
The world's most toxic value system (2001) - agmiklas
https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/TOXICVAL.HTM
======
georgewsinger
> Created 19 November 2001, Last Update 30 August 2011

Looks like this was created right after 9/11\. It's understandable why he
wrote this.

> It's considered bad form in many circles to criticize another culture's
> values. In addition, the social science literature contains a number of
> rationalizations for the "honor" mentality. One is that every value system
> makes sense to the people that hold it. Another is that every value system
> exists for a reason. Well, of course. The problem is that you can make these
> assertions about any value system whatsoever. Rape and genocide and
> embezzlement also exist for a reason, and make sense to people who think a
> certain way. That doesn't tell us whether the values are morally acceptable
> or even whether they are beneficial to those who adhere to them...So I
> regard it as trivially obvious that the "honor" mentality exists for a
> reason and makes perfect sense to the people that adhere to it. I don't
> doubt it for a moment. I merely claim that these values debilitate the
> societies that hold them.

Something this author believes that most people (in our coastal bubbles)
don't: that some cultures are better than others. It's astonishing how
controversial this position is even 16 years later; however, I think when this
article was written it was even more politically incorrect to say than it is
now.

~~~
leohutson
It's illogical to make value judgements about cultures, there is no objective
way to do it. What makes one culture "better" than another? Survival?
Virality? Honor? Piousness? Lawfulness? Every culture values these things
differently.

Calling it politically correct shows your own failing to comprehend something
outside of your own cultural frame of reference.

Notably I could make the same point about morality as the author makes about
honor, as it is just another social construct.

Morality holds individuals back from getting what they want, instead they go
around accumulating morality points even when no one powerful is watching.
Clearly anyone who respects morality as a cultural value is PC wuss.

~~~
sullyj3
What you're gesturing at is that it's illogical to make value judgements,
period, without a standard that your object of interest is being judged
against. This fact, which is blatantly obvious once pointed out, is obscured
by the shortcomings of our language.

Usually the standard is implicit, but obvious from context, for instance if we
were talking about racing, we could say that a Mclaren is better than a
Volkwagen, and elide that we mean "better at moving quickly around a
racetrack".

It certainly makes sense to judge cultures, as long as you remember to have a
standard in mind. For instance, by the standard of the general wellbeing of
African Americans, it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is
superior to American culture of the 1850s.

The fact that different cultures value different things shouldn't be a problem
for discourse, as long as your interlocutors have values in common. Lack of
objective truth about values shouldn't prevent one from working towards the
values that they personally hold.

Relativism isn't (or at least shouldn't be) "there's no objective truth about
values, so therefore every value system should be treated as equally valid".
That would be an objective normative claim, and making it would be
inconsistent with relativism. Relativism is just "there's no objective truth
about values", and it stops there. Nothing about that prevents you from
preferring your own values to those of others.

~~~
leohutson
> For instance, by the standard of the general wellbeing of African Americans,
> it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is superior to American
> culture of the 1850s.

But it might be hard to convince a 1850s white American to adopt that
standard.

It's tautological to say that as by definition 1850s white Americans culture
is extremely distasteful to a modern HN commenter.

Any culture that isn't similar your culture is by definition inferior when
held to your cultural standards, so there is no reason to do so.

All you need to decide is if the other culture is similar enough to tolerate
it.

~~~
interfixus
> _It 's tautological to say that as by definition 1850s white Americans
> culture is extremely distasteful to a modern HN commenter_

Which definition would that be?

~~~
leohutson
I can't respond to your other question, but the particular value we were
discussing was this:

> For instance, by the standard of the general wellbeing of African Americans,
> it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is superior to American
> culture of the 1850s.

Shouldn't really be controversial, but America is going through a regression
right now so who knows..

~~~
interfixus
Being Scandinavian, I do not really partake of whichever American regressions
you may be thinking of.

I most certainly admire and find inspirational a lot of the values that built
the US from the ground up. Hard work, frugality, dedication, diligence, and
self-reliance, to name a few of the qualities that not least Northern
Europeans brought to the expanding frontier.

Nor did they particularly hold with the slavery ways of the South.

Also, you may recall, there was a war fought over that issue.

~~~
leohutson
How is that relevant to what was being discussed earlier in the thread? It was
merely an example.

That you share some values with a historical culture is hardly important
information, if you look hard enough you can probably find something you like
in all cultures, historical and present day.

~~~
interfixus
> _It 's tautological to say that as by definition 1850s white Americans
> culture is extremely distasteful to a modern HN commenter_

Weak tautology, then. And a squishy definition. 1850s white Americans' culture
by and large is not distasteful to me.

