why honor matters 
by tamler sommers 



Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Tamler Sommers
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First Edition: May 2018
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sommers, Tamler, 1970-author.
Title: Why honor matters / Tamler Sommers.
Description: First Edition. | New York, N.Y. : Basic Books, an imprint of
Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc., 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018001837| ISBN 9780465098873 (hardcover) |
ISBN9780465098880 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Honor.
Classification: LCC BJ1533.H8 S63 2018 | DDC 179/.9—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001837
ISBNs: 978-0-465-09887-3 (hardcover); 978-0-465-09888-0 (ebook)
E3-20180417-JV-NF
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PROLOGUE: Honor Matters
CHAPTER ONE: Contours of Honor
CHAPTER TWO: Living Without Honor
CHAPTER THREE: Honor and Community
CHAPTER FOUR: Violence and Aggression
CHAPTER FIVE: Honor and Revenge
CHAPTER SIX: Honorable Justice
CHAPTER SEVEN: Honor Contained
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Tamler Sommers
Bibliography
Notes
Index
To Jen and Eliza and to the memory of my parents,
Fred Sommers and Shula Sommers
PROLOGUE
HONOR MATTERS
Who’s your favorite character in The Godfather? Ask that question to ten
people, and I’ll bet you the cost of this book that at least five answer “Sonny.”
Everyone loves Sonny: Santino Corleone, played by James Caan, the hothead,
the oldest of the don’s three sons, the one who gets gunned down at the tollbooth
about halfway through the movie. But why does everyone love him? Think
about it for a second. He’s violent and impulsive, he cheats on his wife regularly,
and he was a terrible interim don after his father was shot. He starts a war with
the family he thinks is responsible, which is bad for business and unites the other
Mafia families against him. Even worse, the attempt on his father’s life was
Sonny’s fault to begin with. Before he’s taken out at the tollbooth, Sonny almost
leads the Corleone family to ruin. But we love him anyway. Why?
Here’s why: we love him for his passion, courage, guts, integrity, and most of
all his loyalty to his family. When Sonny learns that Connie, his sister, has been
abused by her husband, Carlo, Sonny doesn’t hesitate for a second: he heads
straight for the corner to find Carlo and gives him the beating that every filmgoer
knows he deserves. When it comes to defending his family, Sonny doesn’t
calculate the best move, the most profitable move—Michael is the calculating
member of the family. Sonny just acts out of stubborn passion and a sense of
honor. Repeatedly in the film we hear characters say “It’s only business.” Not
Sonny, though. It’s never “only business” for Sonny. That’s what gets him killed
at the tollbooth: his uncompromising and unprofitable loyalty—to his sister, his
father—and his honor.
Our attitudes toward Sonny reflect a more general ambivalence about honor
in the modern West. Indeed, ambivalence may be too weak a word. When it
comes to honor, we’re positively schizophrenic. On the one hand, we have deep
nostalgia for the honorable way of life. Whole genres of literature and film feed
off this nostalgia. Not just mob movies, but westerns, film noir, revenge stories,
Jane Austen novels, even musicals (think Hamilton). The virtues associated with
honor such as courage, loyalty, solidarity, accountability, and integrity are
precisely what we find lacking in the modern world. But at the same time, we
find many aspects of honor to be absurd, petty, and morally reprehensible. After
all, doesn’t honor lead to blood feuds, pointless duels, vigilantism, revenge,
racism, nationalism, terrorism, bullying, and violence against women? Isn’t one
of the signs of civilization’s progress that we’ve put honor in the rearview mirror
and replaced it with a commitment to dignity, equality, and human rights?
Most contemporary Western thinkers certainly seem to think so. Steven
Pinker, for example, in his celebrated book The Better Angels of Our Nature
attributed much of the decline of violence in the world to secular humanist
values that have swept aside “fetishisized virtues such as… honor, heroism, and
glory.” To critics like Pinker, these honor-related virtues are primitive and
dispensable, like our early beliefs about the solar system, worth studying only to
see how we went wrong. Another psychologist, Ryan Brown, refers to honor as a
disease, a syndrome that must be eradicated from the American psyche.
Meanwhile, with very few exceptions, moral philosophers have ignored honor as
a topic of serious study. Honor is hardly mentioned in the contemporary ethical
literature. It’s too messy, irrational, backward, and weird. It doesn’t fit
comfortably within the Western liberal rule-based ethical tradition that has
dominated moral philosophy since the Enlightenment. Philosophers don’t feel
the need to criticize honor, because it isn’t taken seriously in the first place. It’s
just off the table, “exiled to some philosophical St. Helena,” as Anthony Appiah
puts it, “left to contemplate its wilting epaulets and watch its once gleaming
sword corrode in the salt air.”
Some have gone so far as to question honor’s very reality. Pinker calls it a
“strange commodity that exists because everyone believes that everyone else
believes that it exists.” And such doubts have been with us for ages. Falstaff, for
example, in a famous speech from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, asks:
Can honour set-to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No.
Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that
word “honour”? What is that “honour”? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that
died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then?
Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not
suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon.
To Falstaff, honor is just a word, a “scutcheon,” not a tangible thing with real
value. We still often speak of honor this way, as a shared hallucination, a
pyramid scheme propped up by false notions and petty drives for prestige.
Part of the problem, especially for philosophers, is that honor is so hard to pin
down. Philosophers like their concepts crisp and definable. The dominant
approach in philosophy is called conceptual analysis: an attempt to come up with
necessary and sufficient conditions that capture every instance that the concept is
used. Honor emphatically resists this kind of approach. I’ve been writing this
book on honor for three years, and I’m still hard-pressed to give a concise
description of what it is. Think of how many categories we associate with the
concept: honor cultures, honor systems, honor codes, honor values, medals of
honor, honorary degrees, honor rolls, honor groups, honor societies, honor
worlds. Honor can be a verb (“Honor thy mother and father”), a noun (“We must
preserve the family honor,” “I graduated with honors”), an adjective (honor
society), and a form of address (“Your honor, I object!”). In contrast to the
dominant ethical theories with their small set of universal principles, honor spins
a dizzying web of values, virtues, codes, commandments, and prohibitions that
are constantly changing and evolving. And honor makes no pretense to
universality. The honor of the Mafia is different from the honor of hockey teams,
which is different from the honor of an Eskimo tribe. Anyone who wants to
define honor with even a hint of precision is in for a rude surprise. (Believe me, I
know.)
But “undefinable” isn’t the same as “unreal.” Over the past ten years, I’ve
come to believe that honor is both real and valuable—indispensable, even, for
living a good life in a good and just society. I’m convinced that our collective
rejection of honor has come at great cost and that reclaiming it can improve our
lives and our society. This book is my attempt to explain why.
Why Me? Why Honor?
I’m no stranger myself to ambivalence about honor. At the start of my career, I
was on the side of the critics and the dismissers. I promoted a more rational
approach to ethics—and especially to my area of expertise: blame, praise, and
responsibility. Yet part of me always rebelled against what I was putting down
on paper, in my articles. There was always a nagging voice in the back of my
mind: “You don’t believe what you’re writing here.”
But let me back up. As I say, nobody teaches you about honor in academic
philosophy. Like most philosophers, I was trained in the Western ethical
tradition, which meant that I spent my time engaging in debates between harmbased theories (such as utilitarianism) and dignity- or rights-based theories (from
Locke, Kant, and John Rawls). It was during the writing of my book on free will
and moral responsibility that I stumbled upon research of so-called honor
cultures, societies where honor was a central part of their value system. To my
surprise, these cultures had a starkly different way of understanding
responsibility and its connection to freedom. Like most philosophers in my area,
I was obsessed with questions about how we can be truly free in a world
governed by the laws of nature. How can we blame, praise, and punish people
for actions that didn’t originate in them but were caused by factors that might
trace back all the way to the big bang? Honor cultures didn’t struggle with this
problem, because they didn’t think a strong form of free will was necessary for
holding people responsible for their actions. They didn’t regard the absence of
control as an excuse for behavior. In honor cultures, you can get blamed for
actions that weren’t intentional, for actions committed by relatives, ancestors, or
other members of your group.
My first reaction was a common one for Westerners. How interesting! How
quaint! These odd and primitive people haven’t truly understood the deep
problems of free will and determinism. But the more research I did on cultural
differences, the clearer it became that we were the weird ones, not them. Most
societies throughout history and even today are on the side of the honor cultures.
The exceptions were those of us who live in WEIRD (Western, educated,
industrialized, rich, and democratic) societies. Okay, I thought, but maybe we
were just more rational about freedom and its relation to moral responsibility.
Again, further investigation convinced me this was not the case. The alternate
perspectives were often coherent and empirically sound—in short, just as
rational as our own practices on responsibility, blame, and praise. And that
became the central thesis of my book.
But my interest in honor didn’t stop there. The more research I did on honor
cultures of all sorts, the more I found myself drawn to various aspects of their
way of life. The strong norms of hospitality, for example. The social cohesion
and solidarity, where selfish interests take a backseat to the interests of the
group. The emphasis on courage, integrity, and accountability—in honor
cultures, you have to demonstrate that you’re willing to stand up for yourself and
your principles even in the face of risks to your safety and material interests.
Which leads to plenty of excitement and drama. Not the overwrought social
media drama I had become accustomed to, but real drama—where the deepest
part of your identity is at stake. And finally, people in honor cultures seem to
have a strong sense of purpose and meaning—there’s less existential angst, and
the people know what they’re living for, what’s important, and why.
Courage, integrity, solidarity, drama, hospitality, a sense of purpose and
meaning—these are attractive values and characteristics, important for living a
good and worthwhile life. But there was something else drawing me to honor
too, something more fundamental and harder to describe. 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. The most influential moral
philosophers of the last several hundred years—Immanuel Kant, John Stuart
Mill, and John Rawls—derived their theories from a small set of allegedly selfevident principles. They try to show what an ideal society of rational agents
would look like. The elegance and simplicity of their theories mislead us into
thinking that their principles, properly applied, will result in a perfectly just
society. If we just execute the game plan properly, in other words, our problems
will be solved. But no simple theory can capture something as chaotic and
contradictory as human nature or human society. The more abstract and simple
the theory, the less it can tell us about our actual lives and struggles.
Idealized, systematic, abstract, and universalizable—honor has none of these
attributes. Honor, unlike dignity, is not abstract; it’s grounded in fact. Honor is
real only when people recognize and acknowledge it. 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, not how we wish them to be or
how we imagine they would be if they were “rational.” Honor is full of
compromises; it deals in grays rather than black and white. It seeks better
alternatives, not ideal alternatives. In short, honor is a thoroughly nonideal form
of value, which allows it to operate with a more accurate understanding of
human psychology.
Throughout the book I’ll try to convince you that these two aspects of honor
—its attractive virtues and the unsystematic nature of its codes—are intimately
connected. 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. Honor
frameworks offer a rich tapestry of codes and incentives to counteract this
impulse. They have rituals and traditions for bringing people together, for
celebrating exceptional people and behavior, and for holding people
accountable. Codes that adapt to human strengths and weaknesses can be
effective tools for motivation. These motivational tools are absent in the ethics
of Western liberalism because of its idealized nature.
The central thesis of this book, then, is that honor has a lot to teach us and
that we are wrong to ignore or reject it. It’s undeniable that our commitment to
Enlightenment values has brought tremendous benefits for individual freedom
and respect for human rights. At its best, it produces a society with more equal
treatment, one that respects its citizens and allows them to pursue their interests
and goals without interference. But liberal Enlightenment morality is not perfect,
and it’s not sufficient. It can also lead to increasing alienation, selfish
individualism, and a high-minded disregard for the struggles and suffering of
others. Now don’t worry—this isn’t going to be a cranky “modern society is
going to hell” Slouching Towards Gomorrah kind of book. I like my Netflix,
Subaru, and SodaStream as much as anyone. But the comforts and safety of
modern life shouldn’t blind us to its terrible problems. Reclaiming honor as a
core value can help us address these problems, and this book will show us how.
And Yet…
I know how tempting it can be to romanticize honor—I led off with an example
from The Godfather, for God’s sake. It’s easy to romanticize something that
provides excitement, drama, and great stories. I’m an academic—as the
Kissinger quote goes, our conflicts are so bitter because the stakes are so small.
At times I worry that I’m what you might call an “honor tourist”—someone who
takes in the sights of honor in books and movies, who can enjoy the grandeur
without having to endure the costs of living there on a daily basis. And to be
sure, honor has its share of heavy costs, a well-known dark side. There’s a
reason that Westerners have turned away from it. I showed an early draft of this
book to a friend, and she was wary. Trump had just been elected; the “alt-right”
was gaining steam. Groups that feel humiliated by external forces or a larger
governing society often turn to honor rhetoric to organize and motivate their
movement. And what about all that morally atrocious baggage, my friend asked
me: What about honor’s connection to tribalism, violence, and misogyny? What
about the blood feuds, the duels, the aggression? Honor can trap people in rigid
social roles, limiting their freedom to determine their own identity and
conception of a good life. In many honor cultures, women especially seem to
bear the brunt of these restrictions. Honor has no essential commitment to a
notion of universal human rights, so its codes can, and have, sanctioned morally
odious behavior on a significant scale. Any honest reckoning of honor must take
these concerns very seriously.
So while I plan to offer a defense of honor, it is not a defense of
unconstrained honor. If you’ve picked up this book looking for a subtle or
sideways defense of racism or sexism, you’re going to be disappointed. My
conclusion will be that honor systems flourish only when they’re effectively
contained. Fortunately, honor can be contained; we can restore honor into a
larger value system while at the same time limiting its potential abuses. As we’ll
see, many communities and institutions are doing this already, and there is
potential for many more. We can fruitfully apply basic principles of honor to
some of our most challenging problems: risk aversion, alienation, education,
policing, and mass incarceration. And we can do all of this without taking our
eyes off the dangers that my friend worries about.
The Plan and a Plea
So here’s the plan. In Chapter One, I’ll do my best to explain what honor is and
how it functions, contrasting it with the ethical concept that has come to replace
it in many minds—dignity. In Chapter Two, I’ll examine some of the
consequences of abandoning honor in the modern West. The next three chapters
explore an aspect of honor-related values. They aim to illuminate both the
strengths and the weaknesses of honor codes in relation to community (Chapter
Three), violence (Chapter Four), and revenge (Chapter Five). Chapter Six is the
most ambitious and, in my mind, the most important chapter in the book. It
begins with a critique of the Western approach to criminal justice and finds a
direct connection between its tragic defects and the rationalistic dignity-based
morality at its core. I then describe an exciting new movement in criminal
punishment called “restorative justice” that offers enormous moral benefits, but
requires us to reorient our philosophical understanding of punishment. I show
how restorative justice applies the basic values of honor to criminal conflicts—
with impressive results. It is a prime example of the contained form of honor that
I wish to defend. Finally, in Chapter Seven, I offer a more general model of what
contained honor looks like and how we can implement it to our advantage.
Now for the plea. As I said earlier, honor is full of compromises; it is a
nonideal form of value. To borrow a metaphor from philosopher Otto Neurath,
honor is continuously building and repairing a boat that is already out at sea.
Consequently, honor’s critics can always come up with hypothetical cases of
injustice that honor cannot solve even in principle. So my plea is simple. As you
evaluate my argument, resist that urge to come up with abstract hypothetical
objections. Compare my examples of honor systems with actual alternatives, not
idealized alternatives. Here’s an analogy (one that hits a little too close to home
for me). Imagine living in a house that badly needs repair. As you compare the
contractors, you should choose the one who can actually make the house better,
not the one who can best imagine the blueprint of a perfect house. The same
thinking applies to improving society.
A final word before I begin. I have no political ax to grind, and this book has
no political agenda, though I’m sure some will take it that way. For what it’s
worth, I tend to be a liberal on most issues—though not as far to the left as some
of my academic colleagues. I’ve made no effort to hide my political opinions,
but for the most part my defense of honor is entirely independent of them. And
that’s a good thing too—because the politics of honor are all over the place.
Some honor values are quite progressive: egalitarianism, anti-individualism,
striving for the common good. (Hillary Clinton’s “It takes a village” would be an
accurate motto for many honor cultures.) Indeed, the rejection of abstract
theorizing and the emphasis on personal connections and feelings are in line with
some aspects of feminist philosophy and their critique of theorists like John
Rawls. Other honor values have more conservative (and less feminist)
associations: agonism, tribal loyalty, concern for female purity. In matters of
policy, my examples of contained honor—such as restorative justice, police
reform, hip-hop culture—probably find greater support among liberals than
conservatives. On the other hand, the core commitments of honor cultures may
be more in line with traditional conservatism: a mistrust of centralized power
and the emphasis on the local and the personal over the universal and the
impartial.
Whatever your impression about the politics of honor, try not to let it affect
how you evaluate my argument. The stakes are too high for that. Our collective
rejection of honor has come at a great cost to modern life. The downside to
honor is real, but it can be contained rather than dismissed. By the end of this
book, I hope to convince you that reclaiming honor can help us lead better and
more fulfilling lives as individuals and as a society.
But first I need to explain what it is that I’m defending. And that is no simple
task.
CHAPTER 1
CONTOURS OF HONOR
Taking Care of Business
Sean Tracey, a young relief pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, had appeared in
only two Major League Baseball games when he was ordered to hit Texas third
baseman Hank Blalock. The order came from his manager, Ozzie Guillén—
retaliation for one of his own players getting beaned earlier in the game. Tracey
didn’t have great control of pitches, and he was nervous. His first attempt came
close to Blalock’s chin but missed him. He then threw the next pitch outside to
avoid suspicion. He threw at Blalock again on the third pitch, but again he
missed. Then came the decision that would alter Tracey’s career: he tried to get
Blalock out, figuring it would at least give his team the best chance to win the
game. And Blalock obliged, grounding to third for an easy out. Immediately, a
furious Guillén stormed to the mound and yanked Tracey from the game, yelling
at him all the way to the dugout. Guillén continued berating Tracey in the
dugout, in front of both his teammates and a television audience. With nowhere
to hide, Tracey sat on the bench and pulled his jersey up over his head, “doing
his best to disappear in plain sight.” And before long he did disappear—from the
White Sox anyway. Tracey was sent down to the Minors two days later and then
released by the organization in the off-season. Blalock was the last hitter Tracey
faced as a member of the Chicago White Sox.
What did Tracey do wrong? Why was he berated for doing what pitchers are
supposed to do—get batters out? Tracey had violated baseball’s honor code. He
hadn’t retaliated; he hadn’t evened the score: he didn’t defend his teammates. As
previous White Sox manager Charlie Manuel put it, “We will not tolerate the
guys who are the heart and soul of this team getting hit.… That’s part of the
‘fearless’ package and the ‘respect’ package. We’re not looking to start
anything, but we’re definitely not looking to back off anything either.”
Beanball feuds have been part of baseball since the beginning. As I write this,
my beloved Red Sox are in a bitter one with the Baltimore Orioles that has lasted
for weeks and resulted in multiple suspensions. Outsiders are fond of ridiculing
baseball’s dizzying array of unwritten honor codes and rules: Don’t jog around
the bases too slowly after a home run. If you do, you’ll get hit. Don’t try to steal
a base in a blowout. If you do, you’ll get hit. Don’t try to bunt your way on to
first base when the pitcher is throwing a no-hitter. If you do… You get the idea.
Virtually all of baseball’s unwritten codes revolve around the notion of respect:
respect for the game, for your teammates, and for other teams. When players
suspect they’re being shown up or disrespected, that’s when the fireworks begin.
When they’re not making fun of these rules, baseball journalists like to
moralize against them—the vendettas, the vigilante justice especially. And that’s
not surprising—most journalists operate within the moral framework of dignity,
and honor and dignity understand conflicts in very different terms. In a dignity
framework, all offenses should be addressed by an impartial third party—the
league office, in this case. In honor cultures, turning to third parties when you’ve
been insulted or offended indicates weakness or cowardice and a lack of selfrespect. In honor cultures, people are expected to handle their own business.
My goal in this chapter is to map out the contours of honor and illustrate the
ways it differs from other moral concepts and frameworks, such as dignity. A
clearer sense of what honor is all about will help us see whether it is worth
preserving.
Honor Groups
Honor is social; it cannot exist for individuals in isolation. For honor
frameworks to function, they need what I’ll refer to as an honor group—a
collection of people bound by a set of principles and values. Honor groups vary
in size and structure. Their boundaries can be well defined (navy SEALs, Mafia
families, hockey teams) or loosely defined (American southerners, chefs, standup comics). Each honor group has a set of codes, formal and informal, that
determines how honor and dishonor are distributed among its members.
Anthropologist Frank Stewart introduced a helpful distinction between two
dimensions of honor. The first is “horizontal.” Having horizontal honor means
that you’re entitled to a level of respect just by virtue of belonging to the honor
group. If you’re a “made man” in the Sicilian Mafia, for example, you’re entitled
to an assortment of privileges within the Mafia structure. People in the
community must treat you with respect and deference. You have distinctive
forms of address (“a friend of ours”), you rarely pay for drinks or dinners, and
other mafiosi can’t steal from you, assault you, or hit on your wife or girlfriends.
A defining feature of horizontal honor is that it’s distributed equally to all group
members. Another is that it is not tied to a specific action or achievement. We
say “your honor” to judges simply because they are judges, not because of any
verdict or decision they may have written. Unless they step down or get
disbarred, they are entitled to this form of respect. We allow uniformed military
to board planes early and often say “Thank you for your service” without having
any idea what he or she did to serve the country. Eighteenth-century British
aristocrats could move in the best social circles even if they had no specific
accomplishments under their belt. Having horizontal honor is like being a
member of a club. And membership has its privileges.
Membership also has its obligations and responsibilities. Made men must pay
tribute to the Mafia family and risk life and limb when called upon to defend it.
They are bound by the omertà vow of silence that prohibits cooperation with
outside authorities—even when the price of silence is a long prison term.
Soldiers are bound to follow orders from their commanding officers and never to
desert their unit. Captains must go down with the ship. Failure to live up to your
responsibilities can strip you of horizontal honor. As Stewart observes,
horizontal honor is easier to lose than to acquire. Just ask Sean Tracey.
Indeed, for some people, horizontal honor can be impossible to acquire.
Commoners in Victorian England couldn’t crack the aristocracy no matter how
witty or talented they were. Jimmy Conway and Henry Hill from Goodfellas
(played by Robert De Niro and Ray Liotta, respectively) could never be made
men because they weren’t pure Italians. But not all honor groups have such
impregnable barriers for entry. In principle, anyone can become a naval officer,
a judge, a hockey player, or a comedian. But it can’t be easy either. Honor
groups must be exclusive if they wish to preserve the prestige and status that
come from belonging to them.
Honor groups typically take great pride in their exclusivity; they publicize it
and use it to motivate the people in the group to perform exceptional acts.
Perhaps the most famous example is King Henry’s Saint Crispin’s Day speech to
his troops in Henry V:
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
In the speech King Henry employs the idea of horizontal honor to inspire
men to risk their lives in battle. He doesn’t deny that the English gentlemen
“now a-bed” had a much better chance of living to see tomorrow. Instead, he
appeals to his soldiers’ sense of pride of belonging to the happy few, the band of
brothers. The more exclusive the group, the more people want to belong to it and
the more incentive group members have for living up to their responsibilities.
This psychological insight is no less relevant in our own day: elite military
groups around the world employ similar rhetoric. The slogan “The Few, the
Proud, the Marines” is so effective that it appears on the Madison Avenue
Advertising Walk of Fame.
The other dimension of honor in Stewart’s account is “vertical.” Once they
belong to an honor group, members compete for vertical honor to improve their
status within the group’s hierarchy. In contrast to horizontal honor, vertical
honor is acquired through one’s actions and achievements and cannot, by
definition, be distributed equally among the group members. The honor culture
of ancient Greece had three different words to distinguish three categories of
vertical honor. The first, geras, or gera for the plural, refers to the more material,
tangible forms of honor. After a successful raid, for example, the kings would
divvy up the bounty (jewels, armor, captured slaves, and mistresses) in
accordance with how much each warrior had contributed to the victory. The
more value you had to the group, the more gera you would receive. Geras
therefore has both material and symbolic value. It can add to your material
wealth, but more important your gera serves as an indication of your worthiness.
Some modern examples of gera include medals, titles, salary raises, named
chairs, the Heisman Trophy, Academy Awards, or the Nobel Prize. Meryl
Streep’s three Oscars along with her twenty nominations may not be worth much
money (for someone in her income bracket anyway), but they serve to mark her
as the greatest film actress of her generation.
Not surprisingly, the distribution of gera is something that people in honor
cultures take very personally. When Agamemnon takes away Achilles’s slave
mistress, Briseis, whom he had acquired as geras from a previous battle,
Achilles is so enraged that he stops fighting for the Greeks in the Trojan War.
The source of Achilles’s rage isn’t his attachment to Briseis, but rather the
symbolic challenge to his honor. By stripping Achilles of his geras, Agamemnon
sends the signal “You’re not as valuable as you think you are to the Greek
army.” Achilles can’t let this stand, and he decides to prove his worth by sitting
out the war, knowing it will lead to massive casualties for the Greeks until he
returns.
The second Greek word for vertical honor, tîmê, refers to a more intangible
form of honor. Your tîmê represents your worth, your value, to the group. (Your
geras can be a marker for your tîmê.) Although tîmê is intangible, it does have
tangible effects. Your tîmê determines how people treat you relative to others—
as an object of admiration and deference or one of ridicule and contempt. And it
influences how you regard yourself—with pride or shame. If you live in an
honor culture, your tîmê is a significant part of your identity, what constitutes
you as a person. Anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers describes this form of honor
as “the value of a person in his own eyes but also in the eyes of society.” Tîmê
has both public and objective criteria. You can’t have tîmê unless you’re truly
valuable to the group. But your objective value isn’t sufficient for tîmê; your
group must acknowledge your worthiness as well. William Ian Miller, an expert
on the honor cultures of the Icelandic Sagas, captures this idea well in his book
Humiliation:
In an honor based culture there was no self-respect independent of the respect of
others, no private sense of “hey, I’m quite something” unless it was confirmed
publicly. Honor was then not just a matter of the individual; it necessarily involved a
group, and the group included all those people worthy of competing with you for
honor. Your status in this group was the measure of your honor, and your status was
achieved at the expense of the other group members who were not only your
competitors for scarce honor but also the arbiters of whether you had it or not.
Of course, everyone—honor culture or no—enjoys being recognized for their
accomplishments. Everyone likes to be admired. The difference is one of degree.
In honor cultures, public recognition constitutes a central part of one’s selfworth. That said, it’s a common misconception to think that public recognition is
the only thing that matters in honor cultures. It’s just as important to be worthy
of your acknowledged honor, to prove to yourself and the community that
you’ve earned your tîmê.
Another misconception about honor is that it’s always zero-sum, gained at
the expense of the others. This is often true but not always. The most respected
players on American football teams, for example, earn the title of captain. The
title is honorific (so to speak), and it doesn’t come with additional salary or
benefits—a better parking space, at most. But captains take great pride in the
title because it’s a sign of how much their teammates value their leadership. Not
everyone can be a captain, but there is no set number of captains either. Teams
can have more than one captain, or they can have none at all; it all depends on
who is worthy of the title. Another example comes from the world of stand-up
comedy. Comedians compete to be known as the “comic’s comic”—the person
who kills not just with drunken audiences but also with a tough crowd of fellow
comics. Like “captain,” the title that brings no money or even celebrity, comic’s
comics usually don’t appeal to the widest audiences. But it’s arguably the
highest form of praise within the group of comics. As with “captain,” there is no
set number of comic’s comics. But there can’t be too many either. Like all forms
of honor, tîmê needs to be a relatively scarce resource to be genuine. The
Comedy Cellar in New York is famous for its “comedians table,” where comics
compete in a battle of vicious insults. Comedian Patrice O’Neal was a legend in
the comedy world for his performance at the table. Although he had only one
stand-up special under his belt, he was considered a true comic’s comic. Every
year after his untimely death at the age of forty-one, comics from all over the
world perform a benefit to support his family and honor his memory.
The final category of Greek honor is kleos, often translated as “glory.” Kleos
is the highest form of honor and the easiest to describe. In the Greek world, if
you have kleos, the poets will tell your story for generations. They’ll compose
epics of your adventures and odes to your character and your virtues—your
name will ring out forever. The greatest warriors, like Achilles, Hector, Ajax,
and Odysseus, and the most virtuous women, like Penelope and Antigone, had
kleos, which is precisely why we still read about them today. Woody Allen once
wrote that he did not want to be immortal through his work; he wanted to be
immortal by not dying. Kleos doesn’t quite give you that, but it gives you all the
immortality that it’s possible to have.
Examples of people with kleos in our own time include Babe Ruth, Rosa
Parks, Jackie Robinson, Winston Churchill, Balzac, Tolstoy, Susan B. Anthony,
and Abraham Lincoln—the people we studied in school and our children study
and their children will study. King Henry appeals to kleos when he says that the
band of brothers will be remembered “from this day to the ending of the world.”
When presidents start talking about their historical legacies, they’re making their
bids for kleos. The prospect of kleos provides people with incentives to perform
actions of bravery and heroism. Political scientist Sharon Krause documents the
role of reputation and a sense of honor for motivating heroes like Frederick
Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., and the women suffragettes. (Abraham
Lincoln, for example, paused before signing the Emancipation Proclamation to
say, “If my name ever goes down in the history books, it will be for this act.”)
Whereas honor systems offer plenty of incentives—tangible and otherwise—
for maintaining a high reputation, dignity cultures are mildly embarrassed about
rewarding good behavior. Dignity embraces the Kantian idea that people should
be moral only for the sake of being moral, not for any personal benefit. In real
life, however, rewards are more effective for promoting virtuous behavior.
Lacking such incentives, cultures of dignity focus more on preventing
wrongdoing than promoting virtue. They have elaborate systems of punishment
for deterring wrongdoing but no organized way to encourage people to go above
and beyond the call of duty. Kleos can move people to go well above and beyond
the call of duty for the good of the group.
All the forms of honor I’ve described in this section have motivational
power. This robust motivational structure is largely absent in Western liberal
morality, and it’s perhaps the greatest potential advantage of reclaiming honor as
a core value. Liberalism, with its focus on human dignity and individual liberty,
gives us plenty of reasons to refrain from wrongdoing—through punishment and
other mechanisms—but provides little to inspire exceptional or heroic behavior.
Since individual and group honor is so central to self-conception, people in
honor groups go to great lengths to increase rather than decrease it. Of course,
honor’s motivational power is an advantage only if it motivates good behavior.
In the last section of this chapter, we’ll explore some characteristic norms of
behavior in honor cultures. But first let’s turn to the source of honor’s
motivational power: the connection between honor and identity, honor and the
self.
Honor, Dignity, and Identity
In a seminal essay, “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor,” sociologist
Peter Berger argues that the primary distinction between honor and dignity
involves their relation to identity. Honor cultures, writes Berger, have a
relatively stable set of institutions and institutional roles. The roles adopted by
the group members constitute a significant part of their identity, their sense of
who they are as people. The modern concept of dignity, by contrast, “implies
that identity is essentially independent of institutional roles.” Dignity sees the
institutional roles relating to gender, ethnicity, or family as obstacles rather than
pathways to self-discovery. “The implicit sociology [of dignity],” Berger writes,
“views all biological and historical differentiations as either downright unreal or
essentially irrelevant.… [T]he individual can only discover his true identity by
emancipating himself from his socially enclosed roles—the latter are only
masks, entangling him in illusion, alienation, and bad faith.”
In a dignity framework, your institutions and roles can conceal one’s true self
from the individuals themselves. This makes room for the idea of false
consciousness. Thus, it can make sense for people in dignity cultures to say, for
example, that Muslim women don’t really want to wear a veil in spite of what
they tell outsiders. Or that American women aren’t truly choosing to be stay-athome moms even if they say and believe they want to do so. The dignity
framework allows for the separation of the true self from an oppressive social
structure when that social structure can influence the beliefs and desires of the
oppressed.
This idea can have tremendous moral advantages. Many honor cultures do
indeed have oppressive social structures that impose restrictions on not just a
person’s role but also what he or she is permitted to do. In certain cultures, for
example, girls are prohibited from getting an education because it is not deemed
a woman’s proper role. Preventing people from getting educated is a genuine
obstacle to self-realization and therefore an infringement of basic human
autonomy. In other honor groups, the surrounding environment makes it
necessary to adopt a pose or a role even when it doesn’t reflect who the person
is. Sociologist Elijah Anderson gives a moving account of the struggle that
children face in the inner-city neighborhoods of Philadelphia. “As a means of
survival,” he writes, “one often learns the value of having a ‘name,’ a reputation
for being willing and able to fight.” The code of the street imposes this burden
on the so-called street kids as well as on the “decent kids”—the ones who don’t
want to start trouble but just wish to be left alone. The decent kids have to
campaign publicly for respect too. Otherwise, they can be ostracized, robbed,
assaulted, taken for a punk. Parents encourage aggressive behavior and
sometimes punish them for not fighting back against a bully or assailant.
Anderson writes that “to avoid being bothered decent and street youths alike
must say through behavior, words, and gestures, ‘If you mess with me, there will
be a severe physical penalty—coming from me. And I’m man enough to make
you pay.’” The sad irony to this aspect of the code is that to live a decent,
peaceful life, the kids must engage in public displays of aggression. “With the
right amount of respect, individuals can avoid being bothered in public.” But to
get respect, they have to fight back when someone steps up to them.
The same dynamic is found in prisons. I recently spoke to some former
inmates who have been through the Prisoner Entrepreneurship Program (PEP), a
Texas organization that offers job training and character building for prisoners
about to be released. Knowing the environments that most prisoners come from,
the program begins with a “degangsterization process,” where the inmates give
each other “sweet names” (like Candy Corn or Milli Vanilli) to help them shed
their former images. “Degangsterization,” one prisoner told me, “is really a
process of self-discovery.… When you’re in prison,” he says, “you take on an
identity for survival. When you get into PEP, you can find out who you are.”
This is a perfect description of the benefits of moving from an honor to a dignity
culture as it relates to identity. By rejecting the primacy of social structures both
formal and informal, dignity offers more freedom—indeed, unlimited freedom—
for individuals to determine their own values and identities.
But this liberty, like most liberties, comes at a cost. Institutions provide
stability and structure. They provide boundaries for people to explore without
getting lost. Many of the young men turned to gangs in the first place to find
community, stability, and social support that society failed to provide. In prison
the inmates have the regimentation of prison life to ground them. As many
prisoners report, life can be much harder to navigate post-release. (The PEP
program establishes halfway houses and continued job training for ex-cons to
ease the transition.) This phenomenon is familiar to people in dignity cultures.
With no institutional boundaries, Berger writes, discovering one’s identity
“becomes the goal of an often devious and difficult quest.” Dignity, in other
words, offers little guidance for people who want to “find themselves.” Without
any constraints on identity, people risk getting lost, alienated from the self they
now have the freedom to discover. Just as the constraints of an art form can
bring out the artist’s creativity, the constraints of institutionalized roles can make
the project of self-realization more manageable.
Well-functioning honor cultures find ways to balance the structure of
imposed roles with enough individual freedom to avoid oppression. An example
I’ll return to several times in this book is the honor culture of the National
Hockey League. A core element of the NHL’s honor code is that players
understand and embrace their role for the team. The roles determine how the
player should behave on the ice. The role of skill players is to generate scoring
through shots and assists. The enforcer’s role is to intimidate opponents and
protect his teammates from taking cheap shots. The role of the “agitators” is to
get under their opponent’s skin, to probe for weakness or make them lose their
cool. The code demands that players accept their roles and not stray from them.
As enforcer Don Cherry puts it, “The crusher who becomes a rusher [to score]
soon becomes an usher.” Accept who you are, in other words, or your new role
will be to serve beer to the fans.
The players don’t just accept their roles to stay in the league, however. And
they don’t regard them as veils or disguises that conceal their “true identity” as
hockey players. The roles allow them to discover their identity as hockey
players. They take pride in excelling at them. Enforcer Jeff Odgers describes it
like this:
As kids we all had visions of being the guy who was on the power play and who scored
that big goal in overtime. That is what we all strived for. But as you get older and
wiser, you realize some of your limitations, where your skill level was, and what you
could bring to the table. At a certain point you come to the realization that if you want
to make it in this league you have to adapt and embrace whatever role the coaches have
in mind for you. For me that was being a tough guy. No, it wasn’t as sexy as being a
goal scorer, but it was my ticket to play and I was able to do so for a pretty long time. I
just wanted to be in the NHL more than anything in my life, and that is how I was able
to make my dream come true. I didn’t love fighting, but I did enjoy being respected and
liked by my teammates for protecting them. There is great honor in that.
Odgers is not showing bad faith; the remarks demonstrate no false
consciousness. Odgers recognizes that he is working within externally imposed
constraints. But he also understands that it is precisely these constraints that
enable him to gain honor and to realize who he is as a hockey player.
This connection between identity and institutional roles is found in many
honor subcultures, like the military, the Mafia, and urban gang culture. The
sharply defined roles provide structure and norms of behavior for members. The
rigidity of the roles varies according to the group, and almost all have some
flexibility. But they do not have unlimited flexibility and therefore do not
provide unlimited autonomy. Of course, the same is true for nonhonor cultures
as well. We all have biologically and socially imposed limits on what we can do.
What distinguishes honor and nonhonor societies is the way they understand
these limits—as veils or obstacles to self-discovery or as an indispensable means
of forming one’s identity.
This might sound rather abstract, but as we’ve seen, identification leads to
action. Since honor can constrain identity, it may also constrain the behaviors
that we’re motivated to perform. So let’s examine the norms of behavior in
honor groups to get a better sense of the actions that honor’s elaborate network
of incentives typically motivates.
Honor Norms
First things first: What’s a norm? Norms are the rules or principles that govern
human behavior within society. Every known society has norms, and human
beings have an innate capacity for acquiring and internalizing them. Children
learn the norms of their society early in life and get scolded or punished when
they violate them. As norms are internalized, they become tied to certain
emotions. We feel anger when others violate group norms (especially moral
norms) and guilt or shame when we violate them. Society has a variety of
mechanisms for enforcing its norms of behavior. Some are formal, like legal
punishment. Others are informal, such as shaming, gossip, and ostracism.
Some norms are human universals. Every known society has a norm that
requires parents to care and provide for their children. Other norms are local to a
specific culture and might seem bizarre to people in a different culture. If you
travel to Iran, for example, you’ll encounter taarof, a cluster of norms around
politeness and respect. As an honored visitor, your taxi driver might offer to
provide your ride for free. Taarof requires that you refuse and insist on paying
and then for the driver to repeat the offer and again for you to refuse. After a few
more rounds of offers and refusals, the driver will allow you to pay the fare.
Similarly, if you’re invited to someone’s home and offered food, taarof dictates
that you decline, no matter how hungry you are. After they insist a few times,
then you can accept it.
The principles of taarof can be categorized as honor norms because they are
concerned with matters of respect and deference. What are some other typical
honor norms? For the most part, the answer depends on the honor group we’re
talking about. The norms of the Albanian highlanders don’t have much in
common with the norms of stand-up comics or the norms of the Victorian
aristocracy. That said, we can identify some norms that most, if not all, honor
societies have in common. Hospitality is one of them. One of the most common
features of honor codes across cultures and throughout history is a strong focus
on the guest-host relationship. You probably know that the cause of the Trojan
War was Paris absconding with Helen, the wife of Menelaus. What you may not
know is that Paris’s act was regarded as an offense against hospitality. Guests as
well as hosts have obligations, and Paris violated his in dramatic fashion. Zeus,
the most powerful of the Greek gods, is in fact the god of xenia—or hospitality.
And since Paris was a Trojan prince, Zeus decreed that the Greeks would win
the war.
Hospitality remains of central importance in honor cultures today. If you’ve
traveled widely, chances are you’ve received the warmest welcomes in countries
characterized as honor cultures, and it can be a shock returning home to a society
without the same commitment to hospitality. In modern rural Greece, the person
who shows hospitality to strangers brings credit to the entire household. To the
bedouin, hospitality norms are intimately connected to a family’s honor and
reputation. When bedouin invite a stranger into a tent or building for coffee, tea,
and food, “the guest is protected from harm, and thus rearticulates social
customs by creating a ‘moral space,’ in which the guest is treated as a member of
the ‘house.’”
Hospitality imposes its share of burdens as well. The Balgawi in Jordan say
that “the host must fear his guest. When he sits [and shares your food], he is
company. When he stands [and leaves your house], he is a poet”—meaning that
he can broadcast how he was treated to the rest of the honor group. Reputations
are at stake: “With subtle remarks on lukewarm tea, paltry servings of meat,
reluctant greetings, or farewells given too easily, ‘poets’ can tarnish the name of
hosts who offend them.” The obligations of hospitality persist even when they
put the host in physical danger. The ancient codes of the Pashtun tribes include
the principle of lokhay warkawal, which binds the tribe to safeguard and protect
their guest from an enemy at all costs, even at risk to their own lives. Navy
SEAL Marcus Luttrell, subject of the book and film Lone Survivor, owes his life
to the Pashtun norms of hospitality.
