> Created 19 November 2001, Last Update 30 August 2011
Looks like this was created right after 9/11. It's understandable why he wrote this.
> It's considered bad form in many circles to criticize another culture's values. In addition, the social science literature contains a number of rationalizations for the "honor" mentality. One is that every value system makes sense to the people that hold it. Another is that every value system exists for a reason. Well, of course. The problem is that you can make these assertions about any value system whatsoever. Rape and genocide and embezzlement also exist for a reason, and make sense to people who think a certain way. That doesn't tell us whether the values are morally acceptable or even whether they are beneficial to those who adhere to them...So I regard it as trivially obvious that the "honor" mentality exists for a reason and makes perfect sense to the people that adhere to it. I don't doubt it for a moment. I merely claim that these values debilitate the societies that hold them.
Something this author believes that most people (in our coastal bubbles) don't: that some cultures are better than others. It's astonishing how controversial this position is even 16 years later; however, I think when this article was written it was even more politically incorrect to say than it is now.
Something this author gets that most people (of all political stripes) don’t: whether a culture is “better” than another is not even a well-formed question.
We must ask “better at what?” We must define some criteria to measure, and speak in those terms, not in ill-defined terms like “just better”.
The author speaks mostly in terms of specific consequences of different value systems. This is not the same thing as declaring a culture (usually the speaker’s own) to be “better” in some ill-defined way.
> Rape and genocide and embezzlement also exist for a reason, and make sense to people who think a certain way.
> Something this author believes that most people (in our coastal bubbles) don't: that some cultures are better than others.
I think you can ask people in coastal bubbles about the rape and genocide cultures of various wars and embezzlement subcultures of various corporations. My money is on them saying those cultures are inferior.
It's illogical to make value judgements about cultures, there is no objective way to do it. What makes one culture "better" than another? Survival? Virality? Honor? Piousness? Lawfulness?
Every culture values these things differently.
Calling it politically correct shows your own failing to comprehend something outside of your own cultural frame of reference.
Notably I could make the same point about morality as the author makes about honor, as it is just another social construct.
Morality holds individuals back from getting what they want, instead they go around accumulating morality points even when no one powerful is watching. Clearly anyone who respects morality as a cultural value is PC wuss.
Sam Harris has a great book called "The Moral Landscape" on this very subject, of toxic social values and how morality relates to the purging of such values. There's also a Tedtalk he gives, which essentially explores this idea.
This is interesting. At the risk of being lambasted for this view, I've often felt that this is the issue with a lot of places within the United States.
For instance, I've always considered personal interactions in the South to be largely dictated by honor. I do not think it is coincidental that the poorest and least-educated areas of the country are the same area.
I think a similar problem is at play in inner-city violence. I live in Chicago, and murders seem to be almost entirely honor-related at this point.
While I do think that honor-based societies are indicative of a lack of pragmatism, I think that they make sense in a certain light as well. Honor is something that has no (outright) monetary cost, and so you can have honor when you have nothing else. If you have nothing but your honor, and don't defend your honor when someone besmirches it, you will be left with nothing at all. This alone makes it fairly easy to see why people will kill to maintain their honor.
My impression is that a lot of honor based societies perpetuate themselves at lower levels because they get battered hard by the overarching society / more powerful external powers. People feel that they need to protect themselves and their tribes from being stomped from above. Combatting power inequality and systemic violence/abuse is probably the biggest counter to turf fights, domestic violence, etc., at least on a generational time scale.
I read it, and think it is a so so writing. The author piles too many things together.
martythemaniak gets more of what it is to it.
There are no such thing as an honour based society, and the author is imagining things.
Popular explanation: what seems as an "honour" things to people in the west are often just egregious displays of social status. It is hard for Americans to naturally arrive to the way of thought of this sort. I'll drop few examples for you:
Men killing their wives who were raped - it is not them any much recovering that "honour," but to show everyone that these men do not let the enemy to assert dominance over them, non-verbally stating "hey look, the enemy has no power over me, he will not diminish my status by forcing me to sleep with a woman raped by him"
Same for the extreme sensitivity to insult marty mentions - it is to show everyone "No one is allowed to place themselves above me"
Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing - is the thing from the same opera. It is to show that you do not let the assailant to assume social status above you. If you can't retaliate and kill, you show your weakness/inferiority/impotence.
