Original (Archive)
The more I travel, study history and read the papers, the more convinced I become of the superiority of rationalism. With that attitude, I should spend all my time traveling to northern Europe and Japan. However, fate has also seen fit to send me to many places where people think with their viscera and gonads instead of their brains. The more I see it in action, the more convinced I become that societies that place personal "honor" before everything else are truly cursed. This value system has ramifications that pervade the societies infested with it. It is, in my view, the most toxic value system on the planet. The term toxic is carefully chosen and meant to be taken with the utmost literalness because societies pervaded by this value system are deeply poisoned spiritually.
Almost everybody will react to an attack on their honor, but in many societies people are expected to restrain their impulse to get revenge: to forgive or simply ignore insults, and most members of those societies succeed to a greater or lesser extent. But in societies dominated by the "honor" ethic, it's permissible, often demanded, to seek revenge. In many places, this cycle of revenge creates blood feuds that last for generations, or results in periodic flareups of mass violence or ethnic cleansing.
If there's a single attribute that defines the "honor" mentality, it's the notion that private killing over personal grievances is acceptable. But in addition to the most obvious manifestations of blood feud and vendetta, the "honor" mentality includes a constellation of other attributes. Most conspicuous is male domination, which often includes systematic degradation of women and extreme paranoia regarding female sexuality and possible infidelity.
When describing other societies, our failure to distinguish between the two types of honor leads to gross misunderstandings. So far I have always put "honor" in quotes except when referring explicitly to internalized honor. I am convinced that "honor" is a gross mistranslation of words from other languages. While these concepts in other languages may overlap some of the elements of what we term honor, the "honor" mentality just as often impels people in other societies to do things that are grossly dishonorable by our standards. The "honor" mentality can blow up a school bus, then demand satisfaction when someone calls it cowardice to blow up a school bus. It can force women to live lives totally dominated by male authority, then become indignant when that domination is portrayed in a documentary.
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. And I'm not at all interested in the argument that it's their concept of honor. Their concept has a label in their language, but if it doesn't correspond to our concept of honor, then it's a faulty translation. If all else fails, use the foreign word, but don't mistranslate.
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. Smoking makes perfect sense to a nicotine addict, but it can nevertheless kill him. Not exercising makes sense to a couch potato but it will only make his problems worse.
Words from other languages like "vendetta" and "machismo" aren't really satisfactory because they have been taken into English and at best cover only a part of the attributes of this value system. What we need is a foreign term unfamiliar in English. There's a Spanish word, pundonor, a contraction of punta de honor or "point of honor", but it's not really satisfactory for two reasons. First, its components are too similar to English to avoid confusion and second, it's really not fair to saddle Spanish culture with the term. While we can find this attitude in Spanish cultures, it's much more virulent, destructive and unmoderated by humor and common sense in other parts of the world. Until I find a more accurate term, I will use the Arabic word thar, "blood vengeance," for this value system. The term embodies many of the attributes of the "honor" or "feud" mentality, has no semantic baggage attached to it for English speakers, and comes from one of the largest languages and cultures where these values are widespread.
We find this mentality developed to differing degrees in different places. Hispanics, Turks and Greeks can be roused to seek revenge if insulted, but my experience with these cultures is that the "honor" mentality is deeply moderated by pragmatism, a sense of humor, and a general zest for living (another reason I consider the label "Mediterranean" inappropriate). On the other hand, I recall a bank clerk in Naples who refused to cash travelers' checks even though he had cashed them the previous day. His attitude seemed to be "You're the SOB who makes it necessary for me to come to work and I'm not going to do a thing for you." 24 hours afterward, I cashed a large amount of checks in Greece, totally wiping out the cash supply of a small bank office. Not the slightest problem. The attitude here seemed to be "It's too much trouble to be a pain. Let's cooperate and enjoy life." Where I've personally seen the "honor" mentality at its most grim, deadly, and unredeemed by humanizing characteristics is in the Balkans and the Middle East.
The thar mentality can be said to include these features. They vary in degree from person to person and place to place but if we find all or most of them in a society we can justly apply the label thar.
In sharp contrast to thar, Bushido was an internalized code of honor. One could be shamed in Bushido even if nobody else knew.
In her book The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang recounts the story of a Japanese doctor who had willingly committed atrocities in China during World War II. He now has a shrine of remorse in his waiting room. Many Japanese are in denial about Japanese war crimes but others want to know the truth; it's a terrible struggle for many given their cultural conditioning, but many are making the effort. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for anyone in Hamas, Serbia, Rwanda, or Liberia to build a shrine of remorse.