So central is the commitment to hospitality in some cultures that it can lead to
violent feuds. Writer Ismail Kadare’s fascinating novel Broken April tells the
story of a young Albanian highlander, Georg, trapped in a multigenerational
feud with a rival family. The feud began seventy years earlier, long before Georg
was born, when a stranger happened to pass by Georg’s grandfather’s house in
the evening. The grandfather welcomed him in, offered him food and shelter,
and then escorted him to the outer limits of the village. The grandfather then
turned to go home and heard a shot. The stranger, involved in a feud of his own,
had been killed. Since the body happened to fall facedown toward the village,
the victim was still technically the grandfather’s guest. So according to the
Albanian codes of hospitality, the grandfather and his family were now bound to
avenge his death by killing a member of the shooter’s clan. (Had he fallen facing
away from the village, they would have had no such duty.) By the time the
novel’s protagonist, Georg, is drawn into the feud, forty-four people have been
murdered, twenty-two from each family.
Although it is a work of fiction, Kadare’s story gives an accurate account of
Albanian honor norms, as described in the Kanun, a collection of customary
laws that cover all aspects of the Albanian highlanders’ social and economic life.
A stranger falling at a certain angle can lead to a bloodbath. In the Kanun, the
guest represents “the supreme ethical category, more important than blood
relations.” The guest in Albania is like a demigod. Once you invite one into your
house, you become responsible for his safety. If he is harmed on your property,
you incur a debt of honor to avenge the wrong—even if both victim and offender
are strangers. It is a striking and somewhat puzzling fact about honor cultures
that so many of them take the obligations of hospitality to such extremes.
Another common set of honor norms is one I alluded to in the opening of this
chapter: the obligations to stand up personally against challenges, insults, and
signs of disrespect—even when that comes with significant risk. This value is so
central to honor that some scholars regard it as defining. “At root,” says William
Ian Miller, “honor means ‘don’t tread on me.’” A man of honor, writes exmafioso Bill Bonanno, “is someone willing to acknowledge the power of
another… but he is not willing to brook an insult to his own honor in that
relationship.” Backing down from a challenge in honor cultures frequently has
negative consequences. People use insults to probe for weakness and climb the
ladder of vertical honor. If you challenge someone and they don’t respond, you
gain honor at their expense. But pragmatic considerations like this are only part
of the story. It is a source of profound shame to back down from a challenge in
honor cultures—independent of anything that may come from doing so. Most
people in dignity cultures can relate to these feelings to some extent at least.
How often have you lain in bed going over all the things you should have said to
that person who slighted you at work, or a bar, or the gym? But for most of us,
these feelings are fleeting and superficial—they might cause us to blush from
discomfort for a couple of days, but then we get over it. They don’t cut right to
the core of our sense of self-respect and self-worth. Again, the difference is one
of degree, but it is a crucial difference.
The respective norms for handling conflict in honor and dignity cultures
reflect a broader, more theoretical distinction between the concepts of honor and
dignity. Honor is tenuous and fragile, and it has to be preserved and defended
with vigilance. Dignity, by contrast, is stable and enduring. At least in theory, we
all have dignity simply by virtue of being human—and nobody can take it away.
Dignity is like the participation trophy my daughter got after her team went 0–12
in her basketball league. Everyone gets one; it doesn’t matter whether you win or
lose or even how you played the game. As legal scholar Orit Kamir describes it,
dignity “follows no norms of conduct and is measured against no standards of
achievement.… [I]t involves no competition and no rivalry.… [N]othing a
person does or refrains from doing can enhance or endanger his or her human
dignity.”
Under this (admittedly idealized) conception of dignity, you don’t need to
defend your self-worth against challenges or insults because your self-worth, by
definition, cannot be diminished in the first place. Consequently, dignity does
not require or even tolerate personal or private responses to offenses. When
someone is wronged, dignity regards it “not [as] an affront to the individual” but
rather as “an affront to the whole family, humankind, and its self-determined
collective worth.” Consequently, the duty to respond to the affront falls not on
the individual but on humankind as a whole. In practice, of course, matters may
be quite different. But this ideal has had massive implications—both good and
bad, as we’ll see—for society. It has reshaped the way in which people in dignity
cultures relate to one another and transformed the modern understanding of
punishment. Indeed, this concept of dignity is at the heart of our criminal justice
system. When someone commits a criminal offense, the trial isn’t one between
the victim and the offender. It becomes a conflict between the offender and “the
people,” the offender and “the state.” The victims’ identities, and their desires
and wishes, are deemed irrelevant. (Much more on this in Chapter Six.)
Honor takes precisely the opposite view. After an insult, writes Bill Bonanno
about the Sicilian honor culture, “no one steps up and demands justice—only
revenge. And that act is personal, private and passionate. Yet it is the heart and
soul of an entire people [the Sicilians].” In an honor framework, when someone
challenges your self-worth, humankind isn’t abused; you are. Accordingly, the
obligation to address the challenge falls on you, and maybe your family or
group, and not on humankind. If you fail to do so, you lose honor and risk being
shamed, disgraced, and even excluded from the group—as poor Sean Tracey
learned the hard way. Not surprisingly, honor cultures tend to be suspicious and
even hostile to third-party “impartial” justice. External interference strips the
offended parties of their chance to stand up for themselves, to demonstrate
courage, and most of all to affirm their self-worth against the offenses. This
aversion to third-party involvement is present in a variety of honor cultures:
urban gangs have “stop snitching” campaigns; baseball players don’t involve the
league office in their feuds; Algerians find prison to be a “nuisance,” an
annoying delay on the path to real justice.
Relatedly, people in honor cultures typically show a heightened sensitivity to
insults—and are quick to retaliate at the first sign of disrespect. In a classic paper
on honor and dignity, sociologist Peter Berger writes that honor’s obsolescence
in the modern West is “revealed very sharply in the inability of most
contemporaries to understand insult, which in essence is an assault on honor.”
Modern Americans, Berger observes, don’t regard insults as genuine harms
unless they lead to tangible harms, such as a loss of income or career prospects.
Steven Pinker illustrates this attitude in his sardonic description of the centuriesold practice of dueling. The participants, he writes, “were fighting not for money
or land or even women but for honor, the strange commodity that exists because
everyone believes that everyone else believes that it exists.” From this
perspective, it might make sense to fight a duel over money or land or women,
because those things are tangible and material and therefore real. But honor?
That makes no sense at all. This attitude is both baffling and shameful to people
in honor cultures. They regard their reputation, their honor, as their most
treasured possession, far more important than money or property.
Most problematic for people like me who wish to defend honor are the norms
for female modesty and purity. Many honor cultures, though by no means all of
them, impose strict codes of chastity and fidelity for their female members.
Violating the codes can lead to shame, ostracizing, physical punishment, even
murder in extreme cases—the so-called “honor killings” one finds in some
communities. Fortunately, honor killings are at the far extreme end of the
spectrum—the vast majority of honor cultures do not endorse murdering
relatives for having extramarital sex. But the burdens of honor can fall on
women in many shades or degrees. Some studies suggest that honor cultures in
Latin America are more likely to be tolerant of domestic violence against women
who are unfaithful to their partners. Men with unfaithful spouses are perceived
as less manly, less honorable—which gives them all the more reason to closely
monitor their partners’ behavior. In his classic ethnography of rural Greece, J. K.
Campbell writes that a woman is expected to have “sexual shame,” which is a
“revulsion from sexual activity, an attempt in dress, movement, and attitude, to
disguise the fact that she possesses the physical attributes of her sex.” The
burden for women is significant, making them afraid of even false accusations of
“sexual misbehavior.” Campbell also notes the connection between female
purity and the man’s honor. Suspicion of a woman’s impurity “always implicates
the honor of the men in the family, reflecting on the manliness of the husband,
and, more generally, on the whole social personality of brothers and,
particularly, sons.… [T]he women must have shame if the manliness of their
men is not to be dishonored.” The result is a kind of feedback loop to enforce
female purity and fidelity. Norms are in place to shame both women for
violations and also their male family members, which gives the males an
additional incentive to keep a close eye on their female kin.
We shouldn’t underestimate the freedom and power women possess in these
cultures. In a more recent ethnography of rural Greek cultures, anthropologist
Jill Dubisch writes that women were “hardly the downtrodden, submissive and
self-effacing beings that accounts such as Campbell’s would have had me
believe.” Dubisch continues: “Not surprisingly, there were differences among
individuals as well—women who were dominated by their husbands and fit
more with the ‘Mediterranean woman’ stereotype, and women who bullied their
spouses, and ran their households with a firm hand, as well as households in
which the husband’s show of masculine dominance was regarded with amused
tolerance by the wife. And in many, if not most cases, these village women
exhibited a self-confidence that I sometimes envied.”
Still, the apparent connection between honor and the mistreatment of women
is troubling. Not surprisingly, it’s also the most common objection I get from
people when I tell them what I’m writing about. I raised the issue in my
interviews with William Ian Miller (an expert on honor cultures and saga
Iceland) and Anthony Appiah (author of The Honor Code), both of whom have
wrestled with it in their own work. Miller believes that the connection between
honor and female chastity is overstated. “What about an honor culture like my
saga Iceland guys,” he asks me, “who couldn’t give a damn about whether their
women screwed around?” According to Miller, the honor killings that one finds
in some Islamic and Hindu communities have nothing to do with honor; rather,
they have to do with “the underlying norms about which they decide that honor
are at stake.” Miller is right, as far as that theory goes. Still, it does seem to be a
running theme in many honor cultures, and the prevalence of these attitudes
demands an explanation.
When I put this same question to Appiah, his reply was illuminating. “It’s
just a complex social psychological fact that honor is one of the mechanisms that
gets mobilized to police gender and sexuality,” he told me. “When things are of
value or important to you, honor is going to be one of the mechanisms you
employ to support them.” Men want their women to be faithful. Human beings
in general have a special concern for female fidelity. And sex norms are
especially difficult to enforce, because sexual behavior is tempting and typically
takes place in the absence of witnesses. The stricter the sexual codes are, the
more difficult they will be to enforce. Honor isn’t the source of the codes, but it
often gets recruited for enforcing them, because of its general motivational
effectiveness and the way it gets people to internalize social norms. Now, to be
clear: This is a purely descriptive and historical story. It does not in any way
morally justify strict codes of sexual purity for women. What it reveals is the
absence of a necessary connection between the idea of honor and sexist norms
and practices. Changing morally odious norms doesn’t require doing away with
honor. But the story does not exempt honor for its contribution to gender
subjection either. On the contrary, once in place, immoral honor codes can be
proximate mechanisms for oppression.
So let’s take stock. Honor can lead to long, bloody cycles of violence
between families that are sparked by something as arbitrary as the angle a
stranger falls to the ground. It can force children trying to lead decent, lawabiding lives to act tough and aggressively just to be left alone. Honor can trap
individuals within rigid social roles, limiting their autonomy as rational agents to
determine their own identity and conception of a good life. Honor has no
essential commitment to universal human rights, and in some communities
honor is the mechanism for systematic violations of the rights of women. That’s
a lot of baggage. Meanwhile, the concept of dignity has brought tremendous
benefits. It has provided the philosophical foundation for a universal conception
of individual liberty and equal treatment. Its aim is to provide all human beings,
no matter how lowly born or disadvantaged, with real value and the freedom to
determine who they are and what they do. Maybe the critics are right that we’re
better off rejecting honor in favor of dignity.
I take these criticisms very seriously. Without question, any defense of honor
must address them. I have three replies that I’ll examine in detail over the
remainder of the book. The first is simply to point out that although honor has no
necessary commitment to human rights, it is not incompatible with such a
commitment either. The idea that it is incompatible is a common misconception
that prevents many critics from evaluating the costs and benefits of honor with
an open mind. Celebrated anthropologist and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, for
example, writes that “the ethos of honor is fundamentally opposed to a universal
and formal morality which affirms the equality in dignity of all men and
consequently the equality of their rights and duties.” The dictates of honor,
according to Bourdieu, are directly applied to the individual case and vary
according to the situation. Thus, “they are in no way capable of being made
universal. This is so much the case that a single system of values of honor
establishes two opposing sets of rules of conduct—on the one hand that which
governs relationships between kinsmen and in general all personal relations that
conform to the same pattern as those between kinsmen; and on the other hand
that which is valid in one’s relationships with strangers.” Like many of honor’s
critics, Bourdieu confuses two distinct positions: an opposition to universal and
formal morality and a failure to respect human rights and equality. Bourdieu is
right that honor norms and values tend to be culture specific, constantly
changing, with no pretense to universality. People in honor cultures believe that
their norms apply to the members of their own group, not to all human beings,
persons, rational agents, or God’s children. (As we’ll see, this can be a
tremendous advantage to honor frameworks.) But honor’s indifference to formal,
abstract universal ethical systems does not rule out a respect for basic human
rights. Democracy, after all, was born in the Mediterranean honor culture of
ancient Greece. Honor values did not prevent the modern Renaissance of Italy
and Spain. And the strong commitment to family and communal honor in
modern Japan has contributed to the success of its educational and economic
systems. “What Japan, and indeed portions of the Middle East, shows,” writes
cultural psychologist Gary Gregg, “is that familial attachments and sentiments of
honor can fuel achievement, entrepreneurialship, and modernization under
auspicious conditions.” Now, it’s true that sometimes conditions in honor
cultures are inauspicious and that some honor cultures violate these rights on a
daily basis. It’s also true that some cultures justify these violations—honor
killings, for example—by appealing to honor’s demands. What this reveals,
however, is that the morality of honor is incomplete, not that we should reject it
entirely. Honor needs external boundaries, constraints on behavior, that are not
themselves derived from the principles of honor. One of these constraints is a
respect for human rights. Fortunately, as we’ll see, plenty of well-functioning
honor cultures accept this basic commitment.
My second reply is that honor’s robust motivational structure can be recruited
to bring about desired moral change—including human rights violations. Just as
honor is an effective tool for norm enforcement, it is also an effective tool for
norm transformation—and for the same reasons. As Appiah shows in his book,
for example, honor played a crucial role in bringing the cruel thousand-year-old
practice of foot binding in China to an end. It’s true that the concept of dignity is
often employed to demonstrate the injustice of such practices. But dignity
provides few psychological resources for bringing about the desired moral
change. Honor has these resources to spare. By identifying the auspicious
conditions for honor to function, we can harness its motivational power and
psychological insights. Honor can be a problem in societies with immoral norms
and attitudes, but it can also be a big part of the solution.
Third, I’ll suggest that the moral self-congratulation of dignity cultures is
premature and that dignity often works much better in theory than in practice.
Just as honor can impose burdens and costs to society, rejecting honor does as
well. The next chapter examines several of the biggest costs: hyper risk aversion,
a growing lack of community and solidarity, and diminished personal
accountability. These troubling phenomena only get worse with each passing
year, and they are the direct result of our collective rejection of honor in favor of
dignity. Let’s turn to that discussion now.
CHAPTER 2
LIVING WITHOUT HONOR
As anyone who knows me will confirm (usually rolling their eyes), I’m on a
crusade against bicycle helmets. I don’t wear them, I don’t make my daughter
wear one, and I get enraged on rides when some spandex-covered cyclist starts
lecturing me on the risks of head injuries. I’ll recognize the irony if I get
paralyzed from a bike accident, but I’ll regret nothing. Because I’m not just
opposed to bike helmets. I’m morally opposed to them.
You might reasonably wonder why I’m waging this war against bike helmets.
Is it because of the studies that reveal the risks of failing to wear one to be
inflated and that in fact motorists drive slightly closer to bikers who wear
helmets, marginally increasing the threat of an accident? No, absolutely not. My
opposition runs much deeper than that. Again, it’s a moral issue. To me, bicycle
helmets represent many of the most shameful and tragic problems of modern
life. I believe you can draw a direct link between bike helmets and the drug war,
police militarization, mass incarceration, drone warfare, and the Syrian refugee
ban. If you wear a bicycle helmet, I tell people, then you support the Syrian
refugee ban. It’s that simple. My friends and colleagues can’t tell if I’m joking.
I’m not joking. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but I’m not joking.
There’s a serious point here. When you force people to wear something
uncomfortable (and dorky) because of an insignificant safety benefit, people are
significantly less inclined to ride bikes. This reduces their quality of life. The
massive increases in helmet-wearing regulations, standards, and norms are
indicative of ever-increasing risk aversion in society, a phenomenon with
devastating moral and practical consequences. Of course, bike helmets are not
the cause of this phenomenon; they are just another symptom. As I’ll argue in
this chapter, rejecting honor has in large part brought this about. Obviously, you
don’t have to have an honor orientation to have a sensible attitude toward bike
helmets. (You can just be European.) But hyper risk-averse attitudes are possible
only in a society that has rejected honor. And this risk aversion is one of the
biggest and most neglected costs of casting honor aside as a core value.
Risk aversion isn’t the only unfortunate consequence of rejecting honor—
diminishing personal accountability, increasing social isolation, alienation, and a
weakening sense of solidarity and community spirit have all followed too. A
word of warning: This is the grumpy chapter. This is the cranky “get-off-mylawn,” “kids these days,” “society is going to hell” part of the book. When I
shopped around the book proposal, one editor asked me to make this part
predominant, with a title like “Americans Are a Big Bunch of Cowards,” and to
have an alarmist shaming quality running through the argument. But I wasn’t
interested in that. For one thing, it’s just not my temperament to be that angry
(except when someone lectures me about helmets). For another: I’m genuinely
not generally pessimistic about society and the modern character. Don’t get me
wrong—I think the rise in risk aversion is a serious problem. But I don’t think
the problems run that deep in our natures. As we’ll see in the later chapters of
this book, the frameworks and structures of honor subcultures can bring out the
best in people even when the larger culture stays as it is. Honor, in other words,
has the resources to push back against many of the damaging by-products of
modern life.
But first I need to convince you that risk aversion, diminished solidarity, and
reduced personal accountability are genuinely regrettable developments. And
they are brought about, at least in part, by the flagging commitment to honor in
the West. Let’s turn to that now.
Home of the Cowardly
Americans are obsessed with personal safety. We’re not rational about it, of
course—if we really wanted to stop risking our lives, we wouldn’t get into cars.
But our conscious goal in personal conduct and national policy is to minimize all
threats to life and limb. Okay, fine, you might say. What’s wrong with erring on
the side of safety? The answer is that living a good and moral life is impossible
without the courage to take risks.
Here’s one example: On January 7, 2015, al-Qaida gunmen broke into the
office of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo with automatic weapons. They
murdered twelve people. The gunmen claimed to be avenging Muhammad,
retaliating against the newspaper for publishing disrespectful images of the
Prophet. The Koran, according to some interpretations, prohibits all images of
Muhammad.
After the attacks, the slogan “Je suis Charlie” went viral on social media, a
means of showing solidarity with the murder victims. Meanwhile, major media
outlets were facing a test. How should they cover the story? Should they print
the allegedly offensive Charlie Hebdo cartoons, the ones that provoked the
attack? The news media’s job is to cover a story, and the cartoons were at the
center of the story, no question about that. On the other hand, look what
happened in Paris—it might be a little risky to publish the cartoons in their
articles. For most major news outlets, the latter considerations trumped the
former: they opted not to the print the cartoons in the immediate aftermath of the
attack.
And then there was Charlie Hebdo. Just a few days after nearly half of their
own staff had been gunned down, a skeleton crew of surviving members
released their next issue. On the cover was the headline “Tout est pardoné” (All
is forgiven) and a cartoon picture of a tearful Muhammad holding up a sign
saying “Je suis Charlie.” It was a supremely brave act of defiance, a proud group
of journalists refusing to back down in the face of genuine peril.
Now the news media faced another test. This was a new development in the
story, so how should they report it? Surely, they would be shamed into printing
the new Charlie Hebdo cover in their own papers, right? Wrong. Even after the
release of the new issue, major American media outlets—among them CNN,
ABC, the New York Times, the Associated Press, and more—opted not to
publish images of the new cover. It was a stunning display of spinelessness and a
betrayal of their function as news organizations.
The cowardice of these media is even more objectionable when you consider
that by failing to publish the cartoons, they increased the risk of the
organizations that chose to do their jobs and publish them. Think about it.
Islamic terrorists had just murdered journalists in retaliation for printing those
images. Editors at the major newspapers that printed the images, such as the
Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, were probably a little
concerned and afraid too. But they published the cartoons, because newspapers
are supposed to give a complete and accurate account of a story.
A similar dilemma occurred ten years earlier in 2005 after the Danish journal
Jyllands-Posten published deliberately provocative cartoons of Muhammad,
causing violent Muslim protests across the world. Before the protests, the news
media showed no reluctance to publish Muhammad’s image. But once the
prospect of danger appeared, the media abandoned their journalistic mission and
put their fellow journalists in peril. By bowing to fear and intimidation, blogger
Allahpundit wrote, the Western media “painted the bullseye on Charlie Hebdo
for jihadis by their refusal.” Charlie Hebdo was a target precisely because it was
one of the very few organizations committed to its mission—in their case, as a
satirical journal. The Times’s decision (and that of the Associated Press, CNN,
ABC, and many others) had consequences beyond the paper’s own journalistic
failures.
It may sound paradoxical, but today we place too much value on our own
lives. Threats to physical safety, no matter how infinitesimal, have come to
trump all other concerns, moral and otherwise. This obsession with risk is
antithetical to honor, which places supreme importance on courage and being
faithful to your group’s principles. In Chapter One, I mentioned the story of
Marcus Luttrell, the navy SEAL who found himself alone in Afghan enemy
territory after an ambush by Taliban fighters. Luttrell almost certainly would
have been captured or killed if he hadn’t come across a Pashtun tribe, who
offered him lokhay warkawal. In Luttrell’s words, the term means “an
unbreakable commitment to defend that wounded man to the death. And not just
the death of the principal tribesman or family who made the original
commitment.… It means the whole damned village. Lokhay means the
population of that village will fight to the last man, honor-bound to protect the
individual they have invited in to share their hospitality. And this is not
something to have a chitchat about when things get rough. It’s not a point of
renegotiation. This is strictly nonnegotiable.” The tribespeople knowingly risked
their lives—and the danger wasn’t negligible—to protect Luttrell from the
Taliban, who were ostensibly their allies and rulers of the nation in which they
resided. Why? Because their honor required them to do so.
Compare the tribespeople’s attitude to our own cowardly unwillingness to
help Syrian refugees. After the 2015 ISIS attacks in Paris that killed 130 people,
US governors and presidential candidates tripped over themselves to announce
they would ban the settling of more refugees. Donald Trump, of course, used the
incident to inflame the panic of the American people and continues to do so after
every attack. But it’s not just Trump. At least twenty-six state governors
announced they were closing off their states to the desperate people, who were
themselves fleeing from ISIS. Tough-talking Chris Christie announced that New
Jersey would turn away three-year-old orphans. Texas senator Ted Cruz called
Obama’s intent to honor the US commitment nothing short of crazy. “It would
be the height of foolishness,” Cruz said, “to bring in tens of thousands of people,
including jihadists who are coming here to murder innocent Americans.” Not to
be outdone, Texas governor Greg Abbott tweeted this: “BREAKING: Texas will
not accept any Syrian refugees & I demand the U.S. act similarly. Security
comes first.”
As a proud transplant to Houston, I was embarrassed. The governor of the
swashbuckling state of Texas wanted to turn away families fleeing from ISIS in
the name of “security.” Security from what? There had been exactly zero
terrorist incidents caused by Islamic refugees in America. Refugees go through
extensive screening and are significantly less likely than American citizens to
commit crimes. None of these details matters, though, if avoiding risks—no
matter how negligible—is your number-one priority.
After the Paris attacks, the French president, François Hollande, announced
his country would accept more Syrian refugees, upping the total from twentyfour to thirty thousand. “France should remain as it is,” Hollande said. “Our duty
is to carry on our lives.” For all the jokes about the French penchant for
surrendering, they stood tall while America surrendered its principles—and all
because of an attack on French soil! Regarding Hollande’s statement, columnist
Michael Tomasky wrote, “Imagine an American president making a similar
announcement five days after a terrorist attack on New York or Washington!
He’d be crucified.” But here’s the thing: I’m not sure Tomasky is right about
that. The problem is that our leaders don’t even try.
It’s true that not everyone in the United States opposed accepting more
refugees. But the whole debate is impoverished, because we have no recourse to
the language of honor. The politicians who favor accepting refugees often appeal
to moral considerations—claiming that it’s our duty to accept people who are in
desperate need of help. But these arguments fail to persuade; opponents insist we
have a greater moral duty to protect our own citizens. Others appeal to rational
probability calculations to the insignificant threats that refugees pose. But while
it’s certainly irrational to be scared of refugees, overwhelming research in social
science has demonstrated that people simply aren’t rational when it comes to
probability calculations. Appealing to such calculations alone has little
motivational effect. But why not in addition appeal to the honor of the American
people? Why not say, “Okay, yes. It’s possible that accepting them poses a tiny
threat, but these refugees need our help. They’re fleeing from the most brutal
regime imaginable. It’s shameful, cowardly, not to bear the negligible risk that
the wrong person will make it through. We’re not cowards; we’re Americans.
We’ve always had the courage to support people in great distress, and there is no
reason to change that now.” We’ve lost the power of such appeals because we’ve
abandoned the language of honor. The rhetoric surrounding dignity is mostly
about noninterference, respecting the rights of others. But Syrian refugees don’t
need us not to interfere with their rights. They need help. For cases like a refugee
crisis in another nation, honor gives us a voice when dignity has nothing to say.
I’m aware that economic and political interests often favor stirring panic in
the nation. But that doesn’t let us off the hook. Politicians and the media benefit
only by exacerbating fears that are already there. Scare tactics wouldn’t work
very well in a country of people who take pride in their courage, who regard
their willingness to face danger as part of their identity. In that culture, news
networks wouldn’t get high ratings for hyping the latest shark attack or virus that
has affected .0004 percent of the population.
This epidemic of risk aversion is pervasive throughout our culture. Consider
how we raise our children. We teach them to fear strangers when the likelihood
of being kidnapped by a nonrelative is vanishingly small. We ban playground
equipment for being too dangerous, strap our children into car seats more
suitable to Hannibal Lecter during a prison transfer, and hover over them like
jealous spouses, never giving them unsupervised time to learn how to handle
threats themselves. On several occasions, parents have been arrested for letting
their children play alone at a park—only to be reported to the police by a
“concerned” stranger. A countermovement called “free-range children” has
emerged to push back against parental hysteria. But again, without recourse to
honor language, the debate suffers, focusing only on the numbers. Steven Pinker,
for example, defends the “free-range children” movement by saying the
following: “The annual number of abductions by strangers has ranged from 200
or 300 in the 1990s to about 100 today, about half of whom are murdered. With
50 million children in the United States, that works out to an annual homicide
rate of one in a million.… That’s about a twentieth of the risk of drowning and a
fortieth of the risk of a fatal car accident.”
Pinker is right, of course, but not persuasive: the argument has minimal
emotional force. Again, human beings are notoriously inept when it comes to
processing high numbers and tiny probabilities. One shark attack in ten years is
enough to make us stay away from that beach forever. Pinker could make a far
more compelling case by emphasizing the importance of raising tough, selfreliant, courageous children. Unfortunately, those are the “fetishized virtues”
that Pinker had complained about earlier in his book.
More perversely, psychologist Ryan Brown considers the new risk aversion
to be an enormous advantage—and he makes it a centerpiece of his case against
the “honor syndrome.” Brown conducts research to show that accidental deaths
are slightly higher in so-called honor states (mostly in the American South) than
in nonhonor states. The percentages are minuscule in both. He also shows that
both men and women with a greater honor orientation score higher on a scale for
risky attitudes and behavior. When Dallas writer Lucy Adams took issue with
his honor bashing, Brown replied as follows: “As a social scientist, I go where
the data take me whether it’s to pleasant or unpleasant places. Behaviors
associated with honor ideologies are more frequently of the latter type.… It is
the job of academics like me… to discover reality, using evidence and
systematic analysis, rather than relying on anecdotes viewed through the lens of
cultural ideologies.” It’s a revealing passage. Like so many morally minded
scientists who claim to just “follow the data,” Brown is blind to his own implicit
value judgments. Here is what his evidence and “systematic analysis” revealed:
people who endorsed an honor ideology were, among other things, more likely
to engage in “excessive risk-taking.” What kind of risk taking does Brown deem
to be (objectively) excessive? Activities like “bungee-jumping,” “camping in the
wilderness,” “swimming far out from shore on an unguarded lake or ocean,”
“taking a sky-diving class,” “piloting a small plane,” and “walking home alone
at night in an unsafe area of town.”
This is the typical MO of many honor critics, presenting controversial (and in
this case misguided) value judgments as empirical fact. Brown’s unspoken
assumption is that we ought to live in a way that maximizes the probability of a
long life, no matter the cost. An experience like bungee jumping or backcountry
camping or skydiving is deemed “excessively” or “irrationally” risky because it
marginally increases the probability of an early death. But what if activities like
backcountry camping and skydiving and scuba diving and others are part of what
makes life worth living in the first place? A sense of adventure is not a vice; it’s
a virtue. Imagine how impoverished your life would be if you systematically
excluded any behavior that carried the slightest threat of physical harm. No
wonder stories about honor stir the public imagination! Many of us recognize
and connect with the spirit of adventure, even as we sense it receding in our own
experience.
Now, look—maybe you have no interest in bungee jumping, skydiving, or
camping in the wilderness. Maybe you’re comfortable with your current level of
adventure and risk. That’s fine. But still, the moral considerations against
obsessing about risk are overwhelming. These attitudes have ushered in the age
of military policing, the Patriot Act, domestic spying, Guantánamo, threestrikes-and-you’re-out laws, zero-tolerance schooling, the school-to-prison
pipeline, and a secret drone program, among many other tragic and immoral
developments. None of these institutions and policies would be politically
feasible in a more courageous culture.
Let’s say you agree. There’s another question: How can we reverse course?
Aversion to physical threat is natural. Human beings have an innate survival
instinct that isn’t calibrated to the minimal everyday dangers of the modern
world. Sticking to our moral principles in the face of a perceived threat is
difficult. It requires deep shame when we back down and fierce pride when we
don’t. And here’s where honor can help. Honor cultures of every sort place deep
value on courage and personal integrity. As we saw in Chapter One, honor
provides strong positive incentives to act courageously (to improve your
standing—your time within the group) and negative incentives for chickening
out (shaming, disgrace, loss of time, potential loss of horizontal honor). And not
merely physical courage but moral courage too. As Sharon Krause argues, a
sense of honor helped motivate people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B.
Anthony, and Martin Luther King Jr. to fight for equality against serious
opposition. We’ll look at some more detailed examples in Chapter Four. Other
sources of motivation, such as material self-interest, legal punishment, morality,
and guilt, are much less effective at getting people to overcome their fear. In
honor cultures, people strive to be worthy of their status and reputation and to
live by an internalized code of conduct. They feel a heightened sense of shame
when they fail to do so. Nonhonor cultures lack these motivational resources. It’s
no accident that virtually all warrior cultures and martial societies employ honor
as a central value. But you don’t have to be from a warrior culture to appreciate
the benefits, moral and otherwise, of a more courageous society.
Home of the Solitary
If the previous section didn’t convince you to rethink our safety fetish, then
consider too that it’s not an isolated phenomenon; it has connections to another
troubling modern development: rampant individualism. Author Sebastian Junger
in his excellent book Tribe offers a nice illustration of how the two phenomena
are related. Junger describes his childhood in the comfortable, privileged town of
Belmont, outside of Boston. “The predictability of life in an American suburb,”
Junger writes, “left me hoping—somewhat irresponsibly—for a hurricane or a
tornado or something that would require us to all band together to survive.” This
wasn’t a nihilistic urge; Junger didn’t want destruction or mayhem. He wanted
solidarity: “I wanted the chance to prove my worth to my community and my
peers, but I lived in a time and a place where nothing dangerous ever really
happened.… How do you become an adult in a society that doesn’t ask for
sacrifice? How do you become a man in a world that doesn’t require courage?”
Our sense of community is reignited in times of adversity. Many of us have
experienced this. After the 9/11 attacks, American flags went up all across the
country. People waited in line for hours to donate blood. After a few days, the
Red Cross had to issue a statement that the banks were full and that people
should donate later. But as soon as the immediate threat faded, the flags came
down and the blood banks were depleted.
Social bonds are reinforced under conditions of adversity and risk, and
people are motivated to act for the good of the community rather than
themselves. The causal chain goes both ways: lack of solidarity also makes us
less courageous. As Bruxeius, a character in Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire
about the Battle of Thermopylae, puts it: “Only gods and heroes can be brave in
isolation. A man may call upon courage only one way, in the ranks with his
brothers-in-arms, the line of his tribe and his city.… No one may expect valor
from one cast out alone, cut off from the gods of his home.”
Large, anonymous atomized societies like ours struggle with isolation and
lack of community, a trend that sociologists have written about for centuries.
You can choose your favorite example. Here’s one: in Canada, the United
Kingdom, and the United States, people have started marrying themselves—a
practice known as “sologamy.” It’s a form of “self-empowerment,” expressing to
others that you don’t need to have a partner in order to be happy. But such
gestures transparently protest too much. Human beings are social creatures by
nature—we crave bonds and connections with others. We want to live for
something larger than ourselves and our material possessions. Unfortunately, the
forces of modern life seem hell-bent on making us more and more alone.
The great nineteenth-century sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies distinguished
between two types of social relations. The first—gemeinschaft—is sometimes
translated as “community” but like many German words has no good translation.
People who relate in this way regard themselves as part of the community whose
value can’t be reduced to its individual parts. They have common goals and
values, and they don’t make a clean distinction between what’s good for them as
individuals and what’s good for the group as a whole. Examples of gemeinschaft
include the family, army units, sports teams, and religious communities. Within
these groups, there is plenty of competition among individuals. But they are
working for a common purpose and share some basic standards for how to
evaluate people’s behavior and characters.
Tonnies contrasts gemeinschaft with another type of social relation that best
characterizes the modern industrialized West, gesellschaft. Whereas in
gemeinschaft people share a common identity in spite of their individual
distinctions, in gesellschaft they remain distinct despite their connections as a
community or nation. Emile Durkheim describes gesellschaft societies as “a
circle of men who… live and dwell in peace… but instead of being essentially
joined are essentially separate.” Cooperation is regulated by market forces.
“Nobody is able to make anything for another,” Durkheim writes, “unless it is in
exchange for a similar service or for a compensation that he judges to be
equivalent to that which he has given.” Sociologist Robert Nisbett adds that
gesellschaft is “characterized by a high degree of individualism, impersonality,
[and] contractualism, that proceed from volition or sheer interest rather than
from the complex of affective states, habits, and traditions that underlies
gemeinschaft.” In the place of tradition and unconscious agreement on questions
of value, gesellschaft employs contracts, laws, and a powerful state to enforce
them. Within the constraints of these laws, people are then free to pursue their
individual self-interest and develop their own understanding of right, wrong, and
what makes a good life.
Not all gemeinschaft cultures are honor cultures, but the converse is generally
true: honor cultures are almost exclusively collectivist in orientation—and we’ll
see why in the following chapter. Solidarity, personal connection, and respect for
tradition are foundational values for honor societies. The societies devote
resources to building and cementing bonds within the community. As we turn
away from honor, we naturally divert these resources toward more
individualistic goals. But as with risk aversion, one might wonder: Is the shift
away from collectivist values a bad thing? After all, life in a gesellschaft society
offers plenty of advantages. We have more individual freedom and greater
tolerance for differences. We can pursue the careers we wish to pursue and live
where we wish to live. We have financial and legal restraints but fewer moral
constraints—or at least we can determine our own moral constraints. Tradition
can be stifling and restrictive, whereas freedom is, well, liberating.
In fact, however, the safest and wealthiest societies are not the happiest.
Human beings are deeply social animals. For the past 150 years, sociologists
have shown how feeling connected to one’s community leads to greater
happiness and a reduced risk of depression. The evidence is overwhelming.
Durkheim famously showed that suicide rates were significantly higher in
modern, impersonal, less integrated societies. A 2016 study of twenty-seven
European countries found that people were happier and healthier in more
socially cohesive societies. Each of the three domains of social cohesion—
connectedness, social relations, and focus on the common good—was correlated
with increases in subjective well-being. Though hard to measure, the rates of
depression among tribal cultures are similarly low—and depression and suicide
rates skyrocket after rapid modernization. We see a similar pattern in the
military. Soldiers spend much of their lives in highly cohesive communities.
After they leave the military, they show high risks of depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The risk comes both from the horrors they
experience on the battlefield but even more from the shock of social isolation
after living in the communal society of their units. (Suicide rates are no higher
for veterans who faced combat than for those who did not.) According to the US
Department of Veterans Affairs, between 11 percent and 20 percent of veterans
deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan suffer from PTSD or severe depression. A
RAND Corporation study put the number at 20 percent. For all of its advantages,
our modernized, technologically advanced, individualist society has resulted in
the highest rates of depression in human history.
Lack of social cohesion is also correlated with higher crime rates.
Criminologist Freda Adler examined low-crime societies across the world to see
what they had in common. Among the shared characteristics were “social
cohesiveness, a strong family system, and social control systems which ‘do not
aim to control by formal restraint.’” Individualist gesellschaft cultures require
formal and impersonal systems of punishment to reduce crime. If you commit a
crime, you undergo trial and go to prison. This might satisfy one’s abstract sense
of justice, but the impersonal process-oriented nature of the punishment is
abysmal at reducing the rates of recidivism. Public reprimand from wrongdoing,
Adler found, is particularly effective when “expressed by a social group to
which the offender belongs.” The more impersonal the criminal justice and law
enforcement systems, the higher the crime rates.
Criminologist David Kennedy applied these insights when developing
Operation Ceasefire (also known as the “Boston Miracle”), a program
implemented by the Boston Police Department that produced a 63 percent
reduction in youth homicide rates (people twenty-four and under), a 50 percent
reduction in homicide among all age groups, and a 44 percent reduction in the
rates of armed assaults. Kennedy would walk into meetings with police officers
and gang members and say the following: “Show of hands, please, everybody
who was really afraid of the cops growing up, please raise your hand. Room of a
hundred cops, three, four, five will [raise their hands]. Show of hands, please,
everybody who was really afraid of your mother, please raise your hand. Every
hand goes up. My hand goes up, the AV guy’s hand goes up, the people
replacing the coffee raise their hands. ‘I’m still afraid of my mother,’” somebody
will say.” For Kennedy, this simple anecdote says “everything you need to know
about informal social control,” he concludes. “Communities have tools law
enforcement can but dream of.”
Bottom line: communal ties are necessary for flourishing, well-functioning
societies. We ignore this insight at our peril. The breakdown of communities in
so many Western cities has led to more crime and in America mass
incarceration. Informal social control can work only in communities in which
people know each other and care about their reputations, how they are perceived
within the group. These are precisely the conditions that honor can bring out.
When we reject honor, we become more like the isolated, scared, selfish
individuals that philosophers like Hobbes imagined us to be.
Home of the Shameless
Finally, let’s talk about one aspect of our honorless society that is widely
recognized as a serious cost: the decrease in personal accountability. Consider,
for example, the famous case of Ethan Couch. As polarized as Americans are
these days, everyone came together to denounce the sentencing of this teenager,
or more precisely the reasoning behind the sentence. To refresh your memory:
The sixteen-year-old was speeding, very drunk, through a residential area. He
lost control and crashed into a group of pedestrians. Four people died. One
person in Couch’s truck was paralyzed. For all of this, Couch received a
sentence of ten years’ probation and a stint in a cushy rehab clinic. At the time of
the crash, Couch had a blood alcohol content three times the legal limit. During
the trial, the defense team brought in psychologist Dick Miller, who testified that
Couch suffered from “affluenza.” Affluenza, he explained, was a diminished
capacity to connect actions with consequences because of a privileged
upbringing and permissive parents. Couch had too much freedom as a young
child and was never punished for bad behavior. Because of Couch’s condition,
Miller claimed, he could not be held accountable for the behavior that led to the
four deaths.
Miller’s testimony and the judge’s sentence caused such unanimous
condemnation because of what it symbolized: the vanishing sense of personal
accountability that was so evident in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. An
irony lurks behind all the outrage, though. Whereas the term affluenza likely
deserves whatever mockery it gets, the diagnosis is totally consistent with widely
accepted legal and philosophical ideas about responsibility, ideas that have deep
connections to the rise of individualism in the West. The focus on individual
freedom has led philosophers and legal theories to place a robust “control
condition” on responsibility, roughly the principle that we cannot be accountable
for anything that is beyond our control. To be responsible in the modern sense,
individuals must understand the consequences of their actions, intend to perform
them, and be in a position to know whether the act is right or wrong. Couch
certainly did not intend to kill anyone or hurt anyone. True, he made the choice
to drink and drive. But the reasoning behind the control condition makes it
entirely plausible to ask how much control a spoiled teenager with parents who
never punish him had over the decision to drive drunk. Indeed, as I’ve argued in
my early work, when you take the control condition to its logical extreme, the
result is that no one is morally responsible for their actions. Why? Because our
actions are the product of our heredity and environment, and ultimately we have
no control over either.
