The world of people who really like board games is a gentle corner of the Nerd-iverse. Not for us the eye-bursting outrage of Comic Con attendees, driven to rage by childhood-destroying reimagining of favourite characters. Nor do we indulge in the video game enthusiast’s hobby of sending death threats to people who write reviews we don’t like.
Our message boards are, by comparison, peaceful meadows filled with discussions of things like: best two-player game for a long car journey through France, snack etiquette, and can I borrow some dice? Not, of course, that there isn’t occasional discontent when someone points out that maybe games simulating nineteenth-century colonialism are in poor taste, or notices very few women are game designers.
Shame is good. Shame is nature’s way of letting you know you are – at least on occasions – an arsehole
Recently, there have been heated arguments (mild disagreements, passive-aggressive blog-posts) about “the shelf of shame” – a term board gamers use to denote those games that they have bought and never played, due to a lack of time, or inclination, or friends. They are a baleful, visual reminder of having eyes bigger than the circle of people willing to play board games with you.
There is now – hideously predictably – controversy about whether we should use the term at all. The argument goes that shame is a negative emotion, and to use a term that implies people should feel shame might make them feel bad. To which I say: good. Shame is a healthy response to unhealthy behaviour. Shame is good. Shame is nature’s way of letting you know you are – at least on occasions – an arsehole. The capacity to feel shame is what separates humans from Donald Trump.
If having spent too much money unnecessarily acquiring things you don’t need and don’t use causes you shame, then it’s giving you important information. The problems of the word of 2023 aren’t caused by a world that’s too steeped in shame, but rather because we feel shame too rarely.
Recently Jacob Rees-Mogg, looking and sounding like a stick of liquorice that’s been accidentally left on a radiator, told the National Conservatives conference: “People that try and gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme come back to bite them – as I dare say we found out by insisting on voter ID for elections.”
That’s a minister in the government that brought in the Elections Act 2022 admitting that the Elections Act 2022 was an attempt to rig elections. Rigging elections is illegal, but he will face no consequences for such an admission, nor will he feel any shame for having derided the idea that it was an attempt at gerrymandering before the election happened.
And it’s not just Rees-Mogg. Suella Braverman, the only person who hates lifeboats more than Poseidon, refused to apologise to a Holocaust survivor for the language she used about refugees. Instead, she doubled down and went on to make the false claim that there were 100 million refugees making their way to Britain. When Braverman is not on the air, she’s deputised by Robert Jenrick – who looks like the version of James Corden your mum could afford and promised that everyone in the playground would think is the real thing. Jenrick, of course, is the man who unlawfully approved a housing development for Richard Desmond a day before such approval would have cost Desmond an extra £30 million in tax, and two weeks before Desmond made a large contribution to the Conservative party.
If you or I had to resign after doing that – as Jenrick did – we would rightly feel ashamed. I’m still haunted by a can of drink that I’m not sure scanned properly in the self-service till at the Marks & Sparks in Victoria Station in 2019. I wake with chills thinking about hurtful things I said in the last millennium. The idea of going back into government and just daring everyone not to say anything about it is baffling to me. What our culture needs more than anything is more shame.
We used to have our own ways of punishing shameful behaviour: rough music. We’d clatter pots and pans and hound miscreants out of town, or roll them down a hill in a barrel full of ordure. We had skimmingtons and stang ridings, nominies and wooset-hunts, most of which involved chasing the miscreant while rattling things at them until they fell in a midden-heap. The Italians had their scampanates, Germans their katzenmusiks and the French their charivaris. But politicians don’t feel shame any longer. After all, the public can’t ride you out of town on a railway when you’ve made all the rail operating companies go on strike.
Even Keir Starmer, who feels more and more like an adenoidal lifeboat captain who’s come to your school to give you a stern telling off about playing with his ropes, shamelessly abandons the positions he said he used to believe in. Shame would stop most of us behaving like past promises don’t matter. We’d apologise, or make amends, or even try to keep our word.
Punch, tellingly, was originally subtitled “the London charivari”. Its job was to be the rough music of the city, the clattering of metaphorical pots and the placing of imaginary horns upon the miscreants in our public life. The function of humorous prose is to make someone, somewhere feel shame (someone other than your parents who had such high hopes you’d get a real job).
So, here’s to shame. Let us drink deep from the well of mortification, let shame be our conscience and our guide, and let’s push Jacob Rees-Mogg down a hill in a barrel.
Nathaniel Tapley is a comedy writer and performer on the TV shows you hate