You may of course invoke 'modern' and a No True Scotsman line of argument.

------
Declanomous
This is interesting. At the risk of being lambasted for this view, I've often
felt that this is the issue with a lot of places within the United States.

For instance, I've always considered personal interactions in the South to be
largely dictated by honor. I do not think it is coincidental that the poorest
and least-educated areas of the country are the same area.

I think a similar problem is at play in inner-city violence. I live in
Chicago, and murders seem to be almost entirely honor-related at this point.

While I do think that honor-based societies are indicative of a lack of
pragmatism, I think that they make sense in a certain light as well. Honor is
something that has no (outright) monetary cost, and so you can have honor when
you have nothing else. If you have nothing but your honor, and don't defend
your honor when someone besmirches it, you will be left with nothing at all.
This alone makes it fairly easy to see why people will kill to maintain their
honor.

~~~
baybal2
I read it, and think it is a so so writing. The author piles too many things
together.

martythemaniak gets more of what it is to it.

There are no such thing as an honour based society, and the author is
imagining things.

Popular explanation: what seems as an "honour" things to people in the west
are often just egregious displays of social status. It is hard for Americans
to naturally arrive to the way of thought of this sort. I'll drop few examples
for you:

Men killing their wives who were raped - it is not them any much recovering
that "honour," but to show everyone that these men do not let the enemy to
assert dominance over them, non-verbally stating "hey look, the enemy has no
power over me, he will not diminish my status by forcing me to sleep with a
woman raped by him"

Same for the extreme sensitivity to insult marty mentions - it is to show
everyone "No one is allowed to place themselves above me"

Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing - is the thing
from the same opera. It is to show that you do not let the assailant to assume
social status above you. If you can't retaliate and kill, you show your
weakness/inferiority/impotence.

Americans, you are fortunate enough to not to live in a society where ones
social status is not determined by a principle of "the ones who have higher
status than I am are the ones I can't kill"

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I don't understand what you're trying to express here. You agree that all of
the things the author describes do happen, and pretty much for the same
reasons the author describes, but you...still think he's wrong, somehow?
Possibly because you don't like him using the word "honor," even though he
went to great lengths to _not_ do that?

~~~
baybal2
He picked word Thar, but even that semantic loading that he devised, reinvents
the bicycle. He want to put that to "wage feud" as he puts is different from
simple fight over social status, while it is, and later he effectively says
that.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Most people don't kill over social status. If we're going to communicate about
this effectively, we need to find a word that means "social status except
you're willing to kill over it." Which he did. Is there a word you would have
preferred?

------
c3534l
I'm not sure why the author lumps together so many of the attributes he does,
and when he does acknowledge exceptions, rather than learn from them and
understand why they exist, he simply waves his hands an says Japan wasn't
honor-bound enough or not in the right way or whatever else.

His examples are cherry-picked and similar examples exist in the countries he
holds up as exemplars. Saudi Arabia viewed cleaning as women's work, sure,
just like nearly every country in Europe 100 years ago. Again, sexism is
inexplicably considered to be part of this horoscope-level cultural complex of
traits, as is apparently poor people excessively taking possessions from
deceased relatives.

He blazes by picking one bad thing that happened in a given culture, offering
no further analysis other than to gawk at how much better our culture is, then
moves on to an entirely different society where he happens to know one bad
thing about them and repeats the process.

The article appears to me to be little more than a post-hoc justification of
the author's prejudices, with a few glib references and citations which give a
glib appearance of being well-researched and substantive.

~~~
DubiousPusher
The weirdest thing was the drive by defense of the Confederate flag. That
tipping of the hand was downright parkinsonian.

~~~
dmichulke
There are historical views stating that the American Civil War was in fact a
secessionist war against an increasingly powerful federal government and that
slavery was just used as one cause, obviously the most "despicable" from
today's view, in an effort to legitimize an otherwise illegitimate war against
secessionist states.

You can see this partly in quotes from Lincoln, in constitutional law of the
states (some explicitly reserved the right to leave the union) and the fact
that equality before the law was not achieved until hundred years later
(assuming the view point that it was achieved at all).

This view results in two things:

1\. The confederate flag is not a racist symbol _per se_ (it is used as one
though as is the Swastika)

2\. The war was just another war about power and money, such as pretty much
every other war. Just ask yourself what was the last humanitarian war you
witnessed?

Sources:

\- Google for "Abraham Lincoln Racist". It is a very much divided topic.