Americans, you are fortunate enough to not to live in a society where ones social status is not determined by a principle of "the ones who have higher status than I am are the ones I can't kill"
The reasoning here is that 'honor system' is something that can't be extricated from these societies; that it is somehow a cultural (which is an epithet for racial) invariant. It's a pity that such BS-ery forms the basis for many areas of studies, and proliferates in the editorial pages of major newspapers.
I'm not sure why the author lumps together so many of the attributes he does, and when he does acknowledge exceptions, rather than learn from them and understand why they exist, he simply waves his hands an says Japan wasn't honor-bound enough or not in the right way or whatever else.
His examples are cherry-picked and similar examples exist in the countries he holds up as exemplars. Saudi Arabia viewed cleaning as women's work, sure, just like nearly every country in Europe 100 years ago. Again, sexism is inexplicably considered to be part of this horoscope-level cultural complex of traits, as is apparently poor people excessively taking possessions from deceased relatives.
He blazes by picking one bad thing that happened in a given culture, offering no further analysis other than to gawk at how much better our culture is, then moves on to an entirely different society where he happens to know one bad thing about them and repeats the process.
The article appears to me to be little more than a post-hoc justification of the author's prejudices, with a few glib references and citations which give a glib appearance of being well-researched and substantive.
>"I'm not sure why the author lumps together so many of the attributes he does, and when he does acknowledge exceptions, rather than learn from them and understand why they exist, he simply waves his hands an says Japan wasn't honor-bound enough or not in the right way or whatever else."
He makes a very clear distinction between the two - one honor system is based on (external) shame, the other is based on (internal) guilt.
>"His examples are cherry-picked and similar examples exist in the countries he holds up as exemplars. Saudi Arabia viewed cleaning as women's work, sure, just like nearly every country in Europe 100 years ago."
With the difference that things he describes still happen at large in the middle east and Africa, while Europe has moved past them long time ago.
>"He blazes by picking one bad thing that happened in a given culture, offering no further analysis other than to gawk at how much better our culture is, then moves on to an entirely different society where he happens to know one bad thing about them and repeats the process."
He offers multiple examples of why contemporary western/Japanese culture is superior in many sections, most notably "Degradation of Women".
You provided no evidence to counter the fact that the western/Japanese culture offers rights, protections and (equal) opportunities that are far superior to the ones that come with the cultures criticized in the article. You have also labeled and dismissed the author's findings as mere prejudices, despite there being mountains of evidence to the contrary.
There are a lot of works on the relative impact of honor or shame cultures. I was first exposed to that concept by some of the works of Roland Muller (http://www.rmuller.com/). The thesis that is favored by Christian theology is that Jesus taught forgiveness as the word of God rather than retribution (eye for an eye) which has been the prevailing response, and in so doing changed cultures that had been stagnant for hundreds if not thousands of years into something that could approach enlightenment.
While I cannot say with any sort of authority if one culture is better than another, I can say that my exposure to "honor" cultures in the South and South Central LA did not seem to help the adherents be better people or move forward in their lives. It had the opposite effect of compelling them into behaviors that were self destructive in order to satisfy their person concept of honor.
If you are interested in the role of "honor" in American culture, and up for lengthy academic treatise filled with incredible tidbits of knowledge, David Hackett Fischer's book "Albion's Seed" is delightful. For example, here's an excerpt that stuck with me regarding President Andrew Jackson's approach to marriage:
The border custom of bridal abduction was introduced to the American backcountry. In North and South Carolina during the eighteenth century, petitioners complained to authorities that “their wives and daughters were carried captives” by rival clans.
Even future President of the United States Andrew Jackson took his wife by an act of voluntary abduction. Rachel Donelson Robards was unhappily married to another man at the time. A series of complex quarrels followed, in which Rachel Robards made her own preferences clear, and Andrew Jackson threatened her husband Lewis Robards that he would “cut his ears out of his head.” Jackson was promptly arrested. But before the case came to trial the suitor turned on the husband, butcher knife in hand, and chased him into the canebreak. Afterward, the complaint was dismissed because of the absence of the plaintiff—who was in fact running for his life from the defendant. Andrew Jackson thereupon took Rachel Robards for his own, claiming that she had been abandoned. She went with Jackson willingly enough; this was a clear case of voluntary abduction. But her departure caused a feud that continued for years.
