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The world's most toxic value system (2001)

242 points by agmiklas 9y ago

binarez 9y ago
That's reTharded
georgewsinger 9y ago
> 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.
- eric-hu 9y ago
  > 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.
  - ramy_d 9y ago
    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.
    - alphaalpha101 9y ago
      Sorry, I have to ask: are you actually saying that the tiny niche problem of Hollywood sexual harassment (which is, remember, a miniscule community in the grand scale of things), sexual harassment at one software company, and a scandal about video game review industry ethics is remotely at the same level as stoning people to death for being raped on a regular basis? Executing people for being gay? Oh well, at least the Saudis aren't setting up kickstarter scams. You can criticise consumerism and sexism and racism all you like, don't let me stop you, but don't for a minute think it's reasonable to suggest that that means that all cultures are equivalently good or bad.
    - Chris2048 9y ago
      > and of course the whole gamer gate scandal What about that? The feminist-frequency videos where reverse dog-whistles; insults directed at the gamer community, but couched in misrepresentations and pseudo-intellectual terminology to dress it up as honest critique. Then the trolling and cyber harassment that was received from some demographics were used to tar any critic with the same "GG-supporter" brush. Not at all similar to physical harassment and rape by powerful celebrities.
      - ramy_d 9y ago
        sure
    - 9y ago
- bobthechef 9y ago
  Officially, perhaps, but our coastal bubbles clearly believe that current liberal democratic values and attitudes are superior.
  - ajmurmann 9y ago
    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.
    - leohutson 9y ago
      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.
    - taneq 9y ago
      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.
      - drdeca 9y ago
        "outgroup" vs "fargroup" ?
      - leohutson 9y ago
        Haven’t you just done the same thing to liberals?
        throwanem 9y ago
- neuralzen 9y ago
  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.
- bryananderson 9y ago
  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.
  - leohutson 9y ago
    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.
  - nradov 9y ago
    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.
    - tibbetts 9y ago
      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.
    - tmnvix 9y ago
      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.
- leohutson 9y ago
  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.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    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.
    - leohutson 9y ago
      I disagree, it's inferior from your cultural perspective, but some cultures clearly didn't/don't value human life the same way you do. For instance from my perspective a culture that doesn't allow gay marriage is clearly inferior, which is straight forward and logical.
      - iamthirsty 9y ago
        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.
skmurphy 9y ago
The Ralph Peters article he cites can be found online at http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/Articles/98spring/peters.htm http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/Articles/98spr...
narrator 9y ago
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!
- yorwba 9y ago
  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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenstern_utility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenster...
  - narrator 9y ago
    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.
    - 9y ago
LiweiZ 9y ago
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.
- jjjensen90 9y ago
  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" :)
  - usrusr 9y ago
    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.
- deleted 9y ago
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- majewsky 9y ago
  Meh. Before I read this, I opened open up the devtools and added a html { line-height: 1.4 } to make the lines less hilariously dense. Also, `width: 700px` etc. does not adapt to mobile viewports.
Declanomous 9y ago
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.
- andrewjl 9y ago
  True Detective Season 1 is a very deep, nuanced study of exactly what you describe in the South.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    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.
    - andrewjl 9y ago
      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.)
martythemaniak 9y ago
- Extreme importance of personal status and sensitivity to insult - Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing - Obsessive male dominance - Paranoia over female sexual infidelity - Primacy of family rights over individual rights And who do these values remind you of? It is especially funnysad to read this 16 year old American writing today.
- nyolfen 9y ago
  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.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  #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.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
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/ 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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- bobthechef 9y ago
  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.
  - linkregister 9y ago
    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.
- TimTheTinker 9y ago
  “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)
Nomentatus 9y ago
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.
- usrusr 9y ago
  Optimization to a local maximum pitfall, it is very much acknowledged in the article that the systems criticised make sense to those inside.
  - Nomentatus 9y ago
    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.
    - usrusr 9y ago
      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.
      - Nomentatus 9y ago
        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.
tlb 9y ago
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. [0] http://www.joshua-greene.net/moral-tribes http://www.joshua-greene.net/moral-tribes
cobbzilla 9y ago
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.
- alphaalpha101 9y ago
  >Surely no one culture is universally "better" than another. Pick some metric(s), some cultures will be better, some worse. Firstly, one culture being better than another does not mean that it is better in every way. I'd rather be punched in the stomach than kicked in the balls, but clearly my stomach is still better off in the latter scenario, even if I'm worse off overall. Secondly, I'd really love to hear on what 'metrics' you think Arabian culture is better than say, German culture. Today's German culture, too, and today's Arabian culture. Too often people will say stuff like 'Nazis and 1400s scientific progress in the middle east'.
orbitur 9y ago
This takes a strange detour towards the end. > Even more disturbing is a rise in a mean-spirited resistance to any kind of honors for Confederate soldiers. Seems a bit contradictory to insist that we honor immoral people for the sake of... I'm actually not sure how the author got here. Especially after the bit about not accepting responsibility. The Confederacy was a moral failing, and the best way to take responsibility for it is to disown it.
