> 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.
I don't think the author grasps it either, especially when he uses morality as an outcome rather than just another cultural value. Assessing the quality of the outcome requires a cultural perspective itself, and even if from that cultures perspective the outcome is poor, the values that the culture would have to change may be worse.
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.
It's pretty easy to objectively measure which cultures are better. In general we can just look at long-term trends in voluntary migration rates by country / state / region (or whatever geographic area aligns with a particular culture). Sure there will be some noise in the data based on natural disasters and legal restrictions but those revealed preferences give a good first approximation.
People often move not for cultural reasons, but because of resources. An example would be Nepalese migrant workers moving to Saudi Arabia - they aren't doing that for the culture.
Except historically migration to the US was driven by free land. And more recently by opportunities for wealth. These might be results of the non-thar culture, but they are confounded by natural resources and people are not clearly expressing a preference for the culture so much as a few correlated material benefits.
You are simply picking a measure (immigration) and saying that “being better at my measure that I picked equals being better, period.” What if I threaten all my neighboring countries with nuclear annihilation unless all their citizens move to my country, so that I will be sure to top your list of greatest countries?
If you read the history of Columbus meeting the Arawaks on Hispaniola in his own words and the subsequent annihilation via genocide of the natives, it's hard to accept that the culture of Columbus is better.
Cocaine isn't that addictive, at least not for everyone.
It's more like cocaine is "obviously good" because millions of people around the world use it. I think that's a more apt usage of cocaine in the OP's estimation of popularity === "good."
And yet we are hesitant to push out values on people from other cultures. It's a very different dilemma that I think Houellebecq portrayed fabulously in "Submission". Liberals are eager to defend other cultures whose values could hardly new more opposite. It's fascinating really and a tough position. It's admirable and pathetic at the same time and I'm not sure there is a good answer.
And in the same vein, Liberals show no hesitation in lambasting other people with markedly different values (such as central/southern U.S.) who they lump in as "the same culture" and so consider a valid target.
Not everyone values, or even claims to value, the idea that no culture or value system can be strictly preferable to another. From the perspective where such preferences can exist, there's nothing inconsistent about expressing one.
You're not wrong. Mocking country bumpkins has been our national past time, making the careers of H. L. Mencken and contemporaries.
Two major fronts in the modern culture wars started with industrialization (urbanization), and the south's remything their humiliating unconditional surrender and occupation in defense of slavery as some kind of Noble Lost Cause (victimhood).
As a proud urban progressive, I'm only too eager, happy to hail the wambulance for anyone railing against us job creators and fitness nuts. So I guess I'm no better.
Whether these places share a culture or not, they are dominated by a particular political culture that has an amplified impact due to a variety of factors.
I think Scott Alexander touched on this in his "I tolerate everyone but the outgroup" post. He noted that it is relatively easy to get along with those very different from you, particularly when you're uniting against your proximal enemy. He pointed out that even the racist Nazis allied with the Japanese against other Europeans. This isn't tolerance; it's just another way to gain power in a struggle against old foes.
You might say that multiculturalism is a cultural value in itself, and perhaps some might value multiculturalism more than the survival of their culture.
My view is that syncretic cultures are dominant because they are capable of absorbing other cultures and adapting to change, whereas rigid and intolerant cultures can only last as long as their particular moires are relevant.
Liberals in the USA were defined by their willingness to push their values, beliefs onto others. That was the New Deal. The War Machine got their profiteering and Labor got their middle class. Uniting left and right, over the objections of the isolationist (minor caucus within the Republican coalition).
That Cold War ear consensus was mooted by the fall of the USSR. A new consensus has not emerged (been forged). Nowadays, we of the left are more aware of blowback, and so are more hesitate to support Gun Boat Diplomacy.
And according to the author of the article, they would be objectively superior than the other predominant culture framework in the U.S., namely the regressive authoritarianism of American conservatism.
> 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.
Actually i would argue the opposite. Not to the extent of genocide but the lid has really blown on Hollywood's sexual harassment problem (read: rape culture). Let's not forget Uber's contribution there and of course the whole gamer gate scandal which is still fresh in the minds of the people involved in the community. Racism, classism, and authoritarianism's roaring 2017 comeback. Then there's Madoff, Exon (classic) , various kickstarter scams, Nortel (Canada represent! ) etc
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.
