Lately I’ve been thinking about honor. Maybe because I spent the last couple of months mulling over the musketeers. Maybe because I’ve gone back to a regency-reading jag as I work on things as far from regency as possible.
Honor has got a bad rep lately. It’s been dragged through the mud, and its garments are draggled. Association of its names with such egregious ideas as “honor killings” has done it no good.
It’s particularly unjust since honor killings are more shame-killings. I grew up in a culture that still shows a lot of Arab influence, (well, they were there almost as long as the Romans, you know?) and I almost understand honor killings – if I squint and look sideways. I was, after all, raised in a village (so like Miss Marple I’ve seen all there is to see of human wickedness.) Of course Portuguese – at least civilized ones – don’t honor-kill their daughters. But we had a case in the village where a father shaved his daughter’s head because she was talking to a strange boy. And even with my family’s rather odd behavior, since we were all readers and a fair number of us engaged in creative work, I came across that “how could you talk to him when you were alone in the house? What will people think? You have shamed us all.” I came across it more than once, because I have trouble wrapping my mind across the nonsensical. And to me – particularly when this started, when I was about eight – seeing a little friend who happened to be a boy was no different from seeing a little friend who happened to be a girl.
But the overwrought minds of village spinsters and old women looked at this the way “enlightened” militant “feminists” do. Like the one who accused my nine year old of sexual harassment for touching a girl’s behind while trying to get her attention. (He didn’t fondle her. He reached through a crowd and poked her, to ask if she wanted to play a space exploration game.) If you’re a male you have lust and evil on your mind, and any woman allowing you near has lost her virtue. (They must live MUCH more interesting lives than I do.)
Anyway, honor viewed that way is more what the public thinks of you and what you allow the public to know. You can lose your honor through all sorts of stupid things that have nothing to do with what is in your heart and mind. You can be “disgraced” the way a regency maiden was disgraced because she tripped in public and fell across a gentleman, and didn’t immediately faint or whatever. (Well, at least in regency romances. I believe true society had more leniency. I mean, even in the village, even with my eccentric behavior and the fact I wore shorts outside the house – oh, the humanity! – only half the people considered me a slut.)
We find this in Shakespeare too. “I will bite my thumb at them; which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it.”
This type of honor is fun, of course. Well, fun to write about. It allows you to get your characters in all sorts of nonsensical situations. It is a good stand by for making your character marry someone she hates, for instance. Or for making your male character fight a stupid duel. Since we sometimes require non-brain-damaged characters to act like idiots, this type of honor can be a good tool.
BUT…
But the honor I want to talk about isn’t that.
It’s not the external, being paid homage, being rendered honor. It’s the internal honor, in the secret of your heart, in the center of your being.
To explain it: we all live our lives by certain principles. Yes, even those you think have no principles have stuff they live by, even if it’s just “look out for number one.”
This is very obvious in fiction, because, of course, the characters live only on the page, and their characteristics stand in obvious relief. Characters live by some principles. Athena’s in Darkship Thieves, for the longest time, is “survive” but she does have others, which come to the fore when tested. Things like “I will not return kindness with evil.” And of course “I will not abandon those who looked after me.” (Kit.) This is even more true of Kyrie in the shifter books, whose internal principle is “look after those who can’t look after themselves. Not because they’re good, or deserve looking after, but because they can’t.”
(Writers live by some principles, too. For instance, my refusing to write an autobiography, in which I’d have to tell a lot of lies to protect OTHER PEOPLE’s secrets might have cost me promo and a “dahling of literary establishment” career, but it was my internal principle NOT to step on family and friends on the way to success. To do it would have broken me, and made it impossible for me to be me. Break that barrier, and nothing stands between me and shooting people who annoy me. Me as me stops existing.)
Here’s the thing – it’s not that you can’t have a character break one of their inner principles. You can, but then all hell should break lose internally as well as externally. And that type of principle, inner principle, can only be broken if it’s either only partially broken, or if it’s something the character can convince him/herself is an exception. Say, Kyrie COULD leave someone to starve in the dark. BUT that person had better be a danger to the other people she feels she must protect. (And even then, frankly, she’d be more likely to kill them cleanly.)
The reason I’m bringing this up is victimhood. In this case the treatment of victimhood in books. What do I mean by that?
