I cannot drop litter. It’s impossible. I will walk 10 miles with an empty plastic bottle in search of a bin if I have to, because chucking it in the bushes where it will go unnoticed alongside similar rubbish strewn over weeks and months, is simply unthinkable. My whole being recoils at the notion. It’s not because I’m worried that the bottle isn’t biodegradable. I’m not anxious that a badger will choke on it (although I wouldn’t be pleased at the idea either). It’s that my father instilled in me, from an early age, the idea that dropping litter was egregiously antisocial, contemptuous of the social contract, a moral failure. He didn’t put it like that, but I know that’s what he meant. He never knew his father and grew up practically an orphan, and I’m not sure what instilled the belief in him, except perhaps that the age he grew up in was one where certain behaviours were simply unacceptable. Littering, among other things, carried a stigma. My own son doesn’t live in anything like that age, but I’ve presumably shaped the same disposition in him as my father did in me.
I can form a whole morality from this. I know something important about a person who throws a coffee cup from their car window. I know with close to moral precision that they’re the same person who abandons a shopping trolley in a parking space or who plays music on a speakerphone on a train. The probability that they’re a fraudster, a thief or worse increases, too.
Littering is not a crime worthy of the name except in places like Singapore, where the consequences are severe enough to ensure its streets are immaculate. Drop a cigarette butt there, and the authorities will fine you $10,000, hand you a broom and make you sweep public areas while wearing a bright vest that identifies you as a litterer. Good. This is my kind of police state, although I’d make them use a toothbrush.
It shouldn’t need the threat of punishment, though. Antisocial behaviour ought to be rare because a happy society is one where its citizens value the shared space, each of us signed up to an unwritten social contract that says mutual respect will be rewarded; that my cleaning up after a picnic is the right thing because I know you will do the same, thus preserving the beauty of this spot that drew us here in the first place.
The disgust we feel toward those who transgress certain norms stems from something deeper than mere lawbreaking. It turns out that the same part of the brain that lights up when we face something revolting, like rotten food, responds in the same way to certain transgressions like jumping the queue or shoplifting. I could have saved scientists the trouble. When I see the remains of a McDonald’s Happy Meal on my country walk, I know that my visceral reaction is hardcoded in my brain. The same circuitry that has evolved to warn me off bad eggs activates in the same way when certain people (bad eggs of a different kind) violate the social contract.
The word stigma comes from Ancient Greece, specifically the practice of burning a mark in the skin of slaves and criminals, branding them as tainted or corrupted, a way for the community to know who to avoid and why. The mark became metaphorical over time, but its function remains the same: an expression of the collective agreement that certain behaviours are off-limits and disreputable. Not illegal, necessarily; just not done. Stigma became a means by which human communities delineated and enforced moral boundaries without laws through exclusion, defamation, and loss of status.
Stigma is closely associated with shame, that feeling of distress or humiliation when others judge us, measure our worth and find it wanting. Nietzsche, ever the psychologist before the profession existed, understood that we fear the loss of reputation far more intensely than the troubles of conscience. This is supported by evolutionary psychology today, and it makes perfect sense. For most of human history, social exclusion was a death sentence. If you were rejected by the tribe, you lost the community that helped keep you alive. We are hard-wired to care what the tribe thinks because that’s how our ancestors survived.
Japan is the case study. Drop your wallet in Tokyo, that gigantic metropolis with a population bigger than Australia, and there’s a very good chance you’ll get it back, with all the cash inside and a polite bow from the person who’s crossed the city to return it to you. If you don’t get it back, it probably got pocketed by a tourist. This isn’t because Japanese people are more virtuous by nature, but because social obligation is so embedded and the cost of deviating from that norm so high that handing back the wallet – even at personal inconvenience – is the only rational move. Failure to do so can invite shame upon your family, your company, and your country. When we see clips of visiting Japanese football fans cleaning up the stands at the end of an international game, it’s the same social obligations at work. That’s what happens when shame enforces particular standards.
There’s a dark side to this, however. A culture so profoundly shaped by group obligation can also become savage when in conflict with those outside the group. Japan's conduct during the Second World War set a moral boundary between those in the tribe and those outside it, the latter dehumanised and subject to cruelties that seem unimaginable from a culture so elaborately courteous in peacetime.
