Skam deg! Shame on you!

There are surprisingly many words and expressions in Norwegian that are related to shame. Skamløs, å bli skamfull, bringe skam over noen, leve i skam, gjøre noe for skams skyld, det er både synd og skam, bite hodet av all skam, skamme seg over noe.. Even the housing market has  ‘skambud’. The popular Norwegian TV series about teenagers was also called ‘Skam’. Guess what a movie about French teenagers was called in the 90s? It was called ‘La haine’, hatred.

Shame is defined as “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolishbehaviour.” I believe that shame is a central feeling in Norwegian society, more than in many other cultures. What? you might think. Norwegians always look so smiling and of even mood. When is it they feel shame? Well exactly as mentionned in the definition, when they feel they did something wrong. In other countries shame will exist but I believe not to the degree of Norway at least in Europe (Japanese culture probably has even more importance on shame than Norway). In France, for example, people get angry instead.

Imagine you are a single parent who cannot pay for their child’s cantine fees, in many countries the parent will be angry at the system, at the employers not giving enough salary, at the government not prioritising families. In Norway there is a high chance the parent will feel ashamed, and solve this in silence for example by taking up a consumer loan or credit on a credit card.

Shame is not only something you feel personally from a situation. It is something you inflict on other people by shaming them when you believe they are not confirming with whatever rule you think they should follow. And that is a freaking national sport in Norway. After all these years in Norway, I think foreigners first feel like they are shamed by Norwegians, before we see that Norwegians also feel shame themselves.

Before I came to Norway, I thought that only children were shamed by adults: parents, teachers. dBut here in Norway, adults shame each other in broad daylight!

In many cultures, children are shamed because they don’t do what is expected from them, they get shamed by teachers when they have bad grades. When I was in middle school, teachers distributed exam papers from best to worst grades. I remember the shame I felt when my name was not called first. I just had to close my eyes and hope that my name would be called soon. Teachers would also write on the blackboard the worst and ‘funniest’ mistakes from all of our exams, for everyone to see. They wanted to motivate us through shame and humiliation.

Norwegians will tell you this would never happen in Norway, because here we do not shame children! It is true that children are not shamed for bad grades. But shame is a tool that adults use to make children conform and not stand out. Because standing out is not good in this country. Children learn from an early age to follow the 2 million unwritten and social rules adopted by society. In Norwegian kindergartens kids learn about their emotions, and to recognise them and regulate them. They learn they can get upset, angry, happy. But interestingly enough they don’t learn they can feel shame, despite this feeling being very present in Norwegian society. I think that children and adults should learn to identify the feeling and assess whether it is really right to feel shame at that moment.

The role of shame in child rearing is not easy for foreigners to understand. I have heard many times kindergarten teachers say to my child, ‘He must not stand out.’ But that doesn’t sound particularly problematic to French or Americans. We come from societies where the goal is indeed to stand out. We want our children to be extraordinary, smart, artistic, creative souls who become inventors and visionaries. Who really wants to be like everyone else? Here in Norway, you must have the same clothes, lunchbox, vacation, trampoline, and house color. Fit in! Or feel shame.

One can see shame as something positive. It is a tool for social control that ensures that people do not do too much illegal, and it ensures us a peaceful society. What becomes difficult for people to handle is seeing situations where the shame becomes heavier to bear than the mistake they have made. It’s about proportions. Is painting the house pink when everyone else’s is yellow really so bad, actually? Should one be ostracized for something so harmless? Or to take a more public example, is the case of Simen Velle interesting. He was convicted, Norway’s legal system is done with the case. But society is not. Does he really have to feel shame for the rest of his life? This is typically Norwegian. There are few other countries where honesty is so important and where the whole society gets to have a say in how much shame you must live with. But this becomes complicated.

Why is there so much shame in Norwegian society? I believe that a combination of strict religious morality, and too much Jantelov, are reasons for this. I am very positive about a society where everyone has the same opportunities in life, but I doubt that shame is a good tool to achieve that.

This article was an opinion piece in VG on the 4th of May 2024 under the title Nordmenn-det skambelagte folket