For a cultural historian, the responses to this event were more important than the act itself. In later years, Jackson’s methods of courtship became a campaign issue, and caused moral outrage in other parts of the republic; but in the backcountry he was not condemned at the time. Historian Robert Remini writes, “One thing is certain. Whatever Rachel and Andrew did, and whenever they did it, their actions did not outrage the community.”
“Eye for an eye” is part of the Mosaic law and simply defines the penalty for personal assault (to be carried out only as an order from a magistrate after a hearing).
It does not at all condone revenge. For his followers, Jesus explicitly forbade revenge (or using such laws as justification for revenge):
"You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.'
But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.“ (from Matthew 5 ESV)
I also anecdotally find that value of honor impairs conversation because it distracts people with shame-management and it makes criticism a matter of face.
The important thing to notice is that he author isn't talking about retribution being wrong per se, but private vendettas. Justice is by its very nature retributive. You cannot show mercy if retribution is not the deserved and proper response to a crime. One difference the author alludes to between justice meted out by the state and private vengeance is that the latter is characteristic of blood feuds.
Moral Tribes, by Joshua Greene [0] has a more in-depth analysis of honor and other cultural attributes. You can find large geographical differences in the importance of honor within the US.
Cooperation also varies greatly around the world. Scores in a cooperation game (where you both win by cooperating) vary by an order of magnitude between countries. They are somewhat related, in that getting hosed by the other player in a cooperation game is merely annoying for a non-honor-oriented person, but humiliating for an honor-oriented person, so they're more likely to defect immediately. The article doesn't mention it, but that seems like the obvious mechanism for how thar causes poverty.
The central thesis (thar as a toxic value) seems plausible, but his examples are all crazy, and his deduction about economic prosperity is questionable at best.
Look at the UK as an example of somewhere with extreme classism and heredity of employment for hundreds of years, the bit in between the "honourable knights" and the industrial revolution (which happened in the midst of astonishing inequality of wealth and opportunity). If you don't think the Royal carriages plastered with gaudy decoration are about external honour then what are they about exactly?
Also, the idea that the successful societies succeeded because they weren't sexist is proposterous, since the key points in their development happened long before the (start of the) recovery from that awful vice, which still isn't over as the news from Hollywood and Westminster in the last months neatly illustrates.
As others have said, this looks like a post-hoc justification of prejudice, which sadly ruins an interesting idea.
Sure, women were treated unequally in Western societies, but even in the 18th century, girls of the U.S. were educated in the same local schools. Contrast that with some societies where women can't even drive... Which economy's future would you bet on?
Meanwhile, Israel has not once recognized the right of Palestine to exist.
Why discuss this detail of his essay? Because details are important and if you are ignorant about them, like this author is, you reach the wrong conclusions. The ignorance forms preconceptions that are not true in the slightest. In this conflict, we have one side who is occupying the other and refusing to let go of territory it has conquered. Resisting that is justified and obviously based on nationalism, not the Thar concept the author writes about.
You can't just claim that all those Middle Easterners are driven by Thar, and we Westerners are always the rational ones. It's not so easy.
It's just not historically true that "northern European culture has been relatively free of the thar mentality." We weren't magically spared these traits. In fact few hundred years ago duels were the mainstay of the official justice system in England. These duels were, literally, trials. I wish I knew more about how we got away from all that.
I think that prosperity through the pursuit of opportunity leads to such changes.
The author derides the continent of Africa, yet ignores enormous economic and public health improvement among most countries there in the last 30 years. Attitudes and “honor” culture have changed as well; nowadays commerce and transactions are the norm in cities, rather than violence based.
Given the geographic overlap, protestantism should spring to mind easily as a candidate (even if it can only be a cause if its effect take centuries to have meaningful impact). The differentiation between shame and guilt cultures used in the article resonates quite a bit with the perceived differences between catholic and protestant societies.
Some old traditions like this are so bizarre, I can't even imagine why they were created in the first place. Dowry is also like this -- I always forget which side pays which, because the idea of someone paying for a marriage is so strange.
However, many Nordic and Germanic tribes had working alternatives (mainly banishment or exile and compensation) that greatly limited the violence.
Compensation could be fairly sophisticated. "man value" was the total monetary value of a man. Murderers family had to compensate 100% of the man value for the family of the victim. For the impairment the compensation sums were fractions of the man value.
