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Sex and drugs and rock and roll
- Steven Pinker
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- Journal:
- Behavioral and Brain Sciences / Volume 44 / 2021
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 30 September 2021, e109
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This article is extraordinarily rigorous and rich, although there are reasons to be skeptical of its theory that music originated to signal group quality and infant solicitude. These include the lack of any signature of the centrality of these functions in the distribution or experience of music; of a role for the pleasure taken in music; and of its connections with language.
Piled Modifiers, Buried Verbs, and Other Turgid Prose in the American Political Science Review
- Peter DeScioli, Steven Pinker
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- Journal:
- PS: Political Science & Politics / Volume 55 / Issue 1 / January 2022
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 18 August 2021, pp. 123-128
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- January 2022
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Academic writing is notoriously difficult to read. Can political science do better? To assess the state of prose in political science, we examined a recent issue of the American Political Science Review. We evaluated the articles according to the basic principles of style endorsed by writing experts. We find that the writing suffers most from heavy noun phrases in forms such as noun noun noun and adjective adjective noun noun. Further, we describe five contributors that swell noun phrases: piled modifiers, needless words, nebulous nouns, missing prepositions, and buried verbs. We document more than a thousand examples and demonstrate how to revise each one with principles of style. We also draw on research in cognitive science to explain why these constructions confuse, mislead, and distract readers.
86 - The Science of Our Better Angels
- from Section C - Group and Cultural Processes
- Edited by Robert J. Sternberg, Cornell University, New York, Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, New Jersey, Donald J. Foss, University of Houston
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- Scientists Making a Difference
- Published online:
- 05 August 2016
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- 11 August 2016, pp 409-412
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Summary
One of the delightful features of our field is that a man who wrote an undergraduate thesis on auditory perception, a doctoral thesis on visual imagery, two technical books on children's acquisition of syntax, and a series of monographs on the psychology of irregular verbs could name as his most important scientific contribution an analysis of the causes of war and peace, crime and safety, barbarism and humanity. This analysis appeared in my 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The subtitle is about history, but the main title is defiantly psychological: it's about the components of human nature that inhibit us from causing physical harm.
It was easy to designate this book (and the papers I have written in its wake), as my most important contribution, because that's what the world has told me. It's been discussed by columnists, politicians, diplomats, generals, even a president and prime minister or two. Given the book's topic and message, this should not have been surprising. I wrote in its preface:
This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. Believe it or not – and I know that most people do not – violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species's existence …
No aspect of life is untouched by the retreat from violence. Daily existence is very different if you always have to worry about being abducted, raped, or killed, and it's hard to develop sophisticated arts, learning, or commerce if the institutions that support them are looted and burned as quickly as they are built.
The historical trajectory of violence affects not only how life is lived but how it is understood. What could be more fundamental to our sense of meaning and purpose than a conception of whether the strivings of the human race over long stretches of time have left us better or worse off? How, in particular, are we to make sense of modernity – of the erosion of family, tribe, tradition, and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason, and science?
Political bias, explanatory depth, and narratives of progress
- Steven Pinker
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- Journal:
- Behavioral and Brain Sciences / Volume 38 / 2015
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 08 September 2015, e154
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Political bias has indeed been a distorter of psychology, not just in particular research areas but in an aversion to the explanatory depth available from politically fraught fields like evolution. I add two friendly amendments to the target article: (1) The leftist moral narrative may be based on zero-sum competition among identity groups rather than continuous progress; and (2) ideological bias should be dealt with not just via diversity of ideological factions but by minimizing the influence of ideology altogether.
Warm thanks
- Alan Page Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, Tage Shakti Rai, Northwestern University, Illinois
- Foreword by Steven Pinker
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- Book:
- Virtuous Violence
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2014, pp xix-xx
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1 - Why are people violent?
