Honour-Shame, Fear-Punishment and Righteousness-Guilt

I posed a question...

It is argued that the British culture that I grew up in was one of honour-and-shame. Cricket was not just a game but an attitude to life, a moral code. Something that ‘wasn’t cricket’ was against the moral code we grew up with. Honour and shame have always been driving forces in my life. 

It’s argued that Jewish culture is more righteousness-and-guilt than honour-and-shame. These two cultures are radically different though it could be argued that shame is the result of personal guilt. But what does one feel, guilt or shame? 

Both these two systems create a community culture of morality that binds it together, albeit from a radically different basis. 

Is working class culture, was it one of those two cultures or something different still? Were you more driven by righteousness-and-guilt or honour-and-shame?

But then I realised it was more complex than that and needed an explanation to be able to even ask the question. I knew in my mind what I meant by these concepts, and indeed in one of Robin Skinner's books with John Clease about family life he does suggest the third option. So here I am rewinding to try to explain in a way that allows others to interact and see how it applies to them and their culture.

Introduction

The starting point for me was from a Jewish Rabbi by the name of Jonathan Sacks in his book whose main title is simply 'Morality'. 

Maurice Samuels (1895-1972) was born to Jewish parents in Romania and came to Manchester with his family at the age of six. There, growing up, he discovered the type of English schoolboy literature - Tom Brown's School Days and other books written in a similar spirit - that introduced him to a world of values radically different from the religion-saturated Jewish pietism of his parents tradition. He writes about their impact on him: 'While they held the youngster spellbound with stories of adventures and high jinks in public schools... they indoctrinated him powerfully with English ideals of fair play, honesty, respect for the throne and the country, nobility, pluck, cheerful-ness, loyalty, and cricket.'

Cricket, Samuels discovered, was not just a game. It was an attitude to life, a moral code: 'a thing that wasn't cricket was of course shocking and shameful; but these adjectives do not convey the force or flavour of the condemnation to an outsider'.

Something that 'wasn't cricket' earned the disapproval of 'decent fellows' - the heroes of the schoolboy literature - who were the only kind of people whose opinion mattered. These were the people who, when they wanted to emphasise the truthfulness of an assertion, said, 'Honour bright!' Saying those two words, writes Samuels, meant something other and more than, 'What I am saying is true.' It was 'a reminder of one's consciousness of the code, it was a salute, a Masonic signal'.

What the young Samuels was experiencing was the culture shock that happens when someone brought up in a righteousness-and-guilt morality encounters an honour-and-shame morality.

The Judaism of Samuels' parents was a classic instance of the former, while the late Victorian British public-school ethic was distinctive embodiment of the latter. The difference between them is not like that between two people within a single culture who disagree on specific moral judgements. Rather, they are two different ways of life.

This echoed in my life and reminded me of a conversation I had had in Beirut some years ago. I was brought up in the culture of Tom Brown's School Days, a South East England prep school education where honour was a key value and shame the worst that one could endure.

As I have grown older and lived in different countries (the USA and now Cyprus) and worked in many different countries I have come to observe and value different cultures. Reading Sacks it made me then wonder a number of different questions: 

Honour-Shame, Fear-Punishment and Righteousness-Guilt

In communities around the world we observe both competition and cooperation. As Jonathan Sacks puts it, morality is the domain of cooperation. It is the place where we set aside competition and work together for a common good.  Working for a common good can create a driving force for acceptance within the group. If we feel an outsider this can make a person struggle more to fit in with the values of the group. However some people express no concern about acceptance within a group which sometimes leads to a high level of 'I' rather than 'we', for example, if I disagree that a law is good I am happy to ignore it regardless of the group dynamic. 

In the early 21st century in Europe and North America, we are well aware of competition; of capitalist companies gobbling up smaller competitors. We have observed countries pushing to take land and resources from other countries or people groups. We know well the individual pushing self above others and we see actors, musicians and others as almost demi-gods. We observe politicians almost drunk on power. But it is the opposite end of the spectrum I wish to look at, the altruistic group orientation. Darwin observed that on one hand, competition for resources is part of natural selection but cooperation is essential for the survival of the group as a whole.

Within groups this cooperation is codified either explicitly or implicitly within the area we call morality. There appears to me to be three driving forces for this and that each of these driving forces can either be primarily external or primarily internal. When I say external I mean that the individual is concerned about what the group thinks about them and when I say internal I mean that the individual is concerned about what they as an individual thinks about themselves.

So, for example, growing up myself in what I believe was an honour-and-shame culture it was something exhibited internally. If I did something wrong then I would feel and experience shame for doing so and would bring dishonour upon myself even if nobody ever found out about it. 

In Arabic culture, which is also an honour-and-shame culture it is something exhibited externally. If I did something wrong then I would feel the shame of other people in the group and bring dishonour on my family or group. If nobody knows then that is alright, it is only shameful if others find out about it.

In a strict legalistic culture then fear can be a driving force, especially fear of punishment. Fear and punishment tend to be only exhibited externally, though people may live in fear of people finding out about something they did wrong.

In some ways the righteousness-and-guilt is also related to the fear-and-punishment culture. I am motivated to do right to be righteous, either something I feel about myself internally or something that people think about me externally. Doing wrong then I am on the guilt side of the coin. 

The question people sometimes puzzle over is the difference between the righteousness-and-guilt culture and the honour-and-shame culture. In a sense they are related but my perception is that it is the difference between doing and being. In a righteousness-and-guilt culture it is important to do the right things. In an honour-and-shame culture it is important to be the right person.

The internal and external then relate to whether I value myself or whether I see my value in how others see me. For example, in a righteousness-and-guilt culture if nobody knows that I have done wrong, I might be seen as righteous but internally feel guilt.  If I can ignore the feelings of guilt, then the culture is expressed externally; if it just affects me then the culture is expressed internally. 

The internal vs external also creates a 'can I get away with it?' attitude, for many with the proviso it shouldn't hurt anyone else. That is very much an external way of looking at morality.

I am writing this as if each and every one of these six options are completely separate and don't overlap. Obviously they do. And within different cultures there will be individuals or sub-groups that don't exhibit the same primary culture.

What makes this more complicated in the early 21st century is that 'we' has taken second place to 'I'. And it seems to be increasing year on year. We now want 'we' to provide for 'I' more than 'I' giving to 'we'. This affects these moral alternative world views. Partly it means they are less strong and partly it means in each case external motivation is decreasing. Whether that is true for internal motivation or not I do not know.

All three internal and external cultures also overlap with religious attitudes. Judaism has a lot of cultural laws and complying with them ('doing') makes someone righteous. There are similarities to that in Islam but the being caught doing wrong then pushes it instantly into the honour-and-shame culture, sometimes with severe punishment. 

Christianity is confusing: Some strands of Christianity appear to be clearly in the righteousness-and-guilt culture and then leading unlike Islam to a fear-and-punishment culture. We know of the preachers who preach firmly about doing good so we don't end up in Hell. However, there is another completely different strand which is almost entirely internal-honour-and-shame preaching that God honours us and we have intrinsic value and that Christ came as much to remove shame as the other strand argues he came to remove guilt and punishment.

So now we come back to the questions I posed: Does the USA and Israel share some cultural values that are in fact alien to Europe and other parts of the world? Why is the honour and shame culture I grew up in so different to that of the Middle East where honour and shame are also of great value? And indeed within British culture are some of the so called 'class differences' allied to these cultural differences?