be to the child who expresses anything other than opposite-sex attraction. Trans folks are often summarily dismissed the second they brave an attempt to explain their gender dysphoria.
What is most astonishing is the notion that a person can nurture and know a child for that child's whole life and dismiss and erase them for reasons that are, in the scope of "the big picture," largely innocuous.
Perhaps more astonishing is how a parent or religious leader who makes the decision to dismiss a member of the family or congregation deals with any subsequent pain or guilt by convincing themselves, and anyone else who will listen, that they had no recourse. They label the person irredeemable, unreachable, evil, difficult, sick, and so on--anything to excuse their own actions. Those who use their power to shun and shame must keep the "wrong-doing" of the shunned at the fore of any conversation in a continuous effort to reinforce the necessity of the their actions. Whatever initially caused the exile becomes reinforced, embellished, more urgent, more terrible, more unforgivable to distract anyone who might question the course of the punishment. Never mind that the punisher is also human, also vulnerable to mistakes, also embodies the potential to find themselves on the wrong side of someone's value system.
The end game of this power play is the hobbling of human connectivity and the reduction of empathy, community, and potential. When you eliminate differences from your life you become smaller, your intelligence, left unchallenged, is depleted, and you essentially isolate yourself in a narrow crevice of a wide wide world. We see the consequences of shunning and shaming in the communication style of this election cycle. Not only are the parties shunning and shaming one another, but the political climate has pitted friends and families against one another, and the end result has been the erasure of friends on social media, or virtual assaults via Twitter. While those doing the shunning, the shaming, and assaulting might relish their power in the moment, I would assert that they feel the loss in the aftermath. You cannot erase everything you disagree with, you will not erase everything you are uncomfortable with, and you don't want to erase everything you fear or judge because eventually you will have no one to talk to.
Talking is precisely what we are not doing enough of. I know it seems that perhaps we are talking too much, but real conversation is not finding the people who agree with you to provide back-up 24/7. Real conversation happens in all the in-between places we find ourselves. We are capable of having our own belief systems AND respecting those held by others, of sticking to our talking points without resorting to insults and disruptions, of listening and not condemning. Think of the people you most admire. I am willing to bet they are good listeners, that they are fair, and kind, and know their boundaries without imposing them on you. Most importantly, even if you don't share the exact same values (and really, none of us do), I am sure they don't make you feel shamed and disposable-even on your worst days.