Oh but I didn't say our society's hands are clean. My money simply goes to the odds of what "cultures" most in ours might find reprehensible.
And as for those in our society who do those things? My money is on most people in the home turf saying that's not their culture, that these are bad eggs.
This is a form of Nimby: "well I don't do those things and it is reprehensible that people in my society do!". That's cute and all but what are we doing about that? Look at the Weinstein scandal - that dude was on a 37 year streak. Or Pixar's Lasseter with a history dating back 15 years. NYT quoted Rashida Jones:
“There is so much talent at Pixar, and we remain enormous fans of their films,” they continued. “However, it is also a culture where women and people of color do not have an equal creative voice.”
Racism, Sexism. _But not me, not in my backyard, those people exercise reprehensible behaviour! shame on them_. Come on.
I'm just saying: we gotta own up a bit, we live in this society too, we also make it what it is and we can all strive to make it better. I don't see bad eggs, I see bad systems that foster bad eggs.
my 2c
It really depends. I have noticed this same trend recently, whereby things are accepted in other cultures because judging it would be "cultural imperialism". It even got into some previously non-controversial (in liberal circles) topics, like female genital mutilation. Google for "FGM cultural imperialism" for a lot on this.
Most people in the US seem to be far more tolerant of circumcision than FGM. And under many definitions, circumcision qualifies as genital mutilation...
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.
What you're gesturing at is that it's illogical to make value judgements, period, without a standard that your object of interest is being judged against. This fact, which is blatantly obvious once pointed out, is obscured by the shortcomings of our language.
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, 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.
But it might be hard to convince a 1850s white American to adopt that standard.
It's tautological to say that as by definition 1850s white Americans culture is extremely distasteful to a modern HN commenter.
Any culture that isn't similar your culture is by definition inferior when held to your cultural standards, so there is no reason to do so.
All you need to decide is if the other culture is similar enough to tolerate it.
> Any culture that isn't similar your culture is by definition inferior when held to your cultural standards, so there is no reason to do so.
Ok, so, suppose we met a culture that thought it was a good thing to burn children alive as sacrifices to Moloch. Would you say, "Hey let them do their thing, all cultural practices are equally valid", or would you say "I'm going to try to prevent this from happening, even though my belief that the practice is wrong is due to my particular cultural upbringing"?
I'm assuming the second one. So doesn't that constitute an act of holding another culture to your own cultural standards? And here, the point is to save lives.
Again, to reiterate, just because different cultures value different things, and the question of which value system is "correct" is not really coherent, does not prevent me from condemning practices from within my own cultural framework, and having good reasons to do so.
I can't respond to your other question, but the particular value we were discussing was this:
> 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.
Shouldn't really be controversial, but America is going through a regression right now so who knows..
Being Scandinavian, I do not really partake of whichever American regressions you may be thinking of.
I most certainly admire and find inspirational a lot of the values that built the US from the ground up. Hard work, frugality, dedication, diligence, and self-reliance, to name a few of the qualities that not least Northern Europeans brought to the expanding frontier.
Nor did they particularly hold with the slavery ways of the South.
Also, you may recall, there was a war fought over that issue.
How is that relevant to what was being discussed earlier in the thread? It was merely an example.
That you share some values with a historical culture is hardly important information, if you look hard enough you can probably find something you like in all cultures, historical and present day.
There was an assumption of the inequality of the races and acceptance of slavery on that basis. That's probably what was meant by "those values".
For the regressions, and continuing with my previous assumption: President Trump has been soft on some of the white supremacist groups, for example, being slow to disavow the support of those groups' leaders. This has emboldened some racists to be bolder. Previously, in places like California, racism almost seemed like a thing of a bygone era (at least, it wasn't as overt).
Even more concretely, the terms better and worse are only capable of encoding relative positions on a linear scale.
I find it instructive to look for those scales directly--e.g. rates of violent crime, GDP, life expectancy, etc. This also makes it more natural to recognize specific problems with such linear reductions.
All those scales are valued differently by different cultures.
If I show a conservative American gun crime statistics that we agree on and we agree that are caused by American gun culture, I cannot tell them that American gun culture is inferior, because I just get back "Thats the price of freedom!"
Life expectancy, "It's not the years in your life but the life in your years!"