As for the modern West, the role of shame has changed significantly since the post-war period – often for good reasons. Stigma is enormously powerful in shaping cultures, as we have seen, but it’s also been used viciously, often targeting those who deviated from suffocating norms: unmarried mothers and gay people being prime examples. Changing attitudes to marriage and sex have seen those stigmas rightly reversed. Indeed, stigma itself has been stigmatised to near extinction – the very word conjuring outdated values rejected by all progressive-minded people. This creates a new problem, though. If the machinery of stigma is itself discredited – once the question “Who are you to judge?” becomes the moral arbiter – then the civilising stigmas get thrown out with the cruel ones, and there’s no ready substitute to take their place.
The deeper irony is that the last couple of decades have introduced new stigmas enforced by those who made such a success of eliminating the old ones. The stigma around being a single mother has gone. That’s a good development since the stigma would be better directed at absent fathers. But when new stigmas attach to concerns about (say) immigration, it’s a bad development, making vital and honest conversations fraught for those who most need them – the politicians, civil servants, the cultural establishment, and others who place such a premium on their reputations. Meanwhile, the authorities treat looting and shoplifting as secondary problems – insufficient youth clubs being a typical excuse. The crimes are never condemned on their own account because shaming the perpetrators is itself seen as shameful. Better to talk about the underlying causes, the lack of ping pong tables, and so on.
Breaking the machinery of stigma has produced distinct kinds of failure, the first of which is misdirection. Our capacity for moral enforcement points in entirely the wrong direction – away from behaviour and towards language; away from acts and towards opinions. The things that actually harm people carry less stigma than ever, while we’re encouraged to think that waving the national flag or misgendering a colleague is the real disgrace.
The second failure is devaluation. For years, the progressive establishment threw the word “racist” at just about everything, from punctuality to the countryside, classical music to knitting. These are real examples, by the way. Have you ever had one of those nightmares where you go to work with no clothes on? The progressive’s version of that is turning up on time to a Bach recital in the Lake District wearing a self-made woolly jumper. The preoccupation with race at every juncture of social life is ridiculous, of course, which is why sane people ignore it, but the race obsession has done real harm. Take Nick Fuentes, the right-wing provocateur who proudly declares himself a racist to a cheering audience of people who have grown sick of being called the same. The word that should end a career has become, for a growing cohort of young men, a badge of defiance. It’s not just cynical podcasters and their screen-addled followers, though. The smearing of otherwise decent people as bigots has caused a wider rupture in attitudes toward race. In a conversation about immigration 10 years ago, citing crime statistics would have come with an apology and half a dozen caveats. That’s quickly changing to “there are too many blacks in London” or much coarser varieties. This is the cost of devaluation.
The third failure is surrender. Last week in London, we saw clips of teenagers looting stores while police watched impasively from the sidelines. The public dares not get involved because they’ve learned they’ll be identified as the problem. Take the case of Walker Smith, an employee of Waitrose, a British supermarket. A customer told him a known shoplifter was heading for the door with a bag of Easter eggs. Smith grabbed the bag, acting on the moral instinct most of us have that theft is wrong. For this, he was hauled before HR and promptly fired. He’d worked for Waitrose for 17 years and lost his livelihood because, in one moment in all that time of service, he chose to do the right thing. He says he may now lose his home.
“Nothing we sell is worth risking lives for,” said Waitrose, reading from a crisis comms script created for just this sort of thing. They were referring to Easter eggs, but there’s something else going on in that sentence, a tacit admission that shoplifting no longer carries a stigma, while those who respond like Walker Smith do. The same governing philosophy echoes through every statement of its kind issued by every institution in the land: What matters no longer matters; what you care about we disdain. Your values are the stigma. Shame on YOU.
I still can’t drop litter. No distance is too far if it means avoiding a wrestling match with my own conscience over something as apparently trivial as a plastic bottle. But I’m beginning to wonder if it really matters anymore in a country so determined to throw itself in the bin.
If you’d like to support this kind of work, there are a couple of days left on the 50% anniversary discount. Upgrading also unlocks the full archive.
You might also like:
Thanks for reading. What behaviour should carry more shame than it does? As always, I'm interested to hear what people think, so do join the discussions below.
The Gadfly is six months old this week. The next six months will be broader – longform essays and shorter satirical pieces as before, but with audio/video and some new topics. If you're here for the first time, don't forget to subscribe.
Wow