I can suggest Francis Fukuyama's "Origins of Political Order" for a decent survey of that. Couple it with Steven Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" for a holistic look at violence in human societies in general
Without a working and well-funded criminal justice system, "Don't with me or my clan EVER" may be the best you can do, alas. As mentioned in another comment, if you're living in a U.S. inner city where talking to the police is taboo, similar conditions can develop.
"Irrationally" disproportionate responses to small problems ("display" in ape terms) may prevent worse problems and greater violence. It's not ideal, it's a fallback.
This reminds me of a passage I read from "Hillbilly Elegy" by JD Vance, where he talks about growing up in the Scots-Irish parts of West Virginia, and the almost pathological devotion to family honor.
One anecdote (the details of which I'm mis-remembering slightly) involves an incident he witnessed in a Walmart or Kmart or some such store, where a mother whose out-of-control kids were scolded by an employee for their behavior. The mother proceeded to physically threaten the employee for the perceived affront against her family's honor.
The canonical example of "vendetta" behavior among Scots-Irish is the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys, which I believe Vance also mentions.
Throughout the book, the author intertwines anecdotes of self-limiting (or even anti-social) behavior like the above with descriptions of the worsening economic climate that the region's residents find themselves in. He makes a great case (sometimes subtly and sometimes bluntly) for the idea that the two reinforce each other.
It's amazing what kind of mental gymnastics people will go through to convince themselves that they're "honorable", especially when that honor is the only asset they think they have left.
That book should be the required reading for this article. I love how he talked about the effect of Honor culture even in elementary school fights, and how difficult it has been to detach himself from that culture as an individual.
The author's Japanophilia masquerading as social insight is laughable. His cute anecdote illustrating the self aware remorse of the Japanese is of one doctor who has a shrine in his living room. I wonder if in his extensive travels he's ever visited Yasukuni shrine.
This article, while interesting, is incredibly presumptive and totally non-scientific. As such, I consider it pablum.
Surely no one culture is universally "better" than another. Pick some metric(s), some cultures will be better, some worse.
What's left unstated and undefended in this article is the metric for comparing the "goodness" of cultures. With that, at least we would have some quantitative things to compare -- then one could respectfully disagree on the metric, or offer alternate evidence for calculating the metric, or offer other metrics to consider.
I would describe the "honor" system as like treating the world like a big MMORPG where the only goal in life is to accumulate "honor" points. The whole point of life is to grind away everyday to gain more honor points. Someone insults you = lose honor points. Revenge on the insulter = gain honor points. Wife cheats on you = lose honor points. Revenge on wife = gain honor points. Someone cheats you out of 10 cents = lose honor points, etc. The points are an end in themselves. The whole purpose of life is to get them and he who dies with the most points wins. The truth is unimportant. The benefit to society as a whole is unimportant. More money means you can humiliate people and have people kiss ass which means more honor points!
At last, a rational argument for the moral superiority of Northern European societies! That was about time!
It's pitty this is such an old article, I'd love to hear the author's rationalist defense of the moral superiority of diverse historical phenomena originating in Northern Europe, like anthropogenic global warming, WWI and WWII, separately the Holocaust, Stalin and, well, why not? Colonialism.
Yeah, it's a rhetorical request. It's my attempt at a reminder of the real reason why educated people don't criticise others cultures so easily. Because they know where they themselves come from.
> Even more disturbing is a rise in a mean-spirited resistance to any kind of honors for Confederate soldiers.
Seems a bit contradictory to insist that we honor immoral people for the sake of... I'm actually not sure how the author got here. Especially after the bit about not accepting responsibility.
The Confederacy was a moral failing, and the best way to take responsibility for it is to disown it.
While the reasons behind the war and its intended results can certainly be called immoral, I don’t think we can apply the same label to enlisted / conscripted soldiers. Most of those guys didn’t join up to protect slavery but rather their homes; and many didn’t have a choice about fighting at all.
Agree that slavery was a moral failing; but the cause of the war was economic — the main reason people were pro-slavery was because they owned assets that would lose ownership of or they worked in the slave trade. Yes, that reasoning is morally abhorrent, but morality often gets tossed out the window when money is involved. It wouldn’t have been a war without the money.
Off topic, the web site is truly content-centered and looks clean and clear with no unnecessary information. Font size for each level is very good, too. For me, that's how good design should look like.
