While it may not have been his intent, @JDVance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” is a very effective illustration of honor culture from a first person perspective. That immersion led to unexpected insights on the origins of honor culture while I was writing my notes on the book two days ago.
1. Honor culture may arise in any resource-poor culture. When resources are precious, your survival depends on small amounts. You must defend small amounts yourself. This is the original state. Defense of honor comes from survival instinct.
2. Dignity culture requires a higher level of personal and societal resources. It must be less expensive to tolerate a small loss than to defend against theft yourself. Dignity culture is for the wealthy.
3. Even in a rich country, resource-poor communities exist. Within these communities survival still depends on small amounts. Honor culture continues to be profitable there.
4. Dignity culture cannot enforce the law when losses are small and the cost of law enforcement is not. Honor culture prevails over petty theft. When a neighbor steals a bicycle from your porch the police will never recover it for you. There can never be law enforcement for small amounts of money.
5. Agency is valuable. In a resource-poor society, agency is extremely valuable, and subject to erosion from theft or transgression. Defense of honor is actually defense of agency. Resource-poor societies are often agency-poor as well.
6. In the book, JD’s life truly turns around after his experiences in the Marine Corps provide him with agency he was previously lacking.
7. Honor culture can arise in other domains, such as the world of ideas. Social media is a battleground in which one’s ideas can be attacked and defended as part of one’s honor.
8. Censorship of social media is an attempt to impose dignity culture on the world of ideas. The idea is that disinformation police enforce laws of informational authority on inhabitants of social media.
9. Wealthy and elites, those most likely to live with the internalized rules of dignity culture, are those most likely to endorse censorship of social media, since the ethics of third party enforcement match.
10. It turns out that applying dignity culture to social media is a bad idea. Multiple reasons for this:
11. a. The longest-lived customs of informational authority are from religion. Relying on this custom by elites is inconsistent with their modern messaging on religion.
12. b. Institutions like the government and mass media have been wrong and proven to be so in the modern era.
13. c. Many ideas, especially those requiring high technology, advanced education, or involving morality or politics, are volatile and subject to rapid change depending on circumstance. Enforcing “laws” (dignity culture) in such arenas is nearly always objectively wrong.
14. d. In the U.S. the First Amendment prohibits “information policing.”
15. e. Discovering truth requires consideration of multiple points of view. This would be impossible in a society that rigidly enforces an information authority. See J.S. Mill’s thoughts on freedom of speech in “On Liberty”.
16. f. Enforcing informational authority contradicts the scientific process.
17. While honor culture likely applies to ideas generally, it’s not clear that the impulse to reach for dignity culture-style third party enforcement of an information authority reflects “wealth” in the information sense. Instead, it may reflect emotions and fragility of epistemology.
18. People who make their economic living from ideas are not necessarily “wealthy” in an information sense. Economic value and intellectual production are entirely different spheres.
19. The reach for censorship, though motivated by dignity culture ethics, may be an act of aggression more akin to a defense of honor. In that sense, censorship of social media is a violent act, not law enforcement.