When you lose sense of an internal honor, a moral code, a guiding principle, you tend to misunderstand things like Kyrie’s animating period of “look after those who can’t,” which is one of the animating principles of western civilization. Instead of its being “look after those who can’t, because you owe it to yourself as a human being” you see it as “look after those who can’t because… victims are special.”
I’m getting very tired of seeing this in books written in the last thirty years or so. People who are downtrodden are some sort of saints – magical, not really human. They don’t need anything else to make them magnificent – just that someone be mean to them. The meaner someone is, the more “saintly” the character is treated as – even if the reader can tell he or she is in fact the twit of the universe.
Let me make it clear for those of you short on understanding: the reason Cinderella deserved the prince was NOT because her step sisters were mean to her, but because she was beautiful and sweet. The sisters are on their own course and earn their own doom. HER job was to keep her internal honor, and it is that which earns her the prince. (And please let’s not argue about older versions, okay – I’m talking about it as it’s known.)
Harry Potter is not the main character because he was mistreated, but because he was the boy who lived. The mistreatment which reaches almost comic proportions is an (effective) attention getting device, but it is not how Harry Potter earns his position in the world.
If your character is repulsive or totally amorphous, that will show through the victimhood, and make the reader – this reader at least – gag. More than that, while you might make us root for the underdog – it’s almost a reflex – if the underdog doesn’t prove himself, and is always and perpetually the victim, the story becomes an exercise in sado masochism, and will give off a “sick” feeling. You will also be contributing to moral confusion that is already too prevalent.
Now, I’m not saying you can’t torture your character (look, if you read the beginning of A Few Good Men) you’ll understand why that’s funny coming from me.
I’m saying you should still develop your character after that and make him/her grow. Or of course, make him a terrible person, if he/she is the villain. I mean, why can’t a victim be the villain? Sometimes the poor bastard in the dungeons DID do enough to deserve it. (Er… not in AFGM, by and large. Oh, there’s stuff never talked about but visible between the lines that probably would have earned him a spanking, but not dungeons. THAT was real politik at work, I think.) Or perhaps he’s still a twit who needs to grow out of what took him there. Even if punishment was excessive.
I’m tired of the idea that victim = virtue. We’re starting to see it seep into politics with the idea that groups who have been excluded have some sort of extra special specialness. You know that isn’t true. They’re human. We’re all human. I do not approve of people being excluded or looked down on for color of skin or other irrelevant traits, (or even relevant. There’s more to character than intelligence, for instance) but I also don’t approve of their being sanctified because they were excluded and/or victimized.
“But I was put down” is not a claim to heroism. “But I was put down and achieved something nonetheless” IS.
So, in the end, it’s the internal honor that counts – at least for me, and by and large in life – and what the old biddies in the village think… not so much. And if the biddies are the readers in the global village, enough of them will get disgusted with the idea that victim means virtuous. Also, you’ll be contributing to insanity in society at large.
Make your characters (and as much as you can, yourself) persons (worthy of) honor. We’ll all win by it.
According To Hoyt 
IMO one aspect of true honor is “there are things that I will not do”. Sometimes a person may be in the situation where he has to do something “dishonorable” to prevent something worse, but it is still “dishonorable” in his own mind.
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Oh. Yes. Exactly.
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Characters that don’t stand by their principles, AKA written inconsistently, are really irritating.
I’m blanking on the name of the author that did this to me. Mystery writer. In one book the almighty detective is trying to prove that organized harassment-by-letters (of a homosexual pedophile by his now adult victims) caused a fatal heart attack and is therefore murder. A couple of books later he’s trying to keep his niece from getting the blame for the death of a (perfectly harmless) night watchman in the course of the niece breaking and entering. Without a twinge of that previously over-virtuous rigidly-jugmental conscience.
I didn’t much like the judgemental bit, but the _change_ really pissed me off. Packed all the books off to the library sale, haven’t bought another. Goodness, it’s been years and it still irritates me.
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And then the other honor of concern to a writer, IMO, is showing honorable people in a favorable light. In this case honor not being consistency, but moral, honest, nice and so forth. It’s part of the Human Wave thing. It’s one of the good bits of humanity that needs to be held up and admired.
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Positive re-enforcement, if you will.