\- 2nd paragraph here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_American_Civil_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_American_Civil_War)

\- There was a fantastic seminar on this topic (with downloadable Audio files)
by Walter Block (a Libertarian) but I cant seem to find it.

~~~
lucozade
I'm not sure I follow. It may well be that the north had ulterior motives
beyond humanitarianism but that doesn't take away from the fact that the
explicit reason that a number of states gave for seceding was to preserve
slavery.

I'm not sure I get your point about the flag either. Of course, it's not
racist per se, it's abstract. But it's almost exclusively flown as a symbol of
pride in the confederate institutions that it represents. Those institutions
were explicitly racist. As you say, it has direct parallels with the swastika.

> what was the last humanitarian war you witnessed?

And finally, this really doesn't take into account the period. It was not at
all unusual, in the mid 19C, for countries to use military action for social
aims. Now, I happen to think that an awful lot of it was on behalf of
evangelism of "superior" values rather than humanitarianism. This was rife in
British establishment thinking at the time and was prevalent in the northern
states too.

In other words, I think it's justified to believe that these actions were
driven by feelings of moral superiority rather than human equality. But to
suggest that they can all be understood as power plays simply doesn't fit the
facts.

------
ChuckMcM
There are a lot of works on the relative impact of honor or shame cultures. I
was first exposed to that concept by some of the works of Roland Muller
([http://www.rmuller.com/](http://www.rmuller.com/)). The thesis that is
favored by Christian theology is that Jesus taught forgiveness as the word of
God rather than retribution (eye for an eye) which has been the prevailing
response, and in so doing changed cultures that had been stagnant for hundreds
if not thousands of years into something that could approach enlightenment.

While I cannot say with any sort of authority if one culture is better than
another, I can say that my exposure to "honor" cultures in the South and South
Central LA did not seem to help the adherents be better people or move forward
in their lives. It had the opposite effect of compelling them into behaviors
that were self destructive in order to satisfy their person concept of honor.

~~~
nkurz
If you are interested in the role of "honor" in American culture, and up for
lengthy academic treatise filled with incredible tidbits of knowledge, David
Hackett Fischer's book "Albion's Seed" is delightful. For example, here's an
excerpt that stuck with me regarding President Andrew Jackson's approach to
marriage:

 _The border custom of bridal abduction was introduced to the American
backcountry. In North and South Carolina during the eighteenth century,
petitioners complained to authorities that “their wives and daughters were
carried captives” by rival clans._

 _Even future President of the United States Andrew Jackson took his wife by
an act of voluntary abduction. Rachel Donelson Robards was unhappily married
to another man at the time. A series of complex quarrels followed, in which
Rachel Robards made her own preferences clear, and Andrew Jackson threatened
her husband Lewis Robards that he would “cut his ears out of his head.”
Jackson was promptly arrested. But before the case came to trial the suitor
turned on the husband, butcher knife in hand, and chased him into the
canebreak. Afterward, the complaint was dismissed because of the absence of
the plaintiff—who was in fact running for his life from the defendant. Andrew
Jackson thereupon took Rachel Robards for his own, claiming that she had been
abandoned. She went with Jackson willingly enough; this was a clear case of
voluntary abduction. But her departure caused a feud that continued for
years._

 _For a cultural historian, the responses to this event were more important
than the act itself. In later years, Jackson’s methods of courtship became a
campaign issue, and caused moral outrage in other parts of the republic; but
in the backcountry he was not condemned at the time. Historian Robert Remini
writes, “One thing is certain. Whatever Rachel and Andrew did, and whenever
they did it, their actions did not outrage the community.”_

~~~
stevenwoo
I think breaking up a failing marriage by Jackson mightily pales to his
personal role in fulfilling his contemporary American's desires in the Trail
of Tears which incidentally also helped open up more land for slave owners in
the South.

------
tlb
Moral Tribes, by Joshua Greene [0] has a more in-depth analysis of honor and
other cultural attributes. You can find large geographical differences in the
importance of honor within the US.

Cooperation also varies greatly around the world. Scores in a cooperation game
(where you both win by cooperating) vary by an order of magnitude between
countries. They are somewhat related, in that getting hosed by the other
player in a cooperation game is merely annoying for a non-honor-oriented
person, but humiliating for an honor-oriented person, so they're more likely
to defect immediately. The article doesn't mention it, but that seems like the
obvious mechanism for how thar causes poverty.

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

------
tehwalrus
The central thesis (thar as a toxic value) seems plausible, but his examples
are all crazy, and his deduction about economic prosperity is questionable at
best.

Look at the UK as an example of somewhere with extreme classism and heredity
of employment for hundreds of years, the bit in between the "honourable
knights" and the industrial revolution (which happened in the midst of
astonishing inequality of wealth and opportunity). If you don't think the
Royal carriages plastered with gaudy decoration are about external honour then
what are they about exactly?

Also, the idea that the successful societies succeeded because they weren't
sexist is proposterous, since the key points in their development happened
long before the (start of the) recovery from that awful vice, which still
isn't over as the news from Hollywood and Westminster in the last months
neatly illustrates.

As others have said, this looks like a post-hoc justification of prejudice,
which sadly ruins an interesting idea.

