You should feel thoroughly ashamed of reading this infamous rag. Or else you might decide to revel, shamelessly, in its critics’ prim disapproval. From political squalls to global wars, David Keen argues that a ‘spiral of shame’ and shamelessness now traps individuals and societies in arid cycles of pain, rage and revenge. Manipulative actors – ‘advertisers, warmongers, terrorists, tyrants and charlatans’ – sell us ‘magical solutions’ to the anguish of the shame they themselves stoke. But they merely pass the burden to other groups, leaving us with more suffering. Keen writes: ‘Such actors do with shame what the Mafia does with fear.’

The author teaches conflict studies at the LSE. He draws on his research in war zones, from Sierra Leone to Sri Lanka and Sudan to Guatemala. This border-hopping reach and his focus on shame as a strategic weapon set his work apart from recent investigations into social-media storms of outrage and disgrace. Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, for instance, fails to make the bibliography. Keen cares more about the words, consciences, even souls of Adolf Eichmann, rebel child soldiers in Sierra Leone and violent criminals in US jails than the latest Twitter tempest or Insta imbroglio. This useful emphasis deepens the hinterland of shame.

Advertisers promise – at a cost – to lift the shame of our being too fat, dirty, dowdy or just poor

Yet he presents the ‘vortex of mutual shaming’ that roils through public life with (he admits) ‘political views and biases’. These may limit his ability to persuade anyone outside his tribe. Supporters of Trumpism and Brexit, those twin alliances ‘between the shameless and shamed’, inevitably occupy large chunks of the book. Although he doesn’t sneer or gloat, and shuns Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ attitude, he evidently doubts that a reasonable case could be made for either cause.

Their backers come across not as bad but sad and occasionally mad. Even the hapless Greeks are scolded for their resistance to stitch-ups by the EU on the grounds that, as a once-great culture in eclipse, they suffer ‘narcissistic feelings of aloneness and persecution’. What if they simply object to being shafted to benefit German banks? If, for Keen, the EU can do no wrong, Nato can do no right. Sensitive to Russians’ feelings of humiliation and fear of ‘renewed encirclement’ after the Soviet collapse, he refers euphemistically to Putin’s ‘actions over Ukraine’. Ever eager to criticise Tony Blair for his ‘neocolonial rhetoric’ and shame-generating overseas adventures, Keen has nothing to say about the UK’s interventions in Sierra Leone – Operations Palliser and Barras – which helped end an atrocity-strewn war.

An editor outside the ‘progressive’ academic bubble might have reined in Keen’s taste for blowhard editorialising from a SCR armchair, for, at its best, Shame genuinely enlightens. In search of shame’s ‘many-headed monster’, Keen moves from the troubled minds of American veterans of the Iraq war (wounded warriors ‘simultaneously shamed and honoured’) to Eichmann’s shame-deflecting excuses for his role in the murder of millions, and the sense of ‘inner sinfulness’ fostered by advertisers who promise – at a cost – to lift the shame of our being too fat, dirty, dowdy or just poor.

‘Perverse distributions’ of shame, meanwhile, load blame on to victims – casualties of industrial decline or aid-seekers in famine regions – and grant ‘impunity’ to the truly culpable. Keen does believe that ‘productive shaming’ can improve conduct (private or public) when its targets enjoy ‘basic security and respect’. Then they may deploy a ‘mature sense of shame’ for actions rather than endure misery for being who they are.

That happens all too rarely. Instead, an emotion once bracketed with past or dying cultures (‘honour and shame’ societies) now drives movements of the ‘left behind’, not only in the West but in the African communities Keen has studied – Sierra Leonean rebels felt ‘shame around exclusion from modernity’. He cites Hannah Arendt, who warned that the insulted or forgotten may crave ‘access to history even at the price of destruction’. Revolts against shame defy ‘rational actor’ theories with their hunger for recognition above material reward. Keen also quotes the working-class French writer Édouard Louis: in his run-down post-industrial village, a vote for Marine Le Pen meant ‘a desperate attempt to exist in the eye of the other’.

Social shame, Keen shows, feeds the entrepreneurs of shamelessness. Trump, of course, looms large. He still turns the offer of an escape from shame into political gold. Yet, as with Brexit, those who took the offer faced an additional layer of shame and shaming via charges of stupidity and intolerance. So the wheel of shame cranks round. ‘In a shaming environment, people dig in,’ observes Keen in this lively, wide-angled, if provocative, book. They sure do, as every pundit or politician who beats the shame-on-you drum should grasp. Keen invokes Shakespeare’s Shylock: ‘Thou call’dst me dog before thou hadst a cause;/ But since I am a dog, beware my fangs.’ In today’s theatre of shaming and shamelessness, the dogs are having their day.