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There’s a great line in one of Bujold’s novels (A Civil Campaign, I think), where Miles Vorkosigan’s father is talking to him about the difference between honor and reputation. I don’t have the book in front of me to check the exact quote, but Count Vorkosigan (Miles’s father) warns Miles against a situation where “the world wraps you in public praise while your honor lies shattered at your feet. That’s soul-destroying. The other way around is just very, very annoying.”
The situation, for anyone unfamiliar with Bujold’s novels, is that Miles is widely believed to have had someone murdered in a convenient “accident” because the man was inconvenient to Miles’s plans. The truth is that Miles tried his best to save the man’s life, and feels guilty because he failed, but the man’s death was truly an accident. And yes, the man’s death was very convenient for Miles’s plans — if Miles had succeeded in saving his life, it would have prevented Miles from achieving a goal he wanted very much. But that situation is a good example of the character’s principles: Miles might be willing to murder an innocent man if he believed it would serve his country, but he wouldn’t murder an innocent man just to achieve a purely personal goal.
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Oops, hit “Post Comment” too soon. I meant to include one final bit in that last sentence:
… and, in fact, he tried very hard to save the man’s life, even though it would have derailed his plans if the man had survived the accident, because to do anything less would have Just Been Wrong.
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You can also have great fun torturing your character by pitting his honorable obligations against each other. Say, honor your oath to your emperor or honor your commitment to your soldiers to not waste their lives. Now I need to go reread the Vorkosigan books.
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The crux of One Corpse Too Many is a character’s being caught between two conflicting duties and how to honorably discharge both.
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It’s one of my favorite Peters’. It’s getting about time to re-read the Cadfael’s…
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To add a line to the above. Miles father defines reputation as what other people know about you and honor as what you know about yourself.
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The Spouse has a saying: Live so you can wake up with yourself in the morning.
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I think that man is a moral creature. (Yes, I used “man” in a universal sense. Call the feminazis!) And if your characters are to be truly 3-dimensional, they must reflect some morality. Maybe not yours or mine, but their own. Writing this in a character requires an awareness and literacy in morality. C.S. Lewis has an essay “Men Without Chests” that cannot be understood by moral illiterates. This is seen in the Vorlon question, “Who are you?”
I’ve become a Bollywood addict. What has struck me has been the distinct morality reflected in those films. American shows routinely have characters apparently massaging tonsils with each others tongues. But Bollywood stops at the most fleeting of pecks on the cheek. Nevertheless, they have no problem with characters smoking on camera. Or when the hero avenges himself upon the villain by causing his car to crash and burn, there’s no guilt. Only Americans will notice the villain couldn’t have survived the fire. Same with their racially insensitive bits.
I’m not saying anybody’s evil or puritanical, but I’m noting differences. Noticing differences is the first step in learning to think and then write from an alternate moral framework. This is something I think the writer must do if s/he is to reflect the truth of mankind’s moral nature. (Why, yes, I can write in a sexually inclusive manner. Call the feminazis anyway.)
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A lot buried in this concept and too much of it the sort of thing I thought about years ago, filed and cannot now readily access terminology or cite sources. Bummer.
Honor is at the core of Ellis Peters’ One Corpse Too Many and it is telling that modern readers are so wholly blind to its significance. This is an exploration of the two categories of Honor, the public kind and the personal sort. There are terms distinguishing between external and internal honor but memory ill serves me today. Call them acclaim and integrity, or shame and honor; one is a public perception the other a private awareness. The disparity between the two has provided the basis of many a novel, arguably including Pride & Prejudice, The Scarlett Letter and Huckleberry Finn.
As you haven’t been raised in the States it might not occur to you, Sarah, that your description of the perception of male lust has long been operative in this country, but it used to be restricted to what were once quaintly termed Negroes. I s’pose it is progress of a sort that skin color is no longer sufficient basis for damning a man for “looking at a woman lasciviously” but, to quote Lincoln: If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d just as soon it happened to someone else. [ http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0008.106?rgn=main;view=fulltext ]
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Not that long ago — 8 years — I found myself in the middle of a discussion on how to create an appealing male romantic interest. They were all saying “And he must be socially concerned” and “And he must be a do-gooder” and I came out with “Well, but what if he, instead, just runs his company in a way that lifts people out of poverty; or he’s a donor but covertly, and outwardly he seems cold and selfish and self centered. (I had Pride and Prejudice in mind.) Oh, the storm of reproaches and tears. You’d think I’d killed their baby. To this day I don’t GET it. Do they really think truly good people should wear their good deeds on their sleeve. I love characters like Darcy, or even Athos. Men of inflexible honor, who sometimes do wrong, but you know where you are with them.