- exelius 9y ago
  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.
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    Most confederate soldiers volunteered, and most had no benefit from slaves as property, though half had some household connection to slave owners. Obviously since The Atlantic was founded by abolitionists it might tend to favour one side, but I feel pretty confident in the righteousness of their cause. :) - https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/small-truth-papering-over-a-big-lie/61136/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/small-t... Protecting their homes is different from fighting for slavery in what way - I am having trouble understanding what protecting their homes means in this case. It seems like an after the war mytho to fit Shermans march to the sea burning everything as the army went or the Union army seizing Lee's homestead for what became roughly Arlington National Cemetary (and for which Lee's son was later compensated).
  - int_19h 9y ago
    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.
Nomentatus 9y ago
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.
- kenning 9y ago
  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.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    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.)
- linkregister 9y ago
  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.
  - uiri 9y ago
    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.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sasaf5 9y ago
> I will use the Arabic word thar, "blood vengeance," for this value system Do I see a strawman there?
- nyolfen 9y ago
  he's referring to an existing set of conventions and criticizing them. he isn't constructing them.
sooheon 9y ago
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.
- DubiousPusher 9y ago
  Yes that was strange. My understanding is that the teaching of the war is highly controversial in Japan.
- smnrchrds 9y ago
  More laughable is that he assumes that there is not one person in the variety of cultures he collectively calls thar who has done something similar.
toomanyrichies 9y ago
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.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  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.
c3534l 9y ago
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.
- DubiousPusher 9y ago
  The weirdest thing was the drive by defense of the Confederate flag. That tipping of the hand was downright parkinsonian.
  - sneak 9y ago
    I’m glad it wasn’t just me that had a “hold the phone” moment there.
  - m_mueller 9y ago
    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.
    - DubiousPusher 9y ago
      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.
hamilyon2 9y ago
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.
- bmn__ 9y ago
  > Vendetta is obviously bad. 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.
beautifulfreak 9y ago
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?
throwaway43434 9y ago
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. Not so, sadly, with our 'intellectuals'.
- linuxkerneldev 9y ago
  > 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.
  - DuskStar 9y ago
    > 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.
jstewartmobile 9y ago
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.
dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
I'm amazed that such an interesting but politically incorrect article made it to the front page of HN. And I'm almost sure that in a few hours, when the most of the US wakes up, it will be flagged.
darawk 9y ago
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.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  > These two seemingly unrelated acts fulfill recognizably similar roles in their respective cultures How? Are street gangs demonstrating the obedience of their clothes?
andyjohnson0 9y ago
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. [1] http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/03/albania-dark-shadow-tradition-blood-feuds-160318033023140.html http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/03/albania-da... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanun_(Albania) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanun_(Albania)
scandox 9y ago
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.
InternetOfStuff 9y ago
I almost missed the /PSEUDOSC/ in the URL.
tehwalrus 9y ago
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.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  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?
  - wfo 9y ago
    >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.
    - DonbunEf7 9y ago
      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.
      - 9y ago
fellellor 9y ago
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.
lawlessone 9y ago
Maybe he has confused cause and effect? When you're poor these honor systems may be all you have.
- linuxkerneldev 9y ago
  > 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. "
pron 9y ago
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.
throw2016 9y ago
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.
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bjourne 9y ago
> Just imagine the PLO ever accepting an order to recognize the right of Israel to exist. PLO first recognized Israel in 1988: http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/08/world/arafat-says-plo-accepted-israel.html http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/08/world/arafat-says-plo-acce... Then again in 1993 during the Oslo Accords: http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Yearbook9/Pages/107%20Israel-PLO%20Mutual%20Recognition-%20Letters%20and%20Spe.aspx http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Yearbook9/P... The Palestinian Authority now in control of parts of the West Bank has also done it on several occasions and even Hamas has de facto recognized Israel: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20141011-forget-its-charter-hamas-has-given-de-facto-recognition-to-the-state-of-israel/ https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20141011-forget-its-charte... Meanwhile, Israel has not once recognized the right of Palestine to exist. Why discuss this detail of his essay? Because details are important and if you are ignorant about them, like this author is, you reach the wrong conclusions. The ignorance forms preconceptions that are not true in the slightest. In this conflict, we have one side who is occupying the other and refusing to let go of territory it has conquered. Resisting that is justified and obviously based on nationalism, not the Thar concept the author writes about. You can't just claim that all those Middle Easterners are driven by Thar, and we Westerners are always the rational ones. It's not so easy.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
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.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  "The White Man's Burden" is to Colonialism, as "The World's Most Toxic Value System" is to ___Now?_____ Fuck... I'm sure that's not right. I sucked at this part of the SAT's.
tcell 9y ago
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.
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242 points by agmiklas 9y ago