The strict association of responsibility with control might seem so intuitive as
to be self-evident. But in fact, as I mentioned in the prologue, it is a culturally
local and historically recent development, confined mostly to the WEIRD
(Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic) people of the world. My
book Relative Justice demonstrated widespread differences in attitudes about
when it’s appropriate to blame and punish people. Much of the variation that I
found was in honor cultures. Whereas honor cultures make distinctions between
intended and unintended actions, they typically don’t see control as the whole
story when it comes to responsibility. Indeed, many regard it as shameful to
make excuses by appealing to a lack of control. In honor cultures, taking
responsibility is a bedrock moral principle. Consider a familiar case, already
discussed—the NHL. Hockey’s honor code is fundamentally about personal
accountability. The word appears sixty-three times in Ross Bernstein’s book on
the subject. “We learned the code as kids up in Canada,” says former player
Glen Sonmor. “They were our rules for how we were going to conduct ourselves
above and beyond the official rules of what the officials would enforce. It was a
marvelous system based on honor and accountability.” “When I grew up on a
farm in Canada with six brothers,” says Marty McSorley, “we had to answer for
what we did. That made us pretty tough, no question. There was no running back
to Mommy when things didn’t go our way, so we had to stand up for ourselves
and be accountable. Respect was earned in my family; it wasn’t just given to any
of us.”
Or think back to the case of Georg, the Albanian highlander from Kadare’s
novel, discussed in Chapter One. Georg’s grandfather did everything right after
the stranger’s arrival. He gave him food and shelter and walked him to the
outskirts of the village. Yet because a sniper happened to be right at the town’s
border and because the body happened to fall at a certain angle, the grandfather
was deemed responsible and had to make amends. Two generations later, Georg,
who had not participated in the feud himself, was held to account after his
brother was killed. It’s not that Georg and his grandfather were unaware that
they had no control over the events. It’s that they don’t believe that their lack of
control absolves them from responsibility.
Many philosophers see this as irrational, immoral, and unfair. How can we be
responsible for things that are just bad luck? The WEIRD control requirement
allows us to be judged only by what we can control, not for the accidents of fate.
Poor Oedipus Rex took every step he could to avoid fulfilling the prophecy that
he would kill his father and marry his mother. But through a series of accidents,
he ends up doing both. Oedipus had no way of knowing that these two people
were his parents. He had no intention of committing parricide and incest and
every intention to do the opposite. Yet when he discovers what happened, he
doesn’t make excuses—he doesn’t let himself off the hook. He blinds himself
and wanders away from his kingdom in shame. How fair is that?
Perhaps, like the philosophers, you find Oedipus’s attitude to be irrational or
even pathological. But let’s not overlook the moral advantages of this way of
thinking either. There’s an admirable quality to Oedipus’s refusal to absolve
himself—especially when compared to the modern temptation to search for
every possible excuse for our conduct, to constantly let ourselves off the hook.
Milan Kundera’s great novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being is in part about
how pernicious this self-exonerating mindset can be. The novel’s protagonist,
Tomas, sees that many of his fellow Czech countrymen who had collaborated
with the Soviet regime feel no guilt, no sense of responsibility, simply because
they had no knowledge of the atrocities they committed. He compares them
unfavorably to Oedipus. Kundera writes, “When Tomas heard Communists
shouting in defense of their inner purity, he said to himself, ‘as a result of your
“not knowing,” this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps,
and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the sight of what
you’ve done? How is it that you aren’t horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If
you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes.’”
Tomas (and Kundera too, almost certainly) finds it appalling that the Czechs
would exonerate themselves simply because they did not know that it was wrong
to support the communist regime. It may be true that they were unaware of the
extent of the atrocities, but, according to Tomas, this is no excuse. They should
feel deep shame for what they did to their own country. Tomas doesn’t see
Oedipus’s perspective as irrational or pathological. He sees it as morally superior
to that of his countrymen.
Our focus on control as a condition for responsibility, in other words,
inevitably leads to a culture of excuses and ever-increasing shamelessness.
Anthropologist Dan Fessler asked focus groups of eighty Indonesians from the
Bengkulu Province to come up with the fifty-two most commonly discussed
emotions and then rank them according to their frequency in society. He did the
same for a focus group in Southern California. Shame was second for the
Indonesians but forty-ninth (!) for the Californians—well behind “bored,”
“frustrated,” “offended,” and “disgusted.” Shame, of course, has deep
connections with honor. Indeed, many anthropologists refer to honor cultures as
shame cultures or “honor/shame cultures.”
Shame’s disappearance from our emotional vocabulary has had plenty of
harmful effects. To this day, virtually no one in the financial industry has taken
responsibility for their role in the 2008 banking crisis that sent the economy into
near depression. The precise causal factors behind the crisis are complex and
controversial, but one thing is certain: it was fueled by greed and shamelessness.
And that shamelessness persisted long after the collapse. Senior executives at
banks bailed out by the government still received bonuses in the millions. When
the public expressed their outrage, the executives complained that they were
being singled out, vilified, all part of a cynical attempt to generate “class
warfare.” Honor cultures probably rely too much on shame, but our modern
alternative is an epidemic of shamelessness. If we incorporate a contained form
of honor back into our moral experience, we can find a balance that encourages
personal responsibility without leaving us all at the mercy of luck, oracles, and
fate.
Shamelessness, rampant individualism, a cowardly aversion to risk—these are
complex phenomena, and the factors that have produced them are complex too.
Now, I don’t want to overstate the case. Turning away from honor has been one
contributing factor, but there are plenty of others. The sheer size of Western
nations, the diversity of their citizens, and the commitment to free-market
economic principles have all played a role. The good news is that we can push
back against these unfortunate modern developments fundamentally
transforming societal structures. And honor can help.
In the remaining chapters, I’ll outline many of the specific mechanisms that
honor frameworks offer for building a more courageous, cohesive, and
accountable society. I’ll begin with the issue of community. As we’ve seen
above, our commitment to individualism has come at a price. Social cohesion
leads to happier and less selfish people, safer and more cooperative
communities, and resilience in the face of danger and hardship. Unfortunately,
society is headed in the opposite direction. Is this movement inevitable, a
necessary result of modernization and population growth? Or is there a way to
recapture the sense of community without losing the freedom to define ourselves
and our conception of a good life? And how does honor fit into this picture? In
the next chapter, I’ll offer some hopeful answers to these questions, exploring
the deep connections between honor and solidarity.
CHAPTER 3
HONOR AND COMMUNITY
This is our fucking city.
—DAVID ORTIZ, BIG PAPI
I love Boston. I love the people, the neighborhoods, the accent. I love novels and
movies set in Boston. And most of all, I love Boston sports. After the Red Sox
lost to the Yankees in 2003 because of a mind-bogglingly indefensible
managerial decision, I couldn’t speak for two weeks. About a month later, I went
out to dinner with my dad and stepmother and was thrown out of the restaurant
after getting into a fight with a Yankees fan at the bar. (I was thirty-three years
old.) I believe there should be a new circle of hell for the corrupt, sniveling
weasel Roger Goodell and all the National Football League owners for inventing
the scandal known as “Deflategate”—the physics-defying, ressentiment-driven
fantasy that led to Tom Brady’s suspension and the Patriots losing a first-round
pick. I love that people hate Boston fans for still complaining even at the most
successful time in Boston sports history.
It’s not just me. Bostonians in general have a proud, angry, passionate
relationship to their professional teams. It’s like living in a turbulent marriage.
Yes, we’ve had unprecedented success lately, but it hasn’t always been that way.
Even in the bad times, though, underneath all the bitterness and coaching
grievances, Boston fans show love and devotion like no other city in America.
For some athletes, the relationship can get a little intense. But the ones who stick
around tend to appreciate it and feel closer to the city as a result. And nothing
brought that connection out like the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.
It was on Patriots Day, one of the best holidays of the year for Boston kids.
The rest of the country’s students have to go to school, while Boston kids get an
11:00 a.m. Red Sox game and the running of the Boston Marathon. On this
Patriots Day, though, two Chechen brothers with pressure-cooker bombs in their
backpacks turned a glorious day into one of chaos and tragedy. The brothers set
off their bombs about twelve seconds apart near the crowded finish line of the
Marathon. The explosions caused three deaths and hundreds of injuries,
including at least fourteen people who required amputations. Immediately
following the attacks, first responders, race volunteers, medical staff, bystanders,
and runners rushed to the aid of the injured people to help them get to nearby
hospitals as soon as possible. All of them showed tremendous poise and courage,
charging into a potentially dangerous area, not knowing whether another bomb
would explode as they were helping the victims. The two brothers fled the scene
of the crime.
Two days into the subsequent manhunt, the brothers struck again, murdering
a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer and then carjacking a
Mercedes from a Chinese immigrant. The car’s GPS led law enforcement to
nearby Watertown. The older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed in a
gunfight, but the younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, escaped in the confusion.
With one of the killers still at large, the police issued a “shelter in place” order
(essentially a lockdown) for Watertown and surrounding areas. Public transit
systems in Boston were suspended. Schools were closed. Streets were deserted.
Not since the Watts Riots had an urban area been shut down on this scale.
If the story ended here, it would be just another example of society’s
unhealthy attitude toward risk. This young man had committed a horrific crime,
but as a columnist for the Harvard Crimson put it a year later, “It was us who
gave the brothers two days of public fear and cowering of the kind that two
sadistic thugs might envision, hope for, and relish.” But the story doesn’t end
there. The next night Mayor Thomas Menino lifted the order, and the second
brother was found hiding in a boat, injured and unarmed. And the following day,
the Red Sox played their first game at Fenway Park since the morning of the
bombing.
Just before the game, the wildly popular team leader, David Ortiz, known to
all of Boston as “Big Papi,” grabbed the microphone to speak to the sellout
crowd. “All right Boston,” Papi said. “This jersey that we wear today, it doesn’t
say Red Sox. It says Boston. We want to thank you, Mayor Menino, Governor
Patrick, and the whole police department, for the great job they did this past
week. This is our fuckin’ city, and nobody’s gonna dictate our freedom. Stay
strong.”
The crowd went crazy. The speech hit exactly the right tone, colorful
language and all. Even the comically puritanical Federal Communications
Commission recognized its importance. Its chairman, Julius Genachowski,
tweeted: “David Ortiz spoke from the heart at today’s Red Sox game. I stand
with Papi and the people of Boston.”
Why was Papi’s speech so special? Because it appealed to the honor of the
Boston people. “This jersey… doesn’t say Red Sox. It says Boston.” Papi
reminded Bostonians that they were a tight community. The bombings were not
an attack on the dignity of all human beings; they were an attack on the city of
Boston. And Boston would bear the primary responsibility of taking care of its
own.
“Nobody’s gonna dictate our freedom.” The speech also had a hint of
rebuke. No longer would fear from terrorism keep people in their homes or
restrict their liberty in any way. No more citywide lockdowns and curfews for
possibly armed nineteen-year-olds, no matter what they had done.
Originally a hashtag on Twitter, the phrase Boston Strong became a sustained
movement. Over the next year, local charities raised more than $60 million to
help the victims. Boston bands like Aerosmith and the Dropkick Murphys played
benefits to raise more money. Many of the sports teams biggest stars visited
amputees in the hospitals and worked out with them during their rehab. The
athletes worked with communities and raised money for victims and their
families. And to cap it off, despite the inevitable fear of copycat crimes or
further terrorist plots, the 2014 Boston Marathon saw a record turnout of
runners. Many ran their first marathons with sponsors to raise money for the
injured victims and their families.
As I write this, four years have passed, and people are still studying Boston
Strong and holding it as a model for how communities can come together in the
face of terrorist threats. In 2016, after a terrorist attack in Belgium, President
Obama called Boston’s response to the bombings “one of my most powerful
memories and one of my proudest moments as president.… [T]hat is the kind of
resilience and the kind of strength that we have to continually show in the face
of these terrorists.”
The Harvard Kennedy School and the Program on Crisis Leadership
produced a white paper called “Why Was Boston Strong?” that analyzed the
strengths of Boston’s response. They summarized their findings as follows:
• A part of Boston Strong is pride in the inspired work of those involved in responding to
the event—the bystanders, the other runners, the Boston Athletic Association volunteers,
the first responders, the medical staff at the finish line, the doctors and nurses and support
staff in the hospitals, police from all responding agencies, fire, National Guard; in short,
everyone who helped. From their dedicated, selfless work springs inspiration.
• Another part of Boston Strong is an expression of resilience—that people, including
those directly and indirectly injured, those involved in the response, and the community
as a whole, will come back, stronger than ever, going on with their lives and hopes and
dreams.
• And a part of Boston Strong is an expression of unwillingness to be intimidated. This is a
forward-looking form of resilience—the community refuses to cower, to be deterred or
diverted from its ongoing work and life and hopes and dreams.
Pride, resilience, and an unwillingness to be intimidated—three of the most
central values in honor cultures across the world. In essence, the Kennedy
School report identified honor as the source of Boston’s strength.
Boston is far from an isolated case. Research shows that in general,
community solidarity offers enormous benefits for people coping with tragic
events. In one study, James Hawdon and colleagues analyzed three cases of mass
shootings—one in Omaha and two in Finland—and examined the effects of
solidarity on well-being. They measured solidarity by asking participants to
indicate how much they agree (on a five-point Likert scale) with six statements:
1. I am proud to be a member of my community.
2. I feel I am part of the community.
3. People in my neighborhood share the same values.
4. My neighborhood is a good place to live.
5. I trust my neighbors.
6. People work together to get things done for this community.
The authors found in all cases that solidarity was significantly correlated with
greater well-being and a reduction in the incidence of depressive symptoms.
By examining these six measures of solidarity, we can begin to see why
honor-oriented values are more effective for building solidarity. The morality of
dignity doesn’t encourage us to take pride in our community unless the
community is all of the human race. Indeed, to identify too closely with one’s
community is inconsistent with dignity if it leads us to exclude out-group
members from our primary sphere of moral concern. Dignity also has no interest
in neighbors sharing the same values. A basic tenet of Western liberalism is that
people should be free to form their own values, as long as they don’t violate the
rights of others. Honor value systems, on the other hand, embrace each of these
elements and therefore offer significant psychological benefits for people
dealing with tragedy.
Moreover, it’s no coincidence that honor norms emphasize this sense of
togetherness. Although solidarity is valuable for all communities, it has special
importance for communities in the environments in which honor norms tend to
emerge. To see why, we can turn, somewhat ironically, to the groundbreaking
Culture of Honor, by cultural psychologists Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen.
(It’s ironic because Nisbett and Cohen don’t talk about solidarity much at all in
their book; they focus on why people in honor cultures might have a propensity
for violence. But bear with me.) Nisbett and Cohen famously hypothesized that
the higher rates of argument-related homicides in the American Southeast are in
large part a product of the honor-oriented cultural heritage of its settlers.
Whereas the northern states were mostly settled by farmers, the southeastern
states were settled by Scotch-Irish herders who came from regions that weren’t
suited for agriculture. Anthropologists have documented that herding societies
across the world have much higher rates of violence than farming societies.
Why is that? Well, farming communities and herding communities have
different ecological and social environments, and different norms and attitudes
emerge to adapt to the particular challenges of each environment. Herders lead
precarious lives. Their livelihood depends on protecting their livestock and areas
for grazing, so they continually face the possibility of losing their entire wealth
from a raid. And raids from opposing groups are common because they are so
profitable when successful. In addition, herding societies tend to be in lowpopulation, low-density areas that are not conducive to law enforcement.
Consequently, families typically have little or no dependable protection from the
state. All of these features, according to Nisbett and Cohen, made it essential for
herdsmen to develop aggressive public reputations, to deter other groups that
might be considering a raid. The norms of herding communities should therefore
emphasize honor values like courage, aggression, concern for reputation, as well
as a disposition for violence in response to insults. (Insults, as you’ll recall from
Chapter One, can often be a way to probe for weakness.)
Nisbett and Cohen’s theory is justly famous, well supported by subsequent
research, and it reignited research on honor across disciplines. I certainly would
not be writing this book if it were not for Culture of Honor. One unfortunate
consequence of honor’s reputation, however, is that people too often associate it
exclusively with violent propensities and a heightened sensitivity to insult. This
gives a misleading or, at best, a woefully incomplete picture of honor as a whole.
Part of the problem is that the environments of the particular honor culture they
were studying—American Southeasterners—have radically changed.
Southerners in the present no longer belong to herding communities—indeed,
many don’t belong to any specific community—and so Nisbett and Cohen were
forced to conduct their investigation on individuals rather than groups. Their
methodology entailed conclusions that could shed light only on individual
character traits. The data could not reveal anything about the characteristics of
honor groups. However, the same theory that helped to generate their hypothesis
about individuals also predicts that honor groups would have a strong collectivist
orientation.
For consideration, while it’s true that herding groups need individuals who
are willing and able to use violence for protection, it’s even more important for
individuals to fight not just for themselves but also for the good of their group. A
herding group filled with selfish individuals would be sitting ducks for more
cohesive out-groups to exploit. And remember, herding environments lacked a
reliable system of law enforcement, so group members needed to count on one
another that much more for protection. As Nisbett and Cohen note, herders have
been the best soldiers for centuries, and good soldiers are known for their
communal spirit at least as much as for their violent tendencies. It’s natural,
then, that strong communal norms would emerge to foster these ties, binding the
members of the group together with shared values and a common purpose.
Farming communities, on the other hand, could much better afford a more
individualistic orientation. Since raids were less profitable and much less
frequent, each individual family could focus on themselves and their crops.
Thus far, we’ve seen the benefits of solidarity in general and why it has special
value for honor communities. For the remainder of the chapter, I’ll discuss the
many ways in which honor helps to create and sustain communal ties. In doing
so, I’ll focus on two broad features of honor: the emphasis on group identity and
the distinctive approach to conflict and competition.
Honor and Group Identity
Perhaps the starkest difference between moralities of honor and dignity lies in
their perspective on group identity. Dignity is a thoroughly cosmopolitan value
and is therefore skeptical of narrow forms of identification (for example, with
one’s nation, class, family, culture, or race). The reason for the skepticism, as I
noted earlier, is that when we identify too closely with our particular group, we
risk excluding outsiders from our sphere of moral concern. Honor takes pretty
much the opposite view. In most honor cultures, giving equal weight to group
interests and the interests of strangers is thought to be immoral. You can treat
out-group members with respect and generosity, but taking care of your own is a
central moral priority. If this seems selfish or arbitrary, consider that many
people who join honor groups are marginalized and vulnerable. Take gangs, for
example. Writer Jeff Chang chronicled the rise of street gangs in the 1960s and
’70s in the Bronx, a turbulent time, to say the least, for the borough’s residents.
Gangs served to structure the chaos. Chang writes:
For immigrant latchkey kids, foster children outside the system, girls running away
from abusive environments, and thousands of others, the gangs provided shelter,
comfort, and protection. They channeled energies and provided enemies. They warded
off boredom and gave meaning to the hours. They turned the wasteland into a
playground. They felt like a family. “We like to ride and we like to stay together so we
all do the same things and we’re happy that way,” said Tata, a Savage Skull girl.
“That’s the only way we can survive out here, because if we all go our own ways, one
by one, we’re gone.”
For otherwise isolated individuals, joining a gang offers a sense of
community as well as, crucially, protection from outside threats. As I was
revising this chapter, I came across a documentary called Check It, about the
only known gay and transgender gang in America. The Check It gang originated
in Washington, DC, with just a few members who decided that forming a gang
was their only hope for survival. As its reputation grew, so did the numbers. As
one man puts it in the movie, “In many impoverished areas, just being black, you
have a lot of odds against you. Being gay and black? It’s a nightmare waiting to
happen.” These young men and women have been kicked out of their homes,
ridiculed by teachers, bullied relentlessly in school and on the streets. Check It
gives them an identity and a means of getting respect.
“It’s like a family I always wanted,” says one member, “and when we go out,
we go out as one.” Like all urban gangs, Check It adheres to a code of honor,
and that can lead to violence. If you mess with one of them, you mess with all of
them. They fight for each other whenever one of their members gets hassled or
harassed. Over several years they built a reputation for using aggression in
response to disrespect. That reputation allows them to dress how they like and go
to public places without being harassed. “If no one is going to stand up for us,”
says another Check It member in the film, “we’ll stand up for ourselves.”
Honor critics might point out that if everyone adhered to the principles of
dignity, the rights of these people would be respected and they wouldn’t need to
join gangs to protect themselves. That may be true, but the Check It members
live in the real world, not an ideal one. The sad truth is that the individual liberty
that dignity champions is a luxury afforded to a small portion of relatively
privileged people. Banding together and adhering to gang codes is often the only
means for marginalized and vulnerable individuals to get the respect they need to
navigate their world. Moreover, even an idealized dignity society can contain
isolated and desperately lonely people who yearn for a community, a family they
always wanted. If the violence and aggression of gangs like Check It could be
contained, then the gangs would be worth preserving just for this feeling of
collective concern.
But as we know all too well, collective concern is a scarce resource in large
free-market democracies. Healthy forms of group identification must be
cultivated and fortified. Honor cultures have a lot to teach us on this front. They
have practices, rituals, initiation ceremonies—both formal and informal—to
build this strong sense of togetherness. Navy SEALs, for example, put their
soldiers through grueling boot camps and training regimens, and they make
officers and enlisted men train side by side. “We’re all in it together,” writes
former SEAL Marcus Luttrell, “and the first thing they instill in you at INDOC
(the 3 week ‘indoctrination’ course) is that you will live and train as a class, as a
team.… Teamwork. They slam that word at you every other minute. Teamwork.
Teamwork.” This technique of team building traces back to the Spartans, where
even the king would endure the same punishing physical training as the rest of
the army.
Collective identification also creates a sense of collective responsibility that
further strengthens the bonds within the group. One of the four core principles of
the SEAL honor code is to “take responsibility for your actions and the actions
of your teammates.” The code commits them never to abandon a man, dead or
alive, on the battlefield. These bonds are possible only with a powerful
egalitarian and collective ethos that’s at the heart of honor. In many honor
cultures, when one individual violates a norm or doesn’t meet expectations,
other group members feel shame—real shame; they share responsibility for the
act. This baffles many of us in individualistic dignity cultures. In my book
Relative Justice, I described the reactions of Korean Americans to the shootings
at Virginia Tech by Korean student Seung-Hui Cho, who killed thirty-two
people in all. A reverend and founder of the Oriental Mission Church in
Koreatown released this statement: “All Koreans in South Korea—as well as
here—must bow their heads and apologize to the people of America.” And
South Korean ambassador Lee Tae-sik called on Korean Americans not just to
be ashamed but to repent as well. He suggested a thirty-two-day fast, one day for
each victim of the carnage. A reporter from the NPR program Day to Day sought
reactions from the Korean community in Los Angeles but had a hard time
finding anyone who agreed to be interviewed. When a local real estate agent
finally agreed to be interviewed, he expressed deep shame about the killings.
“But you had nothing to do with it!” the reporter said incredulously. The man
replied, “I know, but he was a fellow Korean.” In a country with such a deep
commitment to individualist ideals, this attitude made no sense whatsoever.
In addition, honor’s emphasis on reputation is crucial for building a cohesive
and responsible community. “Your reputation begins right here,” Luttrell recalls
his boot-camp instructor telling his unit. “And so does the reputation of Class
Two-two-six. And that’s a reflection on me. It’s a responsibility I take very
personally. Because reputation is everything.” Far from being inherently selfish
(as some believe), concern for reputation is in fact a cornerstone of many
contemporary theories of human cooperation. In tight-knit social groups, people
who value reputation are more likely to perform costly or risky cooperative
behavior, especially in public settings. From an evolutionary perspective, the
benefits of high reputation can offset the costs and possible risk of cooperating
(by providing, for example, greater access to potential mates). The more we
value esteem from others, the more incentive we have to try to earn that esteem.
When we don’t care what people think about us, the incentives for costly
cooperative behavior diminish accordingly. And thanks to the principle of
collective responsibility in honor cultures, the concern for reputation extends to
the group. If you act shamefully, you don’t just sully your own reputation; you
sully the reputation of the group. On the flip side, when you act virtuously or
heroically, the group benefits and feels its share of pride.
Another way that honor cultures sustain a sense of group identity is to have
external marks of membership—such as jackets, uniforms, tattoos, or gang
colors. “Back in England every family had their coat of arms,” says a former
member of the Bronx gang Savage Skulls. “This is our family coat of arms.…
This is what we are; this is what we be. You give me respect. I give you respect.
Simple.” Even something as simple as a fan’s team jersey can mark you as part
of a group. You might think it’s silly for grown men and women to wear the
jerseys or T-shirts of their favorite team. But these items have a genuine
function. I can go to a sports bar in most US cities and have an instant
connection with people who would otherwise be strangers.
Many critics of honor find it utterly irrational to identify with something like
a sports team. Ryan Brown, for example, gives this comically melodramatic
account of a visit to an Alabama doctor just before a big college football game
between Alabama and Oklahoma, where Brown resides. The physician’s
assistant told Brown that he wanted Alabama to beat the Oklahoma Sooners
badly: “After all,” he explained, “I’ve got to recruit against them next year.”
Brown reflects on the episode:
As my body was wracked by an involuntary dry heave, I marveled over this man’s
degree of personal identification with his favorite college football team. He was going
to have to recruit against my team—against every team—for the next football season.
He was a physician’s assistant, not a sports recruiter. This delusion went deep, and this
man needed to be handled with care, as do all full-throttled partisans in a culture of
honor.… You can never be sure how far such a man might go to assert his supremacy
when his honor is on the line, and this man had access to needles, drugs, and things that
can make incisions.
Now, obviously, this physician’s assistant knew very well that he didn’t
literally recruit football players for Alabama. There’s no delusion at all, never
mind a deep one. Brown paints a simple use of we in connection to the team
(something virtually all sports fan do) as some sort of dangerous hallucination.
This mindset is sadly all too common among academics, and it’s one that we
should reject wholeheartedly. Identifying with your teams is not just fun, but one
of few remaining ways to connect with strangers of different races, classes, and
backgrounds. We should work to preserve these opportunities for personal
connection whenever we can.
Speaking of sports, let’s now turn to another way that honor groups build
solidarity: through competition and conflict.
Competition and Conflict
Many believe that conflicts can only divide communities, but the truth is closer
to the opposite. Take feuds, for example. Honor cultures are notorious for their
feuds, and there’s no denying that they can cause tremendous suffering and
unnecessary loss of life. But feuds also foster a deep sense of social harmony
and cohesion within the feuding groups. Indeed, some anthropologists regard
this to be the primary evolutionary function of tribal feuds, the reason they’ve
persisted, even with the loss of life that they cause. When you think about it, it
makes sense that feuds would bind communities together rather than tear them
apart. As we saw earlier with the Boston bombing, greater solidarity naturally
emerges under conditions of adversity, risk, and threat. The ever-present
possibility of violent feuds in some cultures creates near-constant adversity, so
it’s not surprising that greater solidarity would result.
In many cases, of course, the costs of feuding in suffering and death
outweigh the benefits of greater solidarity. In more contained environments,
however, feuds can strengthen social bonds without subjecting communities to
excessive danger. I hate to keep going back to this, but the clearest example
again is sports. Whether it’s the Olympics or professional or school athletics,
competition breeds a communal spirit among teammates and fans. And unlike
blood feuds or gang wars, sports have a built-in form of containment. You risk
losing games, not lives. The stakes are still plenty high. A big game can feel like
it’s life or death, especially at the highest levels of competition. But it remains a
feeling, a metaphor, not the reality.
In team sports, players depend on each other to accomplish goals they’ve
spent a big part of their lives pursuing. Opponents are obstacles to those goals,
and teams love to rally around a common enemy. Great rivalries lead to closer
bonds among teammates and a greater connection with the team’s fan base. In
some sports, coaches and players will invent beefs or start fights solely as a
means of cementing bonds within the team. In hockey, writes Ross Bernstein, an
individual fight is often about respect or revenge, but the team brawl “is all
about building team unity and male bonding.… It is a tremendous show of
solidarity when guys know that they can count on each other in battle.”
Professional athletes often say that the hardest thing about retiring is the sudden
absence of the communal spirit they experienced while they were playing. Like
military veterans, they often have a hard time adjusting to the more
individualistic way of life in the greater society.
The benefits of solidarity in athletics are present at all levels of competition.
For both males and females, participating in high school team sports leads to
more community engagement and a greater sense of self-respect. High school
and middle school athletes report significantly higher rates of “social capital,”
which denotes the networks and the relationships that help children negotiate
their paths into adulthood. School athletes feel greater support from their
teachers and families and experience lower rates of depression. The benefits are
even stronger for female athletes than for males. High school can be a lonely and
isolating place for anyone; sports are one area where students can establish
connections with the larger community.
Coaches and managers in team sports often cultivate an “us against the
world” attitude to reinforce the team bonds. As we know, adversity bolsters
solidarity, so coaches may create conditions of adversity even when they don’t
exist. Patriots head coach Bill Belichick takes this strategy to comical extremes,
getting players to believe that the entire sports world doubts their ability even
when they’re heavy favorites to win the game. The strategy works in other
domains too. Michael Feinberg, cofounder of the KIPP charter school program
that serves children from disadvantaged backgrounds, gives what he calls a
“locker-room speech” to the students at KIPP schools. He quotes alarming
statistics, tells the kids that a lot of people out there are convinced they’re going
to fail, that they won’t graduate, go to college, or get a degree. But if they come
together and help each other, he tells them, they can prove these people wrong.
The Prison Entrepreneurial Program that I mentioned in Chapter One employs a
similar strategy in its classes with prisoners. It quotes the high recidivism rates
and the difficulty for felons to get jobs. The goal is not to alarm them, of course,
but to unite the prisoners around a common purpose, a shared struggle they’ll
face as a group.
These strategies fit beautifully within a larger honor framework. But a dignity
framework? Not so much. Dignity can’t support “us against the world” because
it sees no division between “us” and the “world.” Dignity’s slogan is “We are
the world”—which sounds nice in principle but can be isolating in practice.
Individuals can truly belong to a family, sports team, gang, class, or school
group. But the “human family”? It’s difficult, maybe impossible, to feel
connected to something as massive as all of humanity except in the most abstract
and metaphorical manner.
To this point, I’ve been discussing the social benefits of conflicts between
competing groups. No less important for strengthening communal ties are
internal or within-group conflicts. Nineteenth-century sociologist Georg Simmel
regarded conflicts as an integrating force that offers “inner satisfaction,
distraction, relief” and gives “‘vitality and reciprocity’ to relations we might
otherwise avoid.” Conflict, according to Robert Nye, quoted in Simmel, not only
preserves social relations but “is one of the concrete functions which actually
constitute it.” In other words, internal conflicts do more than just strengthen or
revitalize the bonds within a group. They are a part of solidarity. Conflict is one
of the materials out of which social relations are constructed. If this sounds
counterintuitive, consider a more concrete example. Think of the closest married
couple you know or the closest family. Are they the ones with the fewest
arguments and conflicts? Probably not. Too much agreement and aversion to
conflict are often signs of emotional distance and a deadening of relations.
(Interestingly, John Stuart Mill expressed a parallel thought about opinions.
Without the presence of conflicting opinions, our own beliefs become dead
dogma. Even when our beliefs are true, conflicting opinions are crucial for
giving us “the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its
collision with error.”)
The great Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie offers a similar diagnosis in
a more contemporary context. He argues that modern industrialized societies
suffer from too little conflict. The paucity of conflicts, he argues, reflects the
depersonalization of social life. Christie regards the sharp reduction of
defamation cases—crimes against honor—as a dangerous development. The
absence of defamation, according to Christie, doesn’t show that honor has
become more respected, but rather demonstrates that “there is less honor to
respect.” In a large anonymous society, everyone lives in their own corner, their
own bubble. Honor conflicts are one of the few remaining opportunities for
people to connect outside of their bubbles. With “less honor to respect,” people
have no grounds for conflict and can retreat to their own comfortable segment of
society.
One of the profound insights of the restorative justice movement is that
conflicts provide opportunities for social engagement and active group
participation. Modern nonhonor cultures largely shun these opportunities. We
marshal out our conflicts to specialists, lawyers, and judges who have no
personal connection to the case or the people involved. (Indeed, legal officials
can be disqualified for having such a connection.) Christie sees the modern
justice system—a cornerstone of dignity cultures—as “one of the many cases of
lost opportunities for involving citizens in tasks that are of immediate
importance to them.” Honor cultures, by contrast, have more conflicts and
typically don’t rely on outside forms of resolution. Consequently, they learn to
become peacemakers themselves and develop a variety of rituals and ceremonies
that allow people to hash out their differences face-to-face. Anthropologist Jared
Diamond, for example, describes a compensation ceremony in a New Guinean
tribe after the accidental killing of a child by a man from a neighboring village.
The “dead child’s family and the child’s accidental killers, previously strangers
to each other, sit down and cry together and share a meal a few days after the
death.” In the United States, as Diamond observes, the child’s family “would be
planning a civil lawsuit and the accidental killer’s family would be consulting
lawyers and their insurance broker to prepare to defend themselves against the
lawsuit and possible criminal charges.” Our legal proceedings do more to drive
people apart than bring them together.
Conflict-resolution rituals offer benefits for the surrounding community as
well. The Japanese, for example, often hold two ceremonies following every
crime. The first is a kind of shaming ceremony, designed to reinforce the norms
the offender violated and to encourage the offender to apologize and offer
restitution to the victim. Then, after the sentence has been served, they have a
ceremony of repentance and reacceptance. As John Braithwaite, one of the
architects of the restorative justice movement, puts it, “The moral order derives a
very special kind of credibility when even he who has breached it openly comes
out and affirms the evil of the breach.” Nils Christie, himself an inspirational
figure in restorative justice circles, takes this idea even further. Conflicts, he
observes, are opportunities for “norm clarification.” Not just clarification in the
sense that Braithwaite proposes—a reaffirmation of previously determined
values—but also in the sense of discovery. Conflicts can illuminate the presence
of norms that were previously unknown, unarticulated, or even undetermined.
Resolution rituals allow communities to explore normative commitments and
expectations in a lively, active way.
Some readers might complain that I’m cherry-picking examples—
highlighting only the warm, fuzzy side of honor-related conflicts and resolutions.
What about gang wars and endless beefs? Or how about duels? Haven’t we done
well to move beyond that practice? Isn’t it obvious that duels over honor were a
divisive (not to mention bloody) force within society and not a unifying one?
Actually, no. Historical and sociological research suggests that duels have a
bit of a bad rap. The practice in fact offered many social benefits. In particular,
duels served to maintain the egalitarian codes of an honor group. Indeed, early
opponents of the duel, such as Francis Bacon and Cardinal Richelieu, opposed it
on precisely these grounds. Bacon wanted to expand the power of the monarchy
and further distinguish ranks among gentlemen. The equalizing function of duels
was an obstacle to the kind of hierarchy he wanted to create. Duels were also
much safer than commonly supposed. Dueling rituals were designed to testify to
the honor of the combatants while at the same time minimizing the risk of death
or injury. The combatants would use “inaccurate and weak smoothbore pistols”
or swords that were “modified to prevent deep penetrating injuries.” Many
challenges were resolved without fighting of any sort, as “the mere willingness
of both parties to show up for the fight was often satisfactory.” The point of the
duel was more “to demonstrate one’s status-group membership than to establish
dominance over one’s opponent. Thus it was less important to win than to
display courage.”
Although the time of the duel has long passed, there are modern parallels that
reflect the duel’s egalitarian ethos. Former National Basketball Association
(NBA) player Steve Kerr recalls an incident with his superstar teammate
Michael Jordon, a notorious bully during practices. During one practice, Jordan
talked his usual trash to Kerr, and Kerr snapped back at him. In response, Jordan
“punched him in the face right there on the court.” As Kerr remembers it now,
“It was one of the best things that ever happened for me. I needed to stand up
and go back at him, I think I earned some respect. But we have a great
relationship ever since.… [Y]ou gotta prove it and then once you prove it, you’re
fine.”
Or consider the fighting rituals of many poor urban neighborhoods. In The
Code of the Street, Elijah Anderson describes several fights involving a black
fifteen-year-old young man named Tyree in Philadelphia. After moving to a new
neighborhood, Tyree gets beaten up by a gang of “bols” (slang for friends) in
public and suffers a serious loss of respect as a result. As with the duels, beatings
like this have a ritualized form of constraint—though it’s much less formalized.
The goal is to test someone for weakness, but “not to hurt him physically to the
point where blood is spilled and he might have to go to the hospital.” Still, Tyree
has to respond to reclaim his self-respect and the respect of the neighborhood
kids. So he tells his grandmother not to call the police. He cleans himself up and
goes back to the store to find one of the bols who beat him up. When he finds
one, he walks up and punches him in the face. He gets a few good punches in
and then stops immediately once the bol’s nose starts to bleed. Tyree shows
ritualized restraint of his own, doing just enough to get his respect back and no
more. After another more formalized fight with a stronger member of the group,
the bols welcome Tyree into their circle—to their honor group.
Anderson also describes a third fight that helps to cement a friendship. After
some time Tyree develops a bond with a boy named Malik. They watch each
other’s backs in other neighborhoods and start to bond like “brothers” or
“cousins.” But one day Tyree senses that Malik is disrespecting him in front of a
group of girls. He tells Malik he’s sick of getting dissed and challenges him to a
fight. As Anderson describes it, such fights “are part of a long and honorable
tradition of settling disputes between men.” They are characterized by elaborate
rules, including “no hitting in the face,” “you got to use just your hands,” and
“no double-teaming.” (After an accidental slap, Tyree apologizes profusely
before getting back to the fight.) The fight lasts about twenty minutes, with no
clear winner. Anderson writes:
They have fought, and, for the moment, settled their differences. But, actually,
something much more profound has occurred as well. To be sure, the two boys can
now smile at each other again, knowing that if they have a disagreement, they can
settle it man to man. Through this little fight, they have bonded socially. They have
tested each other’s mettle, discerned important limits, and gained an abiding sense of
what each one will “take” from the other. With this in mind they adjust their behavior
in each other’s presence, giving the other his “props,” or respect.… [I]n effect, they
learn the rules of their relationship.
Like duels, what seems like a violent conflict is in fact a way of resolving a
dispute and equalizing the parties. Winning or losing doesn’t matter; they just
have to show heart. Recall too Christie’s idea that conflicts are opportunities for
norm clarification. For Tyree and Malik, the fight helped them learn the rules,
the norms, of their friendship. And yes, on some occasions, these rituals go
badly wrong and someone gets seriously hurt or killed. But that just speaks to
the need for containment. When the rituals function properly, they lead to greater
social cohesion and a more equal status for all parties.
Equality, incidentally, is itself highly correlated with greater solidarity and
higher rates of civic participation. One of the worst misconceptions about honor
societies is that they are essentially hierarchical. On the contrary, honor cultures
tend to be far more egalitarian in practice than dignity cultures. The egalitarian
spirit is necessary to build cohesion, collective responsibility, and group loyalty.
In theory, of course, the morality of dignity supports egalitarianism as well.
But the size, diversity, and impersonal nature of dignity cultures tend to produce
tremendous income and status inequality and a corresponding reduction in
solidarity.
It’s true that the honor codes of neighborhoods like Tyree’s emerge in
conditions of scarcity and adversity and that the codes have their downside,
especially for young men who don’t have Tyree’s toughness. We should
therefore be on the lookout for other more contained forms of conflict—such as
athletics or restorative justice—that bring similar gains in solidarity without as
many of the burdens.
This chapter has examined the psychological benefits of group solidarity and
explored some of the ways that honor works to strengthen it. I’ve argued that
honor can help to mitigate the isolating effects of modernization and that we
should therefore try to cultivate it to bolster the collective spirit of our
communities. You might think that I’ve painted too rosy a picture of the group
dynamics of honor cultures. What about the political polarization? Or the
demonization of out-groups? The nationalism? The tribalism? And not everyone
in impoverished urban communities settles their beefs like Malik and Tyree.
People bring guns to fistfights and get shot in drive-by shootings. Gang-related
homicides in some cities like Chicago are at an all-time high. The honor codes
that call for settling beefs yourself can lead to violent multigenerational feuds.
What good is solidarity if you’re dead? All good questions. In the next chapter,
I’ll try to answer them.
CHAPTER 4
VIOLENCE AND AGGRESSION
Norms of aggression have evolved in honor cultures to adapt to the challenges of
their environment, and consequently honor cultures are typically more violent
than dignity cultures. But the moral of this story is complicated. Excessive
aversion to violence has produced ineffective zero-tolerance policies, the schoolto-prison pipeline, a massive police state, and the largest prison system in human
history. Moreover, honor-based violence helps us resist oppression and maintain
self-respect in the face of dehumanizing forces. The pros of honor-based
violence can far outweigh the cons, especially when the violence can be properly
contained.
Why Are Honor Cultures More Aggressive?
