Shame, Desire, And Politics: A History of Blackmail

An excerpt from, “Shame As A Political Virtue” By Dr. Merold Westphal, Unbound, October 28, 2016: 

I lived in a (familial) culture in which part of what it meant to be a “good boy” was to feel shame when I had been a “bad boy”. I was supposed to experience shame. This corresponds to a major tradition in philosophical ethics, one which takes duty to be the fundamental concept and which has Kant as its paradigm. Put differently, failure to experience shame was to lack a character trait on which the cohesion of the (familial) community depended. This corresponds to the other major tradition in moral philosophy, the one which takes virtue to be the fundamental concept and which has Aristotle as its paradigm.

Both traditions are very much alive and well in contemporary ethical theory. They are not mutually exclusive, but they place the emphasis in different places. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Confucian tradition. It is not only another paradigm of the virtue tradition in ethics; it makes the clearest and strongest case for shame as a political virtue.

How did I get so quickly from ethics to politics? For both Aristotle and the Confucian tradition, ethics and politics are two sides of the same coin. The virtues are personal excellences, to be sure, but we might call them the virtues of citizenship, for, as suggested above, they are character traits on which the health of the community depends.

Thus, for the Confucian tradition, a shameless society is a sick society, quite literally. The body politic is an organism that, in the absence of shame, is not functioning properly. It is in a state of disintegration and decline. Society requires a certain measure of conformity and cooperation lest it lapse into anarchy, the ongoing (political and cultural) war of all against all. A basic Confucian insight is that a society that that takes duty to be fundamental and relies on law and the fear of punishment alone will foster an unhealthy individualism, a calculating self-interest that weakens the social instinct. By contrast, a culture that teaches its members to feel shame properly appeals to the social instinct, the desire to belong, to be part of something greater than oneself. It is as if “liberty and justice for all” presupposes a deep and effective sense of “We the people.”

An excerpt from, “Where did the word “blackmail” come from?” By Elizabeth Nix, History.com, September 25, 2015:

The definition of blackmail—the act of demanding that a person pay money or do something in order to avoid having damaging information about him or her exposed—has evolved over time. The word’s origins are linked to the chieftains in the border region between England and Scotland in the 16th century and part of the 17th century. During that period, the chieftains ordered landholders to pay them in order to avoid being pillaged. The “mail” in the word meant “tribute, rent” and was derived from an old Scandinavian word, “mal,” meaning “agreement.” The “black” in blackmail is thought to be a play on “white money,” the term for the silver coins with which tenant farmers traditionally paid their legitimate rent.

An excerpt from, “A Little History Of Blackmail” By Jane Hu, The Awl, June 21, 2012:

But when it comes to the word’s actual origins, the association is a false one. “Blackmail” does not derive, as one might conjecture, from “letters of evil intent.” Instead, the word originates from the 16th century “black-maill,” where “maill” had nothing to do with letters, but instead meant “rent” or “tax.” Landowners paid “black-maill” in return for protection from looters. The etymological through-line — at least given our current understanding of the word — was that payment was made to the looters themselves. A lose-lose situation, indeed, when one is coerced into preemptively paying one’s robbers.

The can’t-win-ness of the situation didn’t end there. 16th-century legislature tried to put a stop to the injustice by threatening to kill whoever engaged in black-maill, regardless of whether you were doing the robbing or the one being robbed. The first textual account of black-maill appears in a 1530 Scottish document where serial looter, one Adam Scot, ended his career with a beheading.

Blackmail, in this sense, had finite limits — a concrete amount of possessions or money that people could “willingly” give up. While we may no longer think of blackmail in terms of material objects of exchange, the initial meaning of blackmail actually stays pretty close to contemporary understandings of the act. Blackmail is what happens when a person accedes something, not because he or she wants to, but because it’s better than losing something else.

As a narrative, however, modern blackmail has evolved. The choices presented by 16th-century blackmail were limited: either one gave up one’s possessions, or had them taken by force. The outcome remained, more or less, the same. By comparison, the crimes and consequences of 19th-century blackmail were vastly more sophisticated. As literary canon spanning from the British sensation novel to French realism (Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, most of Sherlock Holmes) will tell you, there are worst things than losing money. One example: losing your dignity. Sometimes, no amount of money can ease the devastation of a roomful of judgmental stares (Lily Bart, I’m looking at you). Alexander Welsh’s landmark book George Eliot and Blackmail (buy it! read it!) focuses only on Eliot’s oeuvre, but his thesis expands across the long 19th century: at the heart of the Victorian novel is the blackmail plot.

If the whole point of blackmail is to control your victim without leaving any trace of doing so, then how does one research truly successful acts of blackmail? Blackmail only works when the information that would indict one’s victim is not leaked. Both blackmailer and victim share the desire to keep information private. Blackmail is counterintuitive. In the 1890s, banker Edwin Main Post and his wife Emily Post (yes, of the etiquette books) shocked New York when they disclosed their personal secrets rather than accede to the blackmail threat of a newspaper publisher. In theory, the Posts did something no one — blackmailer and victim alike — wishes to see happen. But if blackmail is fundamentally a question about control, then Edwin Post decided that telling on himself was better than giving that option to anyone else.

An excerpt from, “The Roman Law of Blackmail” By R. H. Helmholz, The Journal of Legal Studies, January 2001:

This paper attempts to do three things: first, to describe the classical Roman law as it related to blackmail; second, to follow the subject into the commentaries of the Continental jurists written during the Middle Ages and Renaissance; and third, to cross the English Channel briefly. Its focus is historical. It has no agenda for shaping the law of blackmail that has drawn so much attention in recent scholarly literature. It is hoped that an account of the Roman law of blackmail may interest some of the many scholars who have contributed to understanding the subject. But its aspiration reaches no higher than that.

The puzzle is this: if one person has information that would harm another’s reputation by bringing shame upon the second person, under normal circumstances he has every right to disclose it. Why, then, should it be illegal for the person with the information to demand money for not revealing that information? It is not altogether easy to see why. Yet that is exactly what the law of blackmail prohibits. The reason for the prohibition against what might be regarded as freedom of contract does seem mysterious, and the natural desire to hit upon a plausible explanation has proved inviting to a wide variety of theoretical approaches, almost all of which assume the law is right to punish blackmail but differ on the reason for the result. The puzzle has also given rise to a casuistic literature that must warm the heart of old-fashioned lawyers who believe in the inevitability and even the utility of drawing fine distinctions in the law.

This paper says little, nothing really, to solve the puzzle that lies at the core of informational blackmail. Indeed, it requires that the reader ‘‘un-think’’ it for a moment. The assumption upon which it rests—that a person has every right to inform the world of what he himself knows, just so long as what he says is true—was not an assumption the Roman law shared. Nor did those who inherited the law of the Romans. That true information necessarily had value was not a view held by the jurists of the Middle Ages. Nor was it accepted by the lawyers and commentators who followed them during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Therein lies the (admittedly slight) relevance of this paper to the modern subject. It may explain something of how we came to have a law of blackmail, even though it tells us little about why we retain it. This is so because something very like the law discussed in this paper turns up in the early English treatises and cases involving extortion, sedition, and blackmail.