- Alan Page Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, Tage Shakti Rai, Northwestern University, Illinois
- Foreword by Steven Pinker
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- Book:
- Virtuous Violence
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2014, pp 1-16
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Summary
We, the authors, must make clear at the outset that, prescriptively, we judge most violence to be immoral. But in every culture, some people sometimes feel morally entitled or required to hurt or kill others. Violent initiations, human sacrifice, corporal punishment, revenge, beating spouses, torturing enemies, ethnic cleansing and genocide, honor killing, homicide, martial arts, and many other forms of violence are usually morally motivated. The fact is that people often feel – and explicitly judge – that in many contexts it is good to do these kinds of violence to others: people believe that in many cases hurting or killing others is not simply justifiable, it is absolutely, fundamentally right. Furthermore, people often regard others’ infliction of violence against third parties as morally commendable – and sometimes acknowledge or even appreciate the morality of violence inflicted on themselves. We wish this weren’t true – we abhor it. But it is true, so to understand or reduce violence, we must recognize its moral roots. Most violence is morally motivated. People do not simply justify or excuse their violent actions after the fact; at the moment they act, people intend to cause harm or death to someone they feel should suffer or die. That is, people are impelled to violence when they feel that to regulate certain social relationships, imposing suffering or death is necessary, natural, legitimate, desirable, condoned, admired, and ethically gratifying. In short, most violence is the exercise of moral rights and obligations. Working within the framework of relational models theory (Fiske, 1991, 1992, 2004) and relationship regulation theory (Rai and Fiske, 2011), our thesis is that people are morally motivated to do violence to create, conduct, protect, redress, terminate, or mourn social relationships with the victim or with others. We call our theory virtuous violence theory.
9 - On relational morality: what are its boundaries, what guides it, and how is it computed?
- Alan Page Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, Tage Shakti Rai, Northwestern University, Illinois
- Foreword by Steven Pinker
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- Book:
- Virtuous Violence
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2014, pp 134-149
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Summary
Defining the moral space
Virtuous violence theory is based on a scientific model of moral psychology, and in the same sense that the scientific concept of mass is not identical to the folk concept of weight, virtuous violence theory does not encompass everything that is entailed by the Western folk model of “moral,” nor is it limited to just what the everyday, folk concept denotes. Indeed, it could not do so because the folk model is different in every culture, and varies from person to person within any culture. In every culture that has a word that more or less translates as “moral,” the term has a unique scope, unique presuppositions, and unique implications. And not every culture does have one word, or a set of synonyms, that neatly corresponds to the English moral. So to understand human “moral” psychology, we need to formulate a construct that aptly captures a natural kind in the world, even if no vernacular language does so precisely. However, virtuous violence theory is intended to capture much of what is meant in lay terms by the English “moral” and congruent terms in other languages, while still maintaining the advantages of a theoretically derived, deductively coherent enterprise. If virtuous violence theory encompasses a broad domain of important psychosocial phenomena that can be clearly and simply explained in terms of morally motivated relationship regulation, it is a good theory, regardless of whether the phenomena that it encompasses correspond precisely to the fuzzy and contentious folk domain of “moral” as any particular person in any particular culture uses that term, or something more or less corresponding to it. The scientific concept of force does not map exactly onto the (polysemic and fuzzy) folk concept of “force” in any culture, but it is nonetheless an invaluable concept – indeed, much better for describing and explaining physics than the folk concept. There are no vernacular terms at all for “Higgs boson,” “carbon ring,” “insular cortex,” “sexual selection,” “analog magnitude system,” “Nash equilibrium,” or “plate tectonics” – but science wouldn’t get very far if it didn’t construct valid technical terms for these important entities. To understand the world, we need technical terms that cut nature at its joints.
Figures and tables
- Alan Page Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, Tage Shakti Rai, Northwestern University, Illinois
- Foreword by Steven Pinker
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- Book:
- Virtuous Violence
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2014, pp xiv-xiv
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8 - Violence to obey, honor, and connect with the gods
- Alan Page Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, Tage Shakti Rai, Northwestern University, Illinois
- Foreword by Steven Pinker
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- Book:
- Virtuous Violence
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014
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- 27 November 2014, pp 107-133
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Summary
Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!”
“Here I am,” he replied.
Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love – Isaac – and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”
Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.”
Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, “Father?”
“Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.
“The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”
Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together.
When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”
“Here I am,” he replied.
“Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”
Genesis 22:1–13; New International Version
13 - Making them one with us: initiation, clitoridectomy, infibulation, circumcision, and castration
- Alan Page Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, Tage Shakti Rai, Northwestern University, Illinois
- Foreword by Steven Pinker
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- Book:
- Virtuous Violence
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2014, pp 179-190
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Summary
If you love your children and want them to become just like you; if you deeply identify with kin or age-mates and they deeply want to become one with you; if you meet someone you want to incorporate into your group, bond with, and become able to trust with your life; in short, if you want and need to create the most intense and enduring CS relationships with someone for the rest of your life, then in many cultures you must cause them excruciating pain by cutting their genitals, terrify them and inflict degrading suffering, or beat them horribly. That is, you must circumcise a boy, excise a girl, initiate them, “jump them in” to the gang, or haze them into the fraternity. Severe initiation creates life-long CS bonds of unconditional altruism and total identity with the other initiates, with the initiators, and with others whose bodies are marked like theirs. So in communities whose existence totally depends on absolute, selfless loyalty, people violently initiate their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, grandsons and granddaughters. Love, identification, and the moral obligation to forge unbreakable commitment to CS bonds – they are what motivates cutting genitals, horrific initiations, and other kinds of group-incorporation violence. The pain itself is crucial to the formation of the CS identity with the initiating group; indeed, the pain may be experienced as the sacrifice of an aspect of the self for the group as a whole (Morinis, 1985).
Initiation rites
A child becomes an adult, or an outsider becomes an insider when ritually controlled pain weakens the subject’s sense of empirical identity and strengthens his or her sense of attachment to a highly valued new center of identification.
(Glucklich, 2001: 7)
7 - War
- Alan Page Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, Tage Shakti Rai, Northwestern University, Illinois
- Foreword by Steven Pinker
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- Book:
- Virtuous Violence
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2014, pp 93-106
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Summary
Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be … Duty, Honor, Country: The code which those words perpetuate embraces the highest moral laws and will stand the test of any ethics or philosophies ever promulgated for the uplift of mankind. Its requirements are for the things that are right, and its restraints are from the things that are wrong. The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training – sacrifice. In battle, and in the face of danger and death, he discloses those divine attributes which his Maker gave when He created man in His own image. No physical courage and no brute instinct can take the place of the divine help which alone can sustain him. However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind… Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory; that if you lose, the nation will be destroyed; that the very obsession of your public service must be: Duty, Honor, Country.
General Douglas MacArthur (1962)It is not only warrior cultures, honor cultures, or street gangs that require men to be violent: in war, people in most cultures and subcultures deem it a moral duty to kill the enemy – and in many cases soldiers feel that they should kill, enslave, torture, rape, or starve enemy captives or civilians. Philosophers and religious leaders often exhort men (and sometimes women) to fight, extolling the noble virtues of warfare. In the twentieth century, soldiers killed approximately 140 million people and wounded far more; in most cases they were morally motivated to do so out of solidarity in support of fellow soldiers, obedience to officers, military honor, or patriotism (Leitenberg, 2006; this number includes deaths in German and Japanese concentration camps).
22 - Metarelational models that inhibit or provide alternatives to violence
- Alan Page Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, Tage Shakti Rai, Northwestern University, Illinois
- Foreword by Steven Pinker
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- Book:
- Virtuous Violence
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2014, pp 269-275
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Summary
As we have seen throughout the book, perpetrators may inflict violence on one person to constitute relationships with others. For example, a soldier may kill an enemy in obedience to an officer, or an initiate may kill a member of a rival gang. A perpetrator may kill one member of another group in retaliation for some other member of that group’s killing a member of the perpetrator’s group. A man may kill his wife’s lover to regulate his relationship with his wife, or, in an honor culture, kill his niece’s lover, and his niece, in order to regulate his relationships with his family and with everyone in the community. As we saw, the Trojan War was all about men fighting men to constitute relationships with other men, or with the gods. In all these and many other cases we have considered in this book, the motive to constitute one or more of the component relationships of a metarelational model morally requires violence in another of the relationships that compose the metarelational model. In general, relationships have moral implications for other relationships with which they are metarelationally linked.