This design is probably a product of the page being written in 2001. Back then, the web was (text) content-centered because browsers couldn't do much other than text and layout. I might even be old enough to say those were "the good ol' days" :)
While the author has every right to hold those opinions, he doesn't seem to be an anthropologist, sociologist or historian, as his entire analysis is completely devoid of context and the desire to understand. Value systems, while also a result of arbitrary progress, mostly arise to fit the conditions of the society that creates them. A face-to-face society is very different from a strangers' society. Europe in the middle ages was not much different from those cultures the author derides. Part of the reason why some cultures still maintain face-to-face values is because Europe, largely due to chance, progressed technologically before other cultures (after learning algebra from the Arabs), and travel and communication technologies are what create a strangers' society with its own, very different values. Then, Europe harmfully interfered with the progress of other societies.
Also, it is a little funny to call other culture's value "toxic" and your own "superior", considering that the European culture of rationality has been the deadly, violent and exploitative (of both people and nature) to a far larger scale than any other.
I super hard agree with the primary point of this article. Honor culture is unbelievably toxic. However, i'd like to quibble with this:
> When a concept has a label that is diametrically opposed to the normal sense of the term, it's the wrong label. This has nothing to do with value judgment (although my value judgment is clearly stated), it is simply a matter of using words accurately. If you translate a foreign word as "red," and notice that people always use it when describing grass, it's obvious that your translation is faulty. If you translate a foreign word as "honor" and find it often used to describe dishonorable acts, it's equally obvious that your translation is faulty.
The author doesn't seem to understand abstraction. The fact that the instances of 'honorable acts' in a given culture differ does not negate the shared meaning. The thing 'honor' refers to is not the definition of the particular acts, but the role this abstract concept fulfills in a society. Honor is the thing that, once impugned, requires retribution to regain. Honor is the thing that bleeds down a family tree for generations. Honor is the thing without which there is shame. Which acts credit and discredit this thing called honor are irrelevant to the definition of the term.
In certain street gangs in the US it is honorable to wear certain colors and not others. In certain sects of Islam it is dishonorable for your wife's face to be seen by other men. These two seemingly unrelated acts fulfill recognizably similar roles in their respective cultures. To not allow language to recognize this shared heritage is to discredit the very notion of abstraction, and to deny the genuine intellectual and social roots of the very concept the author is quite nicely articulating.
[+] [-] georgewsinger|8 years ago|reply
Looks like this was created right after 9/11. It's understandable why he wrote this.
> It's considered bad form in many circles to criticize another culture's values. In addition, the social science literature contains a number of rationalizations for the "honor" mentality. One is that every value system makes sense to the people that hold it. Another is that every value system exists for a reason. Well, of course. The problem is that you can make these assertions about any value system whatsoever. Rape and genocide and embezzlement also exist for a reason, and make sense to people who think a certain way. That doesn't tell us whether the values are morally acceptable or even whether they are beneficial to those who adhere to them...So I regard it as trivially obvious that the "honor" mentality exists for a reason and makes perfect sense to the people that adhere to it. I don't doubt it for a moment. I merely claim that these values debilitate the societies that hold them.
Something this author believes that most people (in our coastal bubbles) don't: that some cultures are better than others. It's astonishing how controversial this position is even 16 years later; however, I think when this article was written it was even more politically incorrect to say than it is now.
[+] [-] bryananderson|8 years ago|reply
We must ask “better at what?” We must define some criteria to measure, and speak in those terms, not in ill-defined terms like “just better”.
The author speaks mostly in terms of specific consequences of different value systems. This is not the same thing as declaring a culture (usually the speaker’s own) to be “better” in some ill-defined way.
[+] [-] bobthechef|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eric-hu|8 years ago|reply
> Something this author believes that most people (in our coastal bubbles) don't: that some cultures are better than others.
I think you can ask people in coastal bubbles about the rape and genocide cultures of various wars and embezzlement subcultures of various corporations. My money is on them saying those cultures are inferior.
[+] [-] leohutson|8 years ago|reply
Calling it politically correct shows your own failing to comprehend something outside of your own cultural frame of reference.
Notably I could make the same point about morality as the author makes about honor, as it is just another social construct.
Morality holds individuals back from getting what they want, instead they go around accumulating morality points even when no one powerful is watching. Clearly anyone who respects morality as a cultural value is PC wuss.
