Nobody likes to feel embarrassed. Indeed, our most painful and vivid memories are often of experiences in which we were humiliated by or in front of others. Embarrassment can lead to shame and self-loathing. It can diminish our confidence, shake us from our sense of certainty, and cause the kind of repression that expresses itself in all types of neuroses. When we feel embarrassed, we want to avoid others and conceal that of which we are ashamed. More than this, we want to escape our embarrassment and ensure that whatever gave rise to it in the first place does not happen again. We tend to view embarrassment as an unqualified evil. To be embarrassed, we think, is a fate that must be avoided at all costs.

And yet, there are times when embarrassment has salutary effects. In some circumstances, feeling embarrassed is not only necessary but good. It helps us to see where we have gone wrong and teaches us to want to do otherwise. It is a corrective for behavior that needs correcting and reminds us of the fact that we are not infallible, but vulnerable, broken creatures who need one another’s mercy, forgiveness, and love.

An example from a little-remarked-upon scene in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov may help to serve the point. Dmitri, the oldest of the Karamazov brothers, is a drunkard and a rogue. He is notorious for throwing lavish parties, typically funded with other people’s money, and gorging himself on sweets, champagne, vodka, and women. He flies into fits of anger and lashes out at anyone unfortunate enough to be in his vicinity at the time. He wallows in depravity. His debauched lifestyle knows no limits.

After beating his father and stealing a fistful of the old man’s money, he blows every cent of it on a carnivalesque night of partying and excess. In the early hours of the next morning, as he makes plans to run off with one of his mistresses, the police arrive and arrest him for his father’s murder. The patriarch of the Karamazov family, it seems, had not simply been beaten but was eventually killed, and Dmitri is the prime suspect.

At first, Dmitri is obstinate, refusing to go along with the investigation. He is proud and even condescending in his own defense. But then the arresting officers ask him to strip so they can search his clothes for clues and weapons, and Dmitri’s demeanor undergoes a profound change. He feels disgraced to have to sit undressed in a room full of people wearing clothes and is even more embarrassed when he is asked to remove his socks—“they were not very clean, nor were his underclothes, and now everyone could see it.”

How, one might ask, could such a degrading circumstance be considered good? In what way can so humiliating a situation be beneficial? And yet there is no doubt that Dmitri benefits from it.

Sitting undressed before the men investigating him for murder reveals his vulnerability. More than that, it shows him how disorderly his life has become. His dirty undergarments attest to the disgraceful way he has been conducting himself. Confronted with his own weakness, mortified by the uncleanliness in which he has chosen to live, Dmitri lets go of his conceit and expresses remorse for his boorish behavior. His embarrassment has helped him to become self-aware and provided him with the opportunity to reform his ways.

The 20th-century rabbi and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel had a similar notion of the humility gained through humiliation in mind when he asserted that “What the world needs is a sense of embarrassment.” For Heschel, the virtue of embarrassment is that it robs us of our certainty and self-satisfaction. The gravest danger, he argued, is to believe oneself morally justified, especially in a world in which oppression and injustice reign supreme.

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“The end of embarrassment,” Heschel wrote, “would be the end of humanity.” For humanity and humility go hand in hand.

I am afraid of people who are never embarrassed at their own pettiness, prejudices, envy, and conceit, never embarrassed at the profanation of life. A world full of grandeur has been converted into a carnival. There are slums, disease, and starvation all over the world, and we are building more luxurious hotels in Las Vegas. Social dynamics is no substitute for moral responsibility.

According to Heschel, feeling embarrassed not only keeps our worst impulses in check; it also opens us to the wonder of existence by reminding us of how small we are in relation to a life that is always more than we expected. When we become aware of just how mysterious and uncertain life really is, we grow in our appreciation for that which transcends us.

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Insisting that embarrassment is a protection “against arrogance, hybris, self-deification,” Heschel suggests that humility is the true path to fulfillment. When we learn to feel embarrassed by our shortcomings, we begin to see the world, and ourselves, more clearly. And it is only then that we can live in love and harmony with one another.

Throughout the rest of The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri is confronted by countless hardships, including being put on trial for a murder he did not commit. And yet, from the time of his arrest on, he remains one of the most honest, faithful characters in the book. His embarrassment has changed him. He has grown in the face of it. Would that we all respond to embarrassment in the same way.

References

Dostoevsky, F. (2021). The Brothers Karamazov: Bicentennial Edition. Trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky. United Kingdom: Picador.

Heschel, A. J. (1965). Who is Man? United Kingdom: Stanford University Press.

The effect of shame on prosocial behavior tendency toward a stranger. BMC Psychology. 2022. S.Li, et al.