Seneca, Moral Letters 11.1

Letter 11: On the blush of modesty

Your friend and I have had a conversation. He is a man of ability; his very first words showed what spirit and understanding he possesses, and what progress he has already made. He gave me a foretaste, and he will not fail to answer thereto. For he spoke not from forethought, but was suddenly caught off his guard. 

When he tried to collect himself, he could scarcely banish that hue of modesty, which is a good sign in a young man; the blush that spread over his face seemed so to rise from the depths. And I feel sure that his habit of blushing will stay with him after he has strengthened his character, stripped off all his faults, and become wise.

I laughed when I first read this letter, since I had quite the tendency to turn beet red when I was younger. It wasn’t just if I did something foolish or embarrassing myself, but also whenever I felt the slightest bit of shame about seeing anything scandalous or improper. This, of course, made me an easy object of ridicule, and so I naturally blushed even more, as well as feeling ever more dejection on the inside. 
 
An old Jesuit I knew once suggested that I instead wear my habitual blushing with a bit of pride. “It isn’t a bad thing, you know, when you automatically react to an evil with a warning sign. It means you’re still responding to a conscience. Think of all the poor people who take no notice of the nastiness in their lives at all.” 

I no longer visibly change colors so much these days, perhaps because age and worry have weathered my face, though crudeness will still make me feel deeply uncomfortable. A touch of sensitivity is not necessarily so terrible at all. 

The act of blushing is itself, of course, just a function of the body, and what matters more is understanding the state of mind that may stand behind it. Perhaps it is my attitude that has slowly changed, but I am increasingly aware of how easily our contemporary brand of hardness and cynicism can roll right over a sense of innocence. We laugh at purity, while glorifying obscenity. 

Yet just because many of us don’t want to be decent and loving people does not mean that any of us can’t be decent and loving people. A sense of shame does not have to be shameful. There is a world of difference between deliberately embarrassing someone, which will rarely do any good, and being acutely aware of our own failings, which can serve to help us correct them. 

Guilt and shame will only become meaningless when we no longer distinguish between right and wrong; where there is only what is convenient or inconvenient, no one ever wants to “feel bad” about anything. It can be quite hard to practice modesty, when people around me think of that virtue as now being a vice. 

I was always taken aback by those who never seemed able to apologize, and while I learned that some were just too arrogant to admit that they were wrong, there were also others who lacked remorse because the lacked a moral compass. If someone blushes, it might be a sign that he still has a conscience. 

Written in 6/2012