But these moral links often work the other way around. As we mentioned briefly in Chapter 2, metarelational models may inhibit violence. If a soldier is ordered to kill a family member or his village chief, he may refuse. The gang initiate may avoid killing his sister’s boyfriend. In a feud, potential perpetrators may refrain from violence if the opposing group includes in-laws, co-members of an age set or secret society, blood brothers, or compadres. Conflict-restraining relationships such as these are “cross-cutting ties” that limit violence in many societies, including ones where there are no effective police, judiciaries, or chiefs (Colson, 1953; Cooney, 1998: 90–6; Evans-Pritchard, 1939; Gluckman, 1954, 1963; LeVine, 1961; Nader, 1990; Rae and Taylor, 1970; Ross, 1993). Such metarelational cross-cutting ties operate in all societies, including modern ones. For example, Varshney (2003) found that violence between Hindus and Muslims was less likely to occur following an instigating act of violence elsewhere in the country in cities where Hindus and Muslims were already working together on joint civic projects.
4 - The right and obligation of parents, police, kings, and gods to violently enforce their authority
- Alan Page Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, Tage Shakti Rai, Northwestern University, Illinois
- Foreword by Steven Pinker
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- Book:
- Virtuous Violence
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2014, pp 42-59
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Summary
Here is a Chinese story that takes place in the Zhou dynasty (1256–1046 BCE), as set down in the third century CE:
A man, Ho, offered a jade matrix as a gift to King Li, and later again to King Wu. Each king’s jeweler failed to recognize the gem in the matrix, and each king ordered one of Ho’s feet amputated for the apparent insult. Hearing that Ho was weeping, King Wu sent a retainer to discover why. The retainer inquired, “Many people in the world have had their feet amputated – why do you weep so piteously over it?” He replied “I do not grieve because my feet have been cut off. I grieve because a precious jewel is dubbed a mere stone, and a man of integrity is called a deceiver. This is why I weep.”
(Han Fei Tzu, c. 235 CE; quoted in Collins, 1974: 415–16)Ho grieved that an act of deferential respect had been mistaken for an offense, while taking it for granted that a king may order his foot amputated for insulting him.
Cultural implementations of AR very often empower and obligate superiors to hurt subordinates. For long periods of history, men have been entitled to strike or beat their wives and force them to have sex; parents have been entitled to whip their children; schoolmasters have exercised the right to rap their pupils’ knuckles, twist their ears, or cane them; military officers have been authorized to strike or flog soldiers and sailors; slave-owners have been freely permitted to beat and rape slaves; and, in general, elites have had a great deal of latitude to inflict physical abuse on lower social classes. Often superiors have the authority to harm at their whim, merely to enact their authority: violence is an integral component of the conduct of these AR relationships. Much more widespread is the authority for the corporal punishment of disrespect and, especially, disobedience: violence is the crucial, prototypical, traditional means for redressing transgressions of AR. These are not just permissions: superiors are often required to inflict corporal punishment as part of the correct performance of their duties. That is, in many AR contexts in many cultures, the necessary, natural, and proper exercise of authority entails inflicting pain on subordinates, sometimes to the point of severe distress – and sometimes so as to inflict permanent injury or death.
2 - Violence is morally motivated to regulate social relationships
- Alan Page Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, Tage Shakti Rai, Northwestern University, Illinois
- Foreword by Steven Pinker
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- Book:
- Virtuous Violence
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014
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- 27 November 2014, pp 17-34
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Summary
Virtuous violence theory proposes that the perpetrator intends to harm or kill in order to constitute a social relationship to make it correspond with a prescriptive model of what the relationship ought to be – what it must be made to be. For our purposes, a social relationship consists of complementarity between the actions of the participants: each participant’s actions fit previous actions by the other and presuppose “fitting” actions by the other(s), such that the actions of each are incomplete without the congruent action by the other(s). That is, the acts of each are part of a whole that none of them can bring off alone. We encompass in the terms “act” and “actions” not simply the morphology of movements, but also, crucially, the participant’s intentions, moral judgments, and motives (often consciously experienced as emotions). Furthermore, each participant implicitly or explicitly aims to induce completion of her acts: she intends to motivationally evoke and morally invoke the congruent actions that will complete or dynamically sustain the jointly constructed pattern. That is, a participant expects the other(s) to do their part, in the predictive sense, in the hopeful sense, and in the evaluative sense of judging the others’ actions according to how well they complete the intended gestalt. A football game is only football if the opposing players hit each other as hard as they can; the offense can only play offense, blocking and knocking down defenders, against a tackling defense.