The thar mentality hinders technological progress in a host of ways. Most obviously, it hinders people from moving into new occupations. You can't become an engineer if the family demands that you go into shoemaking like all your ancestors did. It also blocks progress by causing people to shun necessary but low-status tasks or occupations. Some examples:
But the reality is that much of the world's overpopulation is driven by the thar mentality. In thar societies manhood is measured more or less directly by the ability to father children. I confess I have always found this attitude a bit puzzling - gerbils can mate at the age of 90 days, so procreation isn't exactly a high-order skill. And the attitude is not just limited to men. When women in some African societies were asked if they would limit the sizes of their families, they said first of all they would not go against their husbands' wishes, and second they would not want to face the ridicule of other women. This attitude is not limited to foreign societies. I know of a young black woman with two children who was asked by her family "you're 26 and only have two children? What's wrong with you?"
In many societies dominated by the thar mentality, upward mobility is severely limited. Sooner or later our growth will flatten out. Will we see a rise in the thar mentality in Western society simply because dominance of others will be the only outlet for competition?
I see this as a real danger even if - especially if - we eventually succeed in meeting everyone's needs. In a society where everyone is continually satisfied, the growth of an egocentric world-view is all but guaranteed. Just look at how easily things that were wild utopian fantasies or fabulous luxuries a few decades ago have become "rights" in contemporary American society. In a society where instant gratification is the norm, any obstruction of the will, however trivial, will be seen as a direct personal assault. The more routine gratification becomes, the less able to cope with interruptions people will become. I think we see a harbinger of this in the rise in road rage.
One troubling indicator is the widespread resentment over the rise of intellectual tasks and the increasing economic value attached to intellectual skills. This has a fairly direct parallel to the resentment Asian merchants encountered in many countries when it was discovered that commerce offered better opportunities for success than traditional skills.
Another troubling trend is the increasing politicization of the Civil War. The United States recovered from the Civil War in an absolutely astonishing fashion. But often, symbols from the past take on new meanings and become symbols for grievances. In Bosnia I saw icons displayed by people who from all other appearances had not a shred of religious sentiment, because they had become nationalistic symbols. Thus the Confederate flag has become a focus for attack by black militants and a rallying point for white opponents. Even more disturbing is a rise in a mean-spirited resistance to any kind of honors for Confederate soldiers. When sailors from the recently-raised Confederate submarine the C.S.S. Hunley were buried with honors, there were a number of complaints that the ceremony amounted to a support for slavery and an insult to blacks. We could see easily see once dormant historical symbols become the focal points for future conflicts.
Thar drives much of the world's terrorism, and in the short term the fight against terrorism is frustrating. But in the long term Western society is doing precisely what terrifies thar cultures the most. We are generating forces that foster individual autonomy and especially demands by women for more equality. These forces attack the very root of thar: the whole fabric of status, hierarchy and authority that creates the reward system in thar cultures.
Jacob Black-Michaud, 1975; Cohesive Force: Feud in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, St. Martin's Press, New York, 270 p.
The more I travel, study history and read the papers, the more convinced I become of the superiority of rationalism. With that attitude, I should spend all my time traveling to northern Europe and Japan. However, fate has also seen fit to send me to many places where people think with their viscera and gonads instead of their brains. The more I see it in action, the more convinced I become that societies that place personal "honor" before everything else are truly cursed. This value system has ramifications that pervade the societies infested with it. It is, in my view, the most toxic value system on the planet. The term toxic is carefully chosen and meant to be taken with the utmost literalness because societies pervaded by this value system are deeply poisoned spiritually.
Almost everybody will react to an attack on their honor, but in many societies people are expected to restrain their impulse to get revenge: to forgive or simply ignore insults, and most members of those societies succeed to a greater or lesser extent. But in societies dominated by the "honor" ethic, it's permissible, often demanded, to seek revenge. In many places, this cycle of revenge creates blood feuds that last for generations, or results in periodic flareups of mass violence or ethnic cleansing.
If there's a single attribute that defines the "honor" mentality, it's the notion that private killing over personal grievances is acceptable. But in addition to the most obvious manifestations of blood feud and vendetta, the "honor" mentality includes a constellation of other attributes. Most conspicuous is male domination, which often includes systematic degradation of women and extreme paranoia regarding female sexuality and possible infidelity.
