> Created 19 November 2001, Last Update 30 August 2011<p>Looks like this was created right after 9/11. It's understandable why he wrote this.<p>> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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 (<a href="http://www.rmuller.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.rmuller.com/</a>). 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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.joshua-greene.net/moral-tribes" rel="nofollow">http://www.joshua-greene.net/moral-tribes</a>
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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>As others have said, this looks like a post-hoc justification of prejudice, which sadly ruins an interesting idea.
> Just imagine the PLO ever accepting an order to recognize the right of Israel to exist.<p>PLO first recognized Israel in 1988: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/08/world/arafat-says-plo-accepted-israel.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/08/world/arafat-says-plo-acce...</a> Then again in 1993 during the Oslo Accords: <a href="http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Yearbook9/Pages/107%20Israel-PLO%20Mutual%20Recognition-%20Letters%20and%20Spe.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Yearbook9/P...</a> 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: <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20141011-forget-its-charter-hamas-has-given-de-facto-recognition-to-the-state-of-israel/" rel="nofollow">https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20141011-forget-its-charte...</a><p>Meanwhile, Israel has not once recognized the right of Palestine to exist.<p>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.<p>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 <i>official</i> justice system in England. These duels were, literally, trials. I wish I knew more about how we got away from all that.
Without a working and well-funded criminal justice system, "Don't <i></i><i></i> 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.<p>"Irrationally" disproportionate responses to small problems ("display" in ape terms) may prevent worse problems and greater violence. It's not ideal, it's a fallback.
This reminds me of a passage I read from "Hillbilly Elegy" by JD Vance, where he talks about growing up in the Scots-Irish parts of West Virginia, and the almost pathological devotion to family honor.<p>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.<p>The canonical example of "vendetta" behavior among Scots-Irish is the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys, which I believe Vance also mentions.<p>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.<p>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.
The author's Japanophilia masquerading as social insight is laughable. His cute anecdote illustrating the self aware remorse of the Japanese is of <i>one</i> 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.<p>Surely no one culture is universally "better" than another. Pick some metric(s), some cultures will be better, some worse.<p>What's left unstated and undefended in this article is the metric for comparing the "goodness" of cultures. With that, at least we would have some quantitative things to compare -- then one could respectfully disagree on the metric, or offer alternate evidence for calculating the metric, or offer other metrics to consider.
I would describe the "honor" system as like treating the world like a big MMORPG where the only goal in life is to accumulate "honor" points. The whole point of life is to grind away everyday to gain more honor points. Someone insults you = lose honor points. Revenge on the insulter = gain honor points. Wife cheats on you = lose honor points. Revenge on wife = gain honor points. Someone cheats you out of 10 cents = lose honor points, etc. The points are an end in themselves. The whole purpose of life is to get them and he who dies with the most points wins. The truth is unimportant. The benefit to society as a whole is unimportant. More money means you can humiliate people and have people kiss ass which means more honor points!
At last, a rational argument for the moral superiority of Northern European societies! That was about time!<p>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.<p>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 <i>they themselves</i> come from.
This takes a strange detour towards the end.<p>> Even more disturbing is a rise in a mean-spirited resistance to any kind of honors for Confederate soldiers.<p>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.<p>The Confederacy was a moral failing, and the best way to take responsibility for it is to disown it.
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.
- Extreme importance of personal status and sensitivity to insult<p>- Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing<p>- Obsessive male dominance<p>- Paranoia over female sexual infidelity<p>- Primacy of family rights over individual rights<p>And who do these values remind you of? It is especially funnysad to read this 16 year old American writing today.
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.<p>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:<p>> 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.<p>The author doesn't seem to understand abstraction. The fact that the <i>instances</i> 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.<p>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.
See also the Albanian tradition of Kanun [1,2] for an example of what happens when a society gets trapped in this kind of moral tar pit.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/03/albania-dark-shadow-tradition-blood-feuds-160318033023140.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/03/albania-da...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanun_(Albania)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanun_(Albania)</a>
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.<p>You can easily see this by comparing pre-technology societies from 1 to 1600AD and the structures are essentially feudal and quite similar.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I feel most of these 'cultural prognosis' are generally just old racial prejudices being justified to fit whatever one sees.<p>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.<p>Yet, little of the culture and the way of doing things have 'changed' in a significant way.<p>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.<p>Not so, sadly, with our 'intellectuals'.
The Ralph Peters article he cites can be found online at <a href="http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/Articles/98spring/peters.htm" rel="nofollow">http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/Articles/98spr...</a>
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).<p>However an extremely interesting and brief summation of a very widely held world-view.<p>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.
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?<p>Then he goes on to say:<p>>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.<p>This is a prime example of the "only a sith deals in absolutes" meme.<p>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.