Fundamental ways of relating: the four elementary relational models
Relational models theory (RMT) posits that people in all cultures coordinate nearly all aspects of most social activities by four fundamental relational models (RMs) (Fiske, 1991, 1992, 2000; Fiske and Haslam, 2005). People use these implicit, intrinsically motivated RMs to generate, understand, and evaluate interaction. The models are communal sharing (CS), authority ranking (AR), equality matching (EM), and market pricing (MP). At this point, over 275 researchers have used a great variety of methods to study many social and cognitive phenomena in diverse cultures, and have published hundreds of experimental, ethnographic, interpretive, theoretical, analytic, and philosophical papers, dissertations, and books supporting, extending, or applying RMT (www.rmt.ucla.edu). An essential aspect of these models is the four fundamental motives that underlie most moral judgment, emotions, and behavior: unity, hierarchy, equality, and proportionality (Rai and Fiske, 2011).
19 - Non-bodily violence: robbery
- Alan Page Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, Tage Shakti Rai, Northwestern University, Illinois
- Foreword by Steven Pinker
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- Book:
- Virtuous Violence
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2014, pp 243-250
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Summary
What was the motive behind it? What made it worthwhile to me? I strongly wanted to get even with society for the wrong which I felt it had done me. This spirit of revenge, instilled into me by the years of suffering and ill-treatment behind prison walls, pervaded my whole nature … I left prison with a feeling of bitterness and of hatred in my heart… Almost every man with whom I came in contact while in prison expressed that same feeling… He was “going to get even” and “make somebody pay” for his punishment and suffering.
(Davis, 1922: 148–9)There was an almost magical transformation in my relationship with the rest of the world when I drew that gun on folks. I always marveled at how the toughest cats on those street corners whimpered and begged for their lives when I stuck the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun into their faces. Adults who ordinarily would have commanded my respect were forced to follow my orders like obedient kids.
(McCall, 1995: 101)Western popular culture and social science have tended to conflate material goods with selfish individualism. But except under the most desperate circumstances – and sometimes even then – the principal meaning and function of goods and money are to constitute social relationships. This has been most cogently demonstrated by studies of “gifts,” but also by research on eating, raiding, marriage, ritual, and political economy (e.g., Komter, 2004; Lévi-Strauss, 1961/1949; Malinowski, 1922; Mauss, 1925; Polanyi, 2001; Sahlins, 1965; Veblen, 2007/1899). People want and use money and goods primarily to share, give, exchange, flaunt, conspicuously consume, or measure success and achievement. Material goods mediate relationships. Research on the social-relational meaning of goods and money has focused primarily on giving and sharing initiated by the giver, exploring the moral motives and social-relational aims of giving. But the motives and aims of the taker are similarly moral and relationship-constitutive, even when the taker takes violently.
23 - How do we end violence?
- Alan Page Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, Tage Shakti Rai, Northwestern University, Illinois
- Foreword by Steven Pinker
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- Book:
- Virtuous Violence
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2014, pp 276-286
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Summary
Empirically, as we have seen in chapter after chapter, the objective fact is that people are sometimes morally motivated to harm or kill. Sometimes people feel that to be good, to be just, to be honorable, to do their duty, they have to hurt someone. Morality consists of regulating social relationships (Rai and Fiske, 2011, 2012), and the inductively assembled evidence shows that sometimes moral motives impel people to regulate critical relationships violently. This reveals how profoundly important social relationships are: people will sometimes kill or die to make their relationships right. People’s relationships sometimes are more important to them than their bodies or their very lives, and sometimes to make their relationships right, people sacrifice the bodies or the lives of their spouses, children, friends, neighbors, or others.
