(2018-06-25) Book Review Why Honor Matters

RyanB: Book Review: Why Honor Matters. People who live in honor cultures have a sense of purpose and meaning. They dwell in solidarity with their fellows, are courageous in the face of danger, set great store in hospitality, and put the welfare of the group above their own. Mostly.

I expect when readers from this site (LessWrong) think of honor, it brings to mind Culture of Honor: the Psychology of Violence in the South, the gist of which is that American Southerners kill each other over insults more often than the rest of the country

I also guess that through Scott Alexander's review of Albion's Seed, the usual view of these people (and how they think) is perhaps unflattering.

In Why Honor Matters, Tamler Sommers offers a defense of honor. It is only a defense, and not an apologia, so he makes no excuses for the evils associated with it (eternal feuds, subjugation of women, etc).

I. Why write the book?

Though I subscribe to liberal values of toleration and respect for individual freedom, I've come to believe that the Western liberal approach to ethics is deeply misguided. The approach is too systematic, too idealized and abstract - incapable of reckoning with the messy complexity of the real world.

Honor codes are local, not universal, tailored to the particular needs of each community. Most important, honor codes are tailored to people as they are

Honor frameworks recognize that it's not easy to be virtuous: to take risks and act with integrity and solidarity. We need motivation, what evolutionary biologists and behavioral economists have called "commitment devices," to overcome our natural impulse toward comfort and safety.

II. A clearer sense of what honor is all about will help us see whether it is worth preserving.

Honor is a group activity. There are two reasons for this: one, honor requires actions (usually interactions with another person or group); two, honor requires recognition from others. Sommers calls this the honor group.

An anthropologist named Frank Stewart identified two dimensions of honor: one is "horizontal", which means it comes with membership and entails privileges and obligations; the other is "vertical" which sorts status within the group according to a member's actions

Vertical honor may have multiple components as well. The Greeks recognized three: geras, time, and kleos

An honor group has honor norms

There are some norms that are nearly universal to honor cultures, including:

• Hospitality
• Courage
• Revenge

III. The United States, Canada, Western Europe, etc. are dignity cultures. This has a lot of advantages, like human rights. The question is what the absence of honor at the national level costs us in exchange, and whether this is necessary.

Cowardice: We suffer from acute risk aversion

Isolation: Honor entails a lot of social connections. Without a culture of honor, all those connections are absent

We observe costs when there is a switch: depression and suicide increase for tribal cultures who undergo rapid modernization, and in soldiers who leave the military.

Shamelessness: In American parlance, we have a lack of accountability... Shame, of course, has deep connections with honor. Indeed, many anthropologists refer to honor cultures as shame cultures or "honor/shame cultures." (blame)

The converse for dignity cultures is guilt - so dignity/guilt vs honor/shame.

IV. Honor is tightly wound up with a sense of community, and a sense of honor is good for the community

A sense of community is also good for the individual: Sommers cites a study by James Hawdon of mass shooting survivors in Omaha and Finland, which found measures of community solidarity significantly correlated with well-being and less depression.

The link gets more clear as the environment gets more extreme. Sommers summarizes the contents of Culture of Honor by Nisbett and Cohen; I will compress the summary even more here

Vulnerability to raids and lack of law enforcement means depending on oneself for protection.
Depending on oneself means maintaining a good reputation for violence. An aggressive reputation means responding violently to insults.

Sommers goes on to say that farming communities are less profitable to raid and therefore can afford a much more individualistic orientation.

Collective identity fosters collective responsibility, which is an incentive to do things which benefit the group. It is also yields harmony and cohesion in the face of external threats; Sommers points to some anthropologists who think this is the evolutionary function of feuds.

Historical and sociological research suggests that duels have a bit of a bad rap.

Most of the quotes seem to have been drawn from Randall Collins' book Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory. The point about duels and egalitarianism is hit on repeatedly; this lingers on in the military and on school playgrounds at least as recently as the 1990's, albeit much less formally.

V. Feuds and duels make an excellent segue to violence.

Sommers makes two arguments about violence: first, that losing it completely has a bunch of morally-murky costs; second that violent acts have a much more nuanced morality than the standard answer of causing suffering and therefore wrong. The costs of non-violence mostly consist of key phrases like zero-tolerance, school-to-prison pipeline, prison population, and leviathan

Much more interesting is the nuanced morality angle. He cites the book Virtuous Violence by Alan Fiske and Tage Rai, the thesis of which is that violence is usually morally motivated:
Their thesis is purely descriptive: people who act violently are usually driven by moral motives rather than selfish ones. (or is that just what they tell themselves?)

Consider the question of oppression: what should oppressed people do? Honor has played a key role in motivating people to fight their own oppression

A less laudable, more routine question is the morality of bar fights.

Copes et al. write: "Fighting also was perceived as cathartic. Adversaries can release the stress of tense situations with a flurry of punches

In their circles, fights happen, and in most cases, people get over them." This final point is not actually examined in the book, which is a shame.

VI. The aftermath brings us to the final part of the book I will cover: revenge.

Revenge on the other hand is a direct assertion of the personal nature of the wrong; what the state does or doesn't do is its own business.

Conclusion

This is the kind of book that I am glad exists, but did not find to be well written

the book would be worth it just for the bibliography; it seems to contain just about everything on the subject written in English.