Trade-offs and Possible Worlds

Two final issues must be raised before this topic is left. The first has to do with the trade­offs that violence entails. The second has to do with multiple equilibria and the many dif­ferent ways cultures can solve the problems that confront them.

Regarding the first point, from a northern ethnocentric perspective, it would seem that the trade-off of greater violence in return for more politeness is not a good thing. However, it is far from clear that everyone would assent to this. In the Old South, in fact, the practice of dueling was defended on the grounds that it encouraged greater civility. Thus, it has been written that, “When a man knows that he is to be held accountable for his want of courtesy, he is not so apt to indulge in abuse. In this way dueling produces a greater courtesy in society and a higher refinement” (Kibler 1946, cited in McWhiney 1988). Even today in the United States, where a recent U.S. News and World Report poll found that “9 out of 10 Americans consider incivility a serious national problem,” traces of this sort of reasoning can be found (Morris 1997: 15). For example, Jeffrey Snyder, who is an activist for a more armed populace, noted that

Regarding... our society's general level of aggressiveness and disregard for rules, you may wish to consider Robert Heinlein's famous dictum that ‘An armed society is a polite society.' Knowing that one's fellow citizens are armed, greater care is naturally taken not to give offense. (Will 1993: 93).

Whereas the homicide rates of the South can be between two and four times greater than those of the North, the chance of dying by homicide is still quite small for most people (Nisbett and Cohen 1996). So to some, it may be a reasonable trade-off to ex­change a slightly greater risk of violence for more politeness, civility, respect among people, and friendliness in our everyday lives.

Northern men are spineless wimps with no honor. They will not defend themselves, their women, or their culture, assuming they have a culture...................................................................................

The South's sense of honor is the underpinning of southern courtesy and hospitality. An iron fist in a velvet glove. (Nethaway 1996: G5)

And some people may like it that way.

Violence has a different meaning for people in different societies (Cohen and Van­dello 1997). Among the Gebusi, “violence is not seen as a threat to good company, but as a means of reaffirming it” by ridding the community of those who cause trouble (Knauft 1985: 79). In a similar vein, one famous explanation for southern violence holds that, “In the South, there's just more folks who need killing” (Wright 1997: 64). Obviously this is a somewhat sardonic statement of the view in its most extreme form. But in its toned- down version, there are quite a few people who would agree that sometimes violence can be appropriate medicine, and that in the case of children, some of them just “need” a “good hard” spanking (see Cohen and Nisbett 1994: 563). As John Reed wrote, many southerners “actually don't see much of the violence around them, don't register it as ‘lawlessness,' because it isn't ‘lawless.' It is lawful violence, in the sociological if not the legal sense: more-or-less predictable, more-or-less expected, (and in consequence) more- or-less taken for granted” (Reed 1981: 12, emphasis added). In this context, violence is conceived of as a legitimate and often necessary tool for restoring order, justice, and goodness in the world (Blumenthal, Kahn, Andrews, and Head 1972; Cohen and Van­dello 1997; Fischer 1989: p. 765).

Other worlds.

For example, Campbell’s description of Mediterranean herders bears this out when he notes how youths will deliberately start quarrels to prove themselves (Campbell 1965). Hunter S. Thompson’s account of the code of the Hell’s Angels makes a similar point about their bullying behavior; The Angels, he wrote,

... have a belief in total retaliation for any offense or insult.... Their claim that they don’t start trouble is probably true more often than not, but their idea of provocation is dangerously broad, and one of their main difficulties is that almost nobody else seems to understand it. Yet they have a very simple rule of thumb; in any argument a fellow Angel is always right. To disagree with a Hell's Angel is to be wrong—and to persist in being wrong is an open challenge (Thompson 1966: 65, emphasis added).

Similarly, in American inner cities, some members of the so-called “street culture” adopt a parallel position.

In street culture, especially among young people, respect is viewed as almost an external entity that is hard-won but easily lost, and so must constantly be guarded.... The person whose very appearance—including his clothing, demeanor, and way of moving—deters transgressions feels that he may possess, and may be considered by others to possess, a measure of respect. With the right amount of respect, for instance, he can avoid “being bothered” in public (Anderson 1994: 82).

