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DUBROVNIK, Croatia – Twenty-one episodes of the popular HBO series “Game of Thrones” were filmed in this city of 16th-century high walls and complicated history. One of them was shot along a section of St. Dominic Street, known as the walk of shame.
The very concept of shame seems foreign to us today, like the stockades of the American Puritan era which were designed to humiliate those who violated what were then cultural norms and serve as a warning to others not to tread similar paths.
After Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) was recently censured by the Republican House for promoting the Russia collusion fiction in the 2020 election, Democrats chanted “shame, shame, shame.” It’s nice to know they have some standards besides the double standards they usually display.
At the end of the LGBTQIA+ community’s celebration of “Pride Month,” it might be worthwhile to consider some of the downsides of pride and its opposite — shame, or humiliation.
Once again, definitions can be helpful in focusing the mind. Dictionary.com defines shame as “the painful feeling arising from the consciousness of something dishonorable, improper.” Among shame’s antonyms is humiliate: “made to feel a painful loss of pride, self-respect, or dignity, deeply embarrassed or put to shame.”
The obvious question becomes what happens to a culture that regards fewer things as dishonorable and improper? Put another way, suppose we all get to define what is honorable and proper? Is shameful also individually defined, or does it still have a universal application? If left to the individual, can anything then be called improper and dishonorable?
Last Friday in New York City during the city’s annual Drag March, hundreds of drag performers marched through Manhattan’s East Village chanting “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.” No reporter I’ve seen asked them what they meant by “coming for your children.” No politician appeared to denounce the statement.
Before arriving in Dubrovnik, I stayed in a hotel in Rome which had a large rainbow flag at the check-in desk and just in case I missed the point, a statement about pride on the wall. That I, and perhaps others, might be offended by this corporate woke-ism and promotion of what Scripture calls an “abomination” apparently is of no concern to virtually every major corporation.
How much more are we willing to tolerate before decadence tightens its grip so strongly that there is no escape, and we are left to the consequences of our own base desires? Other nations that have allowed norms to be violated did not live to see future decades or centuries. What makes America – or Europe, which has seen many countries and cultures rise and fall – think we can escape history’s judgment?
Cersei Lannister is recognized as one of the cruelest villains in “Game of Thrones.”
One summation of her journey down the walk of shame episode says: “The queen’s hair is shaved off, she is exposed before the entire population of King’s Landing, her sins are announced and she, naked, has to walk barefoot through the streets, in front of her subjects, while a fair with a bell screams: shame, shame, shame. In less than a few minutes, the population spat, cursed, and threw feces at the Queen.”
Perhaps America needs its own walk of shame. If we had one, the traffic would likely be pretty heavy, but the results might be the redemption of our corrupt and tainted souls.
Check out the Seven Deadly Sins find Pride listed
Actually, Pride is first!
Schiff is a reminder that the abolition of dueling bore consequences.
I assume the author knows the Democrats shouted “shame shame” AT the censure of a liar (and worse) not at the liar himself.
In fact, a slogan for them (and perhaps all of DC ) is “the party of no shame.”
And aren’t we already way past the threshold?
Simply put, shame requires a conscience. Nuff said.
“The stockades of the American puritan era?:” I brlieve you meam the STOCKS, the pillories.
Stockades were more useful if hostile Indians decided to attack…
Hello Cal Thomas, and all, In the article you ask: “How much more are we willing to tolerate before decadence tightens its grip so strongly that there is no escape, and we are left to the consequences of our own base desires?”
But shouldn’t the urgent question be this: How much more will our Creator tolerate?
The second book of Proverbs ends this way, telling us to: “Follow the way of good people and stay on the paths of the righteous, for only the upright will reside in the earth, and the blameless will remain in it. As for the wicked, they will be cut off from the earth, and the treacherous will be torn away from it.”
We are rapidly approaching the moment when our Creator, the God of Abraham, will, as he has promised, “bring to ruin those ruining the earth”. Already the Kingdom of God – the heavenly government for whose coming Jesus taught us to pray – is teaching millions – from “every tribe and nation and tongue” – to live in peace, as the brothers and sisters we truly are.