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How about a male romantic interest who openly sneers at societies values, ridicules their pieties, flaunts the law, consorts with prostitutes and looks at a woman as if he knows what she looks like in her chemise?
Sigh, today’s sophisticates are often the most parochial people around. Lud from simpering snobs’ saccharine storytelling spare me.
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I always wanted to write a love interest LITERALLY like Athos — he is (for good reason, you find out) a misogynistic alcoholic, but he goes weak for this one girl… Um… I think I WILL, dang it. Who’s gonna stop me?
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There once was a time when American movies provided male love interests who were above all male. Gable, Grant, Cagney, Bogart, ANY film directed by Howard Hawks … (come to think of it, Hawks directed some choice female leads, too!)
There MUST be a reason those films retain fans these many years later.
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*beth ponders her fictional harem of bishie-boys*
*beth ponders if Owen from Gargoyles counts as “bishie”*
*beth keeps him anyway*
(All the more bishie-boys for meeeeeeeeee!)
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PFFFFF.
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There’s a place for everything. Could be argued I have some of those. They still tend to be painfully masculine. Nat in DST, Gabriel in Witchfinder.
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I have been told that is one reason that erotica has become popular with many women. It is the only genre where it is acceptable for a male romantic interest to be as you describe.
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Tears? Tears! Good grief!
What could be more romantic than being the woman who is able to discover and release the true goodness inside a man. (Snarf…)
But really, Darcy, as written, is sexy. I don’t give two figs for what modern woman say.
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In Literature, as in Life, villains and heroes are often distinguished by their conceptions of Honor, their motivating principles. Even in modern literature the person whose code is mere survival, is “do unto others before they can do unto you” is usually villainous. A hero’s actions might be essentially equal — they may both be shoving little old ladies around — but differ in motivation.
James Bond acts for Queen & Country but takes fundamentally the same actions as Blofield, Goldfinger, Dr. No. In fact, this parallelism of actions is often the basis of the villains’ monologue trying to draw our hero to the dark side. And it can be the basis of much ironic humour as frequently demonstrated by George MacDonald Fraser in his Flashman novels and 3 Musketeers screenplays.
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The thing is, with spies, both side can be honorable. Loyalty to their own countries can necessitate all sorts of things one would consider dishonorable if done for personal gain or pleasure. In fiction, giving the “bad” guy, or some of the Bad Guys, some nasty personal habits can clear things up nicely. ;)
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John Le Carre … and look where that led him.
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“You live well, Scaramanga.”
“At a million dollars a contract, I can afford to, Mr Bond. You work for peanuts — a hearty well done from Her Majesty the Queen, and a pittance of a pension. Apart from that we are the same. To us, Mr Bond; we are the best.”
“There’s a useful four-letter-word… and you’re full of it. You and I are nothing alike. When I kill, it is on the strict orders of my government — and those I kill are themselves killers.”
[James Bond, and Francisco Scaramanga, _The Man With The Golden Gun_]
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My country, right or wrong … my mother, drunk or sober.
HT: G. K. Chesterton [http://quotationsbook.com/quote/29524/]
“To say that the CIA and the KGB engage in similar practices is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around.”
William F. Buckley [http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100919085350AA58sVC]
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One of the most appealing things about Austen’s Persuasion is that Captain Wentworth admits that his careless behavior with Louisa Musgrove obligated to marry her if she had and her family had demanded such. Many Anne fans howl, but that’s the kind of honor that would also keep him from killing Anne’s father, the hilarious but aggravating Sir Walter after they were married.
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I love Persuasion — all the more as I get older.
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It is worth considering that, as with Religion, each culture’s conception of Honor will look arbitrary and incoherent and downright peculiar to outsiders. The important thing is how it influences the culture and what consequences follow.