Thus, some members of this culture react with aggression to things that “might seem petty to middle class people (maintaining eye contact for too long, for example)”, or some may go on the offensive and try to show “nerve,” which is displayed when some­one “takes another person’s possessions (the more valuable the better), ‘messes with’ someone’s woman, throws the first punch, ‘gets in someone’s face,’ or pulls the trigger” (Anderson 1994: 82, 92). Because doing these aggressive acts is so dangerous or life­threatening, the perpetrator is showing how tough he is and this “helps build a reputation that works to prevent future challenges” (Anderson 1994: 92).

These are the rules of the street, and when people are in public, they must play by them. Definitely, this is a dissatisfying solution, and the vast majority of people in the in­ner city are unhappy with it (Anderson 1994). But it is one equilibrium point that a cul­ture of honor can settle on. In Prisoner’s Dilemma games, a norm for cooperation and positive reciprocity can be an evolutionarily stable strategy, but the opposing norm for everyone defecting can also be quite stable (Axelrod 1984). And this latter strategy seems to be the equilibrium point that the culture of honor in parts of our inner cities has settled on, as people adopt a norm for defection (that is, violence or taking the offensive) as a viable alternative in an uncertain and unsafe world. Perhaps the work of political sci­entist Robert Axelrod or economists Timur Kuran (1995) and Thomas Schelling (1978) can help in finding ways to move from one stable culture of honor equilibrium point to another, or perhaps it can suggest ways for making respect a commodity that can be gained through things other than violence.

About Gender. Perhaps one of the most fascinating topics in cultural psychology is the way many different and coherent cultural realities are possible. Again, in considering cultures of honor, there are a number of different roles women play in such cultures. This deserves a much longer treatment, but it is briefly mentioned here to support the general point about many diverse, plausible cultural models.

We usually associate cultures of honor with hypermasculine and hence also hyper­feminine roles. Consistent with this is the mythology of the southern belle. The belle is “the fragile, dewy, just-opened bloom of the southern female: flirtatious but sexually in­nocent, bright but not too deep, beautiful as a statue or painting or porcelain, but like each risky to touch” (Jones 1989: 1527).

However, whereas some cultures strongly mark off the masculine and the feminine, there are other cultures of honor where the women are every bit as tough as the men and actually perform some of its violence (see discussions by Anderson 1994; Fischer 1989, especially page 770; McWhiney 1988; Miller and Sperry 1987; Nisbett and Cohen 1996; Reed 1986). For example, in the Mediterranean, women “routinely carry out some sorts of homicide, for example, the stoning to death of women believed to be unfaithful” (Nis- bett and Cohen 1996: 87). Or in today's inner cities, “increasingly teenage girls are mim­icking the boys and trying to have their own version of ‘manhood'...including posturing, abusive language, and the use of violence to resolve disputes” (Anderson 1994: 92).

Even within a given culture, a diversity of subtypes can exist. In the South, there is the southern belle. But there is also the “good old girl.” She is “a tomboy who could drive a car and outshoot a man...(but) who could also blow you away when she put on a pink cotton dress” (McGee 1983, quoted in Reed 1986).

Cultural Wholes. Returning to the more limited focus of this chapter, it is clear that there are multiple equilibria and multiple manifestations of the culture of honor stance. Why people in a given culture settle on one “solution” to their collective situation and not on another is a matter for speculation. However, the more general point must be made: Cultures are not like tinker-toys. They cannot be disassembled into their parts and understood as “pieces” isolated from the whole. Rather, cultures are coherent wholes whose parts and whose subsystems constantly interact, influence, and reinforce each other in a dynamic way (see also Shweder 1993; Triandis 1994).

This lesson is illustrated in the way the yin and yang forces of politeness and vio­lence work together in many societies as described above. And the lesson is probably equally true in other societies with the opposite pattern, where violence and everyday belligerence go together hand in hand. Within a given society, these cultural forces sus­tain each other, and importantly, they are in turn sustained by other forces and subsys­tems within that culture which make meaning of everyday life, social interaction, and people's conceptions of themselves and the world.

The broad point is that a culture is a dynamic system that fits together into a coherent whole. And the genius of culture is that it can reconcile potential opposites, in this case, friendliness and aggression for many of the societies described above. There is no single formula for how societies must be put together or for what cultural syndrome must go with what other cultural syndrome. There are many combinations which can be made to “make sense.” Thus, it is important to understand how the forces within a society inter­act, sustain, and are reconciled with each other; and it is important to remember that, through the integrating power of human culture, multiple coherent worlds and multiple coherent meaning systems are possible.

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