Honor Societies
A year or two ago I read just a tiny bit about honor cultures and came away quite dissatisfied. The dissatisfaction has been stewing in my head for quite a while. Most of the liturature about honor cultures is extremely dismissive or romantic.
Here is a little model that I think goes a long way toward explaining the honor culture pattern. Consider a society in which the wealth, moblity, and power are distributed in a highly skewed manner; for example 1% of the population has 90% of the WEP. Societies with high skew are the norm, extreme examples are not uncommon.
The point of the model is to focus in on the risks members of the elite group face. With the numbers above a member of the elite group faces a hundred times high risk of suffering the bad news of exiting the group than members of the poor face of joining the elite. Put another way, when the topic of social mobility comes up a member of the elite see’s a hundred times more mobility than a member of the poor.
Proportionally the poor don’t see much oportunity, though there is some, the rich on the otherhand see lots of risk. That remains the same independent of how much social moblity there is between the two classes. Increasing moblity make things increasingly precarious for the rich; so they tend to be risk adverse re. any activities that might put their social position at risk.
Which sums up my guess about honor societies.
Much of what I read about honor societies confuses two things which we could roughly describe as the supply and the demand. The problem outlined above is the demand that the culture based on honor is trying to solve. The rituals that arise; e.g. dueling, killing your daughters, fastidious adherance to this seasons fashion in manners, etc. etc. are the supply. In each society some number of middlemen arise to fill this demand; and it seems to me that the liturature about honor societies takes far to seriously the marketing brochures of thoese salesmen.
There are plenty consequences of this model.
Predicatively we should see honor societies arise whenever the skew gets sufficiently severe. At that point members of the upper class should all begin seeking (creating demand for) means to reduce the risk of falling out of the class.
The effect should be stronger in societies with large families. Though possibly you can arrange to make the family the economic unit rather than the individual. Honor killings, to take one example, are perfect examples of actions take to protect social position.
While I suspect the effect would be higher in societies with higher mobility that consequence is partially a side effect of treating the poor as homogenous. Note that if there are lots of middleclass categories a rich person can fall into the middleclass where he stands a better chance of climbing back up into the elite. He sees the middleclass as a kind of safety net that licenses his taking more social risks. That’s an illusion if the society is highly skewed. Increasing the severity of the wealth distribution destroys that safety net.
Note a perverse consequence of this model. The role of rich person becomes more risky each time their class manages to capture a larger share of the total economic pie.
A society undergoing a transition, as the US has been for the last 35 years, toward a more severe wealth distribution should see some members of the elite figure out the new rules before others. I.e. some members of the elite will lobby the government to get tools that protect their social standing sooner than other.
June 6th, 2006 at 11:29 am
Hi Ben,
Your seem to imply that in the US we are trending towards an environment where an honor-based society may result. It seems to me, however, that in a law-based society (which we have established over many years to eliminate previous honor-based societies in the US) that is open to change by the elite that there is little chance of this. In other words, why risk dying when I can get the law changed to protect my class position?
June 6th, 2006 at 12:25 pm
Hi John,
Let’s say we have behaviors A, B, C, D; and we suspect that these arise when the wealth distribution becomes extremely skewed. I have no idea how to go about proving that they arise. Even if you collected lots of examples of A or B occuring in tandem with a high wealth distibution I don’t see how you could get a large enough sample. You could certainly spin plausable technical accounts of whe A or C would arise. That’s all the above is, and attempt to lightly sketch a plausible account of why honor societies might appear in tandem with a highly skew’d wealth distribution.
I absolutely agree that the elite have lots of tools available to manage the risk of falling out of their niche.
But even if you get the law on your side the population in the top 1% is still at risk if there is any mobility in and out of the their class. It’s hard to write the laws in such a way that you can keep the mobility close to zero. You start having to write laws that prevent class mixing, demand premogenitor, etc. Once you head down that road the story you tell about why this is an ethically coherent system design start to look more and more like those you see in honor societies.