Guilt Culture

My mother gave me a series of classical mythology lectures on CD for Christmas. The myth lectures were actually my listening material when I first started running. It was once I finished them that I started looking for audio books to listen to.

In one of these lectures, the instructor, who happens to be British, was talking about the "shame culture" of ancient Greece and Rome. When you do something wrong it is very public. You are punished by other people. I can personally attest to Italy's current shame culture. When I was visiting Rome, Antonella (the lovely woman who cooked dinner for us) would shake her finger at anyone who did something they shouldn't have and call them "shamo." This shame culture is a result of the Mediterranean climate. People spend so much time outside that their wrongdoings will inevitably be public.

The instructor compared this to England's "guilt culture." England does not have a Mediterranean climate, so people spend most of their time inside. If you do something wrong here you are punished by yourself. You sit alone in your room watching the rain pour down the window, being devoured by your own guilt.

I haven't been suffering from shame or guilt since moving here, but I am starting to see how the weather could influence an entire culture. It's still only fall but when I open the door and feel the wind, I tend to want to stay indoors. I tried to prepare myself for this last winter and learned that most of my problems with cold weather come from not really wearing the right clothes. So as it gets colder I will be buying some warmer things to wear. And then I can get back to public humiliation. My Italian roots wouldn't have it any other way.