One should also be careful to judge by the normative rather than the extremist behaviour in support of Honor. The average devout Muslim may well be as horrified by “Honor Killings” as are infidels; may be more appalled in fact from repulsion at being called upon to explain and defend that standard against outsiders.
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Not if they are good muslims that follow the Koran, and I’m assuming by devout you mean that they follow their religions holy book. We may not be able to understand it, which is one of many reasons that we have diplomatic problems with them (Also the fact that the Koran calls for them to kill and lie to infidels pretty much rules out any meaningful diplomatic relationship)
As you said Honor can appear peculiar to outsiders, one must understand the culture and the concept of honor in that culture, otherwise you will constantly be surprised when people from that culture act in honorable ways, according to their beliefs, no matter how reprehensible they may be to you.
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Yes. But I suspect there are a lot more “honor beatings” than honor killings. There are STILL in Portugal, which is not Muslim. (I think it’s an Arab thing, not a Muslim thing, if the two can be taken apart) My parents never beat me — possibly because there was no point — over that, but I did get many, many, many beratings. Mostly when I was too innocent to figure out even WHY. I mean, my entire relationship with the boy up the street at ten came from the fact he was an only child and his parents bought him wonderful books and a lot of them. We had a deal. I read them and told him what happened. He then talked to his parents as if HE’d read them. Everyone was happy. (BTW he owns a VAST car repair center and is FAR wealthier than us. So much for reading :-P)
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Beatings covers a very wide swath, from formality only to near life-threatening and it ill behooves the culture of “spare the rod” to be overly critical. Doing them properly involves a lot of work and nowadays many people are not properly trained for it. Which is neither endorsement nor condemnation of beating children. The Daughtorial Unit was raised without beatings but mostly because they proved counterproductive. Instead we employed lectures. Long, tedious, boring lectures. Frankly, she’d have shown more brains had she opted to respond to spanking as it is over with far more quickly.
As for your childhood chum, reading enriches the reader, the publisher and the author (in that order) but not all in the same sense. Any book read represents the purchase cost and the far more significant cost of the time spent reading rather than engaged in productive effort such as mowing lawns or repairing cars.
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RES,
We spanked. We had to. We had to train them out of tomfoolery before they could talk. Charming stuff like running away from backyard in the second my back was turned and heading at a clip for the nearest large intersection. Usually naked. (Sigh. BOYS! Fun, but…) I meant more beatings that continue for the length of the adult daughter living in the house. Or beatings of the wife for talking to a stranger. Or…
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I wonder whether spanking is more effective with boys than with girls. I know corporal punishment works with dogs but not at all with cats.
As for on humans – not once they become human, which is to say: capable of reason. The obvious conclusion is that beatings, spankings, corporal punishment is essentially dehumanizing? OTOH I am sympathetic to Heinlein’s argument pro flogging. And the armed forces have long employed “drop an’ give me #” as a form of negative conditioning, so I am amenable to side-stepping the subject.
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well, like this — all great mammals spank, but usually before the “cub” is too old. Our spanking consisted of hand applied to usually still diapered butt. They understood THAT. However by three taking their computer cord away for a length of time worked MUCH better. … Though nothing worked very well with kid.
I got corporal punishment till 14 — just not for talking to boys. I can’t tell you if it worked. It’s possible without it I’d have even worse problems with authority, who knows?
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Well, I’m reminded of the story about the man, the mule and the old farmer. The man was having problems with the mule and the old farmer said “well you have to know how to talk with the mule”. The old farmer walked up to the mule and hit the mule with a two-by-four. The man asked “that’s talking to the mule”? The old farmer replied “first you have to get the mule’s attention”.
Sometimes, the “spank” is just getting the kid’s attention. [Wink]
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Mostly this was Robert. Marshall was very sickly, so we rarely spanked, and when we did it was light smack on the hand. However, until they were about ten, I had to bark orders like a drill officer just to get through the day. “Up and in the shower, now!” “Into clothes.” “Stop pretending to fight karate and get your school backpack” I only lacked “hut, hut, hut.” I’m not saying there weren’t tender times, and times when we joked and roughhoused, but to get them anywhere on time required “harassing the stragglers.”
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I very much agree, I got spanked regularly growing up. And from what I can see today there are a lot kids that could really use a few good smacks with a belt. There is a big difference however between a spanking and a beating. Something CPS seems unable to comprehend.
