Here is the commentary on the Stand to Reason web site.
Read the whole thing, and take note of this part:
But there’s one necessary requirement for someone ever to feel ashamed for his behavior, and the resistance to shame is really a resistance to this necessary requirement. This requirement is: he must feel responsible for the behavior. If you were forced to do something or it was an accident, there is no reason to feel ashamed. It is when you choose to do something that is patently immoral, and you reflect on it, there is a sense of shame associated with that because you chose to do it. But this is currently one of the deep, deep flaws in the American moral character–the loss of a sense of personal responsibility.
One of the reasons for the plethora of legal cases now is because everybody is saying it’s somebody else’s fault. I trimmed my hedges with a Sears lawnmower. I fell and it cut me. That’s not my fault for doing something stupid. It is Sears fault for not telling me that I shouldn’t have used their lawnmower to trim the hedges with. By the way, that’s a real story and the person collected for that. There are abundant examples of those kinds of crazy things because more and more people are saying that they are not the ones who are really responsible. Everybody is a victim, and if you are not responsible then there is no reason to feel shame about what you are not responsible for. Ergo, no shame and no guilt. The two go hand in hand.
I think it would be great if one phrase was restored to the language of our moral discourse. It would be great if we would have the moral fortitude to say with conviction, Shame on you. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. It feels kind of awkward even to say that. It sounds so rude. Of course, this cuts across the grain of the cult of self-love and self-esteem, which exists not only in our culture but even in the church.
[…]Nowadays we go way out of our way not to act as if there is anything even marginally questionable about any of those things. It’s as if we’re desperately trying to make people who do bad things feel good, or at least feel neutral when they should be feeling very bad about what they’ve done.
It’s as if people have the idea that if we can get rid of shame, we can get rid of the moral offense that is at its root. To say that you ought to be ashamed is like saying that you ought to feel something about your genuine guilt.
The idea seems to be that if we can change our feeling about guilt–I’m speaking here of true moral guilt, not the emotion of guilt, which I would consider much like shame itself–then the guilt itself will disappear. It’s like saying that if we can get rid of the symptoms that sickness causes, then we can get rid of sickness, too. If we can take away the pain that causes the sickness, the sickness is gone. It doesn’t work that way.
If a sinner harms another person, they need to not gloss over the sin and just try to be friends with the victim again, without any real effort to treat the sin as a serious failure. The sinner needs to claim responsibility, to understand how the victim felt, to make it up to them with some actions, and to take steps to change their character so that the mistake won’t happen again.
Without growth, the same selfish mistakes are made over and over again. And saying “I’m sorry – are we friends now? are we friends now?” doesn’t fix the problem with the victim of the sin, and it doesn’t prepare sinner for real relationships with real self-sacrifice and real moral obligations. It’s OK to make a mistake, but you don’t learn from it unless you listen to the other person and then come up with things to do to change who you are and how you treat them. Creating sympathy through deliberately selected experiences can change how you feel. For example, I’m very selfish and arrogant, so I should probably do more volunteer work and spend more time helping other people with ordinary stuff. Reading about issues to create empathy and understanding is also good.
WINTERY KNIGHT 