That's reTharded

> 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.

eric-hu 9y ago
> 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.
- ramy_d 9y ago
  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.
  - alphaalpha101 9y ago
    Sorry, I have to ask: are you actually saying that the tiny niche problem of Hollywood sexual harassment (which is, remember, a miniscule community in the grand scale of things), sexual harassment at one software company, and a scandal about video game review industry ethics is remotely at the same level as stoning people to death for being raped on a regular basis? Executing people for being gay? Oh well, at least the Saudis aren't setting up kickstarter scams. You can criticise consumerism and sexism and racism all you like, don't let me stop you, but don't for a minute think it's reasonable to suggest that that means that all cultures are equivalently good or bad.
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    > and of course the whole gamer gate scandal What about that? The feminist-frequency videos where reverse dog-whistles; insults directed at the gamer community, but couched in misrepresentations and pseudo-intellectual terminology to dress it up as honest critique. Then the trolling and cyber harassment that was received from some demographics were used to tar any critic with the same "GG-supporter" brush. Not at all similar to physical harassment and rape by powerful celebrities.
    - ramy_d 9y ago
      sure
  - 9y ago
bobthechef 9y ago
Officially, perhaps, but our coastal bubbles clearly believe that current liberal democratic values and attitudes are superior.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  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.
  - leohutson 9y ago
    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.
  - taneq 9y ago
    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.
    - drdeca 9y ago
      "outgroup" vs "fargroup" ?
    - leohutson 9y ago
      Haven’t you just done the same thing to liberals?
      - throwanem 9y ago
neuralzen 9y ago
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.
bryananderson 9y ago
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.
- leohutson 9y ago
  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.
- nradov 9y ago
  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.
  - tibbetts 9y ago
    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.
  - tmnvix 9y ago
    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.
leohutson 9y ago
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.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  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.
  - leohutson 9y ago
    I disagree, it's inferior from your cultural perspective, but some cultures clearly didn't/don't value human life the same way you do. For instance from my perspective a culture that doesn't allow gay marriage is clearly inferior, which is straight forward and logical.
    - iamthirsty 9y ago
      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.