I mention using a belt, on a lot of kids a belt would be inappropriate and to severe, I on the other hand was hardheaded and needed the metaphorical two-by-four to get my attention;)
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(BTW he owns a VAST car repair center and is FAR wealthier than us. So much for reading )
Ah, but think. The young man already showed a kind of business sense. He got value, i.e., pleasing his parents (and you), for no cost to himself.
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Oh, brava! Well done, indeed! Thank you for, once again, articulating something that I have held for decades.
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But…but…but what about hurt/comfort fic? :D (More seriously, there is some powerful id-feeding stuff in hurt/comfort. It has to be used carefully or it gets kinda sludgy, but… don’t scorn the very concept in fiction. It’s all over fanfic because it’s powerful. A little judicious hurt/comfort can be just the spice needed…)
Also, yeah, there’s a difference between a class/phenotype of human perhaps needing a boost to get on an even footing (I just watched Hunger Games; siccing well-fed 18-year olds on 13-year olds is no way an even match…), but there’s a good line in http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalNegro territory… Or, for those who do not wish to be sucked into TV Tropes: “it’s usually a moral and artistic shortcut, replacing a genuine moral message with a well-intentioned but patronizing homage to the special gifts of the meek.”
…help, I was going to tie that into honor, but I’ve been sucked in…
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Beth,
Hurt-comfort, like everything else of power — personality redemption, danger overcome, death to save others, etc — is good but not if it becomes ALL. Then it’s just icky.
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All icing, no cake. Or like all too many mediocre restaurants’ sweet ‘n’ sour chicken: all sweet, no sour, when the whole point is the contrasting flavours.
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Bartram Wyatt-Brown wrote the book (literally) about the external honor culture of the Old South in the US, what he calls “primal honor.” (Honor and Violence in the Old South) Look for the abridged edition unless you are truly interested in case studies. And yes, primal honor is central to Arab, Pashto, and other similar cultures (and China and Japan to an extent), as well as those cultures influenced by Arab culture (Iberia, Sicily). I read one account by a Pakistani Imam explaining that a woman has no honor of her own, but that she is the protector of the family’s honor. She has no right to desire a particular man or even to be seen speaking with a strange male in public, because those affect the honor that she represents. If she squanders that honor/reputation/ “face”, the family must punish her in order to restore the communal honor.
In a similar way, if no one knows that someone has done something wrong, there is no honor problem. And then there’s the question about granting outsiders honor, for example by not violating contracts or by respecting certain types of property right. Especially if the outsider is not in a position to quickly punish a violator.
One of my MCs functions within an honor culture on occasion, and runs into difficulty balancing the needs of maintaining others’ external honor with the need to maintain discipline and get work done.
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One time I realized that honor killings probably served a collectivist feminist goal. See, the collective group is ‘females in this family’, who get some degree of corporate familial protection, but can threaten the overall safety of that group by acting independently. The killings both enforce discipline and restore part of what provides safety by sending the message ‘these women are all secured and disciplined, so it isn’t worth trying anything’.
I was horrified when I had this insight, and decided that it was probably correct.
Given that I’m not a feminist, a collectivist, that level of familialist*, or willing to see killings done in response to those acts, maybe I should stop trying to understand.
*I think family is of some importance that can not be replicated elsewhere. I do not care for it as a fundamental organizational unit for law or politics.
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TXRed’s comments about shame and honor cultures reminded me of Dr. Sanity’s classic post “Shame, the Arab Psyche, and Islam“. It’s well worth reading the whole thing, but the part I want to comment about is the chart in the middle of the post. She illustrates the difference between a “guilt culture” and a “shame culture” (a “guilt culture” is one like mainstream American culture, where … well, I’ll just quote from her post:
In a guilt culture, when an individual believes he is NOT GUILTY, he will defend his innocence aggressively despite the fact that others believe he is guilty. In this case, the individual self is strong and able to maintain an independent judgement even if every other person is convinced of his guilt. The self is able to stand alone and fight for truth, secure in the knowledge that the individual is innocent.
The guilt culture is typically and primarily concerned with truth, justice, and the preservation of individual rights. As we noted earlier, the emotion of guilt is what keeps a person from behavior that goes against his/her own code of conduct as well as the culture’s. Excessive guilt can, of course, also be pathological. I am solely referring to a psychologically healthy appreciation of guilt.