And yes, when I was young, pride was considered to be a sin.
Yes – like when Ahab and Jezebel led Israel into decadence and evil, our current leadership is leading America to Decadence.
The safeguards the founders installed to ensure America stays a good nation is being dismantled by Democrats at all levels of government.
We’re here, we’re morons, and now we run your country!
“If left to the individual, can anything then be called improper and dishonorable?”
Subjectivism (anything goes) and cynicism (virtue is useless, impractical, and beyond man), are the tragic consequences of religious morality, the morality of altruism. The morality of altruism is a morality based on what other or others say is moral or immoral regardless of or in contradiction to the facts of reality. Religious, altruist, morality results in moral confusion, subjectivism, cynicism, and an antipathy or even hatred towards morality.
When you place morality above man, beyond man, outside of man, and against his life and his personal, rational, pursuit of happiness, subjectivism, cynicism, and antipathy towards virtue is what you will get.
The opposite of pride is not shame but guilt. And there are two types of guilt, earned and unearned. Just as there are two types of pride, real pride which is earned, and false pride which is unearned pride.
There are two types of shaming also. Rational and morally proper shaming based on an objective moral judgement which in turn is based on facing the facts of reality and absurd, ridiculous, improper, uncalled for, unearned shame.
“I am good because other people say I’m good” or “I am bad because other people say I’m bad” is no way to maintain your sanity, self-esteem, self-confidence, or achieve your happiness, or your actual, real, rational virtue. But it will lead you to give up on ever discovering what true morality is and what it is for.
“You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island—it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today—and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it….
The purpose of [a rational] morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.” – Ayn Rand
Basically your Objectivism For Dummies course consists of the following:
Altruism…bad.
Jesus…..bad
Christianity…………bad
Judaism…….bad
Judeo-Christianity is Leftism……bad
Judaism and Christianity are oriental…..bad
Christianity prepared the ground for modern totalitarianism….bad
Medieval Christianity was a totalitarian system…..bad
God and magical thinking…….bad
Atheism….good
Greeks……good
Christian Dark Age….bad
Renaissance and enlightenment …..good
Greek philosophers……good
Christian philosophers…….bad
selfishness “properly defined”, rational selfishness….good
Objectivist reason and reality….good
Altruism…bad.
Repeat ad infinitum. The Big Lie in practice.
And there we have the simplistic world according to our rezidentura fraud…..THX
“Observe what this beneficiary-criterion of [the altruist] morality does to a man’s life. The first thing he learns is that morality is his enemy: he has nothing to gain from it, he can only lose; self-inflicted loss, self-inflicted pain and the gray, debilitating pall of an incomprehensible duty is all that he can expect. He may hope that others might occasionally sacrifice themselves for his benefit, as he grudgingly sacrifices himself for theirs, but he knows that the relationship will bring mutual resentment, not pleasure-and that, morally, their pursuit of values will be like an exchange of unwanted, unchosen Christmas presents, which neither is morally permitted to buy for himself. Apart from such times as he manages to perform some act of self-sacrifice, he possesses no moral significance: morality takes no cognizance of him and has nothing to say to him for guidance in the crucial issues of his life; it is only his own personal, private, “selfish” life and, as such, it is regarded either as evil or, at best, amoral.” – Ayn Rand
Really? It took you two posts to convey what could have been said more succinctly on one?
Do you think anyone, at this point, is going to read yet another pointless screed on altruism from your girlfriend?
Thank you, Intrepid. You’re right… I gave up early on the twisted THX paragraphs.
And i certainly don’t need tediously long quotes from the likes of Ayn Rand.
You don’t have to read any of my comments, nevertheless Ayn Rand, her philosophy of Objectivism, and her moral code of rational selfishness are right and religious morality is wrong.
Demorats and wokeatards have no shame.
People like these are Marxist and have no regard for what they consider bourgeois morality. The only “morality” they recognize is anything done to obtain and retain power for themselves.