[+] [-] neuralzen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Declanomous|8 years ago|reply
For instance, I've always considered personal interactions in the South to be largely dictated by honor. I do not think it is coincidental that the poorest and least-educated areas of the country are the same area.
I think a similar problem is at play in inner-city violence. I live in Chicago, and murders seem to be almost entirely honor-related at this point.
While I do think that honor-based societies are indicative of a lack of pragmatism, I think that they make sense in a certain light as well. Honor is something that has no (outright) monetary cost, and so you can have honor when you have nothing else. If you have nothing but your honor, and don't defend your honor when someone besmirches it, you will be left with nothing at all. This alone makes it fairly easy to see why people will kill to maintain their honor.
[+] [-] jacobolus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewjl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baybal2|8 years ago|reply
martythemaniak gets more of what it is to it.
There are no such thing as an honour based society, and the author is imagining things.
Popular explanation: what seems as an "honour" things to people in the west are often just egregious displays of social status. It is hard for Americans to naturally arrive to the way of thought of this sort. I'll drop few examples for you:
Men killing their wives who were raped - it is not them any much recovering that "honour," but to show everyone that these men do not let the enemy to assert dominance over them, non-verbally stating "hey look, the enemy has no power over me, he will not diminish my status by forcing me to sleep with a woman raped by him"
Same for the extreme sensitivity to insult marty mentions - it is to show everyone "No one is allowed to place themselves above me"
Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing - is the thing from the same opera. It is to show that you do not let the assailant to assume social status above you. If you can't retaliate and kill, you show your weakness/inferiority/impotence.
Americans, you are fortunate enough to not to live in a society where ones social status is not determined by a principle of "the ones who have higher status than I am are the ones I can't kill"
[+] [-] throwaway43434|8 years ago|reply
The reasoning here is that 'honor system' is something that can't be extricated from these societies; that it is somehow a cultural (which is an epithet for racial) invariant. It's a pity that such BS-ery forms the basis for many areas of studies, and proliferates in the editorial pages of major newspapers.
[+] [-] c3534l|8 years ago|reply
His examples are cherry-picked and similar examples exist in the countries he holds up as exemplars. Saudi Arabia viewed cleaning as women's work, sure, just like nearly every country in Europe 100 years ago. Again, sexism is inexplicably considered to be part of this horoscope-level cultural complex of traits, as is apparently poor people excessively taking possessions from deceased relatives.
He blazes by picking one bad thing that happened in a given culture, offering no further analysis other than to gawk at how much better our culture is, then moves on to an entirely different society where he happens to know one bad thing about them and repeats the process.
The article appears to me to be little more than a post-hoc justification of the author's prejudices, with a few glib references and citations which give a glib appearance of being well-researched and substantive.
[+] [-] Pyrhos|8 years ago|reply
He makes a very clear distinction between the two - one honor system is based on (external) shame, the other is based on (internal) guilt.
>"His examples are cherry-picked and similar examples exist in the countries he holds up as exemplars. Saudi Arabia viewed cleaning as women's work, sure, just like nearly every country in Europe 100 years ago."
With the difference that things he describes still happen at large in the middle east and Africa, while Europe has moved past them long time ago.
>"He blazes by picking one bad thing that happened in a given culture, offering no further analysis other than to gawk at how much better our culture is, then moves on to an entirely different society where he happens to know one bad thing about them and repeats the process."
He offers multiple examples of why contemporary western/Japanese culture is superior in many sections, most notably "Degradation of Women".
You provided no evidence to counter the fact that the western/Japanese culture offers rights, protections and (equal) opportunities that are far superior to the ones that come with the cultures criticized in the article. You have also labeled and dismissed the author's findings as mere prejudices, despite there being mountains of evidence to the contrary.
[+] [-] DubiousPusher|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmngomes|8 years ago|reply
Gender equality is still a big problem in Europe, actually: https://www.oecd.org/inequality.htm#gender
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|8 years ago|reply
While I cannot say with any sort of authority if one culture is better than another, I can say that my exposure to "honor" cultures in the South and South Central LA did not seem to help the adherents be better people or move forward in their lives. It had the opposite effect of compelling them into behaviors that were self destructive in order to satisfy their person concept of honor.
[+] [-] nkurz|8 years ago|reply
The border custom of bridal abduction was introduced to the American backcountry. In North and South Carolina during the eighteenth century, petitioners complained to authorities that “their wives and daughters were carried captives” by rival clans.