~~~
chrisco255
Sure, women were treated unequally in Western societies, but even in the 18th
century, girls of the U.S. were educated in the same local schools. Contrast
that with some societies where women can't even drive... Which economy's
future would you bet on?

~~~
wfo
>Which economy's future would you bet on?

This isn't a good metric. Countries with slavery, for example, can easily have
a stronger economy than free ones. The amount of material goods a society
produces is at best tangential to notions of morality or justice.

~~~
DonbunEf7
Are there any countries with slavery which are outperforming similarly-
situated countries without slavery? AFAIK slavery is only useful in
Civilization 4 (whip it! whip it good!) and IRL it is no substitute for
citizenship.

~~~
wfo
The success of the United States economy was almost entirely built on slave
labor. Dubai and Qatar, some of the most economically successful countries in
their region, are essentially entirely built on slave labor. It is making a
comeback in the US because of how efficient it is in the form of mass
incarceration combined with prison labor. The inference 'economic success' ->
'morally good' is, well, horrifying. Slavery is a good counterexample but old
since it's so abhorrent countries have mostly abolished it. Sweatshops are
another good example.

~~~
majewsky
> Dubai and Qatar, some of the most economically successful countries in their
> region, are essentially entirely built on slave labor.

Exactly. These massive oil reserves have nothing to do with it. /s

~~~
wfo
Exactly, you've clearly stated my original point -- economic success in
countries has nothing to do with the morality of their society or culture or
government. Economic success is more often than not luck of the draw and can
happen to brutal slave dictatorships as much as free market democracies.

------
bjourne
> Just imagine the PLO ever accepting an order to recognize the right of
> Israel to exist.

PLO first recognized Israel in 1988:
[http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/08/world/arafat-says-plo-
acce...](http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/08/world/arafat-says-plo-accepted-
israel.html) Then again in 1993 during the Oslo Accords:
[http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Yearbook9/P...](http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Yearbook9/Pages/107%20Israel-
PLO%20Mutual%20Recognition-%20Letters%20and%20Spe.aspx) The Palestinian
Authority now in control of parts of the West Bank has also done it on several
occasions and even Hamas has de facto recognized Israel:
[https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20141011-forget-its-
charte...](https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20141011-forget-its-charter-
hamas-has-given-de-facto-recognition-to-the-state-of-israel/)

Meanwhile, Israel has not once recognized the right of Palestine to exist.

Why discuss this detail of his essay? Because details are important and if you
are ignorant about them, like this author is, you reach the wrong conclusions.
The ignorance forms preconceptions that are not true in the slightest. In this
conflict, we have one side who is occupying the other and refusing to let go
of territory it has conquered. Resisting that is justified and obviously based
on nationalism, not the Thar concept the author writes about.

You can't just claim that all those Middle Easterners are driven by Thar, and
we Westerners are always the rational ones. It's not so easy.

------
Nomentatus
It's just not historically true that "northern European culture has been
relatively free of the thar mentality." We weren't magically spared these
traits. In fact few hundred years ago duels were the mainstay of the
_official_ justice system in England. These duels were, literally, trials. I
wish I knew more about how we got away from all that.

~~~
linkregister
I think that prosperity through the pursuit of opportunity leads to such
changes.

The author derides the continent of Africa, yet ignores enormous economic and
public health improvement among most countries there in the last 30 years.
Attitudes and “honor” culture have changed as well; nowadays commerce and
transactions are the norm in cities, rather than violence based.

~~~
uiri
The article was originally written 16 years ago and last updated 6 years ago.
How much of the improvement in the last 30 years has been over that time? How
much of the improvement in the last 30 years has filtered its way into the
popular perception of Africa? Or into how Africa looks from a statistical
perspective? I am not surprised that the article gives a picture of Africa
that is 20-30 years out of date.

~~~
linkregister
At that time, various countries in Africa were struggling and at a nadir:
Sierra Leone, Guinea, Burundi; others flourished: Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania,
Zambia. Many others didn’t change materially: Egypt, Tunisia, South Africa.

It is as meaningful to lump all African countries together as it is to group
all countries in Asia. There are more commonalities between North Africa and
the Middle East than similarities with southern and central Africa.

