FOR SHAME: The Loss of Common Decency in American Culture.

By James B. Twitchell. St. Martin’s Press. 237 pp. $22.95.

How do you write a jeremiad for an age that does not know the meaning of the word? Twitchell’s brisk account of how we got from Adam and Eve covering their nakedness to Madonna hawking hers sounds the alarm about the state of contemporary American society, where we are more chagrined to be caught smoking than committing adultery. We have banished the age-old sentiment of shame in favor of an all-enveloping self-indulgence. Why feel guilty when you can feel good? Because, Twitchell argues, unless we understand and recover the social protections of shame, we shall pay a terrible price.

To give shame its due, Twitchell gathers evidence from various sources: biology (consider the blush and the flush, the instinct to hang one’s head and hide—lose—one’s face: "Clearly human biology and evolution have hardwired us to experience the jolt of shame for a purpose"); anthropology ("All cultures depend on shame; all cultures abhor shamelessness"); and history (he deplores the behavior of the prerevolutionary French upper classes, who were "immodest and haughty" and got what they had coming, and brandishes the enviable record of the Victorians, those overachieving blushmeisters).

Twitchell’s book derives from a course he taught on advertising and American culture and on the seismic changes in marketing strategy since the 1950s. Then, we bought because we were shamed into buying; now we buy because we’re so bullish on ourselves. Twitchell believes that the trouble began for America in the 1960s, when an ethos of self-gratification first began to infiltrate the society. From being a pathology of the counterculture, it metastasized to the dominant culture, and we are all now ailing from its settled hold on our spirits.

For Twitchell, who teaches English at the University of Florida, the dominance of commercial television in contemporary life is the key to understanding what has happened to shame in America. Advertisers relentlessly woo the attention of an audience, especially an audience of the young and affluent. "In an electronic culture, the stories are controlled by those hearing them," and the message is predictably skewed, Twitchell says, "toward entertainment and away from shame." The playing field is leveled, not to say scorched; hierarchy is abandoned; authority, direction, reserve, and reprimand are forgone. About the force of the media and their indifference to everything but commercial gain, the author is depressingly correct, and the real value of his book is in its insistence, yet again, on advertising’s blindness to anything beyond its shallow range.

Twitchell hits all the easy targets—O. J. Simpson, TV talk shows, politicians, megachurches, Hollywood and its calculated effluvia—but he has nothing particularly new to say about them. Instead, he repeatedly makes the same assertions about the deplorable condition of the society without developing his themes much beyond their initial sounding. As a result, the book feels both protracted and abrupt. Like a lively TV discussion—PBS, to be sure, not NBC—it captures the attention but does not hold the mind.

The clock ticking for America is the timer on a bomb: that’s Twitchell’s message, and he delivers it in a book that is chatty, entertaining, and too informal, finally, for its own good. To be right is commendable, but you win no disciples unless you are convincing too. A funeral notice should arrive on an engraved card, not a Post-it.

—James M. Morris