Even future President of the United States Andrew Jackson took his wife by an act of voluntary abduction. Rachel Donelson Robards was unhappily married to another man at the time. A series of complex quarrels followed, in which Rachel Robards made her own preferences clear, and Andrew Jackson threatened her husband Lewis Robards that he would “cut his ears out of his head.” Jackson was promptly arrested. But before the case came to trial the suitor turned on the husband, butcher knife in hand, and chased him into the canebreak. Afterward, the complaint was dismissed because of the absence of the plaintiff—who was in fact running for his life from the defendant. Andrew Jackson thereupon took Rachel Robards for his own, claiming that she had been abandoned. She went with Jackson willingly enough; this was a clear case of voluntary abduction. But her departure caused a feud that continued for years.
For a cultural historian, the responses to this event were more important than the act itself. In later years, Jackson’s methods of courtship became a campaign issue, and caused moral outrage in other parts of the republic; but in the backcountry he was not condemned at the time. Historian Robert Remini writes, “One thing is certain. Whatever Rachel and Andrew did, and whenever they did it, their actions did not outrage the community.”
[+] [-] TimTheTinker|8 years ago|reply
It does not at all condone revenge. For his followers, Jesus explicitly forbade revenge (or using such laws as justification for revenge):
"You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.“ (from Matthew 5 ESV)
[+] [-] threatofrain|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobthechef|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tlb|8 years ago|reply
Cooperation also varies greatly around the world. Scores in a cooperation game (where you both win by cooperating) vary by an order of magnitude between countries. They are somewhat related, in that getting hosed by the other player in a cooperation game is merely annoying for a non-honor-oriented person, but humiliating for an honor-oriented person, so they're more likely to defect immediately. The article doesn't mention it, but that seems like the obvious mechanism for how thar causes poverty.
[0] http://www.joshua-greene.net/moral-tribes
[+] [-] tehwalrus|8 years ago|reply
Look at the UK as an example of somewhere with extreme classism and heredity of employment for hundreds of years, the bit in between the "honourable knights" and the industrial revolution (which happened in the midst of astonishing inequality of wealth and opportunity). If you don't think the Royal carriages plastered with gaudy decoration are about external honour then what are they about exactly?
Also, the idea that the successful societies succeeded because they weren't sexist is proposterous, since the key points in their development happened long before the (start of the) recovery from that awful vice, which still isn't over as the news from Hollywood and Westminster in the last months neatly illustrates.
As others have said, this looks like a post-hoc justification of prejudice, which sadly ruins an interesting idea.
[+] [-] chrisco255|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjourne|8 years ago|reply
PLO first recognized Israel in 1988: http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/08/world/arafat-says-plo-acce... Then again in 1993 during the Oslo Accords: http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Yearbook9/P... The Palestinian Authority now in control of parts of the West Bank has also done it on several occasions and even Hamas has de facto recognized Israel: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20141011-forget-its-charte...
Meanwhile, Israel has not once recognized the right of Palestine to exist.
Why discuss this detail of his essay? Because details are important and if you are ignorant about them, like this author is, you reach the wrong conclusions. The ignorance forms preconceptions that are not true in the slightest. In this conflict, we have one side who is occupying the other and refusing to let go of territory it has conquered. Resisting that is justified and obviously based on nationalism, not the Thar concept the author writes about.
You can't just claim that all those Middle Easterners are driven by Thar, and we Westerners are always the rational ones. It's not so easy.
[+] [-] Nomentatus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linkregister|8 years ago|reply
The author derides the continent of Africa, yet ignores enormous economic and public health improvement among most countries there in the last 30 years. Attitudes and “honor” culture have changed as well; nowadays commerce and transactions are the norm in cities, rather than violence based.
[+] [-] usrusr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kenning|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabla9|8 years ago|reply
However, many Nordic and Germanic tribes had working alternatives (mainly banishment or exile and compensation) that greatly limited the violence.
Compensation could be fairly sophisticated. "man value" was the total monetary value of a man. Murderers family had to compensate 100% of the man value for the family of the victim. For the impairment the compensation sums were fractions of the man value.
[+] [-] weeksie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nomentatus|8 years ago|reply
"Irrationally" disproportionate responses to small problems ("display" in ape terms) may prevent worse problems and greater violence. It's not ideal, it's a fallback.
