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.
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.
If my culture does not accept that slavery is acceptable, but is aware that it will be wiped out by the cultures that do allow it, and chooses that fate, my culture is not inferior for doing so from my perspective.
> 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.
I mean if you think about it just a bit, there are many examples that would indicate we actually live in those cultures. Sure they might say those cultures are inferior, but let's take a cold hard look here.
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.
Usually the standard is implicit, but obvious from context, for instance if we were talking about racing, we could say that a Mclaren is better than a Volkwagen, and elide that we mean "better at moving quickly around a racetrack".
It certainly makes sense to judge cultures, as long as you remember to have a standard in mind. For instance, by the standard of the general wellbeing of African Americans, it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is superior to American culture of the 1850s.
The fact that different cultures value different things shouldn't be a problem for discourse, as long as your interlocutors have values in common. Lack of objective truth about values shouldn't prevent one from working towards the values that they personally hold.
Relativism isn't (or at least shouldn't be) "there's no objective truth about values, so therefore every value system should be treated as equally valid". That would be an objective normative claim, and making it would be inconsistent with relativism. Relativism is just "there's no objective truth about values", and it stops there. Nothing about that prevents you from preferring your own values to those of others.
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.
If you make a long essay about how a belief system causes poverty you'll be demonized by the left; the other way around, and you'll be demonized by the right. Say they dovetail, and nobody cares.
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"
This is exactly what the author means by "honor", as opposed to the western definition of integrity, trust, chivalry, etc, etc.
Honour and social status are often correlated inside of honour valuing “subcultures” that often use the honour system they make up as the driver for the typical in group vs out group social dynamics that perpetuate the majority of subcultures. So it’s often hard to distinguish between different “honour systems” that can make some of the more extreme behaviour understandable.
For example the honour killing of wives can stem from absolute moral codes surrounding sexual behaviour combined with strong social stances on purity. Once “tainted” it is viewed as more honourable to kill the tainted wife than to allow her to remain in the family. She is no longer pure enough to remain a suitable partner for anyone thereby making death preferable. This relates back to my honour subcultures point because in this subcultures view, failing to “eliminate the taint” risks devaluation of their own social standing and creates sufficient incentives that some are driven to commit murder in the name of “honour”
Also it often happens that “both” people involved in the extra marital sex are killed in such honour killing cases.
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.
1: identifies a set of social norms which it names "thar".
2: Asserts that these norms tend to occur together (i.e. a society in which individuals primary allegience is to a family or clan is likely to find it acceptable to kill in vengance and be paranoid about female sexuality)
3: Argues that these social norms are generated by poverty, and simultaneously likely to perpetuate poverty, thereby creating a vicious circle.
4: Considers the possibility that our society could develop a similar culture in the future.
You claim that the author believes that this is something that cannot be extricated from the societies that practice it, but I cannot see such a claim in the text. In fact the writers concern about the possible descent of western societies into thar would seem to put the lie to your claim: if a society can descend into thar then it can also climb out of it.
If you say that all "cultural" critique is actually racism in disguise then you make it impossible to consider any aspect of how a culture might affect the prosperity and well-being of its members. This can only be justified if you believe that culture has no impact on prosperity and well-being. If it does have an impact then it becomes necessary to consider which cultural norms promote prosperity and well-being and to criticise those that prevent it.
I think you make that jump too fast. I'm Dutch, and I know people of all kinds of ethnic backgrounds whose culture is closer to "Dutch culture" than to any other. I also know some people of the same ethnic backgrounds whose culture is much closer to that of the country of origin. I really mean culture here - the way people behave at home, at the dinner table. How they interact with society.
I suspect this is even stronger the case in America/Canada - My impression is that for all their differences, Caucasian and African Americans on the coasts are culturally closer to one another than to other groups in the world.
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.
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.
Well kinda depends what you define as "long time ago". Speaking for West Germany:
- 1954: Married woman are now allowed to work in public offices.
- 1958: Married woman are now allowed to work as teachers.
- 1958: The husband has no longer the right to single-handedly terminate the employment of his wife. Women still need the permission of their husband to start gainful employment.
- 1962 woman are allowed to have their own bank account.
- 1977: Woman are no longer forced to have a "house wife" marrige. They no longer need a permission by their husbands to start gainful employment.
===
source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frauenbewegung_in_Deutschland#...
You can see this partly in quotes from Lincoln, in constitutional law of the states (some explicitly reserved the right to leave the union) and the fact that equality before the law was not achieved until hundred years later (assuming the view point that it was achieved at all).
This view results in two things:
1. The confederate flag is not a racist symbol per se (it is used as one though as is the Swastika)
2. The war was just another war about power and money, such as pretty much every other war. Just ask yourself what was the last humanitarian war you witnessed?
Sources:
- Google for "Abraham Lincoln Racist". It is a very much divided topic.
- 2nd paragraph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_American_Civil_...