Imagine you’re a college student who has agreed to be a subject in a
psychological study. The experimenters tell you to fill out a demographic
questionnaire and then turn it in at a table at the end of a narrow hallway. You
fill out the form and start walking down the hallway, and then a tall grad student
walks out of a door marked “Photo Lab.” He opens a big file cabinet that blocks
the hallway. When he sees you, he closes the file drawer to let you pass. You
turn in the form and start to head back down the same hallway to the experiment
room. The grad student sees you again, slams the file drawer shut, bumps you in
the shoulder, and says, “Asshole.” Before you can react, the student heads back
into the door marked “Photo Lab.”
How would you feel if that happened to you? The answer may depend on
where you’re from. In their famous experiment, Michigan psychologists Richard
Nisbett and Dov Cohen (mentioned in the previous chapter) hypothesized that
students from the southern “honor” regions of the United States would take the
insult more personally. They would be angrier and in a more violent state of
mind. And that’s exactly what they found. In one study, neutral observers who
didn’t know the students rated the southerners’ reaction as “angry” and the
northern students’ reaction as “irritated” or “amused.” Southern students also
had greater increases in cortisone levels (a hormone related to stress) and
testosterone than the northern students in the insult condition. In the control
condition with no insult, the hormone levels were the same for both southern and
northern students. Last, all students read written scenarios after the insult that
featured ambiguous offenses—like a driver cutting off another driver on a road.
Southern students were more likely than northern students to predict that the
scenario would end violently. These emotional and physiological differences in
the two groups of students were especially striking given that the southerners
were college students from relatively wealthy families attending the University
of Michigan. Although they came from regions associated with honor, you might
expect the effects on their behavior and physiology to diminish with their
exposure to the norms of college life in the North.
In another well-known experiment, Nisbett and Cohen sent a series of fake
cover letters to employers across the country. The applicant in the letter
explained that he had been convicted of felony manslaughter and wished to
clarify what happened, in hopes that the employer would still consider his
application. He came from a small town, he explained. One night he was having
a drink in a local bar, and an acquaintance started boasting that he had slept with
the applicant’s fiancée. The man laughed in his face and told him to step outside
if he was man enough. So they went outside and fought (“I was young, and I
didn’t want to back down from a challenge in front of everyone”), and the other
man was killed—unintentionally. As Nisbett and Cohen predicted, southern
employers were more compliant than northern ones, more likely to offer contact
information or job applications, and more likely to offer sympathy in their
responses. One southern employer, for example, wrote back to say that although
she had no openings at that time, the incident was not a problem for her.
“Anyone could probably be in the situation you were in,” she wrote. “It was just
an unfortunate incident that shouldn’t be held against you. Your honesty shows
you are sincere.” There were no comparable expressions of sympathy from the
North.
These studies and many others, Nisbett and Cohen argued, help to explain the
higher rates of argument-related homicides in the American Southeast. In cities
with populations of fewer than two hundred thousand, the rates among white
males for non-argument-related homicides were roughly the same in the northern
and southern cities. But the rates for argument-related homicide were twice as
high in the South. In the larger populations, southern cities had significantly
lower rates of non-argument-related homicides than those in the North, but again
had much higher rates for argument-related crimes. The increases, according to
Nisbett and Cohen, were a product of honor norms favoring violent retaliation in
response to personal insults and challenges.
What’s behind the connection between honor and this particular brand of
violence? Why do people in honor cultures have such different behavioral,
emotional, and physiological reactions to insults? I discussed this question
briefly in the previous chapter, but it’s worth returning to Nisbett and Cohen’s
account in more detail. The authors proposed that norms and dispositions for
violence tend to emerge under specific ecological and social conditions typically
found in herding or pastoral societies. Some features of these environments
include the following:
1. Less cooperation between strangers and fewer anonymous interactions period. The
cooperation that occurs in these societies is primarily within tight-knit groups and
among kin.
2. Precarious wealth and livelihood. Protecting resources is crucial for survival, and raids
or thefts can destroy the wealth of an entire family or group.
3. Little or no reliable protection from the state. The societies tended to be relatively
lawless in comparison with industrialized or agricultural communities.
Norms of aggression and a higher sensitivity to insult have vital functions in
environments with these features. Since the benefits of thefts are higher, people
have more incentive to use insults as a probe for weakness. Failure to respond to
insults or challenges makes you a more attractive mark for a theft or a raid. If
you develop a reputation for weakness, you’ll signal to potential thieves that
you’re incapable of defending your animals. If, on the other hand, you develop a
reputation as a hair-trigger retaliator, outraged at the slightest provocation,
offenders are far less likely to take advantage of you. It’s not worth the risk.
Having a violent reputation is like having a guard dog. When burglars see the
dog, they’ll move on to the next house, the one without the dog. Of course,
developing a violent reputation carries risks of its own, but they’re outweighed
by the prospect of losing your property, wealth, and livelihood in a single raid.
In honor cultures, emotions and norms work together to make people more
inclined to act violently in response to insults. The southerners in the “asshole”
experiment were angrier and more stressed than the northerners. And they were
more likely to endorse norms for violent behavior in the written scenarios.
According to the best evolutionary models, cultural norms evolve within
societies to adapt to the demands of the environment. Cultures tend to have
norms that help them cooperate, survive, and reproduce in the part of the world
in which they live. But people don’t think of norms in such pragmatic terms.
Once norms get entrenched, we observe them for their own sake, not merely for
their instrumental value. If you’re in an honor culture, you’ll believe that
backing down from a challenge is cowardly, that standing up for yourself is
simply the right thing to do. Emotions reinforce these convictions. After backing
down, you’ll actually feel greater shame than someone from a nonhonor culture.
There is plenty of social pressure to conform to these aggressive norms too.
In the Corsican honor culture, people who don’t avenge offenses are “the target
of the whisperings of his relatives and the insults of strangers, who reproach him
publicly for his cowardice.” A man who doesn’t punish the person who deceives
his daughter “can no longer appear in public. Nobody speaks to him; he has to
remain silent.” Among the Albanian highlanders, “A man slow to kill his enemy
was thought ‘disgraced’ and was described as ‘low class’ and ‘bad.’… [H]e
risked finding that other men had contemptuously come to sleep with his wife,
his daughter could not marry into a ‘good’ family.” The Japanese warrior culture
of Bushido compels cowards to commit ritual suicide. “Death before dishonor”
is a common proverb across many honor societies.
Men are usually the ones who perform the violence in honor cultures, but
women are central to transmitting and reinforcing the norms of violent behavior
in the face of challenges or insults. Women vigilantly hold the men to account
and make sure they don’t back down out of cowardice. As William Ian Miller
writes, the women in honor cultures understand that “man is more naturally
chicken than wolf.” They devote massive cultural resources to motivating acts of
revenge to overcome this resistance and remember past wrongs. “People,” Miller
writes, “especially the women in those cultures, would not let you forget, though
sometimes they might let you forgive when prudence not only was a sensible
policy but could be made to look like an honorable one too.” In ancient Greece,
women performed mourning rituals after a killing to inflame the men’s passions
for retaliation. The maidens of Sparta sang songs of ridicule to humiliate anyone
who displayed cowardice on the battlefield. When a Spartan warrior accused of
being a “trembler” returned to the city, “the pretty young girls clustered around
him, mocking him and defaming him with these anthems of shame.” And if they
ran to their mothers? A Spartan mom would lift up her skirt to her son and say:
“Where are you running—back here from whence you came?” In many
impoverished urban neighborhoods, mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters
believe they must drill messages like “Don’t punk out” and “Respect yourself”
to their children for their own protection. Mothers and fathers sometimes punish
children for not being sufficiently aggressive. If a child loses a fight, a parent
might respond, “Don’t come in here crying that somebody beat you up; you
better get back out there and whup his ass. I didn’t raise no punks. If you don’t
whup his ass, I’ll whup yo’ ass when you come home.”
So the norms for aggression in honor cultures are reinforced on every level,
through the community, the family, and an individual’s emotions and hormone
levels. Consequently, honor norms can be “sticky”—meaning that they don’t
necessarily change when the environment around them changes. Most
southerners these days aren’t herders, with their entire livelihood at risk from a
single theft or raid. They aren’t oppressed; they don’t live in a lawless society.
Nevertheless, they continue to abide by the traditional norms of hospitality,
politeness, and violence in response to insult.
So far, I’ve given you the descriptive story, an explanation of the connection
between honor and violence. But the morality of these norms for aggression is an
open question. Most of us don’t live in pastoral environments. Most of us don’t
have livelihoods that depend on developing a violent reputation. Does this
suggest that we would do better to rid ourselves of honor values and the violent
norms that typically come with them? In the remainder of this chapter, I’ll argue
that the answer is a qualified no.
Is Violence Immoral?
Ethicists tend to equate violence with moral wrongness as a default, and it’s easy
to see why. Violence causes harm and suffering. Therefore, violence is wrong.
Since honor often promotes and even celebrates acts of violence, we should
reject honor as immoral as well. But matters are not so simple, morally speaking.
Suppose Pinker is right that the “civilizing process,” the transformation from
honor cultures to dignity cultures, has led to a decline of violence. We can’t
evaluate the decline in isolation—lower rates of violence have moral costs that
must be factored in as well. Large nonviolent societies require a powerful state
and a massive law enforcement apparatus. They need Leviathans at every level
—schools, workplaces, national and local communities—and the Leviathans
come with a steep moral downside. Take, for example, the zero-tolerance
policies in schools that were put in place to eliminate school violence like
fighting and bullying. Yes, they produced a reduction of school violence, but
they’ve also led to a proliferation of student suspensions and created a school-toprison pipeline for low-income students. Meanwhile, the ever-increasing public
demand to keep violent criminals off the street has produced a deeply unfair
prison system and the highest prison population in human history. One of the
great self-serving myths in the United States is that if we just eliminated prison
sentences for low-level drug crimes, we would get our prison population under
control. In reality, drug sentences are responsible for 16 percent of prisoners in
state prisons, and only 5–6 percent of that group are both low level and
nonviolent. The explosion of the US prison population is the result of
prosecutors responding to panic about the violent crime wave in the 1970s and
’80s. True reform requires that we shorten or eliminate sentences for violent
criminals, something even the best-intentioned people seem reluctant to do.
So that’s one complication to the story: the moral costs of eliminating
violence from society. Here’s another: most acts of violence are morally
motivated. This is what Alan Fiske and Tage Rai argue in their excellent 2015
book, Virtuous Violence. Of course, Fiske and Rai are anthropologists; they’re
not making ethical judgments about the violence. Their thesis is purely
descriptive: people who act violently are usually driven by moral motives rather
than selfish ones. According to Fiske and Rai, morality is about regulating
relationships, and human beings employ four basic frameworks for regulating
their relationships. The first involves acting within a community. The second
involves acting within a hierarchy. The third involves issues of fairness and
equality. And the fourth involves proportionality and market exchange. The
motives for violent behavior, they argue, almost always come out of these four
frameworks for regulating relationships.
Of course, “morally motivated” doesn’t mean “morally correct.” According
to Fiske and Rai’s account, even something as abhorrent as honor killings counts
as morally motivated. Families rarely want to kill a daughter, sister, or cousin
suspected of having extramarital sex. But they feel obligated to restore their
honor within the community; they feel it’s their moral duty. So for Fiske and
Rai, it counts as morally motivated. (And the same goes for most gang violence,
corporal punishment of children, and even many cases of rape.) From our
perspective, honor killings are plainly immoral, ethically off-the-table, whether
they are motivated by moral considerations or not. For many other cases of
honor-related violence, however, it’s helpful to understand the motives behind
the behavior in order to properly evaluate it.
Consider, for example, a famous recent case of honor-related violence:
Zinedine Zidane’s head butt in the 2006 World Cup final, an act that led to a red
card and his ejection in the final game of his career. Again, I’ll turn to my
running foil, social psychologist and honor scold Ryan Brown. Brown uses this
case as an example of the pathology that comes from embracing an “honor
ideology.” Here is Brown’s account of Zidane’s action:
From most people, a head-butt to the chest would not amount to much, but from Zidane
it was a stunner, knocking Materazzi to the ground. What provoked the assault that led
to Zidane being ejected from the game? Was it a racial slur, as many speculated in the
days that followed? Did Materazzi call Zidane a terrorist or something equally
obnoxious? No and no. It turns out, Materazzi insulted Zidane’s sister. For someone
like Zidane, steeped in the honor culture of his parents’ homeland of Algeria, such an
insult is greater than a racial slur, and it cannot be ignored—even if not ignoring it
means getting ejected from the final game of the World Cup, and the last game of your
career. Even if it means your team loses that final game (which they did). Stained
honor must be cleansed. Asked about whether he would be willing to apologize to
Materazzi almost four years later, Zidane’s response was classic honor syndrome:
“Never. It would be to dishonor me.… I’d rather die.”
For Brown, it’s obvious that Zidane acted wrongly. France ended up losing
the match, and Zidane’s ejection might have cost them a World Cup. And many
commentators following the incident agreed, writing that Zidane was selfish to
retaliate in that manner. He let down the country, they wrote, all because he
couldn’t shrug off a childish insult to his family. But calling the act “selfish” is
clearly a mistake. Zidane didn’t benefit from his ejection. The last thing he
wanted was to get ejected from the World Cup final, the final game of his career,
knowing that his team had to play a man down, at a distinct disadvantage. What
Zidane faced was a moral dilemma, with conflicting duties from within the
community framework. Zidane had a duty to help France’s team win the
championship. But he also had a duty to defend the honor of his sister—to make
his family proud, to make his hometown proud.
Many people recognized the complexity of the incident. In fact, in the days
following the incident, much of the condemnation focused on Materazzi, who
had baited Zidane the whole match, insulting his family and calling his sister a
whore. In an interview on the French television station Canal Plus, Zidane
apologized for getting ejected but said he didn’t regret doing what he did. He
had shrugged off many of the Italian’s insults throughout the match, but the dam
broke when he insulted Zidane’s family: “I would rather have taken a punch in
the jaw than have heard that.” Indeed, it was Materazzi who apologized for the
incident, not Zidane, and he made sure to clarify which member of Zidane’s
family he had insulted. “What annoyed me most,” Materazzi said later in an
interview, “was that some supporters or journalists said that I insulted his
mother. I would never have allowed myself to offend his mother, because I lost
mine a long time ago.”
Opinion on Zidane was split in Europe and in the United States, but not in the
Marseille urban ghetto where Zidane grew up. They loved it. To them, Zidane’s
head butt was a source of pride, not shame. Insults to family members can’t just
be let go, even if it hurts your team’s chances of winning the World Cup. Further
interviews revealed just how much the act was rooted in Zidane’s ties to his
community. “It’s hard to explain,” Zidane said, “but I have a need to play
intensely every day, to fight every match hard. And this desire never to stop
fighting is something else I learnt in the place where I grew up. And, for me, the
most important thing is that I still know who I am. Every day I think about
where I come from and I am still proud to be who I am: first, a Kabyle [a Berber
region of Algeria] from La Castellane, then an Algerian from Marseille, and then
a Frenchman.”
The pride was reciprocated. An Algerian sculptor created a fifteen-foot
bronze sculpture of the incident. (The sculpture was placed in the Centre
Pompidou museum in Paris, indicating that the French fans were not on board
with the sanctimonious condemnation of many commentators.) And Zidane’s
mother told a British newspaper, “Our whole family is deeply saddened that
Zidane’s career should end with a red card but at least he has his honor. Some
things are bigger than football.”
Now, I’m not saying that Zidane clearly did the right thing, although I lean in
that direction. The point is that evaluating the act requires taking many factors
into account: Zidane’s character, his pride, his toughness, and his loyalty to his
family, hometown, heritage. You have to consider the whole moral package.
And look: Materazzi wasn’t seriously hurt, and the act didn’t lead to a long-
running feud; at worst, it cost France a World Cup. It’s a tough moral call,
because there were strong moral considerations on both sides.
Maybe you don’t find this case as tough as I do. Well, then, consider a
context where honorable violence is not just morally motivated but also morally
commendable—more virtuous than nonviolent alternatives. Living under
conditions of oppression, for example. Dignity doesn’t have much to recommend
for the oppressed. Dignity is passive; it tells us to respect others and not to
violate their rights. Okay, but how should we respond when our rights are
violated? On that question, dignity is silent, and honor has a lot to say. Honor
says, “You should be prepared to fight and even to die to preserve your selfrespect and the respect of others in your group.”
It’s no accident, then, that oppressed groups often appeal to honor rather than
dignity to battle oppression and fight for respect from the larger society. In her
book Liberalism with Honor, political theorist Sharon Krause offers many
examples, including this moving account of how Frederick Douglass used honor
to conquer his own sense of himself as a slave. The turning point for Douglass
was an act of resistance against a vicious master named Covey. One day, after a
brutal beating, Douglass resolved to defend and protect himself the next time
Covey attacked him. Krause quotes from Douglass’s autobiography:
I now forgot my roots, and remembered my pledge to stand up in my own defense.…
Whence came the daring spirit necessary to grapple with a man who, eight and forty
hours before, could, with his slightest words have made me tremble like a leaf in a
storm, I do not know; at any rate, I resolved to fight, and what was better still, I was
actually hard at it. The fighting madness had come upon me, and I found my strong
fingers firmly attached to the throat of my cowardly tormentor; as heedless of
consequences, at the moment, as though we stood equals before the law.… The
cowardly tyrant asked if I “meant to persist in my resistances.” I told him “I did mean
to resist, come what might.”
After two hours, Covey gave up the contest, huffing and puffing. Trying to
rescue his own dignity, Covey said, “Now you scoundrel, go to your work; I
would not have whipped you half so much as I have had you not resisted.” But
as Douglass writes, “The fact was, he had not whipped me at all.”
Douglass regarded his act of violent resistance as a watershed moment: “It
rekindled in my breast the smoldering embers of liberty… and revived a sense of
my own manhood.” Fighting back allowed him to reclaim his honor, Krause
says, “in the sense that it made him respectable in his own eyes and in the eyes
of ‘human nature’ itself.” Human nature, writes Douglass, “is so constituted that
it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him.”
After slaves were freed in the United States, honor continued to motivate
African Americans in their struggle for equality. At the outset of the twentieth
century, W. E. B. DuBois called on black Americans to “sacrifice money,
reputation, and life itself on the altar of right… to reconsecrate ourselves, our
honor, and our property to the final emancipation of the race for whose freedom
John Brown died.” Even Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader most
associated with nonviolent resistance, expressed the same opposition to
gradualism and the same readiness to die for his cause. “As much as I deplore
violence,” he wrote, “there is one evil that is worse than violence, and that’s
cowardice.” King went further: “No man is free if he fears death.”
Another group who turned to honor in response to persecution are the Jews of
eastern Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jews at that time
and place were subject to continual maltreatment, forced to live in filthy ghettos,
separate from the rest of society. They were denied economic opportunities and
access to culture, legal redress, and basic human services. According to legal
scholar Orit Kamir, pre-Zionist rabbinic Jews conceptualized these abuses as a
kind of cosmic trial, a purifying punishment from the heavens. They saw
themselves as victims and martyrs, suffering for the glory of God. The founder
of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, on the other hand, denounced this attitude. He
declared it passive, submissive, cowardly, and feminine. He reformulated Jewish
oppression as a national humiliation, a disgrace to Jewish honor. Honor doesn’t
encourage seeing yourself as a victim and leaving it at that. Honor regards being
victimized as shameful and motivates you to restore your wounded pride.
Once Herzl embraced this logic, one of his first actions was to challenge a
leading anti-Semite to a public duel. He would either live and restore Jewish
honor or die and show that Jews were as brave as anyone else—that they
preferred death to dishonor and disrespect. Herzl rejected incremental solutions
like gradual settlement in Palestine: Rather, “Jews were to think big, to practice
bold and risky self-assertion, to seek sweeping solutions that would alter their
situation in one fell swoop.” They would proclaim these aims to the world no
matter what the risk to the fragile Jewish infrastructure in Ottoman Palestine.
And they would rid themselves of their “blighted physiognomy.” They would
nurture physical courage with rewards of medals and prizes for those who
displayed it. Herzl, in other words, used all the tools of honor—shame, pride,
public recognition, rewards, and medals—to strengthen resolve among an
oppressed people to fight back against the persecutors.
In addition, as we’ve seen in previous chapters, honor encourages collective
identification, which is a crucial component of group resistance. For this reason,
many black leaders in the United States have long been suspicious of so-called
respectability politics. To Black Power leaders like Stokely Carmichael and
Charles Hamilton, respectability politics means rejecting your identity as a black
person and striving to become “white.” Black people who do this “are required
to denounce—overtly or covertly—their black race, they are reinforcing racism
in this country.” Carmichael and Hamilton reject the morality of dignity’s focus
on the individual, stripped of his or her group affiliation. In their view, the power
of oppressed groups derives from what it could do as a collective. The nature of
oppression makes it difficult to combat alone. By dividing the group into
individual atomic units, you drain the power of a movement’s resistance.
Herzl understood this too when he conceptualized the persecution of Jews in
eastern Europe as humiliating and dishonorable for all Jews. This connection can
cross national borders, enlisting anyone who identifies with the group to help the
cause. In my interview with honor scholar William Ian Miller, he told me a good
story about the famous Jewish gangster Bugsy Siegel. Siegel was approached by
fund-raisers for the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization, in the early
twentieth century: “And Bugsy,” Miller says, “he don’t know from nothing
about the Haganah. So they explain to him who they are and say, ‘We need guns.
We need weapons.’ And Bugsy says, ‘You mean Jews are killing people?’ They
say, ‘Well, yeah, we have to; we’re fighting.’ Bugsy says, ‘Jews are killing
people?’ And he writes them a check.”
With Herzl, there seems to have been an element of calculation in his
decision to reject the idea of persecution as “heavenly purification.” More often,
honor norms and values emerge naturally and get integrated because of their
effectiveness. The norms shape emotional dispositions and are shaped by them
in turn. A “fighting madness” came over Douglass when he refused to back
down against the cruel slave owner. But then Douglass recognized the
importance of his honorable resistance and embraced a norm for this kind of
behavior. It then became a guiding norm for Douglass as he formed a resistance
movement.
Under conditions of oppression, then, violent honor norms can be moral
goods, providing the clearest—and at times the only—path to collective
resistance, self-respect, and the respect of the oppressors. In recent times, people
have also turned to violence to combat the alienating effects of inequality and
modernization. The past few decades have seen the rise of backyard bareknuckled brawling, fight clubs, and other forms of illegal “sport fighting”—a
response to the highly rationalized controlling forces of the modern state.
Fighting, according to the participants, provides a way for them to get respect
that’s absent in their jobs and their daily experience. When they fight, they feel
in control, however temporarily, over their destinies. Academics in particular
have trouble understanding this perspective. Philosophers may not have high
salaries, but we get tremendous autonomy, a relatively high degree of control
over our day-to-day affairs, compared to other professions. Most people,
especially people in poverty, don’t have that autonomy and turn to violence as a
form of liberation. “Fighting is the ticket, brother,” explains an underground
fighter. “When I step in that cage nothing is holding me back.… I can let go of
everything pent-up inside that I have no control of. I like having the power.…
My whole life has been dictated for me, where I go to school, what sports I play,
how I live.” Another fighter, only eighteen years old, says: “I’ve got school on
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursdays. After school I work, and on my days off I
work, or I study, or I see my family. Sometimes I feel that my entire day is full
of things others have told me to do.” Although these people aren’t battling
organized forms of oppression, they nevertheless see honorable (and largely
contained) violence as a form of liberation and control in a society that doesn’t
respect them.
But now let’s consider another case, one that may be harder to square with
the idea of virtuous violence—bar fights among the white working class in the
South. Sociologist Heath Copes has studied the attitudes and values of white
men living in and outside Lafayette, Louisiana. He and his colleagues
interviewed men between the ages of twenty-two and forty-eight who had been
in multiple fights as adults, including at least one fight in the past three months.
They found that the men typically operated according to a shared code of
acceptable violence. The code was imbued with significant meaning “as a
reflection of inner integrity and honor.” They thought of themselves as “peaceful
warriors” who didn’t seek out violent confrontations but didn’t back down from
them either.
It’s an honor code through and through: stand up to aggression, never take
insults lying down, prove that you’re not a coward. The code calls for loyalty,
expressed through acts of courage. One interviewee named Kevin puts it like
this: “It’s important to show who you are as a man, how you feel about yourself,
and how you feel about your friends and loved ones, that you’re there to protect
them. People, even your friends, need to know that you’re there for them… that
you have the strength to stand up for yourself and kinda prove you’re a man.”
Emotions like pride, shame, and guilt—all tied to the ideal of manhood—
function to enforce the code. When asked how he would feel if he didn’t fight
after being insulted, Kevin answered, “I’d feel guilty. I’d feel weak. I’d feel like
I let myself down. I’d feel like I let anybody else that was involved down.”
Another man, David, said: “I hate to use the word, but the word pussy comes to
mind.… That you punked out and you couldn’t handle your own business.” A
third man, Eric, answered: “That I just wasn’t a man, straight and simple. I feel
like if I’m tested and I walk away, if I didn’t fight that person or prove myself,
you know, I’d just feel real down on myself and feel like I’m kind of a coward.
There ain’t nothin’ more that I hate than feelin’ like a coward. So, if I’m tested,
I’m gonna do what I gotta do to not feel like a coward.”
Critics of honor often point to attitudes like these as examples of “toxic
masculinity,” a pathology that causes men to try to expose weakness and
dominate the people around them. But the code of these Lafayette southerners
doesn’t encourage domination, just active resistance to the domination of others.
They distinguished themselves from “agro dudes that have something to prove
and go out looking for trouble.” In fact, they didn’t even consider themselves to
be violent. They were peaceful warriors, not “thugs” and “violent people.” A
man named Renee explained: “Guys that work out and they just go out to the
bars with their tight shirts that show their muscles, and they get drunk, and they
go out, they lookin’ for a fight. That’s why they go out that night. You can tell
when you see ’em. You know they lookin’ for something. That’s the type of
people that I think are like street people, thugs, you know. I consider them
violent people.” The code, in other words, imposes constraints on violent
behavior. All the interviewees strongly condemned those men who used violence
for robberies and other crimes or who fought just to demonstrate violent
prowess. The code promotes fighting only for legitimate reasons.
The Lafayette men did express concern for their reputations and their roles in
the social hierarchy. But the concern with hierarchy was more defensive than
ambitious. Multiple respondents, according to Copes et al., “made reference to
primitive man or the animal kingdom to show that physical confrontation and
dominance contests are natural.” They believed that the self-respect that comes
from defending yourself physically “will expand and trickle through all aspects
of your life.” Otherwise, “you would be equal to a sitting duck. The same way
sharks smell blood and animals smell fear. People see fear and capitalize on it.
You know big fish, little fish kind of thing.” Fighting was a way of establishing
their place in the natural pecking order. The goal wasn’t to rise to the top, but
simply to maintain a respectable position within the social order. Most
participants, according to Copes and his colleagues, placed themselves in the
middle range of fighting ability and said they weren’t particularly tough guys.
Like many honor codes of ritualized violence, the Lafayette code regarded
fights as far more likely to defuse violent conflicts than to prolong them. The
fights, according to participants, often functioned to settle bad blood and prevent
resentments from lingering. Copes et al. write: “Fighting also was perceived as
cathartic. Adversaries can release the stress of tense situations with a flurry of
punches. After the violence, emotions settle. Even on the losing side of the fight,
these men accepted that they could resolve conflicts with violence and that it
could prevent lasting conflict. Indeed, most believed that dangerous animosity
was unlikely to last beyond the incident. In their circles, fights happen, and in
most cases, people get over them.” Even the losers of fights would share this
perspective. One of them, Cain, explained that “if you’re the person who starts it
and you end up getting your ass handed to you, you get what you deserve. You
feel stupid you know, but you know you had it comin’.”
The code has a blend of pragmatic and principled aspects. The men believed
that standing up to challenges is virtuous and honorable in and of itself. But they
also recognized the practical value of fighting as a deterrent. If you don’t fight
when insulted, said Fred, “you’re laying the foundation to get beat up again,
picked on, taken advantage of, or exploited later.” Dana offered an example of
someone who repeatedly hit on his wife: “I told him to back off, and he didn’t so
I knocked him out. After that he never fucked with her again.… [The police]
wouldn’t have solved anything. Really, I solved it. Maybe it wasn’t the way
everybody wants it to be handled, but it was handled. I got my point across and it
never happened again.” And like most honor codes, this one strongly
discouraged involving the police in personal affairs. Handle your own business;
don’t let others fight your battles.
Overall, Copes and colleagues paint a picture of a relatively high-functioning
honor code that regulates violent behavior and keeps it within reasonable
boundaries. Several elements make this happen. First and foremost is the
widespread agreement about the constraints for honorable violence. All the men,
for example, believed it was dishonorable to try to cause serious injury in a fight.
The code requires that that you give quarter once it’s clear that you’ve won the
fight and to stop fighting when opponents can no longer defend themselves. The
code demands a fair fight, meaning that combatants should be roughly the same
size and have equal numbers on both sides. There is no honor in fighting
obviously outmatched opponents. “If you can already beat somebody up,” said
Eric, “it’s not necessary for you to follow through with it.… [S]ome people,”
Eric explained, “just aren’t worth beatin’ up or fightin’ with because I don’t
want to hurt ’em and I know they really don’t want to fight in the first place.
They’re just drunk.” (As an occasional drunken shit talker with no real fighting
experience, my younger self benefited from the magnanimity of men like Eric on
a number of occasions.)
The code also discourages the use of weapons like bottles, knives, and guns,
a crucial component of limiting the costs of honor-related violence. In the
middle of the twentieth century, inner-city gang violence was much like what
Copes et al. describe in Lafayette, before a massive influx of guns turned some
urban ghettos into war zones. When the guns arrived, homicide rates
skyrocketed. Earlier I mentioned the “Boston Miracle,” a law enforcement
program that cut the Boston homicide rates by more than half in one year. The
cornerstone of the strategy was not to prevent violence. It was to prevent gun
violence. After the program was implemented, the head of Boston’s gangoutreach community burst into a meeting “practically dancing,” and he shouted,
“I just saw a fistfight! I haven’t seen a fistfight in years!”“ Fistfights were the
ultimate sign that the strategy was a success.
Of course, since the constraints of the Lafayette code are flexible and
informal, they aren’t flawlessly observed. When a friend is getting beaten up
badly, the men said they might violate the “equal numbers” rule and jump in to
help him. In addition, alcohol and drugs could lead to code violations that the
men regretted later. Eric told the interviewer, “I beat up some guy one night just
because I was intoxicated. It had nothing to do with him. It had somethin’ to do
with his family member. It had to do with a girl, and if I wouldn’t have been in
the state of mind I was in, I would’ve never done that to that person. He didn’t
deserve that.” Again, this speaks to the importance of keeping guns out of the
equation to avoid a literal arms race. If the constraints are occasionally violated,
arming yourself and showing a willingness to shoot becomes a defensive
position.
Violence Is Not a Deal Breaker
So what should we conclude? Is honor-related violence moral or immoral? I
hope at the very least I’ve convinced you that the question, framed like that, is
misguided. We can’t evaluate the morality of violence in a vacuum. We have to
look at the circumstances and the motives surrounding the violent behavior and
frame the question in proper context. We have to understand the moral costs of
policies that reduce violence—rigid school discipline and overflowing prison
populations, for example. We must also recognize the virtues of violent behavior
in some contexts and the important role it can play in battling oppression and
preserving self-respect and a sense of control in response to dehumanizing
forces. Challenges to dignity are a fact of life for almost everyone. Norms for
standing up for yourself, not backing down, are important for navigating these
challenges. Honor systems recognize that rhetoric about dignity and equal worth
is often just that, rhetoric. In the real world, we have to take risks to earn our
self-respect. This takes courage, and honor norms rightly reward courage.
Finally, recall from Chapter Three that conflicts—both violent and nonviolent—
are important for maintaining relationships in an increasingly segmented society.
Conflicts provide opportunities for active participation and engagement with
other human beings. They reconnect us with others, allowing individuals and
communities to discover who they are, what they’re made of, what they believe
and feel. Honor-based conflict without insults leads to greater cooperation. As
Nils Christie puts it, “Conflicts might kill, but too little of them might paralyze.”
It’s impossible to completely eliminate violence without also reducing
productive community-building conflict.
On the other hand, we can’t be blind to the massive costs that result from the
violence in the modern world either. Violent codes sometimes come with their
own honorable constraints, but not always. Norms that encourage violence are
hard to control, especially when deadly tools like guns are introduced into the
mix. The gang wars in Chicago and other urban areas show what happens when
the constraints are absent. It’s essential for third-party authorities to find ways of
minimizing the costs of violence—fistfights over gunfights. The same norms
that promote a healthy virtuous form of courage in some contexts can lead to
bloodshed and tragedy in others.
Ultimately, then, we can’t deliver a decisive moral verdict on something as
complex as violence. We can, however, rule out the simple syllogism “Honor
values lead to more violence; therefore, honor values should be rejected.” The
crucial questions going forward are as follows: How much violence is acceptable
given the costs of reducing it? And how can we contain the violence that exists
and harness it toward virtuous ends? In the next chapter, we’ll examine one
virtuous end of violence: revenge.
CHAPTER 5
HONOR AND REVENGE
Honor cultures are sometimes referred to as “revenge cultures,” because of their
enthusiasm for the practice. Critics of honor point to this association as another
reason to reject honor in favor of dignity. But revenge has many virtues, and the
source of these virtues lies in the very features that moralists condemn about it:
revenge is costly, revenge is risky, revenge is personal. Because of these
features, the act of revenge can demonstrate personal qualities such as courage,
self-respect, loyalty, and even love. Revenge has a dark side, however, and is
often difficult to contain. How can we harness what’s good about revenge
without suffering its unacceptable costs?
“She Won’t Be Smirking Soon”
My daughter Eliza’s basketball team, the Mavs (the one that got a trophy after
going 0–12), was truly atrocious. None of the girls could shoot, pass, handle the
ball, or play any kind of team defense. Somewhere between 90 and 100 percent
of their offensive possessions resulted in a turnover or a jump ball. Eliza’s
offensive game was even more hopeless than the others, but she took pride in her
defense. The coach called her “Axe.” She would hound and exasperate the girl
she was guarding through sheer effort. She was our shutdown defender, usually
keeping the margin of defeat within ten or fifteen points. But then came the
Rockets on the schedule. The Rockets were good, and they knew how to set
picks. Eliza had never played anyone who knew how to set picks. Suddenly, her
best attribute, her only real way of contributing to the team, was neutralized. At
halftime Eliza was close to tears in frustration after chasing their shooter around
the court and repeatedly running into a girl twice her size in the process. Even
worse, this team had an attitude. They were physical, they could run a fast break,
and they talked trash. Their redheaded shooter, the one Eliza tried to guard, was
a Steph Curry fan; she’d put two fingers to her lips and kiss the sky every time
she hit a shot. That day Eliza’s Mavs were beaten even worse than normal, and
the Rockets crowed about it.
Eliza was crying in the car on the way home. “That girl, she was making
mean faces at me… and she pinched me when I was guarding her,” she told me.
“I don’t know—she just had a little style. I kinda liked her,” I said to her
horror. “Look, they’re a physical team, they weren’t doing anything illegal, and
if you don’t want them to do that again, work on your defense and next time
don’t give up any easy points.”
Eliza looked at me skeptically. But a seed had been planted.
As it happened, the Rockets were on the schedule the next weekend too—
back-to-back games. In the week in between, the coach taught Eliza how to set
picks, and she and I worked on how to fight through them on defense. The next
weekend we arrived a little late, so Eliza didn’t get into the game until near the
end of the first quarter. I’ll now quote from an essay Eliza wrote about this game
—called “Payback”—for a 100 percent accurate account of what happened next:
I look over to the girl, the horrible girl, who seemed like the meanest person ever at
that moment, and she had a little smirk on her face.
She’s won’t be smirking soon!
I was right. Within 20 seconds, that mean little girl was face down in the floor.
I saw it happen. As soon as Eliza checked in, the redheaded girl started
streaking down the court for yet another layup. Eliza… stopped her. It was a
hard foul from the sweetest, gentlest soul I know. Later in the half, Eliza went to
set a pick of her own on that girl who was twice her size. She got there one half
step too late and was called for a moving pick. But the girl hit the floor and Eliza
stayed up on her feet. (It was a ticky-tack call too.) In the third quarter, after
maybe nine minutes of playing time, Eliza fouled out—the first player to do that
all year. The Mavs lost the game 32–2. On the ride home this time, Eliza had the
widest grin I’ve ever seen.
Ah, revenge. Like so many practices associated with honor, revenge has been
dismissed as irrational, selfish, and barbaric—a form of “wild justice” (in
Francis Bacon’s words) that has no place in a civilized society. This mentality is
pervasive, even among laypeople. “I don’t want revenge—I want justice” is the
common and expected refrain from victims about their offenders. We say all
this, yes, but we don’t seem to believe it in our hearts. Revenge has been the
most popular genre of literature, drama, and myth since Homer, and it’s the most
popular film genre today. We root for the avengers in these stories, and we’re
unsatisfied if the payback never comes. Even in cultures of dignity, people love
revenge stories. In one breath, “I don’t want revenge—I want justice.” In
another, “If there’s no revenge, there’s no justice.”
Western moralists try to explain away our attraction to revenge as a safe
outlet for our darker animal impulses. We love revenge stories, they say, because
the stories allow us to indulge our primitive desires and passions without
suffering the terrible consequences that these desires normally produce. But this
view is inaccurate or at best incomplete. Revenge is appealing because it’s an
expression of human virtues like courage, loyalty, self-respect, and even love.
We’re attracted to revenge because other more rational, calculated, or forwardlooking responses to wrongdoing often seem morally deficient in comparison.
We’ll begin by briefly examining these alternatives and clearing up some
common misconceptions about revenge in the process. Next we’ll look at three
revenge stories—one from myth, one from literature and film, and one from real
life—that illustrate the virtues of honorable vengeance. Finally, we’ll reckon
with the costs of retaliation and its potential to corrupt the honor of avengers. I’ll
conclude with some reflections on connections between revenge and criminal
punishment, which will take us into the following chapter on justice.
Revenge Versus Retribution
Cultures of dignity are unanimous in condemning revenge but split over how to
handle criminal wrongdoing. Since the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, two opposing theories of punishment have dominated the
philosophical and legal landscape: utilitarianism and retributivism. Utilitarians
claim that we’re justified in punishing criminals for practical reasons: criminal
punishment provides benefits for society, such as crime prevention, deterrence,
and rehabilitation. In the early to mid-twentieth century, the justice system
operated largely according to utilitarian and rehabilitation principles. But the
mood changed in the late sixties and early seventies. You can see the shift in the
novels and films of that period—such as One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and A
Clockwork Orange—dark satires of state-enforced rehabilitation of criminals.
People were disturbed by the idea of criminals being rehabilitated against their
will to conform with the existing norms of society; it was a disturbing vision and
seemed to violate individual autonomy. You can also see the shift in vigilante
thrillers like Dirty Harry and Death Wish. Ethicists couldn’t extinguish that
lingering feeling that people who commit crimes should be punished even when
it brings no benefits for society at all, but simply because they deserve it. And so
began what’s known in criminological circles as the “retributivist revival,”
which is still with us to this day, especially in the United States.
Whereas utilitarians focus on the future, retributivists focus on the past.
According to retributivists, we’re justified in punishing criminals not for
pragmatic or forward-looking reasons, but because they deserve to suffer for the
immoral actions they have performed. This principle seems to capture two
widespread intuitions about justice: first, that criminals should suffer for
wrongdoing independent of the consequences and, second, that innocent people
shouldn’t be punished even if the punishment would provide benefits for society.
As theorists, however, retributivists have some explaining to do. Specifically,
they have to explain why wrongdoers deserve to suffer even when their suffering
does not contribute to overall well-being. As we’ll see in the next chapter, this is
a difficult and maybe impossible task. The theoretical problem led to a practical
one as well. Since retributivists had no satisfying account of the concept of
desert (that is, deservingness), critics attacked it as an empty concept, a
rhetorical disguise. Retribution, the critics said, is simply revenge dressed up to
look respectable.
So now retributivists had to distance themselves and to draw a clear
distinction between revenge (bad) and retribution (good). Harvard philosopher
and retributivist Robert Nozick laid out five alleged differences between the two,
and several are worth examining because they reflect some common
misconceptions about revenge. For example, Nozick writes that retribution “sets
an internal limit to the amount of punishment, according to the seriousness of the
wrong, whereas revenge internally need set no limit to what is inflicted.” This is
a total distortion of revenge and a bizarre one at that. The plots of ancient
revenge epics like the Iliad and tragedies like the Oresteia revolve around
questions of the proper measure of revenge. The central concern in the honor
code of the Albanian Kanun is to set appropriate limits for retaliation. The
commonly misunderstood talionic “eye for an eye” principle from the Law of the
Twelve Tables is actually a call for restraint. If you lose an eye, take no more
than the other person’s eye. Don’t take both eyes; don’t take an ear; don’t kill
them. Just take an eye and be on your way. Determining the appropriate
boundaries of revenge is an obsession in virtually all honor cultures. And as
we’ll see in the following chapter, their approach to the question of
proportionality is far more plausible than anything retributivists have to offer.