Honor and "Honor"
We use the word "honor" in two ways. One meaning denotes a set of largely internal attributes: trustworthiness, loyalty, courage and truthfulness. The other denotes an externality, as in the expressions "graduation with honors" or "honorary degree." The dual usage arises from the notion that honor given externally by others should arise from behavior that exemplifies the internal kind of honor. Thus, Winston Churchill was given honorary U. S. citizenship (honor in the external sense) because his leadership during World War II exemplified honor in the internal sense. It is perfectly possible, and all too common, to be vilified externally for pursing internal honor. It is also possible to achieve honor in the external sense without having the internal variety, in some cases through deliberate deception. The student who graduates "with honors" by cheating on exams is the perfect example.When describing other societies, our failure to distinguish between the two types of honor leads to gross misunderstandings. So far I have always put "honor" in quotes except when referring explicitly to internalized honor. I am convinced that "honor" is a gross mistranslation of words from other languages. While these concepts in other languages may overlap some of the elements of what we term honor, the "honor" mentality just as often impels people in other societies to do things that are grossly dishonorable by our standards. The "honor" mentality can blow up a school bus, then demand satisfaction when someone calls it cowardice to blow up a school bus. It can force women to live lives totally dominated by male authority, then become indignant when that domination is portrayed in a documentary.
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. And I'm not at all interested in the argument that it's their concept of honor. Their concept has a label in their language, but if it doesn't correspond to our concept of honor, then it's a faulty translation. If all else fails, use the foreign word, but don't mistranslate.
The Blindingly Obvious
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. Smoking makes perfect sense to a nicotine addict, but it can nevertheless kill him. Not exercising makes sense to a couch potato but it will only make his problems worse.
Thar
Although this "honor" mentality tends to be a feature of what anthropologists sometimes call "shame" cultures, "shame" is not really an accurate term either. There really is no specific term in English to describe this value system. The social science literature commonly describes this mentality as "feuding," but though feuding is common in such societies, the term "feud" tends to obscure other aspects of the value system. The term "Mediterranean" is also widely used in the social science literature, and although it's accurate in that almost the entire periphery of the Mediterranean shares this value system to some extent, we find it far beyond the Mediterranean. The term "traditional" is sometimes used to describe cultures imbued with the values I'm discussing, but the word is unsuitable as a general label for too many obvious reasons.Words from other languages like "vendetta" and "machismo" aren't really satisfactory because they have been taken into English and at best cover only a part of the attributes of this value system. What we need is a foreign term unfamiliar in English. There's a Spanish word, pundonor, a contraction of punta de honor or "point of honor", but it's not really satisfactory for two reasons. First, its components are too similar to English to avoid confusion and second, it's really not fair to saddle Spanish culture with the term. While we can find this attitude in Spanish cultures, it's much more virulent, destructive and unmoderated by humor and common sense in other parts of the world. Until I find a more accurate term, I will use the Arabic word thar, "blood vengeance," for this value system. The term embodies many of the attributes of the "honor" or "feud" mentality, has no semantic baggage attached to it for English speakers, and comes from one of the largest languages and cultures where these values are widespread.
We find this mentality developed to differing degrees in different places. Hispanics, Turks and Greeks can be roused to seek revenge if insulted, but my experience with these cultures is that the "honor" mentality is deeply moderated by pragmatism, a sense of humor, and a general zest for living (another reason I consider the label "Mediterranean" inappropriate). On the other hand, I recall a bank clerk in Naples who refused to cash travelers' checks even though he had cashed them the previous day. His attitude seemed to be "You're the SOB who makes it necessary for me to come to work and I'm not going to do a thing for you." 24 hours afterward, I cashed a large amount of checks in Greece, totally wiping out the cash supply of a small bank office. Not the slightest problem. The attitude here seemed to be "It's too much trouble to be a pain. Let's cooperate and enjoy life." Where I've personally seen the "honor" mentality at its most grim, deadly, and unredeemed by humanizing characteristics is in the Balkans and the Middle East.
The thar mentality can be said to include these features. They vary in degree from person to person and place to place but if we find all or most of them in a society we can justly apply the label thar.
- 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
Bushido
One of the most profound consequences of mistranslating foreign terms as "honor" is a tendency by many people to regard Japanese society as similar to the thar cultures of the Balkans and the Middle East. Japan is not a "shame" culture - Japan and the West are the two great "guilt" cultures of the world (and this, I'm convinced, is directly responsible for their leadership in technology, but that's a long story I'll touch on below.) The Japanese code of Bushido indeed placed great emphasis on personal honor but also on obedience no matter what. When the Japanese were ordered by the Emperor to surrender and submit in 1945, they did. When the Japanese were told by the Emperor to submit to the worst, they quite literally expected to be punished and enslaved. We for our part expected sullen acquiescence at best and terrorism at worst. Both sides, to their immense relief, saw the best side of the other. Just imagine the PLO ever accepting an order to recognize the right of Israel to exist. Just imagine the Irish Republican Army obeying an order from the Vatican to disarm. Just imagine the Serbs following an order to give up Kosovo. Just imagine any of these groups accepting the legitimacy of anyone who even tried to issue such a command.In sharp contrast to thar, Bushido was an internalized code of honor. One could be shamed in Bushido even if nobody else knew.