[+] [-] usrusr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomanyrichies|8 years ago|reply
One anecdote (the details of which I'm mis-remembering slightly) involves an incident he witnessed in a Walmart or Kmart or some such store, where a mother whose out-of-control kids were scolded by an employee for their behavior. The mother proceeded to physically threaten the employee for the perceived affront against her family's honor.
The canonical example of "vendetta" behavior among Scots-Irish is the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys, which I believe Vance also mentions.
Throughout the book, the author intertwines anecdotes of self-limiting (or even anti-social) behavior like the above with descriptions of the worsening economic climate that the region's residents find themselves in. He makes a great case (sometimes subtly and sometimes bluntly) for the idea that the two reinforce each other.
It's amazing what kind of mental gymnastics people will go through to convince themselves that they're "honorable", especially when that honor is the only asset they think they have left.
[+] [-] ghostbrainalpha|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sooheon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cobbzilla|8 years ago|reply
Surely no one culture is universally "better" than another. Pick some metric(s), some cultures will be better, some worse.
What's left unstated and undefended in this article is the metric for comparing the "goodness" of cultures. With that, at least we would have some quantitative things to compare -- then one could respectfully disagree on the metric, or offer alternate evidence for calculating the metric, or offer other metrics to consider.
[+] [-] alphaalpha101|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] narrator|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|8 years ago|reply
It's pitty this is such an old article, I'd love to hear the author's rationalist defense of the moral superiority of diverse historical phenomena originating in Northern Europe, like anthropogenic global warming, WWI and WWII, separately the Holocaust, Stalin and, well, why not? Colonialism.
Yeah, it's a rhetorical request. It's my attempt at a reminder of the real reason why educated people don't criticise others cultures so easily. Because they know where they themselves come from.
[+] [-] orbitur|8 years ago|reply
> Even more disturbing is a rise in a mean-spirited resistance to any kind of honors for Confederate soldiers.
Seems a bit contradictory to insist that we honor immoral people for the sake of... I'm actually not sure how the author got here. Especially after the bit about not accepting responsibility.
The Confederacy was a moral failing, and the best way to take responsibility for it is to disown it.
[+] [-] exelius|8 years ago|reply
Agree that slavery was a moral failing; but the cause of the war was economic — the main reason people were pro-slavery was because they owned assets that would lose ownership of or they worked in the slave trade. Yes, that reasoning is morally abhorrent, but morality often gets tossed out the window when money is involved. It wouldn’t have been a war without the money.
[+] [-] LiweiZ|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjjensen90|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majewsky|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] martythemaniak|8 years ago|reply
- Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing
- Obsessive male dominance
- Paranoia over female sexual infidelity
- Primacy of family rights over individual rights
And who do these values remind you of? It is especially funnysad to read this 16 year old American writing today.
[+] [-] pron|8 years ago|reply
Also, it is a little funny to call other culture's value "toxic" and your own "superior", considering that the European culture of rationality has been the deadly, violent and exploitative (of both people and nature) to a far larger scale than any other.
[+] [-] darawk|8 years ago|reply
> When a concept has a label that is diametrically opposed to the normal sense of the term, it's the wrong label. This has nothing to do with value judgment (although my value judgment is clearly stated), it is simply a matter of using words accurately. If you translate a foreign word as "red," and notice that people always use it when describing grass, it's obvious that your translation is faulty. If you translate a foreign word as "honor" and find it often used to describe dishonorable acts, it's equally obvious that your translation is faulty.
The author doesn't seem to understand abstraction. The fact that the instances of 'honorable acts' in a given culture differ does not negate the shared meaning. The thing 'honor' refers to is not the definition of the particular acts, but the role this abstract concept fulfills in a society. Honor is the thing that, once impugned, requires retribution to regain. Honor is the thing that bleeds down a family tree for generations. Honor is the thing without which there is shame. Which acts credit and discredit this thing called honor are irrelevant to the definition of the term.
In certain street gangs in the US it is honorable to wear certain colors and not others. In certain sects of Islam it is dishonorable for your wife's face to be seen by other men. These two seemingly unrelated acts fulfill recognizably similar roles in their respective cultures. To not allow language to recognize this shared heritage is to discredit the very notion of abstraction, and to deny the genuine intellectual and social roots of the very concept the author is quite nicely articulating.
[+] [-] andyjohnson0|8 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/03/albania-da...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanun_(Albania)