Another of Nozick’s distinctions is largely accurate, although he takes the
wrong lesson from it: “Revenge is personal,” he writes, “[w]hereas the agent of
retribution need have no special or personal tie to the victim of the wrong for
which he exacts.” Nozick is right that revenge by its nature is private and
personal. And if anything, Nozick’s claim about retribution isn’t strong enough.
It’s not merely that the agent of retribution need not have a personal tie to the
victim. The agent of retribution should not have a personal tie to the victim.
Retribution is supposed to carry out impartial justice. Where I differ with Nozick
on this distinction is that he sees it as a point in retribution’s favor. I do not, but
more on that in Chapter Six.
Nozick gets back to straw-manning revenge in his fourth distinction.
Revenge, he claims, “involves a particular emotional tone, pleasure in the
suffering of another, while retribution either need involve no emotional tone, or
involves another one, namely, pleasure at justice being done.” One wonders
whether Nozick gets his ideas about revenge from film. Does Michael in The
Godfather take pleasure in killing the police chief for shooting his father? Does
William Muney take pleasure in killing Little Bill for torturing his friend in
Unforgiven? Or from myth—Orestes is distraught when he avenges his father by
killing his mother, Clytemnestra. Revenge can involve taking pleasure in the
suffering of the wrongdoer. But more often it’s a grim business, performed out
of duty and loyalty rather than desire. Indeed, we even have a phrase for this:
“the reluctant avenger.” And on the flip side, although Nozick again means to
praise retribution, the idea that one would take pleasure in the abstract idea of
justice by inflicting suffering seems, well, creepy at best.
Having cleared up some common misconceptions about revenge, we can
better evaluate it from a moral perspective. Enough philosophy—it’s time for
some drama. I started with a story about my daughter. Let’s examine three more,
all of which feature an avenging daughter of their own.
The Virtues of Revenge
Electra: Remembrance and Sacrifice
When it comes to twisted revenge stories, Quentin Tarantino has nothing on
whoever dreamed up the family from the House of Atreus. The lineage begins
with King Tantalus, who decided to cook his own son as a test for the gods. His
grandson Atreus topped that by chopping up, cooking, and serving all three of
his nephews to their father, his brother, Thyestes. (Thyestes had slept with
Atreus’s wife.) Our story, though, begins with Agamemnon, Atreus’s son.
Drawn into the Trojan War, Agamemnon is forced to sacrifice his daughter
Iphigenia to get favorable winds for his ships. After many years, he returns home
in triumph. His wife, Clytemnestra, murders him in his bathtub with a little help
from her lover Aegisthus: revenge for killing their daughter.
Or was it? Many characters in the story express doubts about Clytemnestra’s
motives for killing Agamemnon. In most versions of the myth, Clytemnestra and
Agamemnon had two other children—Orestes and Electra—along with the slain
Iphigenia. At the time of Agamemnon’s murder, Orestes is a small boy, but the
lover, Aegisthus, fears that he’ll become a threat to his new kingdom later in life.
Fortunately, a loyal servant saves Orestes from Aegisthus’s wrath and takes the
child into exile. Agamemnon’s daughter Electra stays on the island with her
mother and stepfather, horrified by the duplicity of her mother. She grieves
loudly and publicly for her father. In Sophocles’s play Electra—the version of
the myth that I’ll focus on here—Clytemnestra tries to convince Electra of her
righteousness: “Tell me why he sacrificed her? Why? Was it to save the
Greeks?… The dead girl, if she could speak, would take my part.” But Electra
doesn’t buy it. “Take a close look at yourself,” Electra replies. “See if you are
merely offering an excuse. Tell me why, if you could, why you are committing
an act beyond shame—sleeping with the murderer with whom you killed my
father. And you are making children with him. But you drive out your legitimate
children.… Will you argue that this too is done to pay for your daughter’s
death?” So Clytemnestra kicks her out of the palace and threatens to send her to
live in a cave if she doesn’t quit her public mourning.
After a few years, Electra decides to avenge her father by killing her mother
and stepfather. But with Orestes banished, she has little hope of infiltrating the
palace and performing the act. Sophocles’s play begins with Electra pacing,
miserable, seething with grief and rage. The chorus implores her not to waste her
life in sadness and anger. Electra replies that she has no choice. “My sorrow has
no natural limit,” she tells them. “Come, is it natural to forget the dead? In what
man is that an instinct? I seek no honor in forgetting.… For if he that is dead is
earth and nothing. If he lies there neglected, and they pay nothing back, no death
for death, then justice, shame, and piety are dead for all of mankind.”
Electra fears that if she lives easy without avenging Agamemnon, it would be
tantamount to forgetting him, to letting go of her father’s memory. Such feelings
are common in honor cultures, which see a strong connection between revenge
and memory. Women often take the lead in keeping alive the memories of slain
group members. Even today, women in parts of southern Greece sing “revenge
lullabies” to infants and toddlers so that they will remember their murdered kin.
William Ian Miller describes a ritual in the Icelandic Sagas “in which the corpse
or parts of the corpse… were employed to charge a person to avenge it.” In one
case, a wife digs up her dead husband, chops off his head, and presents it to her
uncle, who is procrastinating about avenging his brother, her husband. She tells
him that the person who once belonged to the head would have already avenged
him if the situation were reversed. Miller notes that the last words of the ghost of
Hamlet’s father in his speech urging Hamlet to avenge his death are “Remember
me.”
But back to Electra’s story. In Sophocles’s play, Electra has a sister too. Her
name is Chrysothemis, and she provides a perfect contrast in personality. Like
Electra, she hates her mother and especially her stepfather, Aegisthus. But
Chrysothemis takes a decidedly more pragmatic approach to the situation. “Will
you never learn to control your empty anger?” she says to Electra. “If I had the
strength I would show them how I felt. But in this storm I must drift with lower
sails. I must not seem to act and then fail. I wish you would do as I do.” Electra
has no patience for pragmatic thinking. She accuses her sister of cowardice and
lack of integrity: “My whole life is spent seeking vengeance for my father… yet
you do nothing to help. You discourage me. This is cowardice heaped on shame.
… I hurt them and bring honor to the dead.… But you, you say you hate. You say
it. But the fact is you live with your father’s murderers. I would never give them
the satisfaction, not if they bribed me with those gifts you revel in. Set your rich
table. Live your easy life. My inner peace is food enough for me.”
Electra’s remark here gets to the heart of one of revenge’s essential virtues.
With all of its costs and risks, taking revenge shows that you’re not all talk—that
you truly feel the anger and grief at the loss of a loved one. It also illustrates how
wrongheaded it is to think of revenge as “selfish” and how misguided it is to tell
an avenger that she won’t feel any better after the deed is done. Maybe not, but
it’s not about the avenger; it’s about paying back a debt for the victim. Revenge
can be one of the least selfish acts imaginable, for it often requires tremendous
sacrifices to bring about an outcome that doesn’t benefit the avenger in any way.
What’s fascinating about the long exchanges between the two sisters is that
Chrysothemis doesn’t come off as an unsympathetic or selfish character either.
She cares for Electra and is genuinely worried about her. She even takes a small
risk just in coming to warn Electra about her mother’s plot to harm her.
Chrysothemis isn’t deluded either. She recognizes that Electra has the moral
high ground. She concedes that “justice is on your side, not on mine.” But at a
certain point, she thinks, self-interest has to trump justice. “To die from
stupidity!” she says to Electra. “Where’s the good in that?” And it’s a good
question: How does it honor anyone to die for a hopeless cause? Later in the
play, Chrysothemis repeats her question. “Where is the freedom,” she says,
“where is the victory and glory if we die in shame?… There are times when even
justice can bring destruction.” And so they reach a standstill. “I could not live
my life on such principles,” Electra replies.
The point of this story isn’t to demonstrate the obvious superiority of
Electra’s perspective, because it’s not obviously superior. Electra often comes
across as hysterical, stubborn, sanctimonious, and overwrought. All things
considered, Chrysothemis may be right to acknowledge the near-impossible odds
of successful resistance. And if the cause is futile anyway, why not indulge in a
few luxuries that come from being the queen’s daughter? On the other hand,
given how much Electra suffers and how much of the suffering is self-imposed,
there can be no doubt about her loyalty, bravery, and commitment to honoring
her father’s memory. Through her dedication to vengeance, Electra demonstrates
genuine virtues that can’t be expressed to the same degree by taking a rational,
practical, self-interested stance.
If you want to know how Electra and Clytemnestra’s story ends, you’ll have
to wait until the next chapter. For now, though, let’s turn to our next virtuous
avenger, a prim fourteen-year-old girl named Mattie Ross.
Mattie Ross: Revenge as an Expression of Love
Mattie is a character in Charles Portis’s novel True Grit, which has also been
adapted twice for film. At the outset of the novel, we learn that Mattie’s father
has been murdered: “A coward going by the name of Tom Chaney” shot and
killed him while he was unarmed. Chaney then robbed her father and fled the
town on his horse, afraid that he would be pursued by a group of drummers who
had witnessed the murder. His fears, it turns out, were unfounded, and nobody
followed him. Chaney “had mistaken the drummers for men,” Mattie tells us.
So Mattie takes it upon herself to make Chaney pay for his crime. She uses
what remains of her family’s extra funds to travel to Little Rock and hire Rooster
Cogburn, the marshal with “true grit.” Having spent her money to hire Cogburn,
Mattie is forced to sleep in town, in a dank, cold room, on the same bed as a
snoring, wheezing, coughing old man. Soon, she becomes sick herself.
Meanwhile, a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf arrives in town. He’s also pursuing
Chaney, but for a different crime—the killing of a dog and a judge in Texas. As
Mattie makes the final arrangements, LaBoeuf offers to join up with Cogburn to
track down Chaney. Much like Chrysothemis, LaBoeuf offers a pragmatic
perspective to the situation. It would be a lot cheaper for her, he explains to
Mattie, if the two joined forces, and it would improve the chances of getting the
killer. Mattie refuses, however, because LaBoeuf’s involvement would mean
that Chaney would be tried for his crimes in Texas.
LaBoeuf laughs: “It’s not important where he hangs, is it?”
“It is to me…,” Mattie replies. “I want Chaney to pay for killing my father
and not some Texas bird dog.”
LaBoeuf implores Mattie to be sensible. “He will be just as dead that way,
you see, and pay for his crimes all at once.”
Mattie is not having it. “No, I do not see. That is not the way I look at it.”
Cogburn gives it a try too. “What you want is to have him caught and
punished,” he tells her. “We still mean to do that!”
“I want him to know he is being punished for killing my father.”
It matters to Mattie that Chaney gets punished for the crime that’s connected
to her father. LaBoeuf wants Chaney hanged in Texas so that he can get the
money. Cogburn thinks it’s enough for him to be caught and punished so that
justice is served. (Cogburn is like the retributivist here, asking Mattie to be
satisfied with abstract justice.) But Mattie doesn’t see it that way, and she’s
willing to risk her life to ensure that it doesn’t happen that way. She insists on
accompanying the two men on their mission in spite of the risk to her health and
safety.
Cogburn and LaBoeuf try to elude her by setting out at the crack of dawn.
Mattie pursues them, at one point taking her horse into a river and almost
drowning. The mission is long, hard, and dangerous. Revenge always comes
with a “satisfaction not guaranteed” clause. She’s almost killed several times. At
the end of the novel (spoiler alert), Mattie gets her revenge, shooting Chaney
herself in self-defense. But she loses her arm in the process.
Mattie’s and Electra’s stories have a lot in common: a slain father and a
young daughter in a man’s world who wants against all odds to avenge her
father’s death and will do whatever it takes to make it happen. Both stories have
a character who represents prudence and practical reasoning (LaBoeuf,
Chrysothemis) to contrast with the irrational, stubborn, costly attitudes of the
heroines—although LaBoeuf is a less sympathetic, more self-interested contrast.
Where the two stories differ sharply, however, are in the temperaments of their
heroines. Electra wears her emotions on her sleeve, scarves, and tunics. Mattie is
reserved, unsentimental, even robotic at times. (Hailee Steinfeld plays this aspect
of Mattie perfectly in the more recent film adaptation by the Coen brothers.)
Mattie doesn’t say a single word about her love for her father, except that he was
“a handsome sight” on his horse riding into town before he was shot. Yet in spite
of her reserve, no one can doubt how deep the connection was between father
and daughter, precisely because of what she endures to avenge his death. If
Mattie had stayed in Little Rock, or if the marshal and Texas Ranger had found
Chaney and brought him back to Texas, then she would have done nothing to
demonstrate her love and commitment to her father. As Electra says to
Chrysothemis, it is one thing to say you love someone and another thing to show
it. Mattie shows it. That’s what makes her a virtuous avenger.
Laura Blumenfeld: Family Pride and the Demand for Acknowledgment
I can hear you complaining now. You think I’m romanticizing revenge, that I’m
presenting an oversimplified, glorified picture of an ugly practice. I’ve picked
two famous revenge stories in which the revenge is successfully carried out with
little collateral damage, with no further cycle of violence, and in which targets of
revenge clearly deserved their fate. But in real life, revenge is messy and
destructive, and the question of who deserves what is ambiguous and complex.
There’s some truth to this objection. I’ve chosen a couple of paradigm
examples because they help illustrate the moral upside of a practice that many
believe to be morally indefensible, entirely bad. So now I want to focus on an
example from real life: Laura Blumenfeld and her revenge on the Palestinian
man who shot her father. Blumenfeld, a Washington Post reporter, relates her
account in a book called Revenge: A Story of Hope. It’s a beautiful, inspiring
memoir, and I can’t begin to do it justice here. Buy her book and bump it to the
top of your list. (Finish this one first, though.) Here are the CliffsNotes. In 1986
Blumenfeld’s father, David, was traveling to Israel as a tourist. While he was
there, a roving Palestinian Liberation Organization gang began gunning down
people in the old city. David Blumenfeld was one of the victims, shot by a gang
member named Omar. And a few years later, his daughter Laura, a quiet,
diminutive Harvard graduate from a Jewish middle-class family on Long Island,
embarked on a decade-long quest for revenge.
Since her father suffered no long-term injury and the shooter was in prison,
Blumenfeld’s obsession with revenge baffled her friends, her husband, her
brother, and even her father, who was satisfied himself that justice had been
carried out. (Anyone who says that revenge is only a man’s game is mistaken.)
Just as in the two stories above, this one features a solitary woman on a mission
to avenge a wrong against her father. Everyone around the woman wants her to
forget, to move on with her life, but she stubbornly persists. Blumenfeld’s story
even features a Chrysothemis-like character: Rachel, an economics professor at
Brown University, who gently mocks Laura’s obsession. Like most people in
Blumenfeld’s life, Rachel recommended “functional amnesia” as a response to
wrongdoing. “Forgetting was the way forward,” Blumenfeld writes. “I had seen
this reaction in other people. Rather than take revenge, they followed the
principle of maximization of expected utility: ‘What happened in the past—those
are sunk costs. It’s all about optimizing the future. How can I maximize the
present value of my future stream of net benefits.’”
But like Mattie and Electra, Blumenfeld didn’t look at it that way.
Maximizing expected utility can’t trump her sense of family honor. This
becomes explicit when Rachel asks her why she persists in this hopeless quest.
Blumenfeld, almost too embarrassed to reply, makes Rachel promise not to
laugh.
“I wanted them to know…”
“That you can’t shoot your dad?”
“No, not that… that you can’t… you can’t fuck with the Blumenfelds!…
That there’s someone you have to answer to, and I know it’s ridiculous that the
someone is me.”
In an interview with Salon, Blumenfeld elaborates on her motives. “It was
about family,” she says. “Revenge helps answer the question, who are you? You
are what you’re willing to avenge. I wanted to answer the question: Were we a
family who stood up for each other or not?… It was a way of asserting our
family’s identity.” Blumenfeld alone felt that the attack had dishonored her
family and that prison was no remedy. Revenge was the only way of restoring
their status as an honorable family that stood up for each other—a family that
you couldn’t fuck with without consequences.
So what happens? How does it end? (Major spoilers to follow.) Blumenfeld’s
capacity as a journalist enables her to gain access to many corners on the pretext
of researching a story for a book. She meets with the shooter Omar’s family
many times, concealing her identity as the victim’s daughter. In her first visit,
she asks the father why Omar shot the tourist. The father replies that he did it for
the honor of the Palestinian people, for the cause of liberation. “Anybody would
do what my brother did under those circumstances,” adds Omar’s brother Imad.
“If you pretend to be a Palestinian for five minutes, you’ll feel what we feel.”
Blumenfeld asks Imad if he’s afraid that the victim’s family will take revenge.
“No,” he replies. “There’s no revenge. My brother never met the man personally.
It’s not a personal issue. Nothing personal, so no revenge.”
Blumenfeld hears a similar sentiment from Omar in the written
correspondence she initiates with him while he’s in prison. In his first few
letters, it’s clear that he doesn’t regard the shooting as a personal wrong but
rather sees it as a necessary component of an ideological struggle. Laura is
disappointed. “Too much politics,” she writes, “not enough humanity.” This
detail is common to many revenge stories. The offender sees the original wrong
in an impersonal way, “just business,” or as a side effect, collateral damage in
service of a larger goal. The victim, in contrast, takes the act very personally.
Indeed, revenge is a demand that offenders acknowledge the personal aspect of
the wrong.
The story takes a complex turn. Blumenfeld develops a close relationship
with Omar’s family as well as with Omar himself through their correspondence.
But she remains convinced in her duty to avenge her father’s injury. But how?
At one point, Blumenfeld’s journey takes her to Iran, where she interviews the
grand ayatollah. After a few general questions about the Islamic laws of
retaliation and blood money, Blumenfeld asks, “What if a Palestinian shoots a
Jew?” The grand ayatollah replies that Palestinians can’t give blood money or be
avenged because they’re at war with the Jews. Blumenfeld presses further:
“What if he’s a tourist?” “Tourists can get blood money and revenge as long as
they’re not trying to occupy the Palestinian’s house. They are entitled to
retaliation. It’s in Islamic law.” The grand ayatollah, Blumenfeld writes, had
granted her family the right to avenge her father’s injury.
Blumenfeld finally gets her revenge at Omar’s appeals trial. The trial itself is
just a routine hearing over a technical issue concerning Omar’s health; a
favorable verdict would probably lead to an earlier release. But when it comes to
drama, the scene at the trial gives Sophocles a run for his money. Omar and his
family are both present. Blumenfeld demands to speak at the trial, a request
that’s repeatedly denied since the judges view her as just another American
journalist. Blumenfeld presses forward, and then, after more than a year of
keeping her identity secret, she reveals that she’s the victim’s daughter. Stunned
silence. Like the judges, Omar and his family were discovering the secret for the
first time.
The judges ask her why she would do such a dangerous thing, referring to her
undercover relationship with the family in Gaza. Blumenfeld replies, “I did it for
one reason. Because I love my father very much, and I wanted them to know—
he is a good man, with a good family.… I wanted them to understand, this
conflict is between human beings, and not disembodied Arabs and Jews. And
we’re people. Not ‘military targets.’ We’re people with families. And you can’t
just kill us.” Blumenfeld’s words express a demand for personal
acknowledgment and respect. Omar is moved and understandably shaken.
Blumenfeld angrily reminds him that he promised her in a letter not to hurt
anyone again: “I held onto his eyes, angry, firm, hoping that he felt ashamed:
‘This is on your honor,’ she says. ‘Between the Khatib family and the
Blumenfeld family.’” The judges are impressed but have to respect the process.
The two families (Blumenfeld’s mother attended as well) embrace after the trial.
Omar remains in prison and is released a couple of years later, after serving twothirds of his sentence.
Some might say this sounds more like a forgiveness story than a revenge
story. Blumenfeld explicitly rejects this view. At the trial, her mother stands up
and shouts that she forgives Omar. “Forgive?” Blumenfeld writes. “Why did she
use that word? This was not about forgiveness. I was not forgiving him. This
was my revenge.” It was what she calls “revenge as transformation,” which
involves the demand for acknowledgment, recognition, and empathy—not
destroying your enemy but “transforming him, and yourself.” Omar agrees:
“Laura chose a positive way of getting revenge from me. And she succeeded.”
And indeed, all the hallmarks of revenge are there. Blumenfeld makes sacrifices,
takes risks, and demonstrates loyalty and love for her father and a strong sense
of personal and family honor.
Dishonorable Revenge
In spite of what I’ve argued so far, I have no desire to return to the days of
vigilante justice. Revenge can’t function as a proper system of punishment in a
large and diverse society like our own. Too often there is collateral damage, and
there is a constant threat of escalation. The conflict that serves as the backdrop to
Blumenfeld’s story—the Palestinian and Israeli—provides so many tragic
examples. One of the worst occurred on July 2, 2014, when three Israeli settlers
—a twenty-nine-year-old man and two teenagers—drove through East Jerusalem
looking to avenge the killing of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank a few
days earlier. A suitable target of revenge, in the settlers’ minds, was someone
“lightweight,” whom they could quickly and easily force into their car. They
came across a slightly built Palestinian named Mohammad, sixteen years old,
dragged him into their Hyundai, and drove to a nearby forest. The three settlers
bludgeoned Mohammad with a wrench and then set him on fire. They sped off
as Mohammad burned to death. Although they tried to destroy all evidence, the
three suspects were caught almost immediately. An Israeli court convicted them
of murder.
As we’ve seen, honorable avengers demonstrate virtues like bravery, loyalty,
and integrity. They take risks and accept responsibility for their actions. The
three Israeli settlers showed none of these characteristics. They were cowards,
looking for a physically slight victim to make the abduction easier and less risky.
They had no personal ties to the Israeli victims and almost certainly knew that
the victims’ families would be horrified by a murder done in their names.
Indeed, Rachel Frenkel, the mother of one of the Israeli victims, called the attack
an outrage, “the shedding of innocent blood in defiance of all morality, of the
Torah, of the foundation of the lives of our boys and all of us in the country.”
The killers did not accept responsibility; they tried to burn all evidence of their
behavior. One of them pleaded insanity at the trial. You might say they
committed the act to avenge Israel, but their fellow Israelis unequivocally
condemned the act. The families of victims on both sides rejected all acts of
violence in the name of their children. Former Israeli ambassador to the United
States Michael B. Oren condemned the attacks, saying they “dishonor the
memory of our three precious boys.” If revenge is meant to honor the victim’s
memory, this murder did exactly the opposite.
The story highlights the central problem with vengeance: it’s hard to contain,
hard to get right. The passions of revenge can overwhelm the constraints that
honor imposes. This shouldn’t blind us to the moral advantages of revenge or to
the defects of a process-oriented, impersonal justice system. But any honest
account of revenge must acknowledge its deep problems too.
Dinah, Dukakis, and the Death Penalty
So what can we gather from the observations in this chapter? At the risk of
trying your patience, allow me to conclude with two more quick stories that most
readers will already be familiar with. The first is the story of Dinah, in book 34
of Genesis. Dinah visits the city of Shechem, where she is raped and kidnapped
by the ruler’s son, also named Shechem. After capturing Dinah, Shechem falls in
love and wants to marry her. So the ruler goes to Jacob, Dinah’s father, and asks
if his son can marry Dinah. The always prudent Jacob decides to make a deal. In
exchange for some land and wealth, he’ll allow Shechem to marry his daughter.
Dinah’s brothers, though, Shimon and Levi, are still “grieved and very angry”
about what happened. They say they’ll agree to the deal only if all the men of
Shechem are circumcised. Because his son is smitten with Dinah, the ruler
agrees to the amendment. Soon, all the men of Shechem are circumcised. And
three days later, “when they were in pain” (from the circumcision), Shimon and
Levi enter the town and massacre everyone, including Shechem and his father.
Jacob had been unaware of this part of the plan. “What have you done?” he
complains to the sons afterward. “Everyone will turn against us now! The
Canaanites and the Perizzites, will try to kill us. We’ll be destroyed!”
Shimon and Levi’s reply concludes book 34: “Like a whore they should treat
our sister?”
Along with several professors, I teach a class on the great books in the
Honors College at the University of Houston. Genesis was on the syllabus one
semester, and it had been a long time since I had read it. You won’t be too
surprised to learn that my colleagues and I reacted very differently to the Dinah
story. They thought the brothers’ behavior was clearly abhorrent and unjust. It’s
not an unreasonable view. Killing all of the males in the city for the actions of
one man seems disproportionate, and convincing them to get circumcised
beforehand is a macabre touch at best. On the other hand, Shimon and Levi
demonstrated a virtue with this action that had been mostly absent up to that
point in Genesis: family loyalty. Think about it: Cain and Abel are the first two
brothers, and that ends in a fratricide. Lot offers his two virgin daughters up to
be raped by a violent, horny mob. Abraham sends his wife, Sarah, to be part of
an Egyptian king’s harem not once but twice—all for his own protection. And
then he agrees to sacrifice his only son because God asks him to. Jacob and his
twin brother, Esau, started fighting in Rebecca’s womb, and later Jacob swindles
Esau out of his inheritance. And now Jacob wants to make a profitable deal with
his daughter’s rapist. So yes, Shimon and Levi’s actions may seem excessive,
but they also come as somewhat of a relief that someone is finally sticking up for
family.
The brothers’ virtue lies not just in the act of revenge—which is gruesome
and arguably disproportionate—but also in the anger that causes it. By adopting
a prudent “what’s done is done, and let’s make the best of it” approach, Jacob
shows nothing but a concern for his safety and profit. The two brothers, by
contrast, are too outraged over the treatment of their sister to engage in a costbenefit analysis. Their anger leads to a decidedly imprudent act of revenge, and
it’s the imprudence that demonstrates loyalty to their sister.
Now the second story. In the second presidential debate of 1988, CNN
moderator Bernard Shaw put candidate Michael Dukakis on the spot.
“Governor,” Shaw asked, “if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would
you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”
Dukakis replied, “No, I don’t, Bernard, and I think you know that I’ve
opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don’t see any evidence that it’s
a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with
violent crime. We’ve done so in my own state, and it’s one of the reasons why
we have had the biggest drop in crime of any industrial state in America, why we
have the lowest murder rate of any industrial state in America.”
At the time of the debate, Dukakis had been leading in the polls. Many
pundits believe this answer was the single biggest cause of Dukakis’s eventual
defeat.
After the election, the conventional wisdom held that anyone who opposed
the death penalty was unelectable. But opposition to the death penalty wasn’t the
real problem with Dukakis’s response. Rather, it was the clinical nature of his
answer to such a personal question. Like Jacob, Dukakis showed no depth of
feeling, no anger, no fierce loyalty to a close family member. Kitty has been
raped and killed, and Dukakis is worried about whether the death penalty is a
deterrent? This is no time for a cost-benefit analysis. But now imagine if this had
been Dukakis’s response:
Bernard, as you know, I’ve been against the death penalty all of my life. I don’t think
it’s the state’s business to end the lives of its citizens, no matter how heinous their
actions. And I’ll tell you something else: if Kitty had been raped and murdered, I
wouldn’t want the man executed by lethal injection fifteen years later, after dozens of
appeals and legal challenges. I’d want to track down that son of a bitch before the law
could get ahold of him and kill him myself with my bare hands. I’d think it was my job
to do it, not some district attorney or judge or jury of twelve people who didn’t even
know her. Maybe society can’t allow that to happen, but that’s what I’d want to do in
that situation.
This response would have allowed Dukakis to retain his opposition to the death
penalty and turn the tables on those who accused him of being “soft on crime.”
Now it’s the proponents of capital punishment who are clinical, cowardly, and
“by the book.” They’re the ones who want a torturous legal bureaucracy to do
what a decent husband should want to do himself. By tapping into virtuous
qualities of revenge, Dukakis could have had the best of both worlds.
Critics of the death penalty often refer to it as “legalized revenge,” but the
truth is closer to the opposite. Honor cultures, as we’ve seen, think it’s shameful
when third parties punish people who have wronged them or their families.
Revenge is personal. Most arguments against the death penalty involve
deterrence and racial bias, and thus far arguments haven’t resonated with a
majority of the US population. Is the death penalty a deterrent? Probably not, but
proponents can reply that it’s not about deterrence; it’s about justice. Is there
racial bias in how the death penalty is applied? Absolutely. But advocates can
reply that we must work to eliminate the racial bias, not prohibit the practice.
But what if, like my hypothetical Dukakis, opponents called the death penalty
dishonorable—a sign of cowardice and weakness? This challenge might have
greater resonance, especially for people in the so-called honor states where
capital punishment is most popular.
The point can broaden to the justice system as a whole. Like most issues in
modern criminal punishment, the debate over the death penalty is premised on a
fiction. When people say that “the death penalty is about justice,” they’re
appealing to an illusion, a philosophically bankrupt ideal: the existence of “blind
and impartial” justice. Honor cultures turn to revenge because they understand
that justice isn’t impartial but personal. How can we get the best of both worlds?
How can we reorient our understanding of justice to reflect what’s true and good
about revenge without incurring its unacceptable costs? That is the subject of
Chapter Six.
CHAPTER 6
HONORABLE JUSTICE
Justice, if it means anything, means getting people to feel it.
—WILLIAM IAN MILLER
Our current approach to criminal justice causes stupendous suffering for both
victims and criminals. The illusory ideal of “blind and impartial” justice is an
obstacle to effective reform. Honor-oriented justice rightly rejects this ideal. By
understanding what honor gets right about justice and what we get wrong, we
can remove these obstacles. The new movement called “restorative justice,”
which is modeled on honor-based approaches, holds great promise for improving
our system of punishment. But adopting the movement requires that we abandon
the core principles at the foundation of our current approach.
Clytemnestra’s Ghost
In case you were wondering, Electra and Orestes get their revenge on
Clytemnestra for murdering their father. For Sophocles (at least what exists of
his corpus), the tragedy ends there. But in Aeschylus’s version, Clytemnestra’s
death occurs in the second play of a trilogy known as the Oresteia. At the end of
the second play, The Libation Bearers, Orestes is on the run after killing
Clytemnestra, hunted by the ancient godlike vengeance spirits known as the
Furies. The final play, Eumenides, begins with Orestes fleeing to the oracle of
Delphi to ask the god Apollo for help.
Eumenides is famous for presenting the first official criminal trial in Greek
literature, the trial of Orestes for the crime of matricide. Most scholars interpret
the play as heralding the triumph of law-governed, democratic, impartial, real
justice over the honor and revenge-style justice in Homer’s epics and the earlier
tragedies. I’m skeptical of this interpretation. When you examine the
proceedings of the trial, it looks a lot more like a travesty of justice than a
triumph.
Here’s what happens. Athena sets up the trial with twelve randomly selected
Athenians to serve as jurors. The Furies play the role of prosecutor, and Apollo
represents the defendant, Orestes. Perhaps anticipating the modern criminal
justice system, the trial devotes most of its attention to a technicality: whether
Clytemnestra is really a parent of Orestes, whether Clytemnestra’s blood really
runs through his veins. Apollo, for the defense, argues that mother and son are
not in fact blood relatives. Why? Because children share only their father’s
blood. The mother is a mere surrogate, a vessel for the father’s blood. Orestes is
therefore innocent of matricide. His evidence? Exhibit A: the goddess Athena
herself sprang just from her father, Zeus—no mother required. “The man is the
source of life,” Apollo says, “the one who mounts” (antiquity’s version of “If it
doesn’t fit, you must acquit”).
Apollo’s argument is plainly ludicrous. In all of existence, one woman
doesn’t have a mother, and she happens to be a goddess and the daughter of the
most powerful god in the universe; therefore, no children share their mothers’
blood. Yet that’s the entirety of Orestes’s defense. The trial offers no
examination of Orestes’s motives, mitigating factors, or culpability. Instead, it
harps on irrelevant procedural details.
The jury’s verdict reflects the arbitrariness of the proceedings: a perfectly
even split, six for conviction, six for acquittal. With a hung jury, Athena breaks
the tie—she votes for acquittal. Her reasoning? “I honor the male in all things
except marriage. Yes, with all my heart I am my father’s child.” That is the socalled triumph of impartial justice. Athena is daddy’s little girl, so she’ll let
Orestes off the hook for killing his mother.
Meanwhile, what’s become of the victim during the proceedings?
Clytemnestra is dead, of course, but her ghost had been present at the beginning
of the play, telling the Furies to get off their butts and hunt down Orestes. Once
the trial begins, Clytemnestra vanishes, never to be heard from again.
Clytemnestra’s disappearance aptly reflects the place of victims in the
modern criminal justice system. The two dominant Western theories of
punishment—retributivism and utilitarianism—are polar opposites in virtually
every way but one. They both share a total indifference to victims. Once an
offense crosses the largely arbitrary line from civil to criminal trial, the conflict
changes from one between a plaintiff and a defendant to one between the
offender and “the people.” The victim is removed from the equation.
Aeschylus had no illusions about why Athens turned to a state-run judicial
system in place of family feuds. At the time that he’s writing, the Greek world
and Athens in particular are trying to form a cohesive community, a family of
their own. They’re trying to consolidate and build an empire. The intrafamily
violence in the Oresteia is a metaphor for internal discord, civil war—something
nations cannot afford during periods of international instability. “Here in our
homeland,” Athena tells the Furies, “never cast the stones that whet our
bloodlust. Never pluck the heart of a battle cock and plant it in our people—
intestine war seething against themselves. Let our wars wage on abroad, with all
their force, to satisfy our powerful lust for fame.” Take your fury, your
bitterness, and your resentment onto the battlefield. Do that, Athena says, and
you’ll be honored. If Clytemnestra can’t get justice, well, that’s a small price to
pay.
For Aeschylus, then, Orestes’s trial isn’t a triumph of impartial justice but a
compromise between personal justice and internal harmony. He was honest
about the reasons that trials should replace personal vengeance. We are not. We
have concocted theories to convince ourselves that procedural justice, “blind and
impartial” justice, is true justice. But the theories are full of empty principles on
illusory foundations. And the unjust elements of Aeschylus’s fictional trial have
gotten much worse in the present day.
Our Broken Justice System
The American criminal justice system has produced a prison population of more
than 2.3 million people. Prison conditions are atrocious and dehumanizing,
which leads to high recidivism rates (close to 70 percent for property and drug
crimes) that tear apart families and communities. Physical and sexual assault are
pervasive. The racial imbalance is indefensible. The growth of private prisons
gives corporations incentives to lobby for stricter enforcement and longer
sentences to increase the prison population. Wealthy defendants obtain highpriced lawyers to exploit the bewildering array of procedures and statutes to
benefit their clients, giving them an overwhelming advantage over poorer
defendants. Oh, and take a guess what percentage of cases get resolved through
plea bargains rather than trials. When you ask most people that question, they
usually guess somewhere between 20 and 30 percent. The actual number is 97
percent. Fewer than three in one hundred cases go to trial. The other ninetyseven are the product of attorneys negotiating settlements. If even 10 percent of
defendants took their cases to trial, the system would collapse from lack of
personnel to adjudicate them.
This gruesome state of affairs causes stupendous suffering for both criminals
and victims (not to mention taxpayers) and has few defenders from either side of
the political spectrum. But what does all of this have to do with honor? Honororiented justice rightly rejects the illusory ideal that is at the foundation of our
punishment system: the pursuit of “blind and impartial” justice. This ideal does
not entail many of the abuses in our system, but, as we’ll see, it presents
formidable obstacles to effective reform. By understanding what honor gets right
about justice, and what we get wrong, we can remove these obstacles.
The following shows three central ways in which honor approaches differ
from the theories behind modern criminal justice:
Honor: Principles of justice are local and particular, grounded in the norms, feelings,
and beliefs of the parties involved in the conflict and the surrounding community.
Modern criminal justice: Principles of justice are universal, objective, and derived
through reason.
Honor: Conflicts are always between offenders and victims.
Modern criminal justice: When offenders commit crimes, the conflict is between the
offender and the state, not the offender and the victim.
Honor: The aim of justice is to resolve a conflict between the offender and the victim,
to make things right. Just verdicts must satisfy victims, restore honor to the relevant
parties, and maintain harmony within the community.
Modern criminal justice: The aim of justice is to give offenders the punishment that is
proportionate to their culpability. Offenders of equal culpability must receive equal
punishment.
For the remainder of the chapter, I’ll examine the philosophical defects in
theories that ground our current system and then discuss an exciting new
movement called restorative justice that incorporates the strengths and the truth
of honorable justice.
“Uncharted Seas of Irrelevance”: Culpability and the Role
of the Victim
The central tenet of the modern justice system is a retributivist one: criminal
offenders should receive their “just deserts”—the punishments that are
proportionate to their culpability. Culpability has two components: the severity
of the wrong and the offender’s moral responsibility or blameworthiness. So, for
example, imagine that Helen commits an act of armed robbery and assault. To
determine Helen’s culpability, you examine the severity of the crime (were her
victims harmed, how much money did Helen steal, and what kind of weapon did
she use?) and her moral responsibility (her mental state and other potentially
mitigating factors). The feelings and desires of her victims are deemed irrelevant
—because they don’t factor into Helen’s culpability. Indeed, knowledge about
the victims can be regarded as obstacles to the pursuit of impartial justice,
because such knowledge might lead juries to base their verdicts on emotion
rather than reason, distorting their sense of the offender’s culpability.
This perspective on victims held sway in the United States for much of its
history. But in the middle of the twentieth century, a “victims’ rights” movement
emerged to combat the growing marginalization of victims in the criminal justice
process. A Supreme Court ruling in 1973 laid the groundwork for the movement,
holding that states could enact legislation that created a participatory role for
victims. The Crimes Victims’ Rights Act of 2004 granted rights to victims for
the first time in US history.
The problem is that including victims in criminal justice process doesn’t fit
comfortably within the theoretical framework that grounds it. The ongoing
controversy over victim-impact statements, or VIS, illustrates this tension.
Victim-impact statements are statements that express the grief and suffering of
crime victims and in some cases their desires concerning the offender’s sentence.
In the 1987 Supreme Court case Booth v. Maryland, the justices overturned a
lower court’s use of VIS for capital trials (cases that could lead to the death
penalty). Justice Lewis Powell authored the majority decision. The Eighth
Amendment, Powell writes, requires judges and juries to consider only evidence
that has some bearing on the defendant’s “personal responsibility and moral
guilt.” To do otherwise would create the risk that a death sentence would be
based on considerations that are “constitutionally impermissible or totally
irrelevant” to the sentencing process. “The focus of a VIS,” Powell writes, “is
not on the defendant, but on the character and reputation of the victim and the
effect on his family. These factors may be wholly unrelated to the
blameworthiness of a particular defendant.” The formal presentation of victimimpact evidence, he continues, “can serve no other purpose than to inflame the
jury and divert it from deciding the case on the relevant evidence concerning the
crime and the defendant,” which is unacceptable, for “a sentence must be, and
appear to be, based on reason, rather than caprice or emotion.”
Powell argues that knowledge about the feelings of victims could lead to
disproportionate punishments, which violates the Eighth Amendment.
Incidentally, nothing in the text of the Eighth Amendment mentions or even
alludes to the issue of proportionality. The amendment prohibits cruel or unusual
punishments and prohibits them whether they are proportionate or not.
Nevertheless, there is plenty of judicial precedent for interpreting the Eighth
Amendment as a demand for proportionality—in large part because it is a core
feature of retributive theory.
Four years later, the Court reversed the ruling in Payne v. Tennessee and
allowed the use of victim-impact statements. In a furious dissent, Justice
Marshall wrote that the Court had abandoned “rules of relevance that are older
than the Nation itself, and ventures into uncharted seas of irrelevance.” The new
decision, according to Marshall, allows the prosecutor to “introduce evidence
that sheds no light on the defendant’s guilt or moral culpability, and thus serves
no purpose other than to encourage jurors to decide in favor of death rather than
life on the basis of their emotions rather than their reason.” Subsequent
decisions, however, have tempered or reversed those rulings. The quest for
victim participation in the criminal process has had more setbacks than gains.
Now, you might think that excluding victim-impact statements would help
defendants in capital cases, by preventing victims from “inflaming” the juries
and judges with vindictive anger. But more often, victims want the defendant’s
life to be spared. But these wishes are deemed irrelevant as well. In 1987 an
Oklahoma family’s testimony was excluded from consideration because it asked
the jury not to impose the death penalty. In keeping with the Booth ruling, the
judge ruled that the testimony was irrelevant because it related neither to the
defendant’s character nor to the circumstances of the offense (that is, the
offender’s culpability). “Such testimony,” the ruling stated, “at best, would be a
gossamer veil which would blur the jury’s focus on the issue it must decide…
because the offense was committed not against the victim but against the
community as a whole.” A Colorado judge in 2014 used this ruling to bar the
parents of a murdered son from expressing their opposition to a death sentence
for the son’s killer to the jury.
The notion that the wishes of the people who suffered most from the crime
would be irrelevant to the trial’s outcome is one that exists only in cultures under
the sway of retributive theory. In Iran, for example, a country not known for its
merciful approach to criminals, the victims have until the moment of the
execution to forgive the offender and commute the sentence to a prison term.
The United States offers no such opportunity to victims, because doing so would
contradict the principles of blind and impartial justice.