Thus, the essential message of virtuous violence theory is that we cannot attribute most violence to the “breakdown” of morals, or to individualistic rational actors amorally maximizing their personal asocial utility functions. The obverse message is that we cannot equate morality with just gentleness, compassion, caring, or harm-avoidance: there are moralities that impel to violence. Meritorious performance of one’s moral duty may consist of kindness or killing.
From these facts there are three conclusions that we cannot draw. These facts do not imply that a person cannot help but constitute relationships violently.
11 - Intimate partner violence
- Alan Page Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, Tage Shakti Rai, Northwestern University, Illinois
- Foreword by Steven Pinker
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- Book:
- Virtuous Violence
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2014, pp 163-167
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Summary
When you go to war against your enemies and the Lord your God delivers them into your hands and you take captives, if you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife. Bring her into your home and have her shave her head, trim her nails and put aside the clothes she was wearing when captured. After she has lived in your house and mourned her father and mother for a full month, then you may go to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife. If you are not pleased with her, let her go wherever she wishes. You must not sell her or treat her as a slave, since you have dishonored her.
Deuteronomy 21:10–14; New International VersionIn a great many historical societies, including classical Greece, a person taken captive by force may be obliged to become a dependent subordinate in an AR relationship with his or her captor; everyone in the culture construed this relationship as entirely legitimate, and it had full moral and legal validity. In many historical cultures, many women captured in warfare or raids were married by their captors, with more or less full status as wives (except that they had no kin to support them in conflicts with their husband, or to return to if they had to leave their marriage; e.g., for Africa, see Kopytoff and Miers, 1977; Robertson and Klein, 1983). In many such societies, the predominant form of marriage was that lineage elders gave their daughter to a husband chosen by the elders, who typically did not consult the bride about her preferences, so marriage did not involve the bride’s choice in any case. (In some cultures, the groom was not necessarily consulted, either.) In social systems where everyone was a subordinate dependant of someone who exercised control and ownership over them but also looked out for and protected them, the AR relationships between master or husband and wife, concubine, or slave were similar in many respects (Kopytoff, 1988). Likewise, in many historical African, Asian, and other societies, male dependants, whether born into the family, purchased, adopted, or captured, related to their elders and chiefs in similar ways, although in general slaves had lower status and were stigmatized.
Contents
- Alan Page Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, Tage Shakti Rai, Northwestern University, Illinois
- Foreword by Steven Pinker
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- Book:
- Virtuous Violence
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2014, pp ix-xiii
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Dedication
- Alan Page Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, Tage Shakti Rai, Northwestern University, Illinois
- Foreword by Steven Pinker
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- Virtuous Violence
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- 05 December 2014
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2014, pp vii-viii
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6 - Honor and shame
- Alan Page Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, Tage Shakti Rai, Northwestern University, Illinois
- Foreword by Steven Pinker
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- Book:
- Virtuous Violence
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2014, pp 77-92
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Summary
In diverse cultures around the Mediterranean basin and east though Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, there are variants of the honor and shame complex (Schneider, 1971). In the traditional Mediterranean, honor is synonymous with never backing down when threatened, forcing others to back down by threatening violence, avenging insults and homicides, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, killing rather than being killed. Honor and dishonor are shared among brothers, fathers, and sons, who are collectively responsible for avenging the death of any of them, and who are collectively liable to be killed in revenge for a homicide any of them have committed (Black-Michaud, 1975: 54). As Pitt-Rivers (1966a) points out, “The ultimate vindication of honor lies in physical violence” (p. 29), and in the extreme case, the final proof of superiority is that the individual is able to take the life of another (Marvin, 1986: 125).
Variants of this complex are salient in many other cultures with roots in this region, including much of Latin America and many societies strongly oriented to Roman Catholicism or Islam. While there are many differences and peculiarities of particular cultures, a number of common elements co-occur (or co-occurred) in most of the traditional cultures of this region; indeed, all of the following features occur together in many Mediterranean cultures and many cultures elsewhere that have been historically influenced by this region.