Must we live in perpetual fear of being named and shamed?

You should feel thoroughly ashamed of reading this infamous rag. Or else you might decide to revel, shamelessly, in its critics’ prim disapproval. From political squalls to global wars, David Keen argues that a ‘spiral of shame’ and shamelessness now traps individuals and societies in arid cycles of pain, rage and revenge. Manipulative actors – ‘advertisers, warmongers, terrorists, tyrants and charlatans’ – sell us ‘magical solutions’ to the anguish of the shame they themselves stoke. But they merely pass the burden to other groups, leaving us with more suffering. Keen writes: ‘Such actors do with shame what the Mafia does with fear.’

The author teaches conflict studies at the LSE. He draws on his research in war zones, from Sierra Leone to Sri Lanka and Sudan to Guatemala. This border-hopping reach and his focus on shame as a strategic weapon set his work apart from recent investigations into social-media storms of outrage and disgrace. Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, for instance, fails to make the bibliography. Keen cares more about the words, consciences, even souls of Adolf Eichmann, rebel child soldiers in Sierra Leone and violent criminals in US jails than the latest Twitter tempest or Insta imbroglio. This useful emphasis deepens the hinterland of shame.

Advertisers promise – at a cost – to lift the shame of our being too fat, dirty, dowdy or just poor

Yet he presents the ‘vortex of mutual shaming’ that roils through public life with (he admits) ‘political views and biases’. These may limit his ability to persuade anyone outside his tribe. Supporters of Trumpism and Brexit, those twin alliances ‘between the shameless and shamed’, inevitably occupy large chunks of the book. Although he doesn’t sneer or gloat, and shuns Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ attitude, he evidently doubts that a reasonable case could be made for either cause.