- There was a fantastic seminar on this topic (with downloadable Audio files) by Walter Block (a Libertarian) but I cant seem to find it.
Gender equality is still a big problem in Europe, actually: https://www.oecd.org/inequality.htm#gender
Men and women are equal under the law (in most or all European states) when it comes to labour.
Gender inequality in Europe is largely caused by individual choices. This is best demonstrated by the fact that in poorer countries of eastern Europe, women are much more represented in STEM as it's a good way out of poverty, while richer countries (such as Scandinavian) where women have more choice, the interest gap for STEM is much more skewed in favor of men.
It should also be noted that in countries where a company cannot fire you for going part time at work, it is women who overwhelmingly take advantage of this.
Also, equating the inequality of women in the middle east with Europe in any way is ridiculous.
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.
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.”
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)
Though I agree whole heartedly with your conclusion, that blood feuds never have a settled score, while an individual’s debt is (theoretically) paid when the State has meted out its punishment.
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.
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.
This isn't a good metric. Countries with slavery, for example, can easily have a stronger economy than free ones. The amount of material goods a society produces is at best tangential to notions of morality or justice.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Heaven points. Money points. Sex points. Altruism points. Whatever you are trying to achieve in life, it can be reduced to a points system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenster...
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.
Fuck... I'm sure that's not right. I sucked at this part of the SAT's.
> 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.
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.
Obviously since The Atlantic was founded by abolitionists it might tend to favour one side, but I feel pretty confident in the righteousness of their cause. :) - https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/small-t...
Protecting their homes is different from fighting for slavery in what way - I am having trouble understanding what protecting their homes means in this case. It seems like an after the war mytho to fit Shermans march to the sea burning everything as the army went or the Union army seizing Lee's homestead for what became roughly Arlington National Cemetary (and for which Lee's son was later compensated).
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- 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.
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.
> 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.
How? Are street gangs demonstrating the obedience of their clothes?
[1] http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/03/albania-da...
You can easily see this by comparing pre-technology societies from 1 to 1600AD and the structures are essentially feudal and quite similar.
Post colonial european society managed to proceed at a far faster rate by bringing far more people into opportunity and wealth than previously because you now needed many more people and new systems to manage this expansion than the existing feudal power structures. This kicked off a technology scientific revolution and itself caused far reaching fundamental internal structural changes in these societies.
That's 400 years of near constant wealth, science and change others have not had and who now exist in a weird middle ground with access to some of the consequences of modernism but not the wealth, culture and history that made it possible because that cannot be replicated unless you want to kick off a new wave of colonialism.
Other than that, well, sometimes it is perfectly rational to act agressively or overreact to show your seriousness or be impolite in response to some sort of behavior. It depends.
That depends on the value system. When human life is worth less than retaining honour, then killing by vendetta is obviously desirable and good for thar society.
You can see how the author extricates Japan from his 'analysis', but not so for other Asian nations; in fact much of this can be said to be true of China and India (amongst others), but many here and elsewhere will somehow extricate China, but not India for obvious fiscal reasons. This trend is striking if you're old enough to have followed the reporting on a topic for many years.
Yet, little of the culture and the way of doing things have 'changed' in a significant way.
It's kind of like ML, you have some terribly useless set of features, and you use it to fit some dataset. The thing with ML is that you know this is stupid, and you have a test set to tell you it's stupid.
Not so, sadly, with our 'intellectuals'.
I think there's an element of truth to your statement. One key sentence in the essay that lends itself to your conclusion is this one:
" A thar-dominated society will never achieve equality, regardless how prosperous it becomes, because prosperity for the masses is a direct affront to the status of the elite. "
But we know that our very own Anglo-Saxon society was very much a "thar-dominated" one until quite recently and although we've not reached ideal levels of equality, we have significantly cut inequality.
In other words, a "thar-dominated" society won't achieve equality, because the west typically isn't one anymore.
However an extremely interesting and brief summation of a very widely held world-view.
To me what makes it obviously wrong is the simple fact of the holocaust and of Stalin's purges. No honor culture required there. My view is that our cultures and indeed characters are like water balloons - squeeze em tight in one place and watch em pop out elsewhere.
I think you're on to something there. I recall something from Steven Pinker's book on violence.
" if I do something stupid when I'm driving, and someone gives me the finger and calls me an asshole, it's not the end of the world: I think to myself, I’m a tenured professor at Harvard. On the other hand, if status among men in the street was my only source of worth in life, I might have road rage and pull out a gun. "
Then he goes on to say:
>People infected with this attitude will be utterly incapable of recognizing wrongdoing by their own society, utterly incapable of taking criticism or recognizing the need for correction.
This is a prime example of the "only a sith deals in absolutes" meme.
What is more pathetic is that I am so underemployed right now that I had the time to read this whole garbage article in the first place. I guess it's time to move on.
Do I see a strawman there?