skmurphy 9y ago

The Ralph Peters article he cites can be found online at http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/Articles/98spring/peters.htm http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/Articles/98spr...

narrator 9y ago

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!

yorwba 9y ago
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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenstern_utility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenster...
- narrator 9y ago
  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.
  - 9y ago

LiweiZ 9y ago

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.

jjjensen90 9y ago
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" :)
- usrusr 9y ago
  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.
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majewsky 9y ago
Meh. Before I read this, I opened open up the devtools and added a html { line-height: 1.4 } to make the lines less hilariously dense. Also, `width: 700px` etc. does not adapt to mobile viewports.

Declanomous 9y ago

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.

andrewjl 9y ago
True Detective Season 1 is a very deep, nuanced study of exactly what you describe in the South.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  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.
  - andrewjl 9y ago
    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.)

martythemaniak 9y ago

- Extreme importance of personal status and sensitivity to insult - Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing - Obsessive male dominance - Paranoia over female sexual infidelity - Primacy of family rights over individual rights And who do these values remind you of? It is especially funnysad to read this 16 year old American writing today.

nyolfen 9y ago
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.
alkonaut 9y ago
#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.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

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/ 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.

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bobthechef 9y ago
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.
- linkregister 9y ago
  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.
TimTheTinker 9y ago
“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)

Nomentatus 9y ago

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.

usrusr 9y ago
Optimization to a local maximum pitfall, it is very much acknowledged in the article that the systems criticised make sense to those inside.
- Nomentatus 9y ago
  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.
  - usrusr 9y ago
    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.
    - Nomentatus 9y ago
      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.

tlb 9y ago

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. [0] http://www.joshua-greene.net/moral-tribes http://www.joshua-greene.net/moral-tribes

cobbzilla 9y ago

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.

alphaalpha101 9y ago
>Surely no one culture is universally "better" than another. Pick some metric(s), some cultures will be better, some worse. Firstly, one culture being better than another does not mean that it is better in every way. I'd rather be punched in the stomach than kicked in the balls, but clearly my stomach is still better off in the latter scenario, even if I'm worse off overall. Secondly, I'd really love to hear on what 'metrics' you think Arabian culture is better than say, German culture. Today's German culture, too, and today's Arabian culture. Too often people will say stuff like 'Nazis and 1400s scientific progress in the middle east'.

orbitur 9y ago

This takes a strange detour towards the end. > Even more disturbing is a rise in a mean-spirited resistance to any kind of honors for Confederate soldiers. Seems a bit contradictory to insist that we honor immoral people for the sake of... I'm actually not sure how the author got here. Especially after the bit about not accepting responsibility. The Confederacy was a moral failing, and the best way to take responsibility for it is to disown it.

exelius 9y ago
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.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Most confederate soldiers volunteered, and most had no benefit from slaves as property, though half had some household connection to slave owners. Obviously since The Atlantic was founded by abolitionists it might tend to favour one side, but I feel pretty confident in the righteousness of their cause. :) - https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/small-truth-papering-over-a-big-lie/61136/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/small-t... Protecting their homes is different from fighting for slavery in what way - I am having trouble understanding what protecting their homes means in this case. It seems like an after the war mytho to fit Shermans march to the sea burning everything as the army went or the Union army seizing Lee's homestead for what became roughly Arlington National Cemetary (and for which Lee's son was later compensated).
- int_19h 9y ago
  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.

Nomentatus 9y ago

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.

kenning 9y ago
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.
- majewsky 9y ago
  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.)
linkregister 9y ago
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.
- uiri 9y ago
  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.