In her book The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang recounts the story of a Japanese doctor who had willingly committed atrocities in China during World War II. He now has a shrine of remorse in his waiting room. Many Japanese are in denial about Japanese war crimes but others want to know the truth; it's a terrible struggle for many given their cultural conditioning, but many are making the effort. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for anyone in Hamas, Serbia, Rwanda, or Liberia to build a shrine of remorse.
The Toxicity of
There is, in my view, a direct correlation between the poverty of many societies and their tendency toward the thar mentality. Italy is a striking example. There is a remarkable north-south gradient of attitude and wealth in Italy; the far north is wealthy, highly industrialized, participated vigorously in the Renaissance, and is fully in the European mainstream. Although machismo is everywhere in Italy, in the north it rarely leads to anything more than loud exchanges in traffic. As you travel south in Italy, and particularly in the mezzogiorno, the region from Naples south, the poverty increases and so does the thar mentality. Blood feuds over petty slights are commonplace in Sicily and Calabria (the "toe" of Italy). Many historians see this mentality as springing from deep poverty and long oppression, but it's not hard to find poor societies or societies with long histories of oppression where the thar mentality is much less virulent. Instead, I argue that the thar mentality causes poverty, and causes or certainly reinforces the oppression in the society.The thar mentality hinders technological progress in a host of ways. Most obviously, it hinders people from moving into new occupations. You can't become an engineer if the family demands that you go into shoemaking like all your ancestors did. It also blocks progress by causing people to shun necessary but low-status tasks or occupations. Some examples:
- When Western firms first started doing business in Saudi Arabia, they encountered a cultural roadblock. Men would eagerly learn how to do technical tasks, but at first refused to clean things - parts, tools, work areas - because cleaning things was "womens' work."
- After my civil affairs unit had been in Kuwait a month in 1991, we began to sense that something was wrong: the recovery was far too slow. Kuwait was not that badly damaged in the Gulf War, apart from the burning oil wells. It was certainly not as badly damaged as an American city would have been by an earthquake or hurricane. The prevailing attitude everywhere was "where can we hire people to clean up? This attitude, that local people are managers and the actual hands-on work is done by hired help, is pervasive in the Persian Gulf and is very similar to the attitude of ancient Rome. In ancient Rome the attitude was that if citizens needed technical help, they could always hire an educated slave.
- In many societies, the low-status jobs are first taken by foreigners who either don't share their neighbors' disdain for the jobs, or who are more interested in profit than status. However, when the low-status jobs turn out to be critical, often the locals find that they have been bypassed on the ladder to success. Worse yet, the rungs above them are occupied. In many African nations, shopkeeping and clerical jobs were left to Asian immigrants because they were considered too lowly for the warrior and herding classes. As time went by and it became obvious that trade and government were the routes to prosperity, that there really weren't all that many jobs for traditional warriors, the immigrants who took the former low-status jobs found themselves targets of resentment. In Idi Amin's Uganda in the late 1960's, Asian shopkeepers were simply expelled, but at least they were spared the agony of living in the society that Amin proceeded to create.
- Immigrant families from thar-dominated societies to the United States often strongly resisted public education because it was seen as a threat to the authority of the family.
- It's very common to read accounts of entrepreneurs in Third World countries who could easily achieve even greater success but deliberately refrain because if they did, they would be inundated by extended family members. Could there be a more effective mechanism for keeping a society poor?
- For sheer, bottom-of-the barrel depravity, it's hard to top this. A recent newspaper account of the plight of AIDS orphans in Africa described how they would often be left utterly destitute because their parents' relatives would swoop in and take all their property. No doubt these are the same people who would expect the orphans to support them if they became successful.
Degradation of Women
Thar-dominated societies aren't merely male-dominated, but subject women to extreme degrees of degradation. Part and parcel of the thar mentality is extreme paranoia (take that term in the literal, clinical sense of mental illness) regarding female sexuality and possible infidelity.- The Taliban in Afghanistan made it virtually impossible for women to get medical care because that would require them to be seen by men who were not their husbands.
