Text-based art: Shame on You!

Shame on you for being so insufferably smug and self-righteous that you use the phrase “Shame on you!”

I think I first heard the phrase “Shame on you“ when it was chanted on a political demonstration in which I was taking part. My memory tells me that the demonstration may have been an anti-Trump demonstration during his first term in office. The chant was being directed towards the police and was an admonition of the fact that they were protecting this man so that we, the demonstrators, couldn’t get at him. Shame on them indeed.

On previous demonisations one of the standard taunts directed towards the police had been the sarcastic “We’re only doing our job” (chanted as though it was the police themselves who were saying it as a justification of their stance). This coming from demonstrators the majority of whom probably didn’t have jobs.

The phrase “Shame on you” is now one of the go-to phrases for many demonstrators, and in some circles is used as a stock admonition directed at people who hold different opinions. Unfortunately it tells us more about the people who are using the phrase than about the people whom it’s being directed towards. 

It’s a phrase that is redolent with the smell of moral superiority. True, for most people morals are (hopefully) very important, and quite a lot of people aspire quite laudably to a state of moral superiority; but true moral superiority involves the virtue of humility. The moral superiority of the person with the “Shame on you” mindset is the moral superiority of the smug, the self-important and the self-righteous 

It’s also a phrase that is dismissive of the person to whom it’s directed. Those with the “Shame on you” mindset feel that they don’t have to engage with the arguments of those whom they disagree with because such people are morally wanting and are therefore unworthy of engagement.

The phrase is meant to diminish the person to whom it’s directed but it in fact diminishes the person uttering it.