And here’s the problem. The victims’ rights movement was born out of
advocacy, not philosophy. It was born out of frustration with being
“nameless/faceless non-players in criminal justice system.” The absence of
theoretical support for victim participation has stalled the movement and paved
the way for rulings that continue to ignore the victim’s voice. So let’s examine
the three core principles that stand in the way of incorporating victims in
criminal justice to see how well supported they truly are.
We’ve seen them in some form already. The first is the retributive demand
that punishments be proportionate to the offender’s culpability (as defined
above) and that offenders of equal culpability should receive equal punishments.
The second is what we might call the “dignity principle”: that crimes are
offenses not against victims but against the community, state, or the nation as a
whole. The third principle is that verdicts should be based on reason rather than
emotion. As we have seen, honor cultures reject all three of these principles. And
for good reason. There are no good arguments for any of them.
Let’s start with the first principle, the proportionality requirement. This
principle has some well-known problems, most prominently: How on earth do
we determine the quantum of punishment that is commensurate with a given
crime? What is the deserved punishment for armed robbery? Ten years in
prison? Fifteen years? Two years and probation? Flogging? Philosophers and
legal theorists have struggled to find principled answers to these questions.
The most plausible option is to employ a “range-only” view of
proportionality according to which a criminal’s culpability determines only the
upper and lower limits of deserved punishment, a view defended by
criminologist Norval Morris. Morris points out that while we don’t have a good
sense of what precise quantum punishment is deserved, we do have a sense of
when punishments can be undeserved (say, thirty years in prison for marijuana
possession). According to Morris, particular crimes have a wide range of
deserved punishments, and we should use utilitarian considerations to determine
punishments within that range.
Morris’s account is flawed, but at least it lacks the pretense to precision
shared by many of its competitors. According to prominent desert theorist
Andrew Von Hirsch, however, Morris’s view is open to “a fundamental
objection”: it would allow two offenders who are equally culpable to receive
different punishments (thus violating the retributive principle). But Von Hirsch
agrees with Morris that it’s impossible to match units of deserved punishments
to particular crimes. So he faces a dilemma. His proposed solution employs a
distinction between cardinal and ordinal proportionality. Cardinal proportionality
is “range only,” issuing upper and lower limits beyond which punishments
would obviously be either too severe or too light. Ordinal proportionality
demands consistency in punishment. It’s meant to ensure that criminals who are
equally culpable receive the same punishment.
Von Hirsch calls the demand for consistency a “basic requirement of
fairness,” and it may seem plausible when considered abstractly or in the form of
hypothetical scenarios. But the plausibility diminishes when it’s applied to cases
in the real world. Consider a recent trial in Grand Junction, Colorado. A woman
was driving in the early morning, drunk and high on meth. On the way, she had
an accident and hit a sanitation worker. The victim’s legs were shattered, and he
subsequently endured ten surgeries to repair them. The worker testified during
the woman’s trial and asked the judge to give the woman a lenient sentence. He
told the judge he could relate to her predicament, that he had been in a dark
place once too, and hoped she could eventually get to a better place, just as he
had. The prosecutors and the judge took his wishes into account and dismissed
the most serious charges. The woman received the minimum sentence allowable
—still more than five years in jail.
Here we have a clear violation of the principle of consistency. Many people
in Colorado have been given much higher sentences for equally culpable
behavior. But did the judge and prosecutor violate a “basic requirement of
fairness”? Is this case clearly unjust? The victim—the only one who was harmed
by the offense—is more satisfied than he would be with a higher sentence. He
feels respected by the process, and the woman still receives a punishment within
a reasonable cardinal range. If anything, this verdict seems considerably more
just than a verdict that ignored the victim’s wishes would be.
So maybe our commitment to consistency isn’t so deep after all. Indeed,
outside of the context of criminal justice, we seem to lack it entirely. If two
husbands in relatively happy marriages betray their wives on a business trip, no
one finds it remotely unjust if their wives respond differently—if one decides to
give the husband another chance and the other boots him out and demands a
separation. And no one would dream of claiming that the wife’s wishes were
irrelevant. Everyday life is filled with cases like this—acts of infidelity,
betrayals of trust, insulting or offensive remarks, and so forth. We don’t expect
equally culpable offenders to receive the same amount of blame or punishment.
We expect people to stay within certain boundaries in their responses, but within
those boundaries we leave it up to the relevant parties to determine the
appropriate responses. Yet once we’re in the realm of criminal justice, the
demand for consistency allegedly becomes a core principle of fairness.
Why such different demands and expectations for the two kinds of conflicts?
It’s not fully clear, but one part of the answer is laudable. A core principle of
most Western democracies is equal treatment from the state. Since the state
issues the punishment, it seems unjust for two offenders of equal culpability to
receive different punishments. In this sense, consistency matters. But it isn’t an
overriding consideration. It’s one consideration among many, and arguably a
minor one at that. Fairness requires the state to take both offenders and victims
into account. Victims, after all, are the ones who actually suffer from the crime.
And they are affected by crimes in different ways. Victims have different needs,
desires, feelings about what happened. Victim interests are also relevant to
justice and fairness. But our system doesn’t recognize this.
These points seem obvious and intuitive, and they’ve been made over and
over again by the victims’ movement. The common reply appeals to the second
core principle, what I called the “dignity principle”: crimes are not offenses
against victims but rather offenses against “the people” or “the state.” On one
level, the principle is clearly false. If a man assaults me with a broken bottle and
slices my face, the state doesn’t end up with a scarred face—I do. Nobody denies
this. The claim that crimes are offenses against the state rather than a victim is
meant as a metaphor. But it’s not at all clear what the metaphor is supposed to
represent or why it should result in the decidedly nonmetaphorical exclusion of
victims’ interests.
Another reply appeals to the third principle: that verdicts should be based on
reason rather than emotion. The desires of victims are often based on emotions;
punishment should be based on reason. Recall Justice Powell’s claim that
victim-impact evidence could inflame the jury and must be excluded because “a
sentence must be, and appear to be, based on reason, rather than caprice or
emotion.” Or Sandra Day O’Connor, who in a decision concerning mitigating
evidence in capital cases, writes, “The sentence imposed at the penalty stage
should reflect a reasoned moral response to the defendant’s background,
character, and crime rather than mere sympathy or emotion.” Determining the
appropriateness of the death penalty, according to O’Connor, “is a moral inquiry
into the culpability of the defendant, and not an emotional response to the
mitigating evidence.”
Statements like this are grounded in the idea that only reason can determine
culpability. Emotions are distorting, “at best… a gossamer veil which would blur
the jury’s focus.” This might seem plausible if it weren’t for one inconvenient
detail: no one has ever provided a remotely compelling rationalist (reason-based)
argument for establishing an offender’s culpability. Here, for example, is Hegel
—perhaps the foremost retributivist in the rationalist tradition—explaining why
wrongdoers deserve to be punished.
Right as something absolute cannot be set aside, and so committing a crime is in
principle a nullity: and this nullity is the essence of what a crime effects. A nullity,
however, must reveal itself to be such, i.e. manifest itself as vulnerable. A crime, as an
act, is not something positive, not a first thing, on which punishment would supervene
as a negation. It is something negative, so that its punishment is only a negation of the
negation. Right in its actuality, then, annuls what infringes it and therein displays its
validity and proves itself to be a necessary, mediated, reality.
It’s tough to have a clue what Hegel is talking about, never mind buy into the
program. Try to apply Hegel’s idea to the context of a real crime—say, the
shooting of Laura Blumenfeld’s father from Chapter Five. The crime, according
to Hegel, is a nullity, a vulnerable nullity, and the punishment (Omar’s prison
term) was a negation of that nullity, through which Right proves itself to be a
necessary, mediated reality. Hegel’s influence would be comical if it hadn’t
played such a big role in producing our retributive system of justice.
The more recent, more comprehensible, versions of rationalist punishment
theories fare no better. Herbert Morris’s “fair-play” account, for example, is
credited with sparking the retributivist revival in criminal justice in the late
1960s and early ’70s. According to Morris, fairness requires a roughly equal
distribution of benefits and burdens in a society. One of these burdens is having
to restrain ourselves from interfering with other people enjoying their benefits.
By not taking on the burden of restraint, criminals help themselves to an unfair
share of the benefits of society. Punishment, Morris claims, removes their unfair
advantage.
This theory is riddled with problems. For one, it assumes that individuals in
our society start out with roughly equal distribution of benefits and burdens. One
visit to a failing inner-city school would cure anyone of this view. But even if
you granted the assumption, Morris’s view fails to establish the principles of
consistency or proportionality. For most of us, refraining from murder or sexual
assault is not a “burden,” since we don’t have a desire to perform these actions in
the first place. Does that mean that less tempting, more brutal crimes require less
punishment? And that more tempting crimes like fraud or tax evasion require
more?
A third rationalist alternative derives from Immanuel Kant and later John
Rawls. This theory asks us to imagine that we are in a hypothetical position
under a “veil of ignorance” that conceals all of the particular facts about our
lives: we don’t know whether we’ll be poor or rich, smart or dumb, greedy or
moderate, criminals or law-abiding citizens. The truly just system of
punishment, according to this view, is the one that rational people would choose
in this hypothetical position. And take a wild guess which system we would
choose, according to the theory’s proponents. That’s right: rational agents would
opt for a retributivist system that punishes people precisely according to their
culpability. (So that worked out nicely.)
Most objections to this approach argue that with such little knowledge of who
we are under a veil of ignorance, we lack the basis to make a choice about
punishment institutions. But setting this objection aside, why think that our
rational, stripped-down selves would indeed choose retributivism over available
alternatives that involve the victim? Rational agents in the original position are
just as likely to be victims as criminals—why would they opt for a system that
ignores their interests entirely?
The obvious flaws in these approaches point to a fundamental dishonesty in
the rationalist project. They begin with a strong emotional conviction that
offenders ought to be punished according to the three retributive principles. And
they develop elaborate post hoc theories designed to reach their conclusions. But
the theories have obvious flaws. Like it or not, reason is insufficient for
establishing how the state should address criminal wrongdoing. Emotions must
be a part of any theory of punishment too. The only question is whether we’re
honest enough to acknowledge this. Honor cultures have no illusions about the
emotional component of justice and thus have a lot to teach us about how to
incorporate them.
Honorable Punishment: Restorative Justice
There’s a popular Reddit website called “Justice Porn” where members post
videos of people getting their just deserts. The site describes itself as a “place to
see bullies getting their comeuppance,” and the most popular videos feature
bullies getting beaten up by their intended victims. These videos have several
features that make them satisfying. First, the bully suffers the same treatment
that he (or very occasionally she) was intending to inflict. So the suffering is
proportionate to the harm they intended to cause and have almost certainly
caused in the past. Second, the bullies learn how it feels to be one of their
victims and maybe get morally educated as a result. Third, the victims stand up
to their tormenters. We watch them gain self-respect and the respect of
onlookers and in some cases even the bully in the process. Any one of these
features can arouse our sense of justice, but when you put them all together, you
get justice porn.
Our criminal justice system captures the first two of the features but not the
third. Crime victims often suffer a feeling of powerlessness and a loss of respect.
When victims fight back, we applaud their courage and honor. Defenders of the
status quo often assume that punishing wrongdoers automatically restores the
self-respect of victims by sending a message to the offender that the victim is a
person whose rights cannot be violated. But this is a rationalist fantasy with no
basis in real human psychology. Psychologist Dale Miller has shown that the
way victims respond to insults and offenses affects their self-image and their
image in the eyes of others. We’ve seen how many honor cultures actively shun
third-party punishment for precisely this reason. There aren’t any justice-porn
videos of victims reporting the bully to the school principal and the bully getting
suspended.
Of course, the ethics of the schoolyard offers only so much insight into the
nature of justice. We cede the role of punisher to the state in large part to prevent
victim retaliation and vigilantism. But we don’t do this for reasons involving
justice. We do it for practical reasons—to prevent escalating feuds and to limit
collateral damage. But crime victims suffer costs when their cases are handled
entirely by the state, and a maximally just approach to criminal punishment
would consider the interests of crime victims while at the same time retaining
societal order and the rule of law. By rejecting any special voice for victims, our
current system fails to do this. So let’s examine an alternative model—
restorative justice—that directly involves the victim in the sentencing process.
Restorative justice is a recent movement that takes direct aim at the
depersonalized, excessively rationalistic nature of the current legal system.
Restorative processes vary across domains and cultures, but they all share the
following essential principles. First, crimes should be viewed as conflicts
between individuals and only secondarily as violations against the state. Second,
the aim of criminal justice is to repair the harms, resolve the conflicts, and
restore harmony within the community. The aim of the legal system as a whole
is to enable the stakeholders in the conflict—the victim, offender, families, and
other community members—to actively participate in the attempt to find a
resolution. The fundamental difference between conventional and restorative
justice, writes legal ethicist Charles Barton, involves empowerment of the key
stakeholders, “so that the matter is resolved in ways that are meaningful and
right for them.”
Models for implementation vary across domains as well, but most of them
contain some sort of victim-offender mediation conference, sometimes referred
to as “restorative circles,” in which victims, offenders, and other stakeholders
address the harm and try to resolve the conflict. Each person in the conference
has a chance to speak. Victims can ask questions of the offender and relate the
ways in which they were harmed. Offenders are encouraged to take
responsibility for the harm. They aren’t compelled to apologize, or to express
remorse, or to answer the victim’s questions—but they’re given the opportunity
to do so if they wish. Family, friends, and other members of the affected
community are given the opportunity to speak as well. After speaking, the
participants try to come up with ways to repair the harm through restitution,
community service, and prison time if necessary. Trained facilitators or
mediators preside over the conference and are required to take all of the
participants’ interests into account. Most restorative programs also devote
resources to reintegrating the offender into the community once they have paid
their debts and obligations.
It’s no coincidence that restorative approaches bear striking similarities to the
approaches of honor cultures. (Look back at the list here and you’ll see that the
core principles are virtually identical.) The methods of tribal communities for
conflict resolution serve as the model for restorative justice. Although honor
cultures are more famous for their bloody feuds, the fact is that feuds are costly
and people want to avoid them as long as they can maintain their honor and selfrespect. With such high stakes, honor groups acquire tremendous skills and
techniques for mediation, for discovering nonviolent ways for all parties to save
face and restore their honor. Revenge is one form of restorative justice but not
the preferred one, by any means.
Restorative justice isn’t designed to be a panacea or a total replacement of the
current legal system. Restorative approaches may not be appropriate for certain
crimes, because of unwilling participants, the absence of identifiable victims, or
other reasons. Most jurisdictions have a separate impartial criminal process for
determining guilt that precedes the restorative phase of the sentencing. During
this process, the judge may set boundaries for the outcome of the restorative
phase and upper and lower limits on a prison sentence. This ensures that
offenders’ rights are respected and that the outcomes are consistent with the
norms and values of society as well as the law.
Critics have several categories of objections to restorative justice. Some
object that it’s too soft and touchy-feely, too easy on the offenders—”justice for
pussies,” as one prominent legal theorist told me. They consider it naive and
disrespectful to expect victims and offenders to “hug it out” after a crime. This
objection completely misunderstands the nature and purpose of restorative
justice—and only people who have never seen it in action could offer it with a
straight face. What’s tougher on offenders? Sitting in a courtroom while lawyers
and behavioral science experts—complete strangers—battle over the legal
minutia of your crime? Or having to face your victims and their families and
look them in the eye? Not surprisingly, many offenders initially resist the idea of
personal contact with their victims, because they’re reluctant to reckon with the
human cost of their actions. The current system lets them off the hook.
Another common objection to restorative justice is that it’s too hard on
offenders, that it humiliates them and fails to respect their dignity as human
beings. Restorative justice is hard on the offenders, but that’s only part of the
story. Restorative conferences allow offenders to explain the reasons behind
their actions, to express genuine remorse, and to offer forms of restitution.
Restorative justice, writes one of its godfathers, Nils Christie, gives the offender
an opportunity “to change his position from being a listener to a discussion—
often a highly unintelligible one—of how much pain he ought to receive, into a
participant in a discussion of how he could make it good again.” Restorative
justice treats offenders as people rather than cases, as members of the moral
community.
Some critics worry that the encounters will be too difficult for victims,
resulting in “secondary victimization.” This is a legitimate concern, but one
that’s addressed by making the process voluntary. In most models, both victims
and offenders must give their consent to a conference; otherwise, the sentence is
determined through more traditional means. (Offenders may be offered
incentives to participate, but the incentives shouldn’t make it too tempting for
them to offer phony expressions of remorse.) In addition, studies show that most
victims welcome the opportunity to participate in their own conflicts. The results
of a recent Canadian survey indicate that 89 percent of violent crime victims
wanted to meet the offenders. Even in what seems like the most problematic type
of crime—sexual assault—victims report positive effects from meeting with
offenders. Victims who participated in restorative conferences showed a
decrease in PTSD symptoms. Survivors reported that the “experience was
empowering rather than traumatizing.” In another recent study, 70 percent of
rape survivors reported that they would welcome the opportunity for victims to
be able to meet with their offenders in conference settings.
Honor cultures understand the empowering effects of these encounters for
victims very well. We learn a lot about ourselves from how we handle ourselves
in conflicts. Meeting with offenders allows victims to express courage and pride
and self-respect. As Christie puts it, the current legal system “steals the conflict”
from victims by regarding crimes as offenses against the state:
The victim is a particularly heavy loser in this situation. Not only has he suffered, lost
materially or become hurt, physically or otherwise. And not only does the state take the
compensation. But above all he has lost participation in his own Case. It is the Crown
that appears in the newspaper, very seldom the victim. It is the Crown that gets a
chance to talk to the offender, and neither the Crown nor the offender are particularly
interested in carrying on that conversation. The prosecutor is fed-up long since. The
victim would not have been. He might have been scared to death, panic-stricken, or
furious. But he would not have been uninvolved. It would have been one of the
important days in his life.
Active participation in conflicts can be scary, panic inducing, infuriating, and
emotionally charged. Victims may have to overcome fear or blind fury to face
their victimizers and look them in the eye. We learn what we’re made of in these
situations. These encounters help victims recover their self-respect—not just in
theory but in practice.
The interactions also provide opportunities for victims and offenders to
express empathy, to recognize the humanity in one another. Offenders get a
more genuine sense of the suffering they’ve caused. And victims come to better
understand the reasons behind the offender’s actions, which may lead to partial
forgiveness. Or they may still hate the person who wronged them. And the
offenders may feel the same contempt for their victims. Either way, they’re
compelled to deal with real human beings in a way that is well beyond anything
our current legal system has to offer. The same holds for family and other
community members who attend the meetings. Restorative justice offers a
chance for active engagement with people with different backgrounds and
experiences.
Another worry about restorative justice is the potential for racial bias to
influence restorative outcomes. Again, this is a legitimate worry, but we must
evaluate it in light of existing evidence rather than speculation. And we must
examine whether restorative justice is more vulnerable to the effects of racial
bias than the status quo. I’ve already discussed the endemic racial bias in the
criminal justice system. In the schools, “equitable” policies like zero tolerance
for misbehavior have led to a massive disproportional number of suspensions for
minority and especially African American students. The suspensions are the
primary engine of the school-to-prison pipeline, which again disproportionately
affects poor African American students. And the draconian school discipline
policies can blur the lines between schools and prisons by turning “public
schools into well-policed fortresses” and resulting in increasingly large numbers
of school-based arrests. At this stage, the worries about racial bias are purely
speculative. Restorative justice is a recent movement, and more empirical work
needs to be done to gauge the effects of racial bias on restorative processes. But
given the systematic and structural biases that infect our current disciplinary
practices, it would be difficult for restorative justice to fare any worse.
The most common objection to restorative justice has been discussed briefly
above: it violates the principle of consistency (or ordinal proportionality, in Von
Hirsch’s terminology). Restorative justice, almost by definition, must reject the
principle that offenders of equal culpability should receive the same punishment.
Each set of victims and offenders has different needs, wishes, temperaments, and
personalities, and restorative outcomes will vary accordingly. Philosopher
Michael Moore, a leading retributivist, argues that this disqualifies victim
involvement. As he puts it, “In a truly victim-oriented system, if a wrongdoer
has the good luck to injure one of those new testament types, instead of one of
the old testament types, then that wrongdoer is going to receive less punishment
—because he is always going to get the turn-your-other-cheek forgiveness
response from his victim.” Moore’s point is that it’s obviously unfair for the
wrongdoer with the “new-testament type” victim to receive a reduced sentence,
while the latter gets a higher one. But the intuitive appeal of this example derives
from its hypothetical nature and the depiction of victims as caricatured “types”
rather than complex people.
To really test our intuitions about consistency, we must evaluate them in light
of real cases. Braithwaite, for example, in “In Search of Restorative
Jurisprudence,” describes a case of assault and attempted robbery in New
Zealand in which the offender, Mr. Clotworthy, inflicted six stab wounds and a
collapsed lung on the victim. The victim and offender agreed to have a
restorative justice conference as an alternative to a traditional trial to see if the
two could work out a satisfactory resolution. During the conference, the two
parties and the presiding judge agreed upon the following sentence: Mr.
Clotworthy would pay a compensation order of fifteen thousand dollars to pay
for cosmetic surgery for the victim. He would also perform two hundred hours of
community work and serve a two-year prison term that might be suspended if
Clotworthy performed the work and paid the compensation. The sentence then
went to the court of appeals. The appeals judges questioned the victim about the
leniency of the sentence. The victim “reiterated his previous stance, emphasizing
his wish to obtain funds for the necessary cosmetic surgery and his view that
imprisonment would achieve nothing either for himself or Mr. Clotworthy.” The
judges were not convinced. They quashed the compensation order as well as the
community service and instead sentenced Mr. Clotworthy to four years in prison.
The victim “got neither his act of grace nor the money for his surgery.”
The verdict in the court of appeals adheres more closely to the principle of
consistency. Clotworthy got a more similar sentence to other offenders who had
committed a similar crime. But is it a more just verdict? Not to me anyway. The
appeals verdict seems considerably less just than the original verdict that
respected the victim’s wishes and repaired the harm to a significant degree.
Even in the most problematic example of homicide, our justice intuitions
often side with the restorative model. Consider the case of Conor McBride,
described in a recent New York Times Magazine article by Paul Tullis:
At 2:15 in the afternoon on March 28, 2010, Conor McBride, a tall, sandy-haired 19-
year-old wearing jeans, a T-shirt and New Balance sneakers, walked into the
Tallahassee Police Department and approached the desk in the main lobby. Gina
Maddox, the officer on duty, noticed that he looked upset and asked him how she could
help. “You need to arrest me,” McBride answered. “I just shot my fiancée in the head.”
When Maddox, taken aback, didn’t respond right away, McBride added, “This is not a
joke.”
It wasn’t a joke. About an hour earlier, at his parents’ house, McBride had
shot Ann Margaret Grosmaire, his girlfriend of three years. They were both
students at Tallahassee Community College. The couple had been fighting for
thirty-eight straight hours—in person, by text message, and over the phone. They
fought about the mundane things that many couples might fight about. Instead of
resolving their differences or shaking them off, they kept it up for two nights and
two mornings, and it culminated in the moment that McBride shot Grosmaire.
Ann Grosmaire died in the hospital four days later. In Florida, the crime of
first-degree murder typically carries a life sentence or the death penalty.
However, the prosecutor can also charge the offender with a lesser crime such as
manslaughter, which carries a much lighter sentence. In the weeks following the
crime, Ann’s parents and Conor’s parents had become close. (They had met in
the hospital by Ann’s bedside.) As the trial drew near, the Grosmaires learned
about the restorative justice movement and asked the prosecutor, Jack Campbell,
if they could do a restorative conference with Conor McBride and his parents.
They asked Campbell to base his decision on the plea offer on the outcome of
the conference. Restorative justice was a relatively foreign notion in Florida and
had never even been considered for a serious crime. But since the request came
from the victim’s parents, Campbell agreed.
During the conference everyone had an opportunity to speak without
interruptions. The Grosmaires spoke first. They described their love for Ann and
the tremendous suffering they had experienced since the crime. According to
Sujatha Baliga, the mediator of the conference, Ann’s mother “did not spare
[Conor] in any way the cost of what he did. There were no kid gloves, none. It
was really, really tough. Way tougher than anything a judge could say.” Then it
was Conor’s turn to speak. He described the crime and surrounding
circumstances in harrowing detail. He did not shirk responsibility in any way.
On the contrary, his account was even worse than the Grosmaires imagined. He
disclosed that Ann had been on her knees and pleading with him not to shoot
when he pulled the trigger. Tullis writes: “As Conor told the story, Andy’s
[Anne’s father] whole body began to shake. ‘Let me get this right,’ he said, and
asked Conor about Ann being on her knees.… Conor answered, clarifying
precisely how helpless Ann was at the moment he took her life.”
After each member had spoken, each person had the opportunity to suggest a
punishment. Before the conference the Grosmaires had indicated that they would
ask for a light sentence of five years in prison. But after hearing Conor’s story,
they asked for more prison time. Kate Grosmaire suggested five to fifteen years.
Andy Grosmaire suggested ten to fifteen years. Conor’s parents agreed with
Andy about the higher sentence. Conor did not suggest a sentence because “he
did not think he should have a say.”
In most restorative justice proceedings, the judge will issue a decision that
reflects the consensus of the relevant parties. But since this was the first
restorative justice case in Florida for such a serious crime, Jack Campbell
promised only that he would take the opinions into account for determining the
plea offer. Campbell honored his promise, offering a plea of twenty years in
prison with five years’ probation.
Like the original verdict in the Clotworthy trial, the outcome of this case is
incompatible with the principle of consistency. The sentence was considerably
lighter than the norm for homicides in Florida. Again, however, it seems more
appropriate and more just for Campbell to take the restorative conference into
account in determining the plea offer. The possibility that an equally culpable
homicide offender could receive a more severe sentence (because of the wishes
of a more vindictive family) doesn’t undermine this intuition in the least.
I’m not claiming that consistency should play no role in the eventual
outcome. If the Grosmaires had asked for a suspended sentence, or even a twoto five-year sentence, the judge might justly reject this as too lenient in light of
the sentences for other homicides of this kind. Restorative approaches entail only
that consistent sentencing is not an overriding consideration. It is just one
consideration among many.
Let me conclude with a brief illustration from the great western novel Shane. In
the story, a cattle rancher named Fletcher is trying to strong-arm the resident
homesteaders to sell their fertile land to him. When the homesteaders refuse,
Fletcher hires a notorious gunman named Wilson to intimidate them. Joe
Starrett, the inspirational leader of the homesteaders, has been able to keep the
others from selling. But their courage is waning. Meanwhile, Shane, a former
gunman himself, has been staying at the Starrett household as their guest. In the
final pages of the novel, the situation comes to a head, and Joe decides to face
Wilson in a gunfight. Shane, however, realizes that Joe is outmatched and offers
to face him himself. Joe thanks him but refuses. “It’s my stand,” Joe says.
“Fletcher is making a play against me. It’s my business.” Shane replies that
gunfighting is his kind of business and not Joe’s. Joe replies, “And where will it
leave me? I couldn’t hold my head up around here anymore. They’d say I
ducked and they’d be right.”
Joe’s point is that if Shane fights this battle for him, people will rightly think
he is a coward. For Joe, having the reputation of a coward is much worse than
risking his life. He may die in the gunfight with Wilson, but he’ll die with
courage and honor. Shane recognizes the dilemma, but he has a solution. He
provokes Joe into a fight and cold-cocks him with a gun. Shane then ties an
unconscious Joe up and goes off to kill Wilson himself. Why does Shane tie Joe
up? Because it is the only way for Joe to keep his self-respect in spite of the fact
that Shane has fought the final battle. Now the homesteaders will know that Joe
was unable to fight the battle himself. Shane recognizes this is not the ideal
outcome, but he believes the alternative—Joe’s certain death—is even worse.
For some crimes, the state can and should play the role of Shane, stealing the
conflict and taking the punishment entirely out of the hands of the victim. For
the majority of crimes, however, the state can play the more valuable role of
mediator, offering victims the opportunity to display real courage and fortitude
in resolving their own conflicts with their offenders.
Restorative justice offers a perfect illustration of how honor-related values,
when properly contained, can bring tremendous benefits to modern society. In
the final chapter, we’ll look at other ways of containing honor and harnessing its
virtues.
CHAPTER 7
HONOR CONTAINED
Honor, at its best, promotes individual virtues like courage, self-reliance,
hospitality, and personal integrity. Honor contributes to a sense of community,
solidarity, and collective responsibility. When properly harnessed and directed,
honor can advance social progress; it can unify oppressed groups and provide
effective frameworks for resistance and reform. Well-functioning honor cultures
exhibit great wisdom in handling conflicts in a wide range of contexts: from
rural neighborhood bars to inner-city schools and even the criminal justice
system. Honor can provide a sense of purpose in an increasingly atomized,
alienating, and materialistic society. Honor, at its best, can help us lead better,
richer, more meaningful lives.
The problem, though, lies in all those caveats—”at its best,” “well
functioning,” and so forth. The same features that encourage community,
loyalty, and sacrifice can also promote hatred, hostility, and prejudice. They can
provoke and sustain long cycles of revenge. Honor codes may impose heavy
burdens, a need to project images of toughness or purity that may not suit our
personalities and attributes. Honor can restrict our autonomy, telling us what
roles to adopt, whom to marry, what friends are acceptable, which enemies to
hate. If we want to incorporate honor values into modern life, we must contain
those values in ways that limit their moral costs while making the most of their
moral advantages.
Honor’s Hazards
Broadly speaking, the moral hazards of honor fall into two categories. The first
is what I’ll call the danger of escalation. The heightened sensitivity to insult in
honor cultures, along with norms for violent retaliation in response to perceived
disrespect, can lead to explosive situations and interactions. Think Tommy in
Goodfellas, the character played by Joe Pesci (based on the real-life Mafia figure
Tommy DeSimone). You’re having some laughs, playing poker or out for a few
drinks at a bar, and then one “Go get your fuckin’ shinebox” or “Why don’t you
go fuck yourself” later, you’re digging graves. This hazard increases
exponentially at the group level. The same admirable virtues that honor tends to
promote—such as courage, loyalty, solidarity, the willingness to risk injury or
death to defend your group—can lead to escalating feuds between individuals,
families, and entire communities. With no impartial, centralized authorities to
impose constraints, the brutality and violence may intensify into a never-ending
quest to get even.
The second category of moral hazards is an even deeper concern. All honor
groups have norms for determining how honor is allocated and norms that
encourage and prohibit certain kinds of behavior. But honor, unlike dignity,
places few restrictions on the moral content of these norms. At the worst end of
the spectrum, honor norms can sanction white nationalism, ethnic cleansing, or
honor killings, the murders of women suspected of having extramarital sex by
family members. When the content of honor norms is bad, their tremendous
motivational power becomes an evil rather than a good, leading people to
commit cruel and unjust actions out of a perverse sense of duty.
These dangers are serious and real. If they can’t be contained, then honor’s
critics may prove to be right. But the hazards can be contained, and this chapter
examines some models for doing so. Successful containment models address the
hazards on two levels. First, they restrict the content of honor norms to rule out
plainly immoral behavior and preserve respect for human rights. And second,
they impose limits on aggression to keep it from escalating out of control. They
accomplish both goals while at the same time preserving the flexibility of honor
codes with minimal outside interference.
You might have noticed a tension in that last sentence. On the one hand, the
models must constrain and limit the content of honor norms—which requires an
external, largely impartial authority. On the other hand, they seek to minimize
the role of external authorities to preserve the features that allow honor to work
its magic. Striking the right balance between these aims is tricky business, but
it’s not impossible. We’ve seen one example already in the previous chapter,
restorative justice. Now let’s turn to some other examples of well-contained
honor frameworks and see what lessons we can draw from them.
Civilized Insanity
Oddly enough, one of the best examples of a containment model in action is
professional hockey. As we saw in Chapter One, hockey has a well-established
honor code. Ross Bernstein, author of the definitive book on the code, describes
it as a sacred covenant with “unwritten rules of engagement that had been
handed down from generation to generation… [a] mysterious chain of
accountability that [deals] with the issues of violence and fighting.” Versions of
the code exist at every level of play, from the professional to the amateur to the
children’s leagues. The code is embraced by players, coaches, and officials. “It’s
a living, breathing thing among us,” says former enforcer Marty McSorley. “It
changed and evolved as the rules changed and evolved, and it took on a life of its
own.”
The most famous (or infamous) aspect of the code is the sanctioning of ingame fights. The NHL is the only professional sports league that allows fighting
to occur “within reason.” Commentators often characterize this part of the code
as a cynical ploy to appeal to the bloodlust of fans. In reality, though, fighting
effectively makes an inherently violent game less violent and more just.
“Spontaneous fights,” writes Bernstein, “are considered to be a relatively safe
release of emotions for players who might otherwise settle their differences with
dangerous stick work.” Allowing players to release pent-up emotions on the
spot, in front of officials, is safer than letting those aggressions fester.
“Hockey is a game that polices itself,” says McSorley, “and there is a lot of
honor behind that.” And, indeed, hockey has all the elements of a wellfunctioning honor culture. Its norms are fluid and flexible. They celebrate and
reward paradigmatic honor values like courage, honesty, self-respect, respect for
opponents, handling your business, and measured retaliation. The code insists on
personal accountability. “The basic premise of the code,” writes McSorley, “is
that you have to answer for your actions on the ice.” To this end, hockey has
norms of collective responsibility, which encourages self-policing within the
team. When a midlevel player or agitator takes a cheap shot on the opponent’s
superstar, the agitator knows—and his teammates know—that he’s drawn a
bulls-eye on their own superstar. But in common with most honor cultures, the
self-policing goes on in private, in the locker room after the game. During the
game, the code expects players to stand up and fight for their teammates even
when they’re in the wrong. Enforcer Tony Twist writes that he would fight for
his teammates during games regardless of who he was or what he’d done: “It
didn’t matter if I didn’t like a certain guy on my team or if I didn’t agree with
what I was fighting over. If we were wearing the same color sweater, then I was
going to defend him no matter what.” Attitudes like these cement bonds among
teammates and between players and fans.
The fluidity of hockey’s honor code makes it a constant source of debate and
drama. In 1992, for example, the league office wanted to curb excessive fighting.
So they instituted the “instigator rule,” which gives an extra two-minute penalty
to players who initiate fights. The rule reshaped the fighting landscape in the
NHL, and everyone had an opinion on it. Before the rule, teams would designate
a roster spot for “goons”—players whose only job was to intimidate opposing
players and keep them from taking cheap shots at their teammates. It didn’t
matter if they barely knew how to skate; their presence and violent reputations
would often be enough to keep the game clean. But then the occasional fights
began to escalate when teams disagreed over whether the code had been
violated. The goons were compelled to settle scores, and a single game could
feature multiple team-wide brawls. The brawls were popular with the players,
and the fans loved them, but the league believed that goons made the game too
violent and low scoring. Some fights would spin out of control, spilling outside
the rink (the great Bruins-Canadiens “Brawl in the Hall,” for example),
generating bad media attention and threats of legal interference. The instigator
rule was designed to prevent this. Once the rule was in place, goons lost their
value and were replaced by enforcers, who could contribute in other ways on the
ice.
Many players and coaches hate the instigator rule. They think it frees up
agitators to agitate with no accountability. Agitators enjoy taking liberties with
opposing skill players, insulting them to get in their heads “and then running and
hiding after dishing out dangerous hits.” Barry Melrose, one of the rule’s most
ardent opponents, writes:
Nowadays, players don’t have to be accountable for their actions and they don’t have
to fight. Players can high-stick each other, spear each other, slash each other in the
face, run each other from behind into the boards, and do so with the understanding that
they can get away with it.… Twenty years ago if you ever sticked a guy and then not
fought, your own teammates would ostracize you and just wouldn’t accept you in the
locker room. A guy who turtled after doing something dirty would just not be accepted
by his teammates. They would be embarrassed to have him on their team. And let me
be clear, it didn’t matter if you won or lost your fight, but you had to be accountable.
You had to show up. If you did something dirty then you stood up like a man and you
defended your actions; players at least respect that. Now players don’t even have to
show up and that in my eyes is a very sad thing. It is sad because it is just accepted.
Melrose’s remarks reflect the recurring theme in honor cultures discussed in
Chapter Four: it doesn’t matter much whether you win a fight; what matters is
that you show up and take responsibility.
Like most efforts to contain honor-fueled behavior, the instigator rule is
controversial. Honor communities tend to resent outside forces meddling with
their own way of dishing out justice. But since the NHL is a well-functioning
honor culture, it has outlets for players and coaches to express their opinions on
the rule and help the league revise and improve it. As it evolves, the players
adapt, adding more drama and interest to a fascinating sport.
Most important for containing the danger of escalation in the NHL are the
game officials. The referees and linesmen provide space for players to sort out
conflicts, while keeping the violence “within reason.” Officials have to
understand and respect the code and to know when they should interfere to
prevent the violence from going too far. It’s just part of the job for these guys,
Bernstein writes, “and they relish the close bonds that they foster with the
various enforcers they work with on a daily basis.” The bonds they form with the
players allow officials to discern the crucial particulars of each conflict—when
players are hurt or tired or so angry as to be dangerous. They have to be amateur
psychologists, massaging egos, “constantly reassuring each player that he won
and definitely came out on top.” Otherwise, the players will have their rematches
lined up before they get to the penalty box, which could lead to “a risk of having
those situations escalate, involving more players and more chaos.”
Hockey’s approach to player aggression stands in sharp contrast to that of the
National Basketball Association. After the NBA’s most notorious out-of-control
fight in 2004—the so-called “Malice in the Palace” between the Indiana Pacers
and the Detroit Pistons, an on-court brawl that had fans throwing things at the
players and players going after fans in the stands—the NBA imposed strict rules
against fighting, a zero-tolerance policy. Today, any player who leaves the bench
during a scuffle is automatically fined and suspended for the next game, no
exceptions. Hockey officials, by contrast, are instructed to use discretion and
judgment. Officials are there “to keep the peace and to prevent the games from
getting out of hand,” Bernstein writes, “but they know that the game polices
itself, and they know that the code is there for a reason, so they play their role
accordingly.” Hockey officials play the role of mediator rather than judge, and
consequently the players consider them part of their own community. The best
hockey officials are exemplars for sustaining and containing an honor culture.
We can learn a lot from the way they handle conflict in other domains of society.
Informal Social Control: Gang Violence
Hockey is a well-functioning honor culture, but it has many built-in advantages
contributing to its success. For one thing, hockey’s norms aren’t too far out of
line with the norms of the broader North American society. Hockey teams also
have a good mix of younger players and respected veterans to keep them in line.
And like all sports leagues, the NHL has a ready-made institution for
containment—the league office—that gives players financial incentives to stay
within acceptable boundaries. So now let’s look at a tougher case for
containment: the honor codes of urban gangs and of the police tasked with
preventing violent crime.
As we learned in Chapter Four, honor norms typically emerge in
environments with scarce resources and a lack of reliable third-party
enforcement. These conditions are present in many inner-city neighborhoods,
and the young men and women turn to honor to adapt to them. David Kennedy,
the director of the Center of Crime Control at the John Jay College of Criminal
Justice, sums up their attitudes:
It is a community where men will kill for their brothers, die for their brothers, where
being a thug is a good and honorable thing, where thug love means having your
brothers’ backs, no matter what the cost. It is a world in which young men stand
against a powerful, malevolent world and say to themselves and to each other, Prison’s
no big thing; I’m going to be dead by the time I’m twenty-five, so nothing really
matters; if a man is disrespected, he has to return violence or he’s not a man; the enemy
of my friend is my enemy.
Honor values don’t need to be imposed in these communities. The norms for
toughness, courage, loyalty, and collective punishment are already in place.
What’s missing, tragically, is the containment.
It’s easy to see why. Extreme poverty makes people desperate, hopeless, and
angry. “I didn’t eat this morning, I’m wearing my niece’s clothes,” says
community activist Ameena Matthews, describing the mind-set. “I just was
violated by my mom’s boyfriend. I go to school and here comes someone that
bumps into me and don’t say excuse me. You hit zero to rage within thirty
seconds. And you act out.” A destructive sense of fatalism pervades these
communities, which removes all incentive to stay within the boundaries of larger
society. Compounding the problem is the absence of elders with cooler heads
and a better understanding of the consequences of violence. Most are in prison,
or dead, or they’ve left the neighborhoods in search of a better life for their
families.
By far the greatest obstacle to containing honor in these environments is the
presence of guns. The leading cause of death among young black males is
getting shot, resulting in a literal arms race among gang members and other
community members. Both of honor’s dangers are present: escalation and the
content of honor norms. The content of honor norms, such as “stand up for
yourself and your crew” and “don’t get disrespected,” is not the problem,
though. In other contexts, such norms function perfectly well. The problem is the
norms concerning how to stand up for yourself and your crew—specifically in
relation to guns and violence.
The problems are easy enough to identify, but the solutions are not. The
tough prison policies of the past four decades have produced mass incarceration
but no lasting decrease in violence within the communities. Why? Because tough
prison policies don’t change community norms about guns. “Punishment doesn’t
drive behavior,” says epidemiologist Gary Slutkin. “Copying and modeling and
the social expectations of your peers is what drives your behavior.” Sustained
progress in the fight against gun violence, according to the 2015 Annual Review
of Public Health, “requires changing the social norms that perpetuate violence
and the use of guns.”