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sasaf5 9y ago

> I will use the Arabic word thar, "blood vengeance," for this value system Do I see a strawman there?

nyolfen 9y ago
he's referring to an existing set of conventions and criticizing them. he isn't constructing them.

sooheon 9y ago

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.

DubiousPusher 9y ago
Yes that was strange. My understanding is that the teaching of the war is highly controversial in Japan.
smnrchrds 9y ago
More laughable is that he assumes that there is not one person in the variety of cultures he collectively calls thar who has done something similar.

toomanyrichies 9y ago

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.

ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
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.

c3534l 9y ago

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.

DubiousPusher 9y ago
The weirdest thing was the drive by defense of the Confederate flag. That tipping of the hand was downright parkinsonian.
- sneak 9y ago
  I’m glad it wasn’t just me that had a “hold the phone” moment there.
- m_mueller 9y ago
  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.
  - DubiousPusher 9y ago
    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.

hamilyon2 9y ago

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.

bmn__ 9y ago
> Vendetta is obviously bad. 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.

beautifulfreak 9y ago

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?

throwaway43434 9y ago

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. Not so, sadly, with our 'intellectuals'.

linuxkerneldev 9y ago
> 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.
- DuskStar 9y ago
  > 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.

jstewartmobile 9y ago

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.

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago

I'm amazed that such an interesting but politically incorrect article made it to the front page of HN. And I'm almost sure that in a few hours, when the most of the US wakes up, it will be flagged.

darawk 9y ago

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.

Chris2048 9y ago
> These two seemingly unrelated acts fulfill recognizably similar roles in their respective cultures How? Are street gangs demonstrating the obedience of their clothes?

andyjohnson0 9y ago

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. [1] http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/03/albania-dark-shadow-tradition-blood-feuds-160318033023140.html http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/03/albania-da... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanun_(Albania) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanun_(Albania)

scandox 9y ago

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.

InternetOfStuff 9y ago

I almost missed the /PSEUDOSC/ in the URL.

tehwalrus 9y ago

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.

chrisco255 9y ago
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?
- wfo 9y ago
  >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.
  - DonbunEf7 9y ago
    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.
    - 9y ago

fellellor 9y ago

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.

lawlessone 9y ago

Maybe he has confused cause and effect? When you're poor these honor systems may be all you have.

linuxkerneldev 9y ago
> 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. "

pron 9y ago

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.

throw2016 9y ago

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.

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bjourne 9y ago

> Just imagine the PLO ever accepting an order to recognize the right of Israel to exist. PLO first recognized Israel in 1988: http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/08/world/arafat-says-plo-accepted-israel.html http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/08/world/arafat-says-plo-acce... Then again in 1993 during the Oslo Accords: http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Yearbook9/Pages/107%20Israel-PLO%20Mutual%20Recognition-%20Letters%20and%20Spe.aspx http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Yearbook9/P... The Palestinian Authority now in control of parts of the West Bank has also done it on several occasions and even Hamas has de facto recognized Israel: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20141011-forget-its-charter-hamas-has-given-de-facto-recognition-to-the-state-of-israel/ https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20141011-forget-its-charte... Meanwhile, Israel has not once recognized the right of Palestine to exist. Why discuss this detail of his essay? Because details are important and if you are ignorant about them, like this author is, you reach the wrong conclusions. The ignorance forms preconceptions that are not true in the slightest. In this conflict, we have one side who is occupying the other and refusing to let go of territory it has conquered. Resisting that is justified and obviously based on nationalism, not the Thar concept the author writes about. You can't just claim that all those Middle Easterners are driven by Thar, and we Westerners are always the rational ones. It's not so easy.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

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.

ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
"The White Man's Burden" is to Colonialism, as "The World's Most Toxic Value System" is to ___Now?_____ Fuck... I'm sure that's not right. I sucked at this part of the SAT's.

tcell 9y ago

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.

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