In contrast, a typical shame culture what other people believe has a far more powerful impact on behavior than even what the individual believes. The desire to preserve honor and avoid shame to the exclusion of all else is one of the primary foundations of the culture. This desire has the side-effect of giving the individual carte blanche to engage in wrong-doing as long as no-one knows about it, or knows he is involved.
Additionally, it may be impossible for an individual to even admit to himself that he is guilty (even when he is) particularly when everyone else considers him to be guilty [sic — I think she meant “innocent” here] because of the shame involved. As long as others remain convinced he is innocent, the individuals does not experience either guilt or shame. A great deal of effort therefore goes into making sure that others are convinced of your innocence (even if you are guilty).
In general, it has been noted that the shame culture works best within a collectivist society, although it can exist in pockets even within a predominant guilt culture.
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That is an excellent description of the type of culture it takes for things like honor killings to be acceptable.
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THANK YOU – the distinction of guilt/shame cultures was what my exhausted mind was groping after at the start of this discussion.
It should be noted that the Judeo/Christian culture, with its omniscient deity, is inherently a guilt culture (Adam & Eve “knew that they were naked”; “[Cain] where is Abel, thy brother?”) and that the American archetypical hero personifies this. Mr Smith, gone to Washington, Atticus Finch, Will Kaine, John Wayne, John Galt and James T. Kirk. It is a code for a culture of individuals, a pioneer society and exacts a different sense of justice. Huckleberry Finn’s avowal that he will be damned but he will not return Jim to his owner is a statement of this American creed.
As noted, a shame culture is useful for imposing social conformity. Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Orwell’s 1984 and ST:DS9’s Tribunal all revolve around the social definition of Justice, not the individual definition that is so natural to Americans. That is part of the horror of those tales.
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Thanks. So shame works to help collective societies function, and guilt helps individualist societies?
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That may have it inverted — perhaps shame cultures evolve into collectivist societies while guilt cultures develop into individualistic ones. Chicken, egg — who knows?
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And yes, primal honor is central to Arab, Pashto, and other similar cultures (and China and Japan to an extent), as well as those cultures influenced by Arab culture (Iberia, Sicily).
Apparently it has hit the fan in China. The American born wife of a popular teacher of English language seminars recently left him after yet another beating. She micro-blogged about it, posting the hospital photos one by one, and it took off.
Her husband has said, among things, that as he was hitting her head while it was resting on a carpeted surface it doesn’t really constitute a beating, that as he does not beat her regularly and that she is his wife so it is not a matter for the public. One of his more recent statements is that she is a stupid foreigner and does not understand China, that he needs her and she should come home. The police say that unless he is willing to come into the station they can do nothing. Their ways are not our ways.
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For some reason I’m reminded of a character I had convicted of and serve time for a murder they were entirely innocent of. Note that is was a completely fair investigation and trial, and I do not think of the character as a victim in any way. Mainly, there were habits that were not at all compatible with staying out of prison.
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I’m getting very tired of seeing this in books written in the last thirty years or so. People who are downtrodden are some sort of saints – magical, not really human. They don’t need anything else to make them magnificent – just that someone be mean to them.
This is particularly irritating because we also have a culture that wishes to provide apologies for the bad guy. I go to a knitting group at a B&N. Recently I overheard a student in a regular discussion group with a professor try to explain the victim status of poor little Adolph that drove him to… well, never mind. Even the very liberal professor had trouble swallowing that as sufficient excuse.
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Harry Potter is not the main character because he was mistreated, but because he was the boy who lived. The mistreatment which reaches almost comic proportions is an (effective) attention getting device, but it is not how Harry Potter earns his position in the world.
… and …
“But I was put down” is not a claim to heroism. “But I was put down and achieved something nonetheless” IS.
This is a primary plot point to the Harry Potter novels, the reason that Harry is a hero is because he chooses to be decent. However tempted he did not choose to turn to the dark side.
Dumbledore tells Harry more than once that it is the choices that we make that make us. For example, Harry choose to be Gryffindor and not Slytherin. From Merope Mavolo’s disastrous choice to deny Tom Riddle peres his choices to the very end this is a story about the effects of choices.
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