GDP is the most hilarious one, because it's not even per-capita. Assuming that its a high median per capita GDP: "That's materialistic! We're much happier than those greedy capitalists"
This is a good point. Any particular statistic probably doesn't capture the nuances of human values. I think statistics are quite useful though, since they make it easier to differentiate between "facts we can share" and "personal values".
In my experience, a lot of disagreement gets chocked up to opinion differences when in fact it's mainly a failure to unpack beliefs into sets of values and facts.
I like to distinguish between so called "terminal values" which are things we intrisically care about, versus "intermediate values" which are things that matter to us for their external effects. For example, I think the internet is good because of the communications it facilitates. If it did the opposite, I'd probably feel oppositely as well, so my feelings on the internet are an intermediate value. On the other hand, I probably value my mom intrinsically.
Of course, we could further unpack that. Are my feelings on "facile communication" terminal or intermediate? My mental image here is of a sort of a branching set of trees, a forest, of values where the root nodes are our terminal values and the intervening nodes are our intermediate values.
I doubt that we humans actually differ all that much on terminal values. If we take this stance axiomatically, it certainly makes a lot of sense to deconstruct intermediate values into the causal links they're composed of, i.e. facts and statistics.
I'm not sure it's so easy to differentiate, since terminal values are feelings, wishy washy and prone to contradicting each other. I would say that any terminal value can become an intermediate value when you find a contradiction between it and other terminal values. Then, you either find a way to rationalize, ignore the problem, or discover a new terminal value to make the choice and downgrade one of your terminal values to an intermediate, conditional one.
Nonetheless, it's a very useful lens. Take property: many people consider it to be terminal, but I have always seen it as intermediate, a useful tool for accomplishing good things as a society, but not some sacred absolute.
There are attempts to measure "happiness". They surely have their own problems, but if we could measure that relatively objectively it seems to me that "average happiness" would be a good starting point to use to compare different cultures.
It's not "illogical" to say that a culture which executes homosexuals is inferior (in that aspect) to ones that don't. You can argue about the standard, but it's straightforward and logical.
To play devil's advocate on this subject: I spent a lot of time growing up in the South, and when I talk to a lot of friend's back home about the current climate here (e.g.: transgender bathrooms being added at work) they are disgusted and claim "our" culture is literally enabling mental illness.
But the coastal culture I live in now and am originally from doesn't view it that way. I get a lot of these culture-clashes daily and it's a really hard thing to figure out. Mainly because life is truly how you view things, and your worldview builds your reality — but how can one say one worldview is better than another, objectively? Because the observers worldview makes them biased, it's really hard to say.
But why should I care about their perspective? When we judge people, we judge them based on our own system of values (morality, ethics etc - call it whatever you like). They are basically axioms that we take for granted, and that provide a starting point for the logical reasoning process. I don't see why societies should be any different in that regard.
So, yes, every time you see a statement along the lines of "society X is better than Y", it comes with an implied "Based on my values, ...". But precisely because it is always there, there's no point spelling it out every time.
>So, yes, every time you see a statement along the lines of "society X is better than Y", it comes with an implied "Based on my values, ..." But precisely because it is always there, there's no point spelling it out every time.
The problem is: it isn't always there, even when it should be. Some people actually mean "Society X is better than Y in an absolute, not relative, sense."
From their perspective, it may well be - not everyone subscribes to moral relativism; it's part of those axioms.
But even then, "Based on my values ..." is implied. It just comes with an assertion that those values are universal (which, if you're a cultural relativist, you'll treat the same as well, recursively).
Based on which values though? I don’t think they should go unstated, because if I don’t hold the same values then arguments holds no water with me.
A particularly annoying one is when people lie about their values or worse claim that their argument doesn’t stem from their values (are they embarrassed?), it’s purely “rational” and anyone who doesn’t agree is pc virtue-signalling cuck who is blind to reality.
I agree for the most, but it might be better to phrase it as this culture differs from my culture because my value X is incompatible with my value y. Because otherwise you are only making a one sided statement, I can’t assume to know what your values are.
Most political debates here for instance would be a lot shorter if people stated their cultural values upfront, rather than concealing them and arguing about something tangential.
It's not possible to be hard science objective in a discussion of values, but in that acknowledgment, there is a possible objectivity in finding viewpoints which allow for subjectivity. If you can't with hard objectivity say that it is correct to execute homosexuals or limit the rights of women, the most objective thing you can do is to protect people of different attributes and viewpoints. The culture which arbitrarily limits those people is operating...arbitrarily.