In the past two decades, two movements have emerged that aim to do just
that: change social norms about gun violence. Confusingly, they both started out
with the same name—Ceasefire—and both have since changed their names to
avoid getting conflated. The more recent program was developed by Gary
Slutkin and now goes by the name Cure Violence. Tio Hardiman was the first to
implement Slutkin’s model, creating the “Violence Interrupters” program in
Chicago in 2004. (The program, Hardiman, and three other staff members were
the subject of Steve James’s documentary The Interrupters.) Hardiman and
Slutkin recruited former and current gang leaders from all over Chicago for the
program in the belief that only people who were “in the life” have the credibility
to defuse the tempers and emotions that cause the violence. It’s a wise tactic.
Respected older community members are essential for changing norms in honor
cultures. The Cure Violence staff identifies conflicts that threaten to explode in
the surrounding communities and then sends the former gang leaders—the
“violence interrupters”—to mediate between the disputants. “The interrupters
have to deal with how to get someone to save face,” says Slutkin. “In other
words, how do you not do a shooting if someone has insulted you, if all of your
friends are expecting you to do that?… In fact, what our interrupters do is put
social pressure in the other direction.”
It’s a delicate and difficult task because of the strong norms of violent
revenge in the community. In the New York Times Magazine article that inspired
the film, Alex Kotlowitz interviewed a man named Martin Torres whose nephew
had been murdered in Chicago. He took a bus from Austin, Texas, to Chicago,
plotting a revenge murder before the violence interrupters persuaded him to hold
back. “I felt like a punk,” he tells Kotlowitz. “‘I feel shameful.’ [Torres] said he
had sought revenge for people who weren’t related to him—’people who weren’t
even no blood to me.’ But he held back in the case of his nephew. ‘I still struggle
with it.… Something made me do what [violence interrupter] Zale asked me to
do,’ Torres said later, looking more puzzled than comforted. ‘Which is respect
my brother’s wishes.’” Slutkin explains the puzzlement as cognitive dissonance.
“Before Zale walked up to him, this guy was holding only one thought,” Slutkin
says. “So you want to put another thought in his head. It turns out talking about
family is what really makes a difference.”
In addition to mediating violent conflicts, Cure Violence employs outreach
workers to further the long-term goals of bettering the communities. Even for
these jobs, they try to find workers who are known to the community—credible
and respected, sometimes because of their criminal history. The outreach
workers connect the community members with opportunities for jobs, housing,
recreational activities, and education. The goal is to give high-risk young men
and women hope for a better life and, in doing so, shift the incentives and
attitudes about violence.
A controversial aspect of Cure Violence is that the violence interrupters don’t
collaborate with local law enforcement. Since cooperating with police is against
the code of the street, the interrupters would lose the credibility they need to
mediate the conflicts. This approach is consistent with research on effective
mediation. Effective settlement agents, writes sociologist Mark Cooney, “must
be slightly higher in status and relatively intimate with the principals…
regardless of whether they are state officials, private individuals, or a hybrid of
both.” One of the great promises of community policing is that it can build
relationships between law enforcement and the neighborhoods they patrol, with
officers acting more like hockey officials, accepted as part of the community. As
it stands, however, the gangs and even the law-abiding citizens in these
neighborhoods view the police (often with good reason) as hostile outsiders.
When implemented, Cure Violence has met with considerable success, with
reductions of 41 percent to 70 percent in shootings and killings in Chicago, 20
percent in New York City, as well as a startling 73 percent drop in San Pedro
Sula, Honduras. A John Hopkins study found more mixed results in Baltimore.
They confirmed a 56 percent reduction in homicides and a 34 percent reduction
in nonfatal shootings. But another study found no significant differences in norm
change between the Cure Violence neighborhoods and a control group.
However, a second wave of surveys found greater awareness of community
mobilization against gun violence.
The second violence prevention program is one I discussed briefly in Chapter
Three. It was developed in Boston by David Kennedy under the name
“Operation Ceasefire.” The program produced the “Boston Miracle,” a stunning
reduction in homicides in the mid-1990s. (Kennedy’s excellent book, Don’t
Shoot, describes his efforts in lively detail.) The group is now known as Group
Violence Intervention. Like Cure Violence, GVI employs street outreach
workers to contact high-risk gang members and prevent retaliatory shootings.
And like Cure Violence, GVI emphasizes informal social control within
communities and groups. The central difference between the two programs is
that GVI does collaborate with law enforcement in order to create credible
deterrence against shootings. Whereas Cure Violence offers only carrots to
reduce violence, GVI uses both carrots and sticks.
Kennedy’s model is based on several core principles. The first is that serious
acts of violence in urban neighborhoods are perpetuated by a very small number
of young men. “Not an entire generation,” writes Kennedy, “not everybody in
the hot neighborhoods, not all the young black men. Not everybody exposed to
violent video games or rap. Not everybody from a single-parent family.… Not
everybody who’d been disrespected. Hardly anyone, in fact.… [M]ost gang
members never killed anyone. Most years, most gangs never killed anyone.” The
small number of truly violent actors leads Kennedy to believe that gun violence
is a manageable problem. Reducing rates of violence doesn’t require solving all
the ills of society, such as poor education, lack of jobs, single-parent households,
and institutionalized racism. While we have plenty of other moral reasons to
address these ills, we shouldn’t use them as an excuse for inaction or despair
about gun violence.
Kennedy’s second principle is that almost all gang members and at-risk youth
are rational. They’re not the nihilistic, sociopathic superpredators the media and
pop culture often portray them to be. They will refrain from violent behavior
when it’s in their interest. Indeed, most of them want to do so. So why do they
stockpile guns and start long-running murderous beefs? For reasons like those
that Ameena Mathews states above: They’re living in difficult, abusive, often
humiliating home environments. They go to terrible schools with no resources
and teachers who treat them like prisoners. Gangs give them a place to gather,
friends and enemies, a shared purpose, protection, and a pathway to respect.
“They do terrible things to protect themselves, they have terrible norms and
values pressed upon them,” Kennedy writes.
They may act accordingly but it doesn’t mean they like it. They’re actually looking for
a way out.… Even the gang kids are scared to death.… The fear, the group said, makes
them join gangs, it makes them get guns, it makes them carry guns, it makes them use
violence to show they shouldn’t be messed with. The fear, the group said, had become
an independent force. It was both an outcome of and an input into the street craziness, a
positive feedback loop.
If you grew up in a safe neighborhood like I did, it can be hard to relate to these
sentiments. But the fear these young men and women experience is completely
rational.
Kennedy’s third core principle is that people in this community lack
information about the consequences of gun violence. The sentencing process—
federal, state, youth versus adult—is mysterious for legal professionals, never
mind teenagers. The gang members have no idea how much time they would
spend in prison for gun crimes, nor what their odds were of getting caught.
Together, these principles led Kennedy and his group in Boston to implement
a policy of focused and credible deterrence. “Law enforcement, criminal justice,
is a massive, one-size-fits-all architecture,” Kennedy writes. It tells them, don’t
be in a gang, don’t commit crimes, don’t sell drugs or carry weapons, don’t
drink unless you’re twenty-one, go back to school, get a job—too many lines in
the sand to credibly enforce. The strategy of Kennedy’s group, by contrast, was
customized, particular, highly specific: “Don’t shoot.” Stop the gun violence.
Crucially, GVI aims their deterrence at the level of the group. The guiding
belief is that informal social control—”shame, conscience, guilt, what your
friends think, what your mom thinks, what your community thinks”—means
more to high-risk youths than the formal social control of police, trials, and
possible sentences. To that end, GVI employs a tactic familiar to all honor
cultures: collective responsibility. The goal is to give gang members reasons to
police their own. Working with police, the group arranges meetings in the
targeted communities where they speak to gang leaders and gang members faceto-face. This isn’t a sting, they say—we’re giving you information that’s
important to you. Gang violence is a federal matter now. Anyone caught
shooting is going to do serious time. But it won’t just be he who suffers: “We’ll
focus on everyone in the gang. We’ll arrest drug dealers and shut the markets
down. We’ll serve warrants. We’ll call in probation and parole. Nobody’s going
to smoke a joint or drink in public, nobody’s going to have any fun. We’ll talk to
the judges and make sure they know what’s going on. We’ll talk to your parents.
It’s up to you whether you get this attention.”
Essentially, GVI employs a less radical version of “Hamsterdam”—
Lieutenant Bunny Colvin’s plan in the great TV series The Wire to legalize
drugs in a certain area of Baltimore in exchange for no violence. Kennedy’s
group doesn’t offer to legalize drugs. Rather, they promise to devote far more
police attention to the drug dealing of violent gangs and (by implication) less
attention to the nonviolent ones. And they keep that promise.
Like Cure Violence, GVI has met with great success when implemented
properly, with significant reductions in violent crimes and shooting-related
incidents. The strategy has been effective for several reasons. It gives the gang
members an excuse to refrain from violent behavior—which almost all of them
want to do anyway—without signaling weakness. It gives gangs incentives to
police their own violent actors, since the gang’s financial future depends on it.
And because all the gangs share an interest in doing business without massive
police interference, GVI’s deal offers gangs and individuals caught up in beefs
an “honorable exit” from the violence.
The GVI program also treats the community with respect. The officers treat
them as rational agents, not sociopaths—something many of them rarely get to
experience, especially from police. And finally, the program broadens the circle
of caring, good people in the community, all of whom want safer neighborhoods
and better lives for the citizens. In Boston, Kennedy writes:
We had cops acting like social workers and trying to get gang members jobs, outreach
workers acting like cops and bringing law enforcement to bear, street ministers acting
like prosecutors and fingering impact players, prosecutors organizing job programs,
gang members turning in other gang members, neighborhood people reinforcing the
law enforcement messages.… The racial code talk is gone.… If this group says black
kids are killing each other and it has to stop, it doesn’t really mean that it thinks the
black family is collapsing, or that black kids are sociopaths, or that the community is
hollow and corrupt. It means that black kids are killing each other and it has to stop.
This is how honor groups deal with each other. Straightforward, honest,
respectful. It is a model example of containing rather than rejecting honor,
mining its virtues, harnessing its motivational resources, while at the same time
limiting its excesses.
“Aggression into Art”: The World of Battle Rap
The two programs described above are designed to contain the violence and
aggression within the honor cultures of inner-city gang life. My third example of
well-functioning honor seeks not only to contain aggression but also to harness
and direct it toward positive (and legal) ends. Harnessing aggression is crucial to
succeed in the growing community of battle rap. Battling has been around since
the beginning of hip-hop, but more recently formal leagues have formed to
showcase the best and most popular artists. Rules vary according to the leagues
and events, but the basic setup is as follows. Two rappers—usually men,
sometimes women—stand face-to-face, surrounded by their respective crews
and a large crowd of onlookers. Battles usually last three rounds, and in each
round the rapper tries to “outwit, outflow, and outdis” his opponent. In the early
days, battles were mostly improvised, and rappers were judged by how well they
could think, and rhyme, on their feet. In most modern league battles, however,
rappers prepare their verses in advance and throw in a few spontaneous rhymes
when inspiration strikes. The verses typically alternate between dissing
opponents and boasting about the rapper’s own prowess—often exaggerated for
comic effect.
When you watch a battle for the first time, you might think it’s dangerous
and unstable. But the disses and violent boasts are all part of game, part of this
expressive art form that grew out of the African American insult game called
“the dozens,” where the goal is to come up with the best insult for your
opponent’s mother. Since most rappers come from tough neighborhoods, many
boasts involve selling drugs, shooting, killing, robbing, pimping, and sex—often
with their opponents’ girlfriends and moms.
Like most honor frameworks, battle rap offers opportunities for individual
achievement within a communal framework. Rappers don’t just boast about
themselves; they celebrate their crew, neighborhood, city, tradition, and heritage.
Competitions are open to people from all races and cultural backgrounds—
black, Asian, Italian, Hispanic, Jews—and the slurs fly at a hilarious and rapid
pace. These are not microaggressions either, or even macroaggressions—they’re
whatever is above macro. Out of context, they would seem bigoted and almost
cruel. But talent and wit can win over almost any crowd, and the truth is that the
battles celebrate diversity and cultural pride in ways that diversity seminars and
workshops never could.
Hip-hop has plenty of critics and scolds who complain about the glorification
of violence and crime in rap. They’re not wrong about the glorification, but what
they often miss are the opportunities for positive norm change—not just about
guns, but about gang life in general. Take, for example, Loaded Lux’s legendary
final round in his 2012 Summer Slam battle against Calicoe. Calicoe had spent
his rounds establishing his reputation as a hard Detroit gangster. Calicoe’s father
had been one of the leaders of Detroit’s Black Mafia Family in the late ’80s,
which gave Calicoe some instant credibility. Loaded Lux started his final round
by deflating some of Calicoe’s pretensions, a common battle strategy. On a big
screen behind him, Lux showed a PowerPoint of an Instagram photo Calicoe
posted of swimming naked with some friends, saying, “So that’s how Detroit
gangstas do? / Skinny-dippin’ gone wild?” This was standard stuff, but it earned
big laughs from his home crowd in New York. But then Lux’s round takes a
more serious turn. As hip-hop scholar Shiva Mavima describes it, Lux
“condemns the destructive virtues embodied by gang life, and questions why
Calico’s father had not gotten a ‘9–5’ like a responsible parent would instead of
peddling drugs in the community and being arrested for much of Calicoe’s life.”
Lux returns repeatedly to the refrain “your pops wasn’t no gangsta, he was just
another lost nigga” and goes on to praise the “real gangsters,” the historic heroes
of the black community, such as Marcus Garvey, Nat Turner, and Harriet
Tubman, who “was more of a man than [Calicoe’s] father would ever be.” To
this day, many rappers and battle aficionados calls Lux’s final round the best
battle round of all time. P-Diddy had attended, and Jay Z tweeted out links to the
battle along with the line “He gon’ get this work!” that Loaded Lux used
repeatedly to get the rowdy crowd to calm down so he could continue his verse.
The canonization of verses like Lux’s, writes Mavima, reflects the value of
communal responsibility in black culture. In an interview, Mavima asked rapper
Pharaoh Soul to name the best battle he had seen. Pharoah Soul singled out a
battle in which Remy D called out his opponent, T-Dubb, for his unrelenting
emphasis on gunplay in battles: “As Pharaoh Soul explained to me, ‘he stopped
talking about what guns do, and started talking about what guns do,’ that is,
instead of focusing on the glamorized use of guns as an extension of one’s
masculinity, and described how violence had been destructive to the hood: ‘I
don’t respect niggas living your life standards / coz when you categorize the
victims your type adds up / they usually classified as innocent bystanders.’”
It’s true that these verses are more the exception than the rule—most battles
have plenty of references to violence and crime. For one thing, sanctimony and
moralistic sermonizing don’t lead to effective norm change. For another,
expressing violent impulses is part of the skill of battling—where the
“aggression into art” mantra becomes more than just a myth that “captured the
liberal imagination.” And crucially for the theme of this chapter (containment!),
the aggression in battle rap is confined to words and contained within the arena
of competition. No fights allowed. On very rare occasions, an insult might touch
a nerve, and a punch gets thrown. But the fight is immediately broken up, and it
usually leads to a suspension from the league. When the rounds are over, battlers
usually hug or shake hands, no matter how vicious the attacks were during the
battle. Nobody wants to get suspended; nobody wants to lose money and status
(and open themselves up for future attacks). Like the B-boy break-dancing
battles in the ’70s and ’80s, rap battles are effective opportunities for poor kids
of all races and creeds to gain status, honor, and for some even a steady income,
all through nonviolent means.
Lessons and Challenges
These are just a few examples of well-contained honor; there are plenty of
others: poetry slams, school team sports, backyard bare-knuckled fighting
leagues (such as those featured in the documentary Dawg Fight), and of course
restorative justice, an honorable and contained means of resolving conflicts. Just
before my deadline for turning in the book, I came across a new Chicago
program that in one year reduced violent-crime arrests by 50 percent and
improved high school graduation rates (19 percent) among young men. It’s
called BAM—“Becoming a Man”—and its six core values epitomize the idea of
contained honor that I’ve tried to flesh out in this chapter and throughout the
book. The values are integrity (“My values equal my actions; I am a man of my
word”), accountability (“I am responsible for the consequences of my actions
whether intended or unintended; I take ownership for what I do and avoid
projecting blame”), positive anger expression (“I learn that anger is a normal
emotion that needs to be expressed; how I express my anger is a choice, whether
as a savage or as a warrior”), self-determination (“I pursue my goals in the face
of adversity”), respect for womanhood (“I am more mindful and respectful in
how I interact with women; I strive to be a self-liberator and not an oppressor”),
and visionary goal setting (“I create a vision for myself, for who I am, and how I
want to be seen in the world; I create a vision that is focused on making my
community and the world a better place”).
If you’ve come this far in the book, you’ll recognize BAM’s core values as
central to most honor groups. Recall from Chapter One, for example, that
accountability for both intended and unintended actions is far more prevalent in
honor cultures than dignity cultures, which often have a strong control condition
for responsibility. BAM’s values also illustrate key elements of containment.
Their goal isn’t to eliminate anger but to control it (as warriors learn to control
anger). And since mistreatment of women is all too common in urban
neighborhoods and honor cultures in general, BAM’s core values insist upon
treating women with greater respect. (This recalls one of the fifty-six elements of
the Bushido Samurai code: “The warrior who strikes his wife is a coward.”)
Contained honor comes in too many forms to give a precise account of what
the features have in common. But the following are some elements that are
typical of well-functioning contained honor systems. The first is flexibility, with
an emphasis on moral character building. Honor groups are skeptical of onesize-fits-all solutions. They mistrust idealized solutions and exceptionless
general principles, showing a preference for flexible, focused, particularized
engagement. Again, we can turn to the BAM program for an excellent
illustration. BAM requires students to meet four times a month, and a trained
counselor leads students in discussions about personal challenges in their own
lives. They learn a variety of practices and activities—like meditation and
archery—that help them regulate and control their emotions and channel their
energy toward productive goals. The counselors avoid telling youth what is the
“right” and “wrong” thing to do, which is different from many moral values
programs:
For that matter, BAM never teaches youth not to get angry, or even that they should
never fight—because the program providers realize youth are growing up in difficult
neighborhood environments where they will be challenged and sometimes need to fight
back. Providers tell youth “if you fight be sure it’s only when you have to,” and report
that while most youth wind up fighting less, some stand up to challenges more often
due to BAM.
Analysts trace the success of BAM in part to this shift from moral rules to moral
character, which allows for greater flexibility in addressing the particular
challenges the young men face.
Well-functioning honor communities also tend to be small and relatively
egalitarian. People in honor groups need to know each other and be generally
aware of the group members’ behavior. Too much anonymity makes it difficult
to acquire reputations and to care about the reputation you have.
The communities should also feature a good mix of youth and experience.
Younger group members bring passion, energy, and new ideas. Elders can relate
the benefits of experience and rein in the excesses of youth. All of the examples
in this chapter—the NHL, Cure Violence, GVI, the rap-battle community, and
BAM—have elders within the community who are respected by the youth. In
addition, keeping the community relatively small makes it easier for members to
develop strong social ties, strong relationships, and a positive form of group
identification.
Another element these communities have in common is personalized conflict
resolution and skilled mediators. Most honor cultures have a norm for handling
your own business when it comes to conflict. When possible, people should
address disputes within the group directly—with trusted mediators available to
step in when necessary. The mediators should be members of the community.
But they shouldn’t have too close a relationship to either party. Recall
sociologist Mark Cooney’s claim that the best peacemakers are neither too low
nor too high in status relative to the principals. Too low and they won’t
command the respect of the disputant. Too high, Cooney writes, and they’ll have
“a strong tendency to be moralistic,” eschew “consultation, compromise, and
conciliation in favor of control, commands, and coercion.” Disputants in
conflicts don’t like moralistic mediators and will often turn their backs on
mediation efforts if they demonstrate moralistic attitudes.
Finally, well-contained honor cultures typically flourish in environments in
which basic needs are met. Honor’s violent side is much harder to contain when
people are desperate or hopeless. Accordingly, honor groups function best when
the needs for food, clothing, shelter, education, and employment are satisfied.
For these reasons, the best programs devote resources and attention to
community outreach that helps individuals meet these basic requirements.
This list of elements isn’t exhaustive, and many well-functioning honor
cultures don’t have all of them. Unfortunately, these elements aren’t sufficient
either for honor communities to flourish. Even the most successful honor
frameworks face tough obstacles in modern society. Both the Cure Violence and
the Group Violence Intervention programs, for example, have struggled to gain
widespread implementation despite overwhelming evidence that they reduce gun
violence and other violent crimes. Often this is for political reasons. Existing
institutions feel threatened. Turf wars are rampant. Not from the gangs, but from
the various agencies that deal with crime. Even in Boston, where GVI’s success
was celebrated and unambiguous, the program didn’t last. The institutions
wouldn’t cooperate. As street worker Teny Gross put it in an op-ed for the
Boston Globe:
There was glory enough for everybody, but the cooperation turned to competition and
control. There is no polite way to say it: Boston’s regression into its old territorial self
has translated directly into death. A decade ago a young man in Dorchester told me,
“You adults are the real gang members, easy to feel slighted, fighting petty beefs,
vying for attention and credit.” It is the beefs on the streets that get the headlines. But
the beefs in the offices and agencies are now equally to blame for what is happening.
Resistance is also born out of ignorance. The best-intentioned people are
often reluctant to implement an honor framework simply because they don’t
know how it really functions. Voters who know very little about Cure Violence
and GVI have the impression that it’s soft on crime—”hug-a-thug,” as rightwing op-ed columnists have referred to it. The same goes for restorative justice
programs. When people hear about them in the abstract, they sound touchyfeely, naive, Pollyannaish—hippie justice, the “hug-it-out” approach to justice
(what do people have against hugs anyway?). Watching or experiencing concrete
cases, however, leads people to almost the opposite impression. To fully
appreciate the value of honor systems, you have to experience them firsthand—
or at least witness them in action. But because honor systems are insular by
nature, outsiders often have difficulty understanding or relating to them. Honor’s
defenders must find creative forms of outreach that present a more personal and
vivid portrait of how it works.
Honor’s defenders face theoretical challenges as well. The dominant ethical
theories since the Enlightenment are abstract, idealized, systematic,
foundational, and universalizable. Honor has none of these attributes. Honor
norms are local, not universal. They are complex, messy, unsystematic, at times
even incoherent. Most important, honor is a thoroughly nonideal form of value.
Dignity-based theories, or utilitarian theories, can produce utopian ideals under
perfect conditions. True, conditions are far from perfect in the real world. Moral
injustice pervades our criminal justice system, for example; nobody denies that.
But the mere prospect of an ideal justice system with no bias or error, where all
criminals receive punishments in precise accordance with their just deserts, is
hard to resist. Though practically unattainable, the prospect prevents ethicists
from questioning the foundations of the status quo. At least it aims for an ideal,
even if it can’t ever approach it in practice. Honor doesn’t strive for perfection
and often comes in the form of an “unfinished alternative” or a work in progress.
The allure of perfection is strong, however, and it can get in the way of better
but nonideal alternatives. Honor groups must convince skeptics to compare their
approaches with actual rather than idealized options. Worried about racial bias
within restorative justice programs? It’s a legitimate concern, but compare how
it works in practice with the racial bias in our current system as it exists, not as it
is supposed to exist. And if restorative justice fares better, then institute it and
work to improve this aspect of its approach. Concerned about inconsistent
enforcement of drug laws under Group Violence Intervention policies? Fair
enough, but compare that moral cost to the costs of higher homicide rates and
the abiding mistrust and hostility toward police. Compare it to the costs of zerotolerance or three-strikes-and-you’re-out policies, all of which were instituted in
the name of consistency in sentencing. And so on, down the line. Well-contained
honor-oriented approaches may have inherent defects, yet still be morally
preferable by a mile to systematic and idealized approaches that could achieve
perfection “in principle.” The old saying “Don’t let the perfect get in the way of
the good” is worth taking very seriously here. If we allow honor to work its
magic, while limiting its excesses, we can make actual rather than theoretical
progress.

EPILOGUE
The specter of W. W. Beauchamp has haunted me throughout the writing of this
book. Beauchamp is a side character in Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece
Unforgiven, the dime-store author who chronicles the adventures of gunslingers
in the Old West. He swears by the accuracy of his accounts, but it’s clear from
the outset that Beauchamp romanticizes his subjects, depicting them as honorbound knights when they’re in fact brutal and merciless killers. In the film,
Beauchamp accompanies British bounty hunter English Bob on his way to the
town of Little Whiskey. Beauchamp is writing Bob’s biography, “The Duke of
Death.” What happens to English Bob is mostly unconnected to the main
narrative, but it perfectly distills the movie’s themes. As soon as Bob and
Beauchamp roll into town, Sheriff Little Bill takes away his guns and gives him
a brutal beating in front of the townspeople. Beauchamp pees his pants. Little
Bill then throws Bob in the town jail and unravels the myth of English Bob
completely. As he exits the town the next day, Bob is a raving lunatic, shouting
insults at America from the back of a horse carriage. Beauchamp, far from
chastened, just changes the subject of his biography from Bob to Little Bill,
eager to get started on a new romantic myth.
So I’ve approached this four-year project holding W. W. Beauchamp as my
cautionary tale, doing my best to separate the romance of honor cultures from
the reality. In the meantime, Donald Trump became president, and white
nationalist, neofascist, neo-Nazi groups have gained national attention.
Thankfully, they seldom mention the word honor, and white people is far too
diffuse and amorphous to count as anything like an honor group. But the white
nationalists do use rhetoric that isn’t too far off from the language I’ve employed
to describe honor communities. They bemoan the atomization of white society.
They portray themselves as victims of multicultural oppression, humiliated by a
powerful and politically correct State. To combat this “oppression,” they urge
white people to embrace their white identity. They’ve embraced a movement,
identitarianism, with origins in Far Right neofascist groups in France, Germany,
and Scandinavia. This past weekend (August 11–13, 2017), as I am writing this,
the groups united in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest against the removal of a
Confederate statue. The protest turned violent. It was an eye-opening event for
many Americans, including me, who didn’t quite realize the extent of their
abhorrent racist ideology. It’s scary stuff, and it would be naive to think there
won’t be more incidents like this between now and this book’s publication.
As a consequence, tribal value systems, including honor, are of even lower
repute among classical liberals and moderate conservatives than they were when
I began this project. Proponents of Western liberalism, Enlightenment values,
and the culture of dignity regard the past few years as vindication. About a
month before this book is scheduled to be published, Steven Pinker’s new book,
Enlightenment NOW, will come out. I haven’t seen a draft, but I’m willing to bet
that honor values will attract some more of his ire. And that’s fine. Like any
value system, honor should be subjected to serious critical scrutiny. Moreover,
the past few years should make us more appreciative of the morality of dignity
and its focus on equality and respect for human rights.
At the same time, there’s a smugness to the most triumphalist champions of
liberalism, an elitist “let-them-eat-dignity” quality, that ignores or undervalues
the serious problems of modern life, especially for the least educated and least
fortunate. The resurgence of Far Right nationalism in the United States and
Western Europe has exposed the inherent weaknesses and vulnerabilities of our
culture of dignity. These movements didn’t emerge out of nowhere. Human
beings crave communal connections; they crave purpose and meaning and seek
to identify with movements, causes, and groups. This is a well-documented fact
of human psychology. The policies and social structure of dignity cultures place
all the moral emphasis on the individual, which, along with the depersonalizing
forces of industrialization, has left many people feeling lost, alienated,
humiliated, and seething with resentment. That void, the lack of meaning,
community, and forms of identification, will get filled somehow. The question is
how it gets filled, what we identify with, how we derive meaning and purpose
from our lives. Liberal morality by design doesn’t give positive answers to these
questions; it gives us the freedom to answer them in our own way. But that’s not
enough. As I hope I’ve demonstrated throughout the book, honor offers flexible
and psychologically realistic frameworks that can satisfy these deep human
needs. Yes, we need to be careful about honor’s darker aspects, but we should
embrace the many positive manifestations that stay within the broad boundaries
of rights-based morality.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As I was developing my idea for a book, I called psychologist and prolific author
Paul Bloom for advice. He listened to my pitch and with his usual empathetic
(yes empathetic!) tact, steered me in a different direction. “It’s funny,” Paul said,
“based on our conversations, I would have thought you’d be writing a book on
honor.” And that was that. So thanks to Paul for reminding me to write the book
I was supposed to write.
My agent, Russell Weinberg, worked with me over two years developing the
proposal and nailing down the argument. I wanted to give up on the project
many times in the earlier part of the process, and Russell encouraged me to keep
trying. I’m also grateful to Russell for reading several drafts of the book and
helping me find my voice.
Thanks to T.J. Kelleher, editor at Basic Books, for offering me the contract
and for his valuable editing suggestions throughout the process. I’m grateful to
Leah Stecher, also an editor at Basic Books, for her detailed notes on an early
draft of the manuscript. Thanks to everyone at Basic Books for marshaling the
book through to publication.
I’ve spent countless hours talking to David Pizarro about honor, revenge, and
restorative justice. True, it was on our podcast Very Bad Wizards, and even now,
after five years, he still doesn’t fully appreciate the virtues of restorative justice.
I’ll never give up, though, and I’m grateful to David for his challenges, good
humor, and encouragement.
Big thanks to the graduate students in my seminar on honor in the fall of
2014. Our discussions throughout the semester were invaluable as I formed the
argument for this book. Special thanks to Valerie Soon (now at Duke); I’ve
incorporated several of her insights about honor’s value for battling oppression
in Chapter Four. Thanks also to David Sommers, Vida Yao, and Justin Coates
for reading drafts of the manuscript and offering helpful suggestions to improve
it.
Thanks to the University of Houston for giving me a semester leave to work
on this project. I’m especially grateful to David Phillips (Philosophy Department
chair) and Bill Monroe (dean of the Honors College) for being flexible with my
schedule, allowing me the time to finish this project.
Over the past dozen years, I’ve had many valuable conversations about honor
and responsibility, all of which have helped to shaped my views. I’m sure this
list isn’t exhaustive (and I apologize to anyone I left out), but thanks to William
Ian Miller, Anthony Appiah, Fiery Cushman, John Doris, Shaun Nichols, David
Shoemaker, John Bickle, Nancy Sherman, Steve Stich, Steve Burke, Dan
Demetriou, Ron Mallon, Hagop Sarkissian, Kim Meyer, Gabriela Maya,
Cameron Bruckner, Michael McKenna, Joe Henrich, Liane Young, Josh Greene,
Josh Knobe, Felipe de Brigard, Eddy Nahmias, Pavel Nitchovski, Dan Weiner,
and Eddie Guzelian.
My wife, Jennifer Sommers, has read several drafts of this book and helped
to shape it more than anyone else. Many of the book’s virtues (and all its
defects) are due to her influence. I’m so grateful to Jen and my daughter, Eliza,
for their loving, good-humored support, for making our small house a pleasant
place to work and a wonderful place to stop working. Finally, thanks to my dogs,
Charlie and Omar, for keeping me company as I wrote the book. They offered
unwavering enthusiasm even during the darkest periods of the writing process.
Tamler Sommers is associate professor of philosophy at the University of
Houston. He is the author of two previous books, Relative Justice: Cultural
Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility (Princeton, 2012) and A Very Bad
Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain (Routledge, 2016), and cohost of the Very
Bad Wizards podcast. He lives in Houston, Texas, with his wife and daughter
and two dogs of uncertain breed.
ALSO BY TAMLER SOMMERS:
Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility
A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain
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NOTES
PROLOGUE
“fetishisized virtues such as”: Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our
Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity, 183.
honor is hardly mentioned in the contemporary: Exceptions include work
by Anthony Appiah, Anthony Cunningham, Dan Demetriou, Peter
Olsthoorn, Laurie Johnson, Sharon Krause, and Shannon French.
“exiled to some philosophical St. Helena”: Anthony Appiah, The Honor
Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, loc. 2375, Kindle.
“strange commodity that exists”: Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature, 23.
WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic)
societies: Anthropologist Joe Henrich and colleagues coined the acronym
WEIRD to denote societies in the modern West that have these attitudes
about fairness, justice, and other ethical and political views. See Joe Henrich
et al., Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and
Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies and “The
Weirdest People in the World?”
CHAPTER ONE
“doing his best to disappear in plain sight”: Jason Turbow and Michael
Duca, The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing
Brawls—the Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, 113. Turbow and
Duca’s book is chock-full of entertaining stories about baseball’s unwritten
honor codes.
“We will not tolerate the guys”: Ibid., 112.
helpful distinction between two dimensions of honor: See Frank
Henderson Stewart, Honor.
Having horizontal honor is like: Brett McKay, Art of Manliness (blog),
www.artofmanliness.com/2012/10/01/manly-honor-part-i-what-is-honor/.
“In an honor based culture”: William Ian Miller, Humiliation, and Other
Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence, 116.
your virtues: The concept of “virtue” has acquired a fair amount of
philosophical and political baggage. Throughout I’ll use the word virtue in
its broadest sense, meaning “admirable character traits.”
“If my name ever goes down”: See Sharon R. Krause, Liberalism with
Honor, 135.
“implies that identity is essentially independent”: Peter Berger, “On the
Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor,” 177.
“The implicit sociology [of dignity]”: Ibid.
“to avoid being bothered decent and street youths alike”: Elijah
Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the
Inner City, 106.
“With the right amount of respect”: Ibid., 33.
“The crusher who becomes a rusher”: Ross Bernstein, The Code: The
Unwritten Rules of Fighting and Retaliation in the NHL, loc. 1985, Kindle.
“As kids we all had visions of being the guy”: Ibid., 1821.
If you travel to Iran: See www.bbc.com/travel/story/20161104-the-persianart-of-etiquette.
“With subtle remarks on lukewarm tea”: Andrew Shryock, “The New
Jordanian Hospitality: House, Host, and Guest in the Culture of Public
Display, 36.”
“the supreme ethical category”: Ismail Kadare, Broken April, 76.
It is a striking and somewhat puzzling fact: Some theories suggest that
hospitality norms are for ensuring the possibility of travel among potentially
hostile communities and groups. Guests proposing peace treaties or bringing
goods for trade had to be protected from harm and theft. In addition, since
forms of travel were much slower, travelers had to make several stops before
arriving at their destination. See, for example,
https://minerva.union.edu/wareht/gkcultur/guide/8/web1.html. Although
there is plenty of research on hospitality norms in honor cultures, there is
very little scholarly work on the origin and function of these norms.
“honor means ‘don’t tread on me’”: W. Miller, Humiliation, 84.
“is someone willing to acknowledge”: Bill Bonanno, Bound by Honor: A
Mafioso’s Story, xvi.
“follows no norms of conduct”: Orit Kamir, “Honor and Dignity Cultures:
The Case of Kavod (Honor) and Kvod Ha-adam (Dignity) in Israeli Society
and Law,” 16.
“no one steps up and demands justice”: Bonanno, Bound by Honor, xvi.
This aversion to third-party involvement: See Laura Blumenfeld,
Revenge: A Story of Hope.
“revealed very sharply in the inability”: Berger, “On the Obsolescence of
the Concept of Honor,” 172.
“were fighting not for money”: Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature, 23.
“revulsion from sexual activity”: J. K. Campbell, “Honour and the Devil,”
146.
“always implicates the honor of the men”: Ibid.
“hardly the downtrodden, submissive and self-effacing beings”: Jill
Dubisch, Gender & Power in Rural Greece, 10.
“What about an honor culture like my saga Iceland guys”: Tamler
Sommers, A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain, 101.
“It’s just a complex social psychological fact”: Ibid., 122.
“the ethos of honor is fundamentally opposed”: Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria,
1960: The Disenchantment of the World, The Sense of Honour, The Kabyle
House or the World Reversed, 129.
“They are in no way capable”: Ibid.
“What Japan, and indeed portions of the Middle East”: Gary S. Gregg,
The Middle East: A Cultural Psychology, 30.
CHAPTER TWO
the Western media “painted the bullseye”: Allahpundit, “Charlie Hebdo
Editor Warns Western Media: ‘We Can’t Be the Only Ones to Stand up for
These Values,’” Hot Air, May 4, 2015,
hotair.com/archives/2015/05/04/charlie-hebdo-editor-warns-western-mediawe-cant-be-the-only-ones-to-stand-up-for-these-values/.
consequences beyond the paper’s own journalistic failures: The hashtag
#spreadtherisk went viral afterward in response to the refusal of newspapers
like the Times to publish the cartoons.
“an unbreakable commitment to defend”: Marcus Luttrell and Patrick
Robinson, Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing
and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10, 282–283.
“France should remain as it is”: Michael Tomasky, “François Hollande
Shows True Grit on Refugees,” Daily Beast, November 19, 2015,
www.thedailybeast.com/francois-hollande-shows-true-grit-on-refugees.
“The annual number of abductions”: Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature,
446.
“As a social scientist”: Ryan P. Brown, Honor Bound: How a Cultural Ideal
Has Shaped the American Psyche, loc. 3233–3234, Kindle.
Other sources of motivation: See Appiah, Honor Code; and Sommers, Very
Bad Wizard.
“I wanted the chance to prove”: Sebastian Junger, Tribe, xiv.
“Only gods and heroes”: Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of
the Battle of Thermopylae, 36–37.
distinguished between two types of social relations: See Jonathan Haidt
and Selin Kesebir, “Morality,” for a good analysis of this distinction.
“a circle of men who”: Joan Aldous et al., “An Exchange Between
Durkheim and Tonnies on the Nature of Social Relations, with an
Introduction by Joan Aldous,” 48–49.
“characterized by a high degree of individualism”: Robert Nisbet cited in
Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, “Planet of the Durkheimians, Where
Community, Authority, and Sacredness Are Foundations of Morality.”
suicide rates were significantly higher: The rates were much lower in more
integrated groups, for people in large families, for example, and for Jews and
Catholics rather than Protestants. See ibid.
rates skyrocket after rapid modernization: See Roy J. Shephard and
Andris Rode, The Health Consequences of “Modernization”: Evidence from
Circumpolar Peoples.
A RAND Corporation study: See Junger, Tribe.
“social cohesiveness, a strong family system”: John Braithwaite, Crime,
Shame and Reintegration, loc. 1590–1592, Kindle.
“Show of hands, please”: David M. Kennedy, Don’t Shoot: One Man, a
Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America, 126.
WEIRD (Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic) people:
See Henrich et al., Foundations of Human Sociality.
“We learned the code as kids”: Bernstein, The Code, loc. 40, Kindle.
“When Tomas heard Communists”: Milan Kundera, The Unbearable
Lightness of Being, 177. I discuss this case in Relative Justice: Cultural
Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility as well.
“bored,” “frustrated,” “offended,” and “disgusted”: See Jennifer Jacquet,
Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool.
CHAPTER THREE
“It was us who gave the brothers”: J. Gram Slattery, “The Meaning of
‘Boston Strong’: Opinion,” Harvard Crimson, April 22, 2014,
www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/4/22/meaning-of-boston-strong/.
“Why Was Boston Strong?”: Herman B. Leonard et al., “Why Was Boston
Strong? Lessons from the Marathon Bombing,” 59.
solidarity was significantly correlated: James Hawdon et al., “Social
Solidarity and Wellbeing After Critical Incidents: Three Cases of Mass
Shootings.” See also James Hawdon and John Ryan, “Social Relations That
Generate and Sustain Solidarity After a Mass Tragedy” and “Social
Solidarity Measure,” for more detail on the measuring of solidarity.
the groundbreaking Culture of Honor: Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen,
Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South.
All of these features: See ibid., 4–7. See also Tamler Sommers, Relative
Justice and “The Two Faces of Revenge: Moral Responsibility and the
Culture of Honor,” for a detailed account of their view and its implications
for collective and individual responsibility.
“For immigrant latchkey kids”: Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A
History of the Hip-Hop Generation, 49.
I came across a documentary: As of this writing, Check It is available to
watch only on Louis CK’s website, louisck.net. See also Courtland Milloy,
“Gay Black Youths Go from Attacked to Attackers,” Washington Post,
September 27, 2011, www.washingtonpost.com/local/gay-black-youths-gofrom-attacked-to-attackers/2011/09/27/gIQA2JV52K_story.html?
utm_term=.c3c27e17f03a.
“We’re all in it together”: Luttrell and Robinson, Lone Survivor, 79.
“Your reputation begins right here”: Ibid., 90.
many contemporary theories of human cooperation: See, for example,
Natalie Henrich and Joseph Patrick Henrich, Why Humans Cooperate: A
Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation.
“Back in England every family”: Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, 49.
primary evolutionary function of tribal feuds: Jacob Black-Michaud,
Cohesive Force: Feud in the Mediterranean and the Middle East;
Christopher Boehm, Blood Revenge: The Anthropology of Feuding in
Montenegro and Other Tribal Societies; and Joseph Ginat, Blood Revenge:
Family Honor, Mediation, and Outcasting, provide excellent discussions of
how conflicts and feuds can build solidarity. In addition, strong retaliation
norms of feuding groups are correlated with strong norms of positive
reciprocity, which creates strong bonds of mutual influence and obligation.
