Peter Levine speaks of “restoring goodness.” Here is a sample video, which I found interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8b-6C-5wQo
It occurs to me that what he is speaking about is the resolution of irrational shame. People who are innocent, who have done no wrong, feel good. I think feeling like a good person is something which comes naturally to relatively normal people who are, in fact, good people. Neurologically, feeling shame and feeling good are on opposing ends of the affective spectrum.
This raises the interesting question: are people who are shamed into socially desirable behavior actually good? I would answer: no, not really, to precisely the extent their own personal feelings would otherwise lead them in other directions.
This leads to the further consideration that a society, as a whole, which acts to shame people into conformity cannot really be called a good society. Think of Communists. Think of Southern Baptists. The effect is the same, other than that Southern Baptists do not and never have felt the need to murder millions of people.
Shame and violence, of course, go together, but nowhere in world history are the two combined so inextricably as in regimes like that of modern China. First there was the physical violence, the concentration camps and psychological torture camps. Then the Cultural Revolution where millions were murdered by psychopathic children. Current dictator Xi Jinping was apparently exiled when his father fell into disfavor during that cataclysmic series of atrocities directly inspired by Mao.
Now, the violence is indirect. It exists in the “social credit score”, which is a more or less direct measurement of how much shame an individual should feel according to a government which, if it wanted to, would know how many shits you take a day, and certainly knows how many cigarettes you smoke, what books you are reading, what websites you visit, and how many and which video games you own.
All of this, though, is on a continuum. Shaming can and should be seen as violence by other means.
Shame has a place, like all human emotions. But it rarely leads anywhere genuinely good. Its value is most conspicuous in its absence. Chuck Schumer, for example, seems incapable of feeling shame. In him, it would accomplish some good.