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.
In the past of any European country you'll see peasants being largely peaceful and the aristocracy following honor culture at its worst. Honor culture doesn't arise in response to oppression, it arises when private violence is unchecked by law. The only counter is rule of law.
The peasants being peaceful? Where do you get that idea? Alcoholism, domestic violence, theft, fist fights, mob justice, banditry, etc. seem pretty common in peasant society that I have seen.
Or you just mean the peasants don't often pick fights with the soldiers, and their violence typically doesn't rise to the scale that would make history books?
Honor culture is not an umbrella term for evils like alcoholism, theft, or fist fights. It's a sharper, uglier thing. The central idea of honor culture is that a man must kill anyone who insults him, otherwise he's "not a man" and becomes fair game for everyone. It was much more prevalent with the aristocracy than with common folk, for the reason that I explained in the previous comment.
Even today you'll find that honor culture is much more popular with criminals than with law-abiding poorer folk that the criminals prey upon. It's not about how much power your group has, compared to other groups. It's about whether your conflicts within the group are constrained by law.
Yeah I'd say it's not necessarily a case of honor based systems causing poverty. It's also the other way around. Pretty straightforward.
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.
How so? It didn't especially focus on honor or vendettas, it was about cults, abuse, and a cover-up. Based in the South, yeah, but not getting the honor connection.
Think of Hart vs Cohle as an analogy to shame vs guilt cultures.
One particular scene I recalled when reading this article was the punishment Hart exacted on the two boys he caught with his daughter. Contrast that to his behavior towards the young women he cheated on his wife with, which is reminiscent of the honor culture described here.
Another scene he saw he a woman he was having an affair with seeing another man and proceeded to assault him in her own apartment. Again very reminiscent of the honor culture. We can see how Hart is unable to comprehend the moral inconsistency of his actions.
Contrast with Cohle, who feels deep guilt over the loss of his daughter and does not engage in any infidelity over the course of the series. (Besides the incident with Maggie, however it was something she goaded him into and he was single at the time.)
I agree with Aaron, the major themes of the show were decline and depravity. All of the main characters were self-destructive. Honor and pride had little to do with the series.
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"
I don't understand what you're trying to express here. You agree that all of the things the author describes do happen, and pretty much for the same reasons the author describes, but you...still think he's wrong, somehow? Possibly because you don't like him using the word "honor," even though he went to great lengths to not do that?
While he mentions that to him, it seems that deemed honour is a proxy for social status in some cultures, in none it is. Egregious manifestations of social status, do come a mile apart from what even moderately enlightened person considers an honour in cultures he listed. His finding went only a finger poke length in the issue.
No sane Sikh or Bengali will publicly admit that men who killed their wives in anticipation of Pakistani army coming, rather than to defend them with their lives did an honorable thing. These historical episodes are publicly denounced as the most shameful in history of Sikh and Bangla communities, with only few fringe, marginal religious fanatics coming forward with opposing opinions.
Nor will any normal person from Balkans accept exceptional vengefulness as something to be proud of.
He picked word Thar, but even that semantic loading that he devised, reinvents the bicycle. He want to put that to "wage feud" as he puts is different from simple fight over social status, while it is, and later he effectively says that.
Most people don't kill over social status. If we're going to communicate about this effectively, we need to find a word that means "social status except you're willing to kill over it." Which he did. Is there a word you would have preferred?
I’m not an anthropologist but I’ve read a few things over the years.
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.
I think you are erecting a straw man here. The article
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
There are historical views stating that the American Civil War was in fact a secessionist war against an increasingly powerful federal government and that slavery was just used as one cause, obviously the most "despicable" from today's view, in an effort to legitimize an otherwise illegitimate war against secessionist states.
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.
I'm not sure I follow. It may well be that the north had ulterior motives beyond humanitarianism but that doesn't take away from the fact that the explicit reason that a number of states gave for seceding was to preserve slavery.
I'm not sure I get your point about the flag either. Of course, it's not racist per se, it's abstract. But it's almost exclusively flown as a symbol of pride in the confederate institutions that it represents. Those institutions were explicitly racist. As you say, it has direct parallels with the swastika.
> what was the last humanitarian war you witnessed?