------
Nomentatus
Without a working and well-funded criminal justice system, "Don't ____with me
or my clan EVER " may be the best you can do, alas. As mentioned in another
comment, if you're living in a U.S. inner city where talking to the police is
taboo, similar conditions can develop.

"Irrationally" disproportionate responses to small problems ("display" in ape
terms) may prevent worse problems and greater violence. It's not ideal, it's a
fallback.

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

~~~
Nomentatus
But to the individual, it's not a local maximum; they are trapped in a first
mover's dilemma (later called Nash Equilibrium), and everybody simultaneously
moving to very different norms is statistically unlikely.

~~~
usrusr
That only addresses the depth of the hole (even deeper), not the fact that the
hole is a trap.

The whole discussion here was surprisingly devoid of how to get out
(individually or as a society) and so was the article. From a solution-
oriented crowd such as this I take that as a sign that it is indeed difficult.
Even acknowledging it as a problem seems to be a struggle with an open
outcome.

~~~
Nomentatus
Again, let's please be precise, not return to imprecision. For the individual,
it is a local maximum. For the population, it isn't, it's a trap/local
maximum. However moving whole groups to new behavior is insanely tough for a
simple reason: culture-retainment (cognitive herding) is high in the list of
what humans do best, for good reason. Ironically perhaps, the history of
colonization provides the best evidence of how to initiate change. Building a
new prestigious culture within the old one does work. Maybe not in a
delightful direction, but it has been demonstrated to be effective.

------
toomanyrichies
This reminds me of a passage I read from "Hillbilly Elegy" by JD Vance, where
he talks about growing up in the Scots-Irish parts of West Virginia, and the
almost pathological devotion to family honor.

One anecdote (the details of which I'm mis-remembering slightly) involves an
incident he witnessed in a Walmart or Kmart or some such store, where a mother
whose out-of-control kids were scolded by an employee for their behavior. The
mother proceeded to physically threaten the employee for the perceived affront
against her family's honor.

The canonical example of "vendetta" behavior among Scots-Irish is the feud
between the Hatfields and McCoys, which I believe Vance also mentions.

Throughout the book, the author intertwines anecdotes of self-limiting (or
even anti-social) behavior like the above with descriptions of the worsening
economic climate that the region's residents find themselves in. He makes a
great case (sometimes subtly and sometimes bluntly) for the idea that the two
reinforce each other.

It's amazing what kind of mental gymnastics people will go through to convince
themselves that they're "honorable", especially when that honor is the only
asset they think they have left.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
That book should be the required reading for this article. I love how he
talked about the effect of Honor culture even in elementary school fights, and
how difficult it has been to detach himself from that culture as an
individual.

------
sooheon
The author's Japanophilia masquerading as social insight is laughable. His
cute anecdote illustrating the self aware remorse of the Japanese is of _one_
doctor who has a shrine in his living room. I wonder if in his extensive
travels he's ever visited Yasukuni shrine.

~~~
smnrchrds
More laughable is that he assumes that there is not one person in the variety
of cultures he collectively calls thar who has done something similar.

------
cobbzilla
This article, while interesting, is incredibly presumptive and totally non-
scientific. As such, I consider it pablum.

Surely no one culture is universally "better" than another. Pick some
metric(s), some cultures will be better, some worse.

What's left unstated and undefended in this article is the metric for
comparing the "goodness" of cultures. With that, at least we would have some
quantitative things to compare -- then one could respectfully disagree on the
metric, or offer alternate evidence for calculating the metric, or offer other
metrics to consider.

------
narrator
I would describe the "honor" system as like treating the world like a big
MMORPG where the only goal in life is to accumulate "honor" points. The whole
point of life is to grind away everyday to gain more honor points. Someone
insults you = lose honor points. Revenge on the insulter = gain honor points.
Wife cheats on you = lose honor points. Revenge on wife = gain honor points.
Someone cheats you out of 10 cents = lose honor points, etc. The points are an
end in themselves. The whole purpose of life is to get them and he who dies
with the most points wins. The truth is unimportant. The benefit to society as
a whole is unimportant. More money means you can humiliate people and have
people kiss ass which means more honor points!

~~~
yorwba
You could replace "honor" by any other kind of value system and you could
still interpret is as a points system. That's because of the Von Neumann-
Morgenstern theorem [1], which basically says that any kind of well-behaved
(i.e., not self-contradictory) preferences can be modeled as a points system
(called _utility function_ ).

Heaven points. Money points. Sex points. Altruism points. Whatever you are
trying to achieve in life, it can be reduced to a points system.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenster...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenstern_utility_theorem)

