“I wouldn’t want my money to go toward perpetuation of privilege,” declared Larry Summers, speaking to students at Northern Essex Community College on October 2, 2019, less than two months after the death of his alleged “wingman,” Jeffrey Epstein.
The recent release of a trove of emails from the Epstein estate provides us with an instructive opportunity to reflect on the relationship between guilt, embarrassment, and shame.
We should be grateful to the former Harvard president for such a clear illustration.
In 1993, philosopher Bernard Williams provided a major reflection on ancient Greek ethics, and he made a number of insightful observations regarding shame.
First, while guilt is related to violations of moral rules and breaches of moral codes through specific actions, shame is concerned with a failure of the self, from the perspective of some imagined or real internal spectator.
Second, shame prompts one to want to hide or withdraw, due to a sense of unworthiness. Simultaneously, it provides an opportunity and, ideally, an aspiration to improve oneself.
Third, shame is not about society’s standards; it is self-imposed, even if learned through our upbringing and socialization.
Finally, guilt does not penetrate the self as deeply as shame. Shame asks “What sort of person am I?” and when the answer is unsavory and distasteful to the subject, a profound disconnect between how one would like to see oneself, and the person one actually is ensues. Guilt, on the other hand, is the reaction to “What ought I to do?” and finding that one does not attain the moral standards that society or oneself has set. The response to this guilt is often just to do better in future.
The reason why Summers’ situation is illustrative is because he has engaged in actions that are embarrassing and ought to elicit guilt on his part, and as a person he ought to feel shame, but not for the same reasons. In 2006 Summers was forced to resign from the presidency of Harvard following statements that he speculated that women were innately inferior to men in the realm of science and mathematics, thereby accounting for their underrepresentation in those professions. For most people, this would have been a deeply embarrassing moment in a career, and one that might prompt some reflection and reconsideration of such views. However, the recent emails and text messages reveal a Summers who joked about women’s intelligence and complained about excessive penalties for men who hit on women in the workplace. This demonstrates that whatever social penalties Summers had experienced for voicing his views, it apparently did not rise to the level of guilt that might have prompted deep introspection and a revision of his attitudes. I speculate that the current, self-inflicted, situation that Summers finds himself in is embarrassing also. He ought to feel guilty that he was seeking “dating” advice from a notoriously convicted sex offender so that he might be able to hook up with a woman he described as his mentee. No amount of large dollar donations that he might have solicited from Epstein could erase the embarrassment that this episode causes Summers’ wife, whose name has been dragged into every news article on the subject.
Summers has declared “I have great regrets in my life. As I’ve said before, my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error of judgement.” This error of judgement persisted up to the day before Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019. This week he confessed, “I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr Epstein.”
Summers is making a category mistake here, but obviously that is the least of his offences. One’s actions might prompt one to feel guilty, shame should only follow a self assessment that one is decidedly not the person that one had believed oneself to be. And shame should not need public revelation to prick the thick skin of privilege and superiority. A pre-condition for shame is that internal spectator who recognizes a disconnect between who one sees oneself as, and who one actually is. At no point up to this week did anything happen to suggest that Lawrence Summers experienced shame.
If Summers were truly ashamed of his association with Epstein, he would have realized that this day of reckoning was inevitable.
He would have unwound his associations with the corporate boards and educational institutions that are now implicated in the revelations.
Unless his fellow directors and board members were aware of Summers’ entanglements with Epstein, the names of Yale University’s Budget Lab, the Center for American Progress, Harvard University, The New York Times, OpenAI and countless other entities should not arise in the week’s stories. But Summers doesn’t have the moral virtues to appreciate the effect of his actions on others, and was content to derive all the benefits that accrue to someone invited to the corporate boards of some of the most prestigious institutions in the country. He could certainly have spared the students of Northern Essex Community College the experience of listening to the hypocrisy of Epstein’s wingman pontificating on the perpetuation of privilege.