D. Cohen and J. A. Vandello, “The Paradox of Politeness.”
“is all about building team unity”: Bernstein, The Code, loc. 1058–1063,
Kindle.
sports are one area: See Martin Van Boekel et al., “Effects of Participation
in School Sports on Academic and Social Functioning.”
“inner satisfaction, distraction, relief”: Robert Nye, “How the Duel of
Honour Promoted Civility and Attenuated Violence in Western Europe,” loc.
4956, Kindle. See Nye’s essay for an excellent discussion of Simmel’s views
on conflict.
“the clearer perception and livelier impression”: John Stuart Mill, On
Liberty.
“there is less honor to respect”: Nils Christie, “Conflicts as Property,” 6.
“one of the many cases of lost opportunities”: Ibid., 7.
“dead child’s family and the child’s accidental killers”: Jared Diamond,
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional
Societies?, 84.
“The moral order derives a very special kind”: Braithwaite, Crime, Shame
and Reintegration, loc. 1414, Kindle.
the egalitarian codes of an honor group: See Nye, “How the Duel of
Honour Promoted Civility”; Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-sociological
Theory; and Ben Merriman, “Duels in the European Novel: Honor,
Reputation, and the Limits of a Bourgeois Form.”
opposed it on precisely these grounds: Appiah, Honor Code, loc. 538,
Kindle.
“inaccurate and weak smoothbore pistols”: Collins, Violence: A Microsociological Theory, 218, cited in Merriman, “Duels in the European Novel,”
205.
“punched him in the face”: From Andrew Sharp, “The Miami Dolphins and
Everything That Will Never Make Sense.”
“not to hurt him physically”: Anderson, Code of the Street, 82.
“They have fought, and, for the moment”: Ibid., 90.
Equality, incidentally, is itself highly correlated: See Marii Paskov and
Caroline Dewilde, “Income Inequality and Solidarity in Europe”; and Bram
Lancee and Herman G. van de Werfhorst, “Income Inequality and
Participation: A Comparison of 24 European Countries.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Michigan psychologists Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen: These
experiments and their implications are discussed in Nisbett and Cohen,
Culture of Honor; and Dov Cohen et al., “Insult, Aggression, and the
Southern Culture of Honor: An ‘Experimental Ethnography.’”
According to the best evolutionary models: See Peter J. Richerson and
Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human
Evolution; and Henrich et al., Foundations of Human Sociality.
“the target of the whisperings”: Jacques Busquet, Le droit de la vendetta et
les paci corses, 357–358.
“A man slow to kill his enemy”: Margaret Hasluck, Unwritten Law in
Albania, 231–232.
“man is more naturally chicken”: William Ian Miller, Eye for an Eye, 96.
“the pretty young girls clustered around”: Steven Pressfield, “The
Warrior Ethos.”
“Don’t come in here crying”: Anderson, Code of the Street, 70–71.
honor norms can be “sticky”: See Joseph A. Vandello et al., “U.S.
Southern and Northern Differences in Perceptions of Norms About
Aggression.”
The explosion of the US prison population: See John F. Pfaff, Locked In:
The True Causes of Mass Incarceration—and How to Achieve Real Reform.
market exchange: Market is defined broadly—this framework, for example,
includes questions about proportionality in punishment—determining the
proper punishment for a particular crime. See Alan Page Fiske and Tage
Shakti Rai, Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End,
and Honor Social Relationships; and Rai and Fiske, “Moral Psychology Is
Relationship Regulation: Moral Motives for Unity, Hierarchy, Equality, and
Proportionality.”
“I’d rather die”: Brown, Honor Bound, loc. 2979, Kindle.
“What annoyed me most”: James Maasdorp, “Zidane’s Headbutt 10 Years
On: The Hit That Shocked the Football World.”
“It’s hard to explain”: Andrew Hussey, “Interview: Zinedine Zidane,”
Observer, April 3, 2004,
www.theguardian.com/football/2004/apr/04/sport.features.
“Our whole family is deeply saddened”: Tony Karon, “The Head Butt
Furor: A Window on Europe’s Identity Crisis.”
“I now forgot my roots”: Krause, Liberalism with Honor, 145–146.
“It rekindled in my breast”: Ibid., 146.
“sacrifice money, reputation, and life”: Ibid., 144–145.
“As much as I deplore violence”: Ibid., 175.
a disgrace to Jewish honor: See Kamir, “Honor and Dignity Cultures.”
“Jews were to think big”: Ibid.
“are required to denounce”: I owe much of this discussion to my former
master’s student Valerie Soon, now a PhD student at Duke University. In her
final paper for my seminar, entitled “Honor, Dignity, and Collective
Resistance,” she argued that honor offers a more effective framework for
battling oppression than dignity and invoked the writings of Stokely
Carmichael and Charles Hamilton to go along with the arguments of Krause
and Kamir.
The nature of oppression makes it difficult: Again, I’m grateful to Valerie
Soon for these insights.
he told me a good story: Sommers, Very Bad Wizard, 105.
controlling forces of the modern state: See J. J. Brent and P. B. Kraska,
“‘Fighting Is the Most Real and Honest Thing’: Violence and the
Civilization/Barbarism Dialectic.”
“Fighting is the ticket”: Ibid., 365.
“I’ve got school on Tuesday”: Ibid.
“as a reflection of inner integrity”: Heith Copes et al., “Peaceful Warriors:
Codes for Violence Among Adult Male Bar Fighters,” 763.
“It’s important to show who you are”: Ibid., 772.
“That I just wasn’t a man”: Ibid.
“agro dudes that have something to prove”: Ibid., 773.
“made reference to primitive man”: Ibid., 775.
“will expand and trickle through”: Ibid.
“Fighting also was perceived”: Ibid., 776.
“if you’re the person who starts it”: Ibid., 777.
“I told him to back off”: Ibid., 774.
“If you can already beat somebody up”: Ibid., 779.
Fistfights were the ultimate sign: Kennedy, Don’t Shoot, 59.
“I beat up some guy”: Copes et al., “Peaceful Warriors,” 782.
leads to greater cooperation: Fieke Harinck et al., “The Good News About
Honor Culture: The Preference for Cooperative Conflict Management in the
Absence of Insults.”
“Conflicts might kill”: Christie, “Conflicts as Property,” 1.
they “dishonor the memory…”: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-murderof-innocents-and-evil-fruit/
CHAPTER FIVE
“I look over to the girl”: Also from her essay: “The one thing that my dad
didn’t really teach me was the difference between a foul and not a foul. It
was kind of a problem. Well not kind of.”
“sets an internal limit”: Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, 366.
“Revenge is personal”: Ibid., 367.
“Tell me why he sacrificed her?”: Sophocles and Nicholas Rudall, Electra,
29.
“Take a close look at yourself”: Ibid., 31.
women in parts of southern Greece: Blumenfeld, Revenge.
“in which the corpse”: W. Miller, Eye for an Eye, 91.
“Will you never learn to control”: Sophocles and Rudall, Electra, 20.
“My whole life is spent seeking vengeance”: Ibid., 30.
“Where is the freedom”: Ibid., 49.
“No, I do not see”: Charles Portis, True Grit, 75.
“I want him to know he is being punished”: Ibid., 97.
“satisfaction not guaranteed” clause: W. Miller, Eye for an Eye.
“Forgetting was the way forward”: Blumenfeld, Revenge, 49.
“you can’t fuck with the Blumenfelds!”: Ibid., 114. I have a special
fondness for this part of her story. I first discussed Blumenfeld’s story in a
presentation at the 2006 Society of Philosophy and Psychology meeting. It
was one of my first major talks, a big success, and for the rest of the
conference people would refer to me as the “Can’t fuck with the
Blumenfelds” guy.
“It was about family”: Suzy Hansen, “Her Father’s Keeper.”
“Anybody would do what my brother did”: Blumenfeld, Revenge, 6.
“What if a Palestinian shoots a Jew?”: Ibid., 83.
“I did it for one reason”: Ibid., 344.
“Why did she use that word?”: Ibid., 348.
“the shedding of innocent blood”:
www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/rachelle-fraenkel-condemns-murderof-abu-khdeir/.
CHAPTER SIX
“The man is the source of life”: Aeschylus and Robert Fagles, The
Oresteia, 260.
“I honor the male in all things”: Ibid., 264.
“Here in our homeland”: Ibid., 269.
a “victims’ rights” movement emerged: See
law.lclark.edu/centers/national_crime_victim_law_institute/about_ncvli/history_of_victimfor more information on the victims rights movement.
“personal responsibility and moral guilt”: Booth v. Maryland, 482 US 496
(1987), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/482/496/case.html#515.
“The focus of a VIS”: Ibid. (emphasis added).
“can serve no other purpose”: Ibid.
“rules of relevance that are older”: Payne v. Tennessee, 501 US 808
(1991), www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/90–5721.ZD1.html.
“Such testimony,” the ruling stated: Robison v. Maynard, 857 P.2d 817
(1992). law.justia.com/cases/oklahoma/court-of-appealscivil/1992/15625.html.
“nameless/faceless non-players”:
law.lclark.edu/centers/national_crime_victim_law_institute/about_ncvli/history_of_victimthe upper and lower limits of deserved punishment: Norval Morris,
Madness and the Criminal Law.
open to “a fundamental objection”: See Andrew Von Hirsch,
“Proportionality and Desert, Reply to Bedau” and “Proportionality in the
Philosophy of Punishment.”
Consider a recent trial: I discuss this case and my objections to Von Hirsch
in “Partial Desert” and “The Three Rs: Retribution, Revenge, and
Reparation.”
crimes are not offenses against victims: Recall Orit Kamir’s remark about
how dignity regards offenses and harms: “It shouldn’t matter to us who the
victim happened to be, through whom human dignity was abused, since it is
the same dignity/value that we assign each and all of us, human beings.”
“The sentence imposed at the penalty stage”: California v. Brown, 479 US
538 (1987), http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/479/538.html.
“Right in its actuality”: Georg Hegel, Philosophy of Right, sec. 97a, as
quoted in Igor Primoratz, Justifying Legal Punishment.
credited with sparking the retributivist revival: See Herbert Morris,
“Persons and Punishment.”
why would they opt for a system: The best defense of this theory is
Primoratz, Justifying Legal Punishment.
the way victims respond to insults and offenses: See Dale T. Miller,
“Disrespect and the Experience of Injustice.”
“so that the matter is resolved”: See Charles Barton’s “Restorative Justice
Empowerment,” accessed at the Victim Offender Mediation Association
website, www.voma.org/articles.shtml.
“to change his position”: Christie, “Conflicts as Property,” 2.
a decrease in PTSD symptoms: Mary P. Koss, “The RESTORE Program of
Restorative Justice for Sex Crimes.”
“empowering rather than traumatizing”: Nadia M. Wager cited in
Francesca Marsh and Nadia M. Wager, “Restorative Justice in Cases of
Sexual Violence.”
In another recent study: Ibid.
“The victim is a particularly heavy loser”: Christie, “Conflicts as
Property,” 8.
These encounters help victims: See, for example, Tinneke Van Camp and
Jo-Anne Wemmers, “Victim Satisfaction with Restorative Justice.”
massive disproportional number of suspensions: See, for example, Russell
J. Skiba, Suzanne E. Eckes, and Kevin Brown, “African American
Disproportionality in School Discipline: The Divide Between Best Evidence
and Legal Remedy.” See also the Advancement Project, “Test, Punish, and
Push Out: How Zero Tolerance and High-Stakes Testing Funnel Youth into
the School,” www.advancementproject.org/resources/entry/test-punish-andpush-out-how-zero-tolerance-and-high-stakes-testing-funnel.
“public schools into well-policed fortresses”: Advancement Project, “Test,
Punish, and Push Out.”
“In a truly victim-oriented system”: Michael Moore, “Victims and
Retribution: A Reply to Professor Fletcher,” 77.
in light of real cases: Recall the trial in Grand Junction, Colorado, described
earlier. In that case, the judge took the wishes of the victim into account, and
it didn’t seem unjust in the least.
“reiterated his previous stance”: John Braithwaite, “In Search of
Restorative Jurisprudence,” 347.
“got neither his act of grace”: Ibid.
“At 2:15 in the afternoon”: Paul Tullis, “Can Forgiveness Play a Role in
Criminal Justice?,” New York Times, January 5, 2013,
www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/magazine/can-forgiveness-play-a-role-incriminal-justice.html.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“unwritten rules of engagement”: Bernstein, The Code, loc. 174, Kindle.
“It’s a living, breathing thing”: Ibid., 805.
“Spontaneous fights,” writes Bernstein: Ibid., 85.
“Hockey is a game that polices itself”: Ibid., 60.
“The basic premise of the code”: Ibid., 55.
“It didn’t matter if I didn’t like”: Ibid., 116.
Bruins-Canadiens “Brawl in the Hall”: You can see the famous brawl on
YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwRDsYrueUU.
“Nowadays, players don’t have to be accountable”: Bernstein, The Code,
loc. 3190, Kindle.
“and they relish the close bonds”: Ibid., 3405.
“constantly reassuring each player”: Ibid., 3408.
“a risk of having those situations”: Ibid., 3413.
“to keep the peace”: Ibid., 3493.
“It is a community where men will kill”: Kennedy, Don’t Shoot, 20.
“I didn’t eat this morning”: From the excellent documentary The
Interrupters, directed by Steve James, drawn originally from Alex Kotlowitz,
“Blocking the Transmission of Violence,” New York Times Magazine, May
4, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/magazine/04health-t.html.
“Punishment doesn’t drive behavior”: Kotlowitz, “Blocking the
Transmission of Violence.”
“requires changing the social norms”: Jeffrey A. Butts et al., “Cure
Violence: A Public Health Model to Reduce Gun Violence,” 39.
“The interrupters have to deal”: Kotlowitz, “Blocking the Transmission of
Violence.”
“I felt like a punk”: Ibid.
“Before Zale walked up to him”: Ibid.
“must be slightly higher in status”: Mark Cooney, Warriors and
Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence, 141.
a second wave of surveys: See Butts et al., “Cure Violence”; and Charles
Ransford et al., “Report on the Cure Violence Model Adaptation in San
Pedro Sula, Honduras.”
“Not an entire generation”: Kennedy, Don’t Shoot, 43.
“They do terrible things”: Ibid., 48.
“Law enforcement, criminal justice”: Ibid., 54.
“We’ll focus on everyone”: Ibid., 65.
GVI has met with great success: See, for example, A. Braga and D.
Weisburd, “The Effects of ‘Pulling Levers’ Focused Deterrence Strategies on
Crime”; and the data at https://nnscommunities.org/our-work/strategy/groupviolence-intervention.
GVI’s deal offers gangs and individuals: Ibid., 71.
“We had cops acting like social workers”: Ibid., 73.
“Aggression into Art”: The phrase comes from Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t
Stop, quoting a Village Voice article on break-dancing battles in the 1970s.
best insult for your opponent’s mother: The history of the dozens is
fascinating itself, going back to the time of slavery. Until the late 1970s, the
dozens was confined mostly to street corners in black neighborhoods. It was
a way for young black kids to exercise their minds—“like white people play
Scrabble.” One example:
I fucked your mama
For a solid hour
Baby came out
Screaming Black Power.
(Elijah Wald, The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama, 11)
all races and cultural backgrounds: The battle between Dumbfoundead (a
Korean) and Tantrum (Chinese) (which you can see at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0ZyNhsBWHc&t=1s) is one of the funniest
battles I’ve ever seen. They spend their rounds trading Asian slurs. A sample
from Tantrum’s final round:
Even in here there’s segregation
I’m faster at solving test equations,
basically I’m just a better Asian
See I spit sicker and I rhyme fresher
I can kick quicker by a higher measure
And just to throw it in, my dick’s bigger and I drive better!
Loaded Lux condemns the destructive virtues”: Shinga Mavima, “Bigger
by the Dozens: The Prevalence of Afro-Based Tradition in Battle Rap,” 86.
Mavima offers an excellent account of battle rap’s connection to the dozens
and to the oral tradition of the griots in West Africa.
the best battle round of all time: You can watch the battle between Calicoe
and Loaded Lux at www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1-z2hxXxKg&t=5s.
“As Pharaoh Soul explained”: Mavima, “Bigger by the Dozens,” 100.
“captured the liberal imagination”: Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, 156.
a new Chicago program that in one year: See www.youthguidance.org/bam/ and https://urbanlabs.uchicago.edu/projects/becoming-aman for more details on the program and its results. See also Sara B. Heller
et al., “Thinking, Fast and Slow? Some Field Experiments to Reduce Crime
and Dropout in Chicago,” on its results and an analysis of why it’s
successful.
“The warrior who strikes his wife”: Shannon E. French, The Code of the
Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present, 207.
They learn a variety of practices and activities: See Ulrich Boser, “The
Youth-Counseling Program Helping to Curb Chicago’s Violence.”
“For that matter, BAM never teaches”: Heller et al., “Thinking, Fast and
Slow?” (quote is from the working paper in 2015, 27).
shift from moral rules to moral character: The approach is also in line
with Aristotelian and Stoic approaches toward building moral virtues, which
emphasize practice and training over general moral principles. See the
excellent work on this topic by Nancy Sherman such as Stoic Warriors: The
Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind and The Fabric of Character:
Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue as well as my interview with her in A Very Bad
Wizard.
easier for members to develop strong social ties: Again, see Boser,
“Youth-Counseling Program.” The strong social ties, Boser writes, “fosters a
sense of belonging for BAM youth that influences positive identity
development and, for some youth, extends to a broader sense of belonging
with other prosocial networks.”
“a strong tendency to be moralistic”: Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers,
141. See also Donald J. Black, Social Structure of Right and Wrong.
turn their backs on mediation efforts: Cooney, Warriors and
Peacemakers; Black, Social Structure of Right and Wrong.
“There was glory enough”: Kennedy, Don’t Shoot, 235–236.
“unfinished alternative” or a work in progress: See Allegra McLeod,
“Confronting Criminal Law’s Violence: The Possibilities of Unfinished
Alternatives.”
EPILOGUE
Human beings crave communal connections: See, for example, Jonathan
Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and
Religion; and Haidt and Graham, “Planet of the Durkheimians.” According
to Haidt, moral values and intuitions are constructed from five basic
foundations, and community/loyalty is one of them. Western liberals,
informed by the morality of dignity, recognize only two of these foundations
—harm/care and fairness—as legitimate. But they are in the vast minority of
the world population. See also Alan Page Fiske’s relationship-regulation
theory in Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human
Relations and Fiske and Rai, Virtuous Violence. See also Henrich et al., “The
Weirdest People in the World?,” on the values of WEIRD cultures.
INDEX
Abbott, Greg, 51
ABC network, 49
accountability
affluenza, 64
in BAM program, 207
control condition, 64–67
decrease in, 63
honor and, 2, 7, 9, 46
individual freedom and, 64
in professional hockey, 189
shamelessness, 67–68
Achilles, 21, 24
Adams, Lucy, 54
Adler, Freda, 61–62
Aeschylus, 154–156
affluenza, 64
Agamemnon, 21, 133–134
aggression in honor cultures, 99–106
See also violence
“aggression to art,” 206
agonism, 13
Ajax, 24
Albanian honor norms, 33–34, 66, 104, 131
alcohol and drugs, 122
Algerian view of justice, 37
alienation, 46, 217
Allahpundit, 49, 226n49
Allen, Woody, 24
Anderson, Elijah, 27, 94
anger expression, 207
Annual Review of Public Health (2015), on gun violence, 195
Anthony, Susan B., 24, 56
Antigone, 24
Appiah, Anthony, 3, 40, 44
Associated Press, 49
athletics, solidarity in, 88
Bacon, Francis, 93, 128
Balgawi, 33
Baliga, Sujatha, 180
Baltimore, 197, 201
Balzac, Honoré de, 24
BAM (Becoming a Man) program, 206–208
banking crisis of 2008, 68
bar fights in Lafayette, Louisiana, 117–121
Barton, Charles, 172
baseball, as honor culture, 16–17, 37
basketball revenge, 125–127
beanball feuds, 16
Beauchamp, W. W., 215–216
Belichick, Bill, 88
Berger, Peter, 25–26, 28, 37
Bernstein, Ross, 65, 88, 188, 191–192
The Better Angels of Our Nature (Pinker), 3
bicycle helmets, 45–46
Black-Michaud, Jacob, 229n87, 241
Blalok, Hank, 15–16
Blumenfeld, David, 140–141
Blumenfeld, Laura, 140–145
Boehm, Christopher, 229n87, 242
Bonanno, Bill, 35, 37
Booth v. Maryland (1987), 160
Boser, Ulrich, 239n208, 242
Boston, 62, 71–76, 122, 198, 200, 202, 210
Boston Globe, on resistance to violence prevention programs, 210–211
Boston Marathon, as model of community solidarity, 72–76
“Boston Miracle,” 62, 122, 198
Boston Police Department, 62
Boston sports fans, 72
Boston Strong movement, 74
Bourdieu, Pierre, 42
Brady, Tom, 72
Braithwaite, John, 92, 178
bravery, 146
Broken April (Kadare), 33
Brown, John, 113
Brown, Ryan, 3, 54–55, 85–86, 108
Calicoe, 204, 205
Campbell, J. K., 39
Campbell, Jack, 180–181
Carmichael, Stokely, 115
Chang, Jeff, 80–81
Charlie Hebdo, 47–48
Charlottesville, Virginia, white nationalist march in, 216
Check It (documentary film), 81
Check It gang, 81–82
Cherry, Don, 29
Chicago, 97, 124, 195–197, 206
Chicago White Sox, 15
Cho, Seung-Hui, 83
Christie, Chris, 51
Christie, Nils, 90–92, 123, 174–175
Churchill, Winston, 24
Clinton, Hillary, 13
A Clockwork Orange (Burgess), 129
Clotworthy stabbing case, 178–179
Clytemnestra, 132–134, 137, 154–155
CNN, 49
code of the street, 27
The Code of the Street (Anderson), 94
Cohen, Dov, 77–79, 100–102
comedians table, 23
Comedy Cellar, 23
comic’s comic, 23
commitment devices, 8
community solidarity
adversity and, 57–58
benefits of in tragic events, 76
community policing, 197
depression and, 60
happiness and, 60
human beings as social creatures, 58
informal social control, 62–63
low crime rate, 61
types of social relations, 59
competition and conflict
athletic events, 87–89
conflict-resolution rituals, 92
contained forms of, 96
duels, 92–93
feuds, 86–87, 97
neighborhood fighting rituals, 94–95
as opportunities for social engagement and group participation, 91, 123
team brawls, 88
within-group conflicts, 89–90
See also violence
conceptual analysis, 4
conflict. See competition and conflict
conflict resolution, 92, 173, 209
Conor McBride’s murder of girlfriend, 179–180
control condition, 64–66
Cooney, Mark, 197, 209
Copes, Heath, 117
Corleone, Santino (Sonny), 1–2
Corsican honor culture, 104
Couch, Ethan, 63–64
courage, 2, 7, 56, 78
Covey, Edward, 112–113
crime rates, 61–62
Crimes Victims’ Rights Act of 2004, 160
criminal justice system, 36–37
Cruz, Ted, 51
culpability, 158–159, 161–167, 169, 177, 182
Culture of Honor (Nisbett and Cohen), 77–79, 100–102
Cure Violence program, 195, 196–197, 210, 211
Day to Day (NPR program), 84
De Niro, Robert, 19
death penalty, 149–151
Death Wish (film), 129
degangsterization process, 28
depression
after discharge from military, 61
rates of in US, 61
in socially cohesive societies, 60–61
in tribal cultures, 61
Diamond, Jared, 91
dignity
building solidarity and, 77
as cosmopolitan value, 80
criminal justice and, 36
dignity-based theories, 212–213
freedom to determine own identity, 28
individual liberty as luxury, 82
lack of connectedness to community, 89
lack of motivation, 24
passive nature of, 111–112
as replacement for honor, 11
respect for others’ rights, 52
third-party justice, 17
dignity-or rights-based theories, 5
dignity cultures
benefits of, 41
better in theory than in practice, 44
emphasis on individual, 217
handling conflict, 35–36
income and status inequality, 96
inherent weaknesses in, 217
institutional roles in, 26
lack of guidance in finding oneself, 28–29
reaction to insults, 35
separation of self from social structure, 26
as sign of civilization’s progress, 2
treatment of offenses by third party, 17
view of morality, 24–25
Dinah, 147–149
Dirty Harry (film), 129
domestic spying, 56
Don’t Shoot (Kennedy), 198
Douglass, Frederick, 24, 112–113, 116
the dozens (African insult game), 203
drama in honor cultures, 7
drone program, 56
Dubisch, Jill, 39
DuBois, W. E. B., 113
duels, 92–93
Dukakis, Kitty, 149–150
Dukakis, Michael, 149–150
Durkheim, Emile, 59, 60
Eighth Amendment, 160–161
Electra, 132–137
Electra (Sophocles), 133
Eliza’s basketball team, 125–127
emotion regulation and control, in BAM program, 208
Enlightenment NOW (Pinker), 217
Enlightenment values, 9
equality, 2, 96
Eumenides (Aeschylus), 154–156
“eye for an eye” principle, 131
false consciousness, 26
Falstaff, 3–4
Far Right nationalism, 217
farming communities, individualistic orientation of, 79–80
Feinberg, Michael, 89
female fidelity, 13, 40
Fessler, Dan, 67
feuds, 86–87, 97
fighting, 94–95, 116–121
Fiske, Alan, 107
free-range children, 53
free will, 6
French, Shannon, 223n3, 239n207, 244
Frenkel, Rachel, 146
gang violence
absence of elders, 194
battle rap, 202–206
environment for honor norms, 193
escalation of dark honor norms, 194
principles of violence prevention, 198–200
prison policies, 195
settlement agents, 197
violence prevention programs, 195–202
Garvey, Marcus, 205
Gates of Fire (Pressfield), 58
gemeinschaft, 59–60
Genachowski, Julius, 74
gera, 20–21
gesellschaft, 59–60, 62
Ginat, Joseph, 229n87, 244
glory, 3, 23–24
goal-setting, in BAM program, 207
The Godfather (film), 1–2, 132
Goodell, Roger, 71
Goodfellas (film), 19, 186
grad student and file cabinet experiment, 100
Graham, Jesse, 227n59, 240n217, 244
Greek words for vertical honor, 20–23
Gregg, Gary, 43
Grosmaire, Ann, 179–180
Gross, Teny, 210
group identity
collective responsibility, 83
concern for reputation, 84–85
sports fans, 85–86
street gangs, 80–82
taking care of your own, 80
team building, 83
Group Violence Intervention (GVI), 198–202, 210, 211
Guantánamo Bay detention camp, 56
Guillén, Ozzie, 15
guilt, 31, 56, 67, 118, 160–161, 173, 200
gun violence, 121–122, 194–195, 198–200
GVI (Group Violence Intervention), 198–202, 210, 211
Haganah, 115
Haidt, Jonathan, 227n59, 240n217, 244
Hamilton, Charles, 115
Hardiman, Tio, 195
harm-based theories, 5
Harvard Crimson, 73
Harvard Kennedy School, analysis of Boston’s response to Marathon bombings,
75–76
Hawdon, James, 76
Hector, 24
Hegel, G. W. F., 167–168
Henrich, Joseph, 221, 223n6, 229n84, 245
Henrich, Natalie, 229n84, 245
Henry IV, Part I (Shakespeare), 3–4
Henry V, King of England, 24
Henry V (Shakespeare), 19–20
herding societies, rates of violence in, 78
heroism, 3
Herzl, Theodor, 114, 115–116
hip-hop, 203–204
Hobbes, Thomas, 63
hockey, as example of containment
collective responsibility, 189
enforcers, 190
game officials’ role, 191–192
goons, 189–190
instigator rule, 190
personal accountability, 189
sanction of in-game fights, 188
Hollande, François, 51
honor
ambivalence about, 2
collective identification, 115–116
constraints on, 43
contemporary ethical theories about, 3, 211–213
criticism of, 12, 55
dark side of, 2, 10, 185–186
”fetishisized” virtues of, 3
grounding in fact, 8
hazards of, 186–187
honor tourists, 10
horizontal, 18–20
human rights and, 43
language of, 52
motivational power of, 25, 56
nonidealism of, 8
politics of, 12–13
reference to as disease, 3
as response to persecution, 112–116
romanticizing, 9–10
as shared hallucination, 4
as tool for norm transformation, 43
undefinable quality of, 4–5
as various parts of speech, 4–5
vertical, 20–25
virtues associated with, 2, 185
zero-sum misconception, 22
honor, containment of
battle rap, 202–206
examples of, 206
limiting potential abuses, 10–11
in professional hockey, 188–192
respect for human rights, 43
violence prevention programs, 195–202, 206–208
The Honor Code (Appiah), 40
honor cultures
balance of imposed roles and individual freedom, 29–31
basic needs met, 210
benefits, 82–83
central values of, 60, 76, 77
conflict resolution, 209
criticism of, 41–42
drama in, 7
egalitarianism in, 96, 209
external marks of membership, 85
female purity and men’s honor, 39
flexibility, 208
freedom and power of women in, 39–40
handling conflict, 35–36
honor codes, 8–9
honor-related violence, 108, 111
hostility to third-party justice, 37
immoral honor codes, 41
institutions and institutional roles, 26
mix of youth and elders, 209
moral character building, 208
motivational tools, 9
norms of aggression, 99
oppressive social structures, 26–27
public recognition, 22
responsibility and freedom, 6
sense of purpose and meaning, 7
Sicilian, 18, 37
size, 209
value of reputation, 38, 84–85
violence in, 103–104
women in, 10, 38, 134–135
See also group identity
honor groups
baseball teams, 15–17
collectivist orientation, 79
defined, 17
exclusivity, 19
football teams, 23
rhetoric as motivation for, 19–20
soldiers, 79
honor ideologies, activities associated with, 54
honor killings, 38, 40, 43, 108
honor norms
Albanian, 33–34, 66
culture specific, 42–43
defined, 31
enforcement of, 31
human universals, 31–32
obligation to stand up to challenges, 35
of Pashtun tribes, 33
honor tourists, 10
horizontal honor, 18–20
hospitality, 7, 32–34
human rights, 2, 9, 42, 43
Humiliation (Miller), 22
Icelandic Sagas, 22, 134
Iliad, 131
Imad, 142
“In Search of Restorative Jurisprudence” (Braithwaite), 178
individual freedom, 7, 9, 60
Indonesian focus groups, 68
informal social control, 62–63, 193–202
institutions, purpose of, 28
insults and honor, 38, 78, 103
integrity, 2, 7, 56, 146, 207
The Interrupters (documentary film), 195
intimidation, refusal of, 76
Iran, victim involvement in offender sentencing, 162
James, Steve, 195
Japanese ceremonies following crimes, 92
Japanese warrior culture, 104
Jay Z, 205
Jews, persecution of in eastern Europe, 113–116
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 193
Johns Hopkins, study of Cure Violence results, 197
Jordan, Michael, 93
Junger, Sebastian, 57
justice
American criminal justice system, 157
Colorado victim’s plea for lenient sentence, 164
consistency, 165–166, 182
culpability, 158, 159, 161–167, 169, 177, 182
dignity principle, 166–168
fair-play account, 168
honor approaches vs. modern criminal justice theories, 158
Iran, victim involvement in offender sentencing, 162
obstacles to victim involvement, 162–170
victim involvement, 159–164
See also punishment
“Justice Porn” website, 170
Jyllands-Posten, 49
Kadare, Ismail, 33
Kamir, Orit, 36, 114
Kant, Immanuel, 5, 7, 169
Kanun, 34, 131
Kennedy, David, 62, 193, 198–202
Kerr, Steve, 93
Kesebir, Selin, 227n59, 244
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 24, 56, 113
KIPP charter school program, 89
Kissinger, Henry, 10
kleos, 23–25
Korean-Americans, reaction to shootings at Virginia Tech, 83–84
Koss, Mary P., 235n175, 246
Kotlowitz, Alex, 196
Krause, Sharon, 24, 56
Kundera, Milan, 67
Lafayette, Louisiana, study of bar fights in, 117–121
language of honor, 52
Lee Tae-sik, 84
The Libation Bearers (Aeschylus), 154
liberal values, 7
liberalism, 8, 25
Lincoln, Abraham, 24
Liotta, Ray, 19
Loaded Lux, 204–205
Locke, John, 5
lokhay warkawal, 33, 50
Lone Survivor (film), 33
Lone Survivor (Luttrell and Robinson), 33
Los Angeles Times, cartoons of Muhammad published by, 49
loyalty, 2, 96, 146, 148–149
Luttrell, Marcus, 33, 50, 83, 84
“made man,” 18
Mafia, 18, 30
Malik, 94–95
manhood, 118
Manuel, Charlie, 16
Marine Corps slogan, 20
Marshall,Thurgood, 161
mass shootings, community solidarity and, 76
Materazzi, Marco, 109–111
Matthews, Ameena, 194, 199
Mavima, Shiva, 204
McBride, Conor, 179–181
McKay, Brett, 224n18, 247
McLeod, Allegra, 240n212, 247
McSorley, Marty, 65, 188–189
media cowardice, 47–49
Melrose, Barry, 190
Menino, Thomas, 73
Merriman, Ben, 230n93, 247
military, as honor subculture, 30
military policing, 56
Mill, John Stuart, 7, 90
Miller, Dale, 171
Miller, Dick, 63
Miller, William Ian, 22, 35, 40, 104–105, 115, 134–135, 153
misogyny, 10
Moore, Michael, 177
morality, regulation of relationships and, 108
Morris, Herbert, 168
Morris, Norval, 163–164
National Hockey League, 29–30
Navy SEALS, 83
NBA, zero-tolerance of fighting in, 192
Neurath, Otto, 12
New England Patriots, 72, 88
New York City, 197
New York Times, refusal to publish cartoons of Muhammad, 49
New York Times Magazine, on Conor McBride’s murder of his girlfriend, 179
New York Times Magazine, on violence prevention programs, 196
Nisbett, Richard, 77–79, 100–102
Nisbett, Robert, 59
Nozick, Robert, 130–131
Nye, Robert, 90
Obama, Barack, 75
O’Connor, Sandra Day, 167
Odgers, Jeff, 29–30
Odysseus, 24
Oedipus Rex, 66
Omar, 141–145
“On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor” (Berger), 25
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey), 129
O’Neal, Patrice, 23
Operation Ceasefire (now Group Violence Intervention), 62, 198–202
oppression, 116
Oren, Michael B., 146
Oresteia (Aeschylus), 131, 154, 156
Orestes, 132, 156
Ortiz, David, 71, 73–74
P-Diddy, 205
Parks, Rosa, 24
Pashtun tribes, 33, 50
Patriot Act, 56
Patriots, New England, 72, 88
Payne v. Tennessee (1991), 161
Penelope, 24
PEP (Prison Entrepreneurship Program), 27–28, 89
personal connection, 60
Pfaff, John, 231n107, 248
Pharaoh Soul, 205
Pinker, Steven, 2, 38, 53–54, 106, 217
Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 21
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 61, 175
Powell, Lewis, 160, 166
presence of guns, 194
Pressfield, Steven, 58
pride, 75–76, 118
prison(s)
conditions, 157
population in US, 99, 107
Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP), 27–28, 89
private, 157
reform of, 107
survival identity in, 27–28
private prisons, 157
Program on Crisis Leadership, analysis of Boston’s response to Marathon
bombings, 75–76
punishment
culpability and, 159–170
in gesellschaft cultures, 62
influence on behavior, 195
modern understanding of, 36
restorative justice and, 171–182
revenge and, 145–147
theories of, 129–132, 155–156
Rai, Tage, 107
RAND Corporation study of PTSD, 61
rap, battle, 202–206
Rawls, John, 5, 7, 169
recidivism rates, 62
refugees, Syrian, 50–53
Relative Justice (Sommers), 65, 83
Remy D, 205
reputation, 38, 78, 84–85, 119
resilience, 75–76
responsibility
collective, 83
control and, 65
egalitarian spirit and, 96
in honor cultures, 6, 191
moral, 6, 159
in professional hockey, 189
restorative justice and, 172
restorative justice
benefits of victim’s encounter with offender, 175–176
Clotworthy stabbing case, 178–179
Conor McBride’s murder of Ann Grosmaire, 179–180
norm clarification, 92
objections to, 173–178
potential for racial bias, 176–177
principles of, 171–173
retribution vs. revenge, 129–132
retributivism, 129–130, 155, 169
revenge
Dinah, 147–149
dishonorable, 145–147
Electra, 132–137
Eliza’s basketball team, 125–127
as expression of love, 137–140
”eye for an eye” principle, 131
for family pride and acknowledgment, 140–145
honorable, 146
Laura Blumenfeld, 140–145
Mattie Ross, 137–140
Michael Dukakis, 149–150
personal nature of, 125, 131, 142–145, 150
remembrance and sacrifice, 133–137
retributivism, 129–130
as transformation, 145
utilitarianism, 129
Revenge: A Story of Hope (Blumenfeld), 140
Richelieu, Cardinal, 93
risk aversion
children and, 53
consequences of, 56–57
honor ideologies and, 54–55
increase in, 46
media cowardice, 47–49
obsession with physical safety, 50, 57
unwillingness to help Syrian refugees, 50–53
Robinson, Jackie, 24
Ross, Mattie, 137–140
Ruth, Babe, 24
safety fetish, 50, 57
Saint Crispin’s Day speech, Henry V, 19–20
Salon, interview with Blumenfeld, 142
San Pedro Sula, Honduras, 197
Savage Skulls, 85
school-to-prison pipeline, 56, 99
self-determination, in BAM program, 207
self-respect, 116, 119, 123, 170, 173, 176, 183
sexual norms, 40–41
shame
for backing down from a challenge, 35, 56–57, 118
disappearance from our emotional vocabulary, 68
as informal social control, 200
for not taking responsibility, 65
for other group members, 83
sexual, 39
when norms are violated, 31
when third parties punish people who have wronged one, 150
shamelessness, 67–68
Shane (Schaefer), 182–183
Shaw, Bernard, 149
Shryock, Andrew, 225n33, 249
Siegel, Bugsy, 115–116
Simmel, Georg, 89
Slutkin, Gary, 195, 196
social cohesion, 7, 60–61, 69, 96
social isolation, 46, 61
solidarity, 2, 7, 46, 48, 58, 60, 87–90, 96
sologamy, 58
Sonmor, Glen, 65
Southern Californian focus group, 68
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 56
Stewart, Frank, 17, 19, 20
Streep, Meryl, 21
suffragettes, 24
suicide rates, 61
Summer Slam Battle of 2012, 204
Supreme Court, 159–160
Syrian refugees, 50–53
T-Dubb, 205
taarof, 32
team building, 83
three-strikes-and-you’re-out laws, 56
tîmê, 21–23
toleration, 7
Tolstoy, Leo, 24
Tomasky, Michael, 52
Tonnies, Ferdinand, 59
Torres, Martin, 196
Tracey, Sean, 15–16, 37
tradition, 60
tribalism, 10, 13
Tribe (Junger), 57
Trojan War, 32, 133
True Grit (Portis), 137
Trump, Donald, 50
Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar, 73
Tsarnaev, Tamerlan, 73
Tubman, Harriet, 205
Tullis, Paul, 179, 181
Turner, Nat, 205
Twist, Tony, 189
Tyree, 94–95
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera), 67
Unforgiven (film), 132, 215
urban gang culture, 30, 37
USA Today, cartoons of Muhammad published by, 49
utilitarianism, 5, 129
vertical honor, 20–25
Veterans Affairs, US Department of, 61
violence
“aggression to art,” 206
alcohol and drugs, 122
argument-related homicides, 101–102
bar fights, 117–121
code of, 117–121
as conflict resolution, 120
constraints on, 119, 121, 124
excessive aversion to, 99
functions of norms of aggression and higher sensitivity to insult, 103
guns, 121–122, 194–195, 198–200
in herding societies, 78
in honor cultures, 103–104
honor norms typically found in herding or pastoral societies, 102–103
honor-related, 108–111
morality of, 122–124
norms of aggression, 99
as path to respect, 116–117
pressure to conform to aggressive norms, 104
reinforcement of aggression norms, 105–106
resistance to violence prevention programs, 210–211
in response to persecution, 112–116
studies of students from northern and southern states, 100–101
violence prevention programs, 195–202, 206–208
women’s role in, 104–105
zero-tolerance policies in schools, 107
See also gang violence; honor, containment of
Violence Interrupters program, 195
Virtuous Violence (Fiske and Rai), 107
Von Hirsch, Andrew, 163–164
warrior cultures, 57
Washington Post, cartoons of Muhammad published by, 49
WEIRD (Western, educated industrial, rich, and democratic), 6, 65, 66
Western ethical tradition, 5, 7
white nationalists, 216
The Wire (TV series), 201
women
fidelity, 40
in honor cultures, 10, 38, 104–105, 134–135
honor killings, 38, 40, 43, 108
respect for, 207
zero-tolerance policies in schools, 56, 99, 107, 177
Zidane, Zinedine, 108–111
Zionism, 114