And finally, this really doesn't take into account the period. It was not at all unusual, in the mid 19C, for countries to use military action for social aims. Now, I happen to think that an awful lot of it was on behalf of evangelism of "superior" values rather than humanitarianism. This was rife in British establishment thinking at the time and was prevalent in the northern states too.
In other words, I think it's justified to believe that these actions were driven by feelings of moral superiority rather than human equality. But to suggest that they can all be understood as power plays simply doesn't fit the facts.
Absolutely. The cause of the war was succession. There was no legally defined process for succession and the withdrawal of United States soldiers from the territory of succeeded parties. If there had been, would the North have fought a noble war sacrificing life and treasure to free black people? Absolutely not. For god sake, they barely passed the 13th amendment. Abraham Lincoln himself said that if he could restore the Union without freeing a single black he would.
What is fiction however is that any other issue besides slavery led the South to succeed. Here are the "Declaration of Causes of Succession" made by four of the states.
These documents were intended as equivalents to the Declaration of Independence made by the U.S. in which Thomas Jefferson outlined a list of grievances the colonists had with the king. The grievances you'll find in these documents almost exclusively revolve around slavery. The one from Texas contains this little gem.
"We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable."
Yes, the war was about white people and their problems with each other but that does not mean the Confederacy was not a horrifyingly evil society. They desired to raise a nation founded on the principal of racist slavery. And people rightly object to being subjected to the symbols of that nation.
Free southerners (to massively oversimplify, and with recognition that this excludes the very different concerns of enslaved southerners) were worried about the federal government getting both strong enough and regionally diverse enough to abolish slavery, which they felt would be both culturally and economically disastrous.
Northerners (to also massively oversimplify) didn't really care one way or the other about the moral question of slavery, at least not until fairly late in the war. They were worried about the Union dissolving into a dozen perpetually feuding nation states (like they saw in 19th century Europe) and taking American prosperity and power with it.
Both sides were probably correct. Had the war not occurred, abolition via the political process was eventually inevitable. Demographics weren't on the Confederate side. And had the Confederacy succeeded there's almost certainly no Pax Americana in the 20th century.
The American Civil War was fundamentally about slavery. It was also fundamentally about states rights vs federal power. Specifically, it was about the inherent instability of a specific, geographically coherent region having a slave economy inside a larger nation where slavery was generally illegal and where they would no longer unilaterally held any political veto points. But more fundamentally, why should it be surprising that the people who disagreed strongly enough to shoot at one another didn't cleanly line up about the exact single issue they were fighting about? History's not under any obligation to be simple and coherent.
And since this thread is already Godwined, If you went back and polled the average German circa 1940 on whether their flag was racist, I suspect the vast majority would emphatically insist it was about national pride and cultural unity and whatnot. Most arguments about why the Confederate flag is fine also accidentally serve as compelling arguments as to why Swatstikas are fine, and I've yet to hear a compelling distinction between the two cases.
Was it a defense? I thought he meant that it's a sign of 'thar' that people have become so emotionally (1) attached and (2) opposed to it, when it should just be something to be seen in history books at most.
I guess I'd agree if the conflict over the flag was between "black militants" and "white supremacists" but it's not. The conflict is between citizens who feel the public usage of the flag by their state and local governments should cease because it is not appropriate and those who believe it should not cease.
In this context, claiming the flag as bit of historical inertia seems like a status quo defense.
At the very least, there is a moral equivalence implied that is bonkers.
Edit: I'm open to the idea that I'm over reading this particular position. As a point of style, doing a drive-by on a highly controversial subject in a persuasive essay is poor form.
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.
My point was that gender equality is far from a solved problem in Europe (unlike the previous post claimed in "just like nearly every country in Europe 100 years ago."). To me, what actually sounds ridiculous is to dismiss the problem by saying it "results from choices" when you have evidence (data on the website I linked) that demonstrates that - all things equal (experience, geography, etc) - women globally make less money, namely in STEM jobs, than their male counterparts.
"Men and women are equal under the law" in Europe, but the reality is far from text in law, unlike what was previously said.
Well, assuming that men and women would make the same choices given the same options, we must consider countries were the number of women in STEM fields is close to that of the men to be much more equal for women, than countries where this is not the case.
Otherwise, you have to explain why womens' "individual choices" would differ from those of men. I note that assuming that they do not is the simplext theory that needs the least complex explanation.