- Women who were raped by the Pakistani army in Bangladesh during that country's war for independence were often abandoned by their husbands, despite an intense government campaign on their behalf. At that, they weren't badly off. In many other thar-dominated societies, it is common for rape victims to be killed by their own families.
- The practice of female genital mutilation so widely practiced in Africa and the Middle East is specifically designed to deprive women of sensation because it is felt that women who can experience sexual sensations are more likely to be unfaithful.
Thar
Although the Vatican is commonly cited as a villain in discussions of overpopulation, a cursory glance at demographic statistics reveals instantly that the fastest-growing countries are not Catholic. Attacking the Vatican is a bit like dropping your keys in a dark alley and looking under the corner lamppost because the light is better there - it's an easy and obvious target. Also, it's a safe target; nobody will criticize you for being a racist or ethnocentrist if you attack a Western institution. Finally the Vatican is fun to attack because they just won't stop raining on the sexual liberation parade.But the reality is that much of the world's overpopulation is driven by the thar mentality. In thar societies manhood is measured more or less directly by the ability to father children. I confess I have always found this attitude a bit puzzling - gerbils can mate at the age of 90 days, so procreation isn't exactly a high-order skill. And the attitude is not just limited to men. When women in some African societies were asked if they would limit the sizes of their families, they said first of all they would not go against their husbands' wishes, and second they would not want to face the ridicule of other women. This attitude is not limited to foreign societies. I know of a young black woman with two children who was asked by her family "you're 26 and only have two children? What's wrong with you?"
Our Prognosis
The fact that northern European culture has been relatively free of the thar mentality has been, in my view, one of the most significant factors in explaining its rise to dominance. Thar is the absolute antithesis of meritocracy; in a thar society you have status automatically by virtue of being a male, being an elder, or being a member of an illustrious family. I believe the Western concept of the individual has been one of the pivotal ingredients in the rise of technology, because people who see themselves as autonomous agents, capable of changing the world, invent things. Many historians trace our concept of the individual to the medieval concept of chivalry, which created an elite class that was expected to model its conduct on an internalized code of ethics - and sometimes even did. It is of towering significance that one other society had a similar knightly class - Japan. In thar cultures people are encouraged to see themselves as members of a group rather than as individuals, and discouraged from changing the world because it threatens to undermine tradition.In many societies dominated by the thar mentality, upward mobility is severely limited. Sooner or later our growth will flatten out. Will we see a rise in the thar mentality in Western society simply because dominance of others will be the only outlet for competition?
I see this as a real danger even if - especially if - we eventually succeed in meeting everyone's needs. In a society where everyone is continually satisfied, the growth of an egocentric world-view is all but guaranteed. Just look at how easily things that were wild utopian fantasies or fabulous luxuries a few decades ago have become "rights" in contemporary American society. In a society where instant gratification is the norm, any obstruction of the will, however trivial, will be seen as a direct personal assault. The more routine gratification becomes, the less able to cope with interruptions people will become. I think we see a harbinger of this in the rise in road rage.
One troubling indicator is the widespread resentment over the rise of intellectual tasks and the increasing economic value attached to intellectual skills. This has a fairly direct parallel to the resentment Asian merchants encountered in many countries when it was discovered that commerce offered better opportunities for success than traditional skills.
Another troubling trend is the increasing politicization of the Civil War. The United States recovered from the Civil War in an absolutely astonishing fashion. But often, symbols from the past take on new meanings and become symbols for grievances. In Bosnia I saw icons displayed by people who from all other appearances had not a shred of religious sentiment, because they had become nationalistic symbols. Thus the Confederate flag has become a focus for attack by black militants and a rallying point for white opponents. Even more disturbing is a rise in a mean-spirited resistance to any kind of honors for Confederate soldiers. When sailors from the recently-raised Confederate submarine the C.S.S. Hunley were buried with honors, there were a number of complaints that the ceremony amounted to a support for slavery and an insult to blacks. We could see easily see once dormant historical symbols become the focal points for future conflicts.
Thar drives much of the world's terrorism, and in the short term the fight against terrorism is frustrating. But in the long term Western society is doing precisely what terrifies thar cultures the most. We are generating forces that foster individual autonomy and especially demands by women for more equality. These forces attack the very root of thar: the whole fabric of status, hierarchy and authority that creates the reward system in thar cultures.
References
Christopher Boehm, 1984; Blood Revenge: The Anthropology of Feuding in Montenegro and Other Tribal Societies, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 263p. p. 114-5, 177,Jacob Black-Michaud, 1975; Cohesive Force: Feud in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, St. Martin's Press, New York, 270 p.
it is".