~~~
narrator
Well let's say that someone criticizes a "honor" system person for being
violent. Someone interested in the truth would not react violently to that
criticism because they would acknowledge that as a contradiction and that
doing so would prove their critic correct. Someone only interested in "honor"
points would react violently toward the critic because that's how you get
"honor" points, by getting revenge for insults. The person interested in the
truth can recognize a flaw in their fitness function. The person only
interested in "honor" points never questions the rules. Their is no procedure
to question the rules in the "honor" points system just as a computer is
unable to question its programming.

~~~
yorwba
> Someone interested in the truth would not react violently to that criticism
> because they would acknowledge that as a contradiction and that doing so
> would prove their critic correct.

But wouldn't proving their critic correct give them "truth" points?

Presumably, you actually mean "someone I'd call a reasonable person, who can
recognize the truth; but who has other aims beyond making things true". That
person's actions will still follow some kind of points system, although it
might be slightly more complicated. But "honor" points can be complicated as
well, since they need to encode which actions are "honorable".

Ultimately, the only difference is that you agree with one kind of behavior
over the other. But what you think is a flaw in someone's utility function,
they'll think is a flaw in _yours_. That doesn't mean all value systems are
equally good, just that their relative ranking depends on the person doing the
evaluation.

~~~
narrator
The fundamental aspect of the truth system is that the person remains flexible
as to the way to achieve their goal, but not necessarily the goal itself.

The methods of the "honor" points system never changes in response to any
empirical feedback. The "honor" points are the way and the end in themselves.
They are not subject to backpropagation in the "honor" points system. They
were burned into ROM and the "honor" automotaun faithfully executes the
program until it dies. The "honor" system does not evolve. The truth system
does not know what it will be in several decades, but it will seek truth and
incorporate feedback. It is fundamentally incomplete and will remain so. The
"honor" points system is complete -- forever.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
At last, a rational argument for the moral superiority of Northern European
societies! That was about time!

It's pitty this is such an old article, I'd love to hear the author's
rationalist defense of the moral superiority of diverse historical phenomena
originating in Northern Europe, like anthropogenic global warming, WWI and
WWII, separately the Holocaust, Stalin and, well, why not? Colonialism.

Yeah, it's a rhetorical request. It's my attempt at a reminder of the real
reason why educated people don't criticise others cultures so easily. Because
they know where _they themselves_ come from.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
"The White Man's Burden" is to Colonialism, as "The World's Most Toxic Value
System" is to ___Now?_____

Fuck... I'm sure that's not right. I sucked at this part of the SAT's.

------
orbitur
This takes a strange detour towards the end.

> Even more disturbing is a rise in a mean-spirited resistance to any kind of
> honors for Confederate soldiers.

Seems a bit contradictory to insist that we honor immoral people for the sake
of... I'm actually not sure how the author got here. Especially after the bit
about not accepting responsibility.

The Confederacy was a moral failing, and the best way to take responsibility
for it is to disown it.

~~~
exelius
While the reasons behind the war and its intended results can certainly be
called immoral, I don’t think we can apply the same label to enlisted /
conscripted soldiers. Most of those guys didn’t join up to protect slavery but
rather their homes; and many didn’t have a choice about fighting at all.

Agree that slavery was a moral failing; but the cause of the war was economic
— the main reason people were pro-slavery was because they owned assets that
would lose ownership of or they worked in the slave trade. Yes, that reasoning
is morally abhorrent, but morality often gets tossed out the window when money
is involved. It wouldn’t have been a war without the money.

~~~
stevenwoo
Most confederate soldiers _volunteered_ , and most had no benefit from slaves
as property, though half had some household connection to slave owners.

Obviously since The Atlantic was founded by abolitionists it might tend to
favour one side, but I feel pretty confident in the righteousness of their
cause. :) -
[https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/small-t...](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/small-
truth-papering-over-a-big-lie/61136/)

Protecting their homes is different from fighting for slavery in what way - I
am having trouble understanding what protecting their homes means in this
case. It seems like an after the war mytho to fit Shermans march to the sea
burning everything as the army went or the Union army seizing Lee's homestead
for what became roughly Arlington National Cemetary (and for which Lee's son
was later compensated).

------
LiweiZ
Off topic, the web site is truly content-centered and looks clean and clear
with no unnecessary information. Font size for each level is very good, too.
For me, that's how good design should look like.

~~~
jjjensen90
This design is probably a product of the page being written in 2001. Back
then, the web was (text) content-centered because browsers couldn't do much
other than text and layout. I might even be old enough to say those were "the
good ol' days" :)

~~~
usrusr
Those good old days were much earlier, that article is from the heyday of
Macromedia Flash. The page is as bare and content centric as it is not because
of age but because it is on .edu, the majority of which was already
delightfully retro back in 2001.