I think you missed the point, Scandinavian countries are closer to that perfect sphere in a vacuum, they are much more free of external pressures than those in poorer countries. They make their choices on what will make them happiest and not on some harsh economic realities.
...by eschewing individuality, being small and having the luck to have petro money. How is that “free from influence” when you’re talking about the people who invented Jante law?!
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.”
I think breaking up a failing marriage by Jackson mightily pales to his personal role in fulfilling his contemporary American's desires in the Trail of Tears which incidentally also helped open up more land for slave owners in the South.
“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.
Yet the most effective justice systems focus on public safety and rehabilitation. See Norway, et. al.
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.
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?
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.
Are there any countries with slavery which are outperforming similarly-situated countries without slavery? AFAIK slavery is only useful in Civilization 4 (whip it! whip it good!) and IRL it is no substitute for citizenship.
The success of the United States economy was almost entirely built on slave labor. Dubai and Qatar, some of the most economically successful countries in their region, are essentially entirely built on slave labor. It is making a comeback in the US because of how efficient it is in the form of mass incarceration combined with prison labor. The inference 'economic success' -> 'morally good' is, well, horrifying. Slavery is a good counterexample but old since it's so abhorrent countries have mostly abolished it. Sweatshops are another good example.
Exactly, you've clearly stated my original point -- economic success in countries has nothing to do with the morality of their society or culture or government. Economic success is more often than not luck of the draw and can happen to brutal slave dictatorships as much as free market democracies.
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.
The article was originally written 16 years ago and last updated 6 years ago. How much of the improvement in the last 30 years has been over that time? How much of the improvement in the last 30 years has filtered its way into the popular perception of Africa? Or into how Africa looks from a statistical perspective? I am not surprised that the article gives a picture of Africa that is 20-30 years out of date.
At that time, various countries in Africa were struggling and at a nadir: Sierra Leone, Guinea, Burundi; others flourished: Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia. Many others didn’t change materially: Egypt, Tunisia, South Africa.
It is as meaningful to lump all African countries together as it is to group all countries in Asia. There are more commonalities between North Africa and the Middle East than similarities with southern and central Africa.
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.
The family of the bride has to pay dowry, because she becomes part of the man's family after marriage and they have to feed her. Or so goes the logic, I guess. (Or maybe because women are so much less worth then men that you have to add a dowry to make the marriage a fair trade.)
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
Take Fukuyama several grains of salt: he also gave us the thesis that liberal democracy constituted a final resolution of the problem of government, and that history as we understand it has ended.
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.
But to the individual, it's not a local maximum; they are trapped in a first mover's dilemma (later called Nash Equilibrium), and everybody simultaneously moving to very different norms is statistically unlikely.
That only addresses the depth of the hole (even deeper), not the fact that the hole is a trap.
The whole discussion here was surprisingly devoid of how to get out (individually or as a society) and so was the article. From a solution-oriented crowd such as this I take that as a sign that it is indeed difficult. Even acknowledging it as a problem seems to be a struggle with an open outcome.
Again, let's please be precise, not return to imprecision. For the individual, it is a local maximum. For the population, it isn't, it's a trap/local maximum. However moving whole groups to new behavior is insanely tough for a simple reason: culture-retainment (cognitive herding) is high in the list of what humans do best, for good reason. Ironically perhaps, the history of colonization provides the best evidence of how to initiate change. Building a new prestigious culture within the old one does work. Maybe not in a delightful direction, but it has been demonstrated to be effective.
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!
You could replace "honor" by any other kind of value system and you could still interpret is as a points system. That's because of the Von Neumann-Morgenstern theorem [1], which basically says that any kind of well-behaved (i.e., not self-contradictory) preferences can be modeled as a points system (called utility function).
Heaven points. Money points. Sex points. Altruism points. Whatever you are trying to achieve in life, it can be reduced to a points system.
Well let's say that someone criticizes a "honor" system person for being violent. Someone interested in the truth would not react violently to that criticism because they would acknowledge that as a contradiction and that doing so would prove their critic correct. Someone only interested in "honor" points would react violently toward the critic because that's how you get "honor" points, by getting revenge for insults. The person interested in the truth can recognize a flaw in their fitness function. The person only interested in "honor" points never questions the rules. Their is no procedure to question the rules in the "honor" points system just as a computer is unable to question its programming.
