Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Our patients barreled through these tasks with the immodest impulse of the wild-eyed, street-corner psychopath. In the emotional disclosure task, comparison participants talked about being embarrassed at forgetting someone’s name or not understanding the punchline of a joke. Orbitofrontal patients, in contrast, recounted experiences that were often sexual and more suitable to a therapy session than an interaction with a stranger. They were unconstrained by the anticipation of embarrassment at having crossed the boundaries of intimacy. One patient’s account of embarrassment to his new acquaintance, the experimenter: “I was embarrassed when I was discovered in a store’s dressing room with my girlfriend.”

When teasing the stranger, the orbitofrontal patients did so in inappropriate and often lewd fashion. The nicknames they devised always contained sexual innuendo directed at the experimenter. One joked about what he and the experimenter might really get down to if given the chance. Unlike the comparison participants, the orbitofrontal patients showed no signs of embarrassment when teasing, even though their provocative efforts were often quite outlandish.

Finally, in judging the emotions of others, our orbitofrontal patients were inept at identifying embarrassment from photos, although they were quite skilled at judging other facial expressions, for example those of happiness, amusement, or surprise. They resembled psychopaths, who prove to be unresponsive to the signs of suffering in others.

Embarrassment warns us of immoral acts and prevents us from mistakes that unsettle social harmony. It signals our sense of wrongdoing and our respect for the judgments of others. It provokes ordinary acts of forgiveness and reconciliation, without which it would be a dog-eat-dog world. Orbitofrontal patients, fully capable in the realm of reason, have lost this art of embarrassment. They have lost the subtle ethic of modesty.

AN ETHIC OF MODESTY

 

Philosophers turn to metaphors to describe the moral sentiments, and those metaphors often center upon animating natural forces that unite humans in common cause. For the British Enlightenment philosophers, moral sentiments like sympathy made up an invisible force field, binding individuals to one another. For the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, the Tao, or way of virtue, is like water, noncompetitive but touching all. Embarrassment is like an ocean wave: It throws you and those near you into the earth, but you come up embracing and laughing.

The simple elements of the embarrassment display I had documented and traced back to other species’ appeasement and reconciliation processes—the gaze aversion, head movements down, awkward smiles, and face touches—are a language of cooperation; they are the unspoken ethic of modesty. With these fleeting displays of deference, we preempt conflicts. We navigate conflict-laden situations (watch how regularly people display embarrassment when in close physical spaces, when negotiating the turn-taking of everyday conversations, or when sharing food). We express gratitude and appreciation. We quickly extricate embarrassed souls from their momentary predicaments with deflections of attention or face-saving parodies of the mishap.

Embarrassment is the foundation of an ethic of modesty. The display of embarrassment converts events that go into the denominator of the jen ratio (social gaffes, offensive remarks, violations of privacy) and transforms them into opportunities for reconciliation and forgiveness (experiences in the numerator of the jen ratio). It is in these in-the-moment acts of deference that we honor others, and in so doing, become strong. It is often when tender and weak that we are alive, and full of jen. In the words of Lao Tzu:

When man is born, he is tender and weak

At death, he is stiff and hard

All things, the grass as well as trees, are tender and subtle while alive

When dead, they are withered and dried.

Therefore the stiff and the hard are companions of death

The tender and weak are the companions of life

If the tree is stiff, it will break

The strong and the great are inferior, while the tender and the weak are superior.

 

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