------
martythemaniak
\- Extreme importance of personal status and sensitivity to insult

\- Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing

\- Obsessive male dominance

\- Paranoia over female sexual infidelity

\- Primacy of family rights over individual rights

And who do these values remind you of? It is especially funnysad to read this
16 year old American writing today.

~~~
nyolfen
who are you trying to allude to? these traits apply to almost every
traditional patriarchal culture on the planet, they're the historical norms
for huge swathes of humanity.

------
pron
While the author has every right to hold those opinions, he doesn't seem to be
an anthropologist, sociologist or historian, as his entire analysis is
completely devoid of context and the desire to understand. Value systems,
while also a result of arbitrary progress, mostly arise to fit the conditions
of the society that creates them. A face-to-face society is very different
from a strangers' society. Europe in the middle ages was not much different
from those cultures the author derides. Part of the reason why some cultures
still maintain face-to-face values is because Europe, largely due to chance,
progressed technologically before other cultures (after learning algebra from
the Arabs), and travel and communication technologies are what create a
strangers' society with its own, very different values. Then, Europe harmfully
interfered with the progress of other societies.

Also, it is a little funny to call other culture's value "toxic" and your own
"superior", considering that the European culture of rationality has been the
deadly, violent and exploitative (of both people and nature) to a far larger
scale than any other.

------
darawk
I super hard agree with the primary point of this article. Honor culture is
unbelievably toxic. However, i'd like to quibble with this:

> When a concept has a label that is diametrically opposed to the normal sense
> of the term, it's the wrong label. This has nothing to do with value
> judgment (although my value judgment is clearly stated), it is simply a
> matter of using words accurately. If you translate a foreign word as "red,"
> and notice that people always use it when describing grass, it's obvious
> that your translation is faulty. If you translate a foreign word as "honor"
> and find it often used to describe dishonorable acts, it's equally obvious
> that your translation is faulty.

The author doesn't seem to understand abstraction. The fact that the
_instances_ of 'honorable acts' in a given culture differ does not negate the
shared meaning. The thing 'honor' refers to is not the definition of the
particular acts, but the role this abstract concept fulfills in a society.
Honor is the thing that, once impugned, requires retribution to regain. Honor
is the thing that bleeds down a family tree for generations. Honor is the
thing without which there is shame. Which acts credit and discredit this thing
called honor are irrelevant to the definition of the term.

In certain street gangs in the US it is honorable to wear certain colors and
not others. In certain sects of Islam it is dishonorable for your wife's face
to be seen by other men. These two seemingly unrelated acts fulfill
recognizably similar roles in their respective cultures. To not allow language
to recognize this shared heritage is to discredit the very notion of
abstraction, and to deny the genuine intellectual and social roots of the very
concept the author is quite nicely articulating.

~~~
Chris2048
> These two seemingly unrelated acts fulfill recognizably similar roles in
> their respective cultures

How? Are street gangs demonstrating the obedience of their clothes?

------
andyjohnson0
See also the Albanian tradition of Kanun [1,2] for an example of what happens
when a society gets trapped in this kind of moral tar pit.

[1] [http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/03/albania-
da...](http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/03/albania-dark-shadow-
tradition-blood-feuds-160318033023140.html)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanun_(Albania)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanun_\(Albania\))

------
beautifulfreak
I was reminded of Chapter 6 of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The chapter is
called "Harlan, Kentucky," and discusses the feuds that took place there. He
makes an attempt to blame it on genetic heritability, tracing it back to
Scotland and forebears who herded sheep and practiced honor culture, with
mention of a psych study showing Southern students responded differently to
insults. Higher testosterone levels? I can't remember. I think it's unsettled
that genetics plays a role, but why not?

------
throw2016
A lot of societies are extremely similar as they progress in stages to some
kind of 'modernity' \- defined as access to basic resources, education
opportunities, scientific advancement and some degree of prosperity.

You can easily see this by comparing pre-technology societies from 1 to 1600AD
and the structures are essentially feudal and quite similar.

Post colonial european society managed to proceed at a far faster rate by
bringing far more people into opportunity and wealth than previously because
you now needed many more people and new systems to manage this expansion than
the existing feudal power structures. This kicked off a technology scientific
revolution and itself caused far reaching fundamental internal structural
changes in these societies.