> Someone interested in the truth would not react violently to that criticism because they would acknowledge that as a contradiction and that doing so would prove their critic correct.
But wouldn't proving their critic correct give them "truth" points?
Presumably, you actually mean "someone I'd call a reasonable person, who can recognize the truth; but who has other aims beyond making things true". That person's actions will still follow some kind of points system, although it might be slightly more complicated. But "honor" points can be complicated as well, since they need to encode which actions are "honorable".
Ultimately, the only difference is that you agree with one kind of behavior over the other. But what you think is a flaw in someone's utility function, they'll think is a flaw in yours. That doesn't mean all value systems are equally good, just that their relative ranking depends on the person doing the evaluation.
The fundamental aspect of the truth system is that the person remains flexible as to the way to achieve their goal, but not necessarily the goal itself.
The methods of the "honor" points system never changes in response to any empirical feedback. The "honor" points are the way and the end in themselves. They are not subject to backpropagation in the "honor" points system. They were burned into ROM and the "honor" automotaun faithfully executes the program until it dies. The "honor" system does not evolve. The truth system does not know what it will be in several decades, but it will seek truth and incorporate feedback. It is fundamentally incomplete and will remain so. The "honor" points system is complete -- forever.
I think the difference is that in "thar" culture you begin with 100 honor points and can only lose them. In western "honor" culture you start with 0 honor points and you are expected to gain them. The first system makes everybody paranoid, the latter system makes people compete.
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.
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).
The problem with the "they weren't fighting for slavery" narrative is that the leaders of the Confederacy laid out their cause clearly and unambiguously very early on - the state declarations of secession, the Cornerstone Speech etc - and slavery featured very prominently in them all. It's not like those documents and speeches were hidden from the public eye, either. So anyone who volunteered knew exactly what they were fighting for.
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" :)
Those good old days were much earlier, that article is from the heyday of Macromedia Flash. The page is as bare and content centric as it is not because of age but because it is on .edu, the majority of which was already delightfully retro back in 2001.
who are you trying to allude to? these traits apply to almost every traditional patriarchal culture on the planet, they're the historical norms for huge swathes of humanity.
#1 is at least very familiar today. It's a trait of a narcissist. 2017 should really be the year of narcissism awareness. Suddenly it's a disorder that affects us all.
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.
I was reminded of Chapter 6 of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The chapter is called "Harlan, Kentucky," and discusses the feuds that took place there. He makes an attempt to blame it on genetic heritability, tracing it back to Scotland and forebears who herded sheep and practiced honor culture, with mention of a psych study showing Southern students responded differently to insults. Higher testosterone levels? I can't remember. I think it's unsettled that genetics plays a role, but why not?
A lot of societies are extremely similar as they progress in stages to some kind of 'modernity' - defined as access to basic resources, education opportunities, scientific advancement and some degree of prosperity.
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.
I don't understand author's position. Vendetta is obviously bad. Genocide and religiois fanaticism is incompatible with western sosiety. This is obvious too.
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.
I feel most of these 'cultural prognosis' are generally just old racial prejudices being justified to fit whatever one sees.
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.
> I feel most of these 'cultural prognosis' are generally just old racial prejudices being justified to fit whatever one sees.
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.
> 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.
Minor nitpick - he mentions the concept of Shame Cultures vs. Guilt Cultures and mentions the Japanese as a Guilt Culture, along with the European cultures. But this concept was first popularized in a book by Ruth Benedict called the Chrysanthemum and the Sword, where she claims that Japanese culture is a Shame (haji) culture where social norms are primarily enforced by fear of ostracism ("Nobody will be your friend/help you if you act like that!") versus internalized fears in a Guilt culture ("God will punish you if you act like that!"). It was written in the late 40's and it's been criticized by Japanese and others, but that's where the idea comes from.
Ahistorical, generalizing, self-serving and definitely not within the author's stated expertise (earth science, physical sciences, astronomy).
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.
> When you're poor these honor systems may be all you have
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.
"
This whole thing read like sickening sanctimonious bullshit. So there are no instances of revenge, based on personal honor, anywhere in Japan or the western world?
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.
When you've been a professor that long, it happens to you. The students aren't going to challenge you, and the classroom becomes a feedback amplifier for your own bullshit.
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.