In recent years, popular culture has encouraged us to be or do anything we want to in the name of freedom. In fact, it has become acceptable and courageous to defy traditionally-held views of ethics, family, marriage, religion, and political action.

But has this rush to stretch our wings, embrace freedom, and ditch shame actually been damaging to the human race? C.S. Lewis suggests such might be the case.

In his book, The Problem of Pain, Lewis discusses the topic of shame and how harmful it is for society to view it as “a dangerous and mischievous thing”:

We have labored to overcome that sense of shrinking, that desire to conceal, which either Nature herself or the tradition of almost all mankind has attached to cowardice, unchastity, falsehood, and envy. We are told to ‘get things out into the open’, not for the sake of self-humiliation, but on the grounds that these ‘things’ are very natural and we need not be ashamed of them.