That's 400 years of near constant wealth, science and change others have not
had and who now exist in a weird middle ground with access to some of the
consequences of modernism but not the wealth, culture and history that made it
possible because that cannot be replicated unless you want to kick off a new
wave of colonialism.

------
hamilyon2
I don't understand author's position. Vendetta is obviously bad. Genocide and
religiois fanaticism is incompatible with western sosiety. This is obvious
too.

Other than that, well, sometimes it is perfectly rational to act agressively
or overreact to show your seriousness or be impolite in response to some sort
of behavior. It depends.

~~~
bmn__
> Vendetta is obviously bad.

That depends on the value system. When human life is worth less than retaining
honour, then killing by vendetta is obviously desirable and good for thar
society.

------
throwaway43434
I feel most of these 'cultural prognosis' are generally just old racial
prejudices being justified to fit whatever one sees.

You can see how the author extricates Japan from his 'analysis', but not so
for other Asian nations; in fact much of this can be said to be true of China
and India (amongst others), but many here and elsewhere will somehow extricate
China, but not India for obvious fiscal reasons. This trend is striking if
you're old enough to have followed the reporting on a topic for many years.

Yet, little of the culture and the way of doing things have 'changed' in a
significant way.

It's kind of like ML, you have some terribly useless set of features, and you
use it to fit some dataset. The thing with ML is that you know this is stupid,
and you have a test set to tell you it's stupid.

Not so, sadly, with our 'intellectuals'.

~~~
linuxkerneldev
> I feel most of these 'cultural prognosis' are generally just old racial
> prejudices being justified to fit whatever one sees.

I think there's an element of truth to your statement. One key sentence in the
essay that lends itself to your conclusion is this one:

" A thar-dominated society will never achieve equality, regardless how
prosperous it becomes, because prosperity for the masses is a direct affront
to the status of the elite. "

But we know that our very own Anglo-Saxon society was very much a "thar-
dominated" one until quite recently and although we've not reached ideal
levels of equality, we have significantly cut inequality.

~~~
DuskStar
> But we know that our very own Anglo-Saxon society was very much a "thar-
> dominated" one until quite recently and although we've not reached ideal
> levels of equality, we have significantly cut inequality.

In other words, a "thar-dominated" society won't achieve equality, because the
west typically isn't one anymore.

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

------
tcell
Minor nitpick - he mentions the concept of Shame Cultures vs. Guilt Cultures
and mentions the Japanese as a Guilt Culture, along with the European
cultures. But this concept was first popularized in a book by Ruth Benedict
called the Chrysanthemum and the Sword, where she claims that Japanese culture
is a Shame (haji) culture where social norms are primarily enforced by fear of
ostracism ("Nobody will be your friend/help you if you act like that!") versus
internalized fears in a Guilt culture ("God will punish you if you act like
that!"). It was written in the late 40's and it's been criticized by Japanese
and others, but that's where the idea comes from.

------
scandox
Ahistorical, generalizing, self-serving and definitely not within the author's
stated expertise (earth science, physical sciences, astronomy).

However an extremely interesting and brief summation of a very widely held
world-view.

To me what makes it obviously wrong is the simple fact of the holocaust and of
Stalin's purges. No honor culture required there. My view is that our cultures
and indeed characters are like water balloons - squeeze em tight in one place
and watch em pop out elsewhere.

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

~~~
linuxkerneldev
> When you're poor these honor systems may be all you have

I think you're on to something there. I recall something from Steven Pinker's
book on violence.

" if I do something stupid when I'm driving, and someone gives me the finger
and calls me an asshole, it's not the end of the world: I think to myself, I’m
a tenured professor at Harvard. On the other hand, if status among men in the
street was my only source of worth in life, I might have road rage and pull
out a gun. "

------
fellellor
This whole thing read like sickening sanctimonious bullshit. So there are no
instances of revenge, based on personal honor, anywhere in Japan or the
western world?

Then he goes on to say:

>People infected with this attitude will be utterly incapable of recognizing
wrongdoing by their own society, utterly incapable of taking criticism or
recognizing the need for correction.

This is a prime example of the "only a sith deals in absolutes" meme.

What is more pathetic is that I am so underemployed right now that I had the
time to read this whole garbage article in the first place. I guess it's time
to move on.

------
sasaf5
> I will use the Arabic word thar, "blood vengeance," for this value system

Do I see a strawman there?

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

------
InternetOfStuff
I almost missed the /PSEUDOSC/ in the URL.

------
jstewartmobile
When you've been a professor that long, it happens to you. The students aren't
going to challenge you, and the classroom becomes a feedback amplifier for
your own bullshit.

