This is demonstrated in the famous incident described by Herodotus of the very first tragedy performed in Athens. It was performed only once. The play was The Fall of Miletus by Phrynicus, describing the sack of that Ionian city by the Persians in 494 B.C., a disaster that had happened the previous year. The reaction of the audience was so extreme that all Athens could not function for several days. Phrynicus was banished, never to be heard of again, and his tragedy burnt.
From Shame to Guilt
The second biological affect I wish to consider here is shame.
Because it is a socially evoked affect, it has rarely been studied experimentally, in either animals or humans. It is a complicated affect whose occasioning stimuli often have to do with maintaining hierarchical relationships in highly social animals, and is the submissive response to rejection by the hierarchical group. While such biological shame is apparent as a controlling mechanism in
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carnivore groups, it is much more obvious among the primates, and particularly in human beings. We seem to be ashamed to talk about shame, and, indeed, as adults, we have been so shaped by shame in the past, so confined to a narrow band of socially acceptable behavior, that it is rarely occasioned.
But when we think back to our childhoods, the piercing, throbbing trauma of being rejected by our peer groups, the fear of inappropriately crossing over from the private domain into the public countenance, the agony when we do, particularly in relation to sexual and excretory functions, toilet accidents of others or ourselves, but also in a milder form, in wanting to be dressed the same as other children, to receive as many valentines, and to be promoted with the rest, or have parents equal in wealth, health, or promise to the parents of others, or not to be beaten up or teased by others, sometimes even to be average in schoolwork when one is really superior — anything to be sure that one is snugly sunk deeply into one’s cohort — these are some of the most powerful and profound influences on our development. We should remember here that as we grow older, our cohort is less and less our immediate peer group and more and more our family tradition, race, religion, union, or profession, et cetera.
The physiological expression of shame or humiliation involves of course blushing, dropping of the eyes and of the head, and the behavioral one of simply hiding from the group. Unfortunately, nothing is known about its biochemical or neurological basis.
If you wish to feel shame in its pure form, this stepping outside what is expected of you, simply stand out in a busy street and shout out the time in minutes and seconds over the heads of everyone who passes by, and do it for five minutes — or until you are taken away. This is shame, but not guilt, because you have done nothing your society has taught you to call wrong.
And now consider what conscious reminiscence and imagery of the future bring to this affect. And particularly consider this in the milieu of ethical right and wrong that developed as markers
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for behavior after the breakdown of the bicameral mind with its certainty of gods’ directives. Wrongs, or by another word, sins, or indeed anything that would eject us from society if it were known or seem to eject us from society can be reminisced about out of the past and worried about for the future. And this we call guilt. No one before 1ooo B.C. ever felt guilt, even while shame was the way groups and societies were held together.
To indicate the evidence that guilt as opposed to shame is a new emotion at this time, I would cite a single bit of evidence, and one that is well known.24 This is the story of Oedipus. It is referred to in two lines of the Iliad and two lines in the Odyssey which I think we can take as indicating the true story, as it came down from bicameral times. The story seems to be about a man who killed his father and then unwittingly married his mother and so became King of Thebes, proceeding to have several children-siblings by his mother, then discovering what he had done, certainly feeling shame since incest had always been a taboo, but evidently recovering from that shame, living a happy life thereafter with his wife-mother, and dying with royal honors sometime later. This was written down around 800 B.C., but the story comes from several centuries before that.
And then, only four hundred years later, we have the great trilogy of Sophocles on the subject, a play about unknown guilt, guilt so extreme that a whole city is in famine because of it, so convulsive that the culprit when he discovers his guilt is not worthy to look upon the world again and stabs his eyes into darkness with the brooches clutched from his mother-wife’s breasts, and is led away by his sister-daughters into a mystical death at Colonus.
And again, there is no biological mechanism for getting rid of guilt. How to get rid of guilt is a problem which a host of learned social rituals of reacceptance are now developed: scapegoat ceremonies among the Hebrews (the word for sending away translates 24 E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951).
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now as “forgiveness”), the similar pharmakos among the Greeks (again the word aphesis for sending the pharmakos away becomes the Greek for “forgiveness”), “purification” ceremonies of many sorts, baptism, the taurobolium, the haj, confession, the tashlik, the mass, and of course the Christian cross, which takes away the sins of the world (note the metaphors and analogies in all this). Even changing the nature of God to a forgiving father.
And I would also have you note here that while the affects are usually discrete, and evoked in very specific kinds of situations for specific kinds of responses, the emotions in consciousness are not discrete, can meld and evoke each other. Pve just said that in guilt we can have worry about future shameful experiences, which indeed is anxiety, and we thus have two emotions, anxiety and guilt, coming together as an even more powerful emotion.
From Mating to “Sex”
The third example I would consider here is the affect of mating.
It is similar in some respects to other affects but in other ways quite distinct. Animal studies show that mating, contrary to what the popular mind thinks, is not a necessary drive that builds up like hunger or thirst (although it seems so because of consciousness), but an elaborate behavior pattern waiting to be triggered off by very specific stimuli. Mating in most animals is thus confined to certain appropriate times of the year or day as well as to certain appropriate sets of stimuli as in another’s behavior, or pheromones, light conditions, privacy, security, and many other variables. These include the enormous variety of extremely complicated courtship procedures that for rather subtle evolutionary advantages seem in many animals almost designed to prevent mating rather than to encourage it, as one might expect from an oversimplified idea of the workings of natural selection. Among the anthropoid apes, in contrast to other primates, mating is so rare in the natural habitat as to have baffled early ethologists as to
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how these most human-like species reproduced at all. So too perhaps with bicameral man.
But when human beings can be conscious about their mating behavior, can reminisce about it in the past and imagine it in the future, we are in a very different world, indeed, one that seems more familiar to us. Try to imagine what your “sexual life” would be if you could not fantasize about sex.