Culture Of Honor

The Psychology Of Violence In The South

Richard E Nisbett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429980770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book focuses on a singular cause of male violence—the perpetrator's sense of threat to one of his most valued possessions, namely, his reputation for strength and toughness. The theme of this book is that the Southern United States had—and has—a type of culture of honor.

1

Violence and Honor in the Southern United States

THE U.S. SOUTH HAS LONG BEEN viewed as a place of romance, leisure, and gentility. Southerners have been credited with warmth, expressiveness, spontaneity, close family ties, a love of music and sport, and an appreciation for the things that make life worth living—from cuisine to love.

But there has also been the claim that there is a darker strain to southern life. For several centuries, the southern United States has been regarded as more violent than the northern part of the country.¹ This belief has been shared by foreign visitors, northerners, and southerners with experience outside the South. Duels, feuds, bushwhackings, and lynchings are more frequently reported in the correspondence, autobiographies, and newspapers of the South than of the North from the eighteenth century on.² The rates of homicide in some areas of the South in the nineteenth century make the inner city of today look almost like a sanctuary. According to one accounting, in the plateau region of the Cumberland Mountains between 1865 and 1915, the homicide rate was 130 per 100,000³—more than ten times today’s national homicide rate and twice as high as that of our most violent cities.

Not only homicide but also a penchant for violence in many other forms are alleged to characterize the South. The autobiographies of southerners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often included accounts of severe beatings of children by parents and others.⁴ And southern pastimes and games often involved violence that is as shocking to us today as it was at the time to northerners. In one game called “purring,” for example, two opponents grasped each other firmly by the shoulders and began kicking each other in the shins at the starting signal. The loser was the man who released his grip first.⁵ Even more horrifying to modern (and to contemporaneous northern) sensibilities was a favorite sport of frontiersmen called fighting “with no holds barred,” which meant that weapons were banned but nothing else was. Contestants could and did seek to maim their opponents.⁶ Thus gouged-out eyes and bitten-off body parts were common outcomes of such fights.

Cases of southern violence often reflect a concern with blows to reputation or status—with “violation of personal honor”—and the tacit belief that violence is an appropriate response to such an affront. The journalist Hodding Carter has written that in the 1930s he served on a jury in Louisiana that was hearing a case concerning a man who lived next to a gas station where the hangers-on had been teasing him for some time. One day he opened fire with a shotgun, injuring two of the men and killing an innocent bystander. When Carter proposed a verdict of guilty, the other eleven jurors protested: “He ain’t guilty. He wouldn’t of been much of a man if he hadn’t shot them fellows.”⁷ A historian has written of the same period that it was impossible to obtain a conviction for murder in some parts of the South if the defendant had been insulted and had issued a warning that the insult had to be retracted.⁸ And until the mid-1970s, Texas law held that if a man found his wife and her lover in a “compromising position” and killed them, there was no crime—only a “justifiable homicide.”

The young men of the South were prepared for these violent activities by a socialization process designed to make them physically courageous and ferocious in defense of their reputations: “From an early age small boys were taught to think much of their own honor, and to be active in its defense. Honor in this society meant a pride of manhood in masculine courage, physical strength and warrior virtue. Male children were trained to defend their honor without a moment’s hesitation.”⁹

Even very young children were encouraged to be aggressive, learning that “they were supposed to grab for things, fight on the carpet to entertain parents, clatter their toys about, defy parental commands, and even set upon likely visitors in friendly roughhouse.”¹⁰ Children themselves rigorously enforced the code of honor. A boy who dodged a stone rather than allow himself to be hit and then respond in kind ran the risk of being ostracized by his fellows.¹¹

The southerners’ “expertise” in violence is reflected in their reputed success as soldiers.¹² Southerners have been alleged, at least since Tocqueville’s commentary on America, to be more proficient in the arts of war than northerners and to take greater pride in their military prowess. Twentieth-century scholars have documented the southern enthusiasm for wars, their overrepresentation in the national military establishment, and their fondness for military content in preparatory schools and colleges.¹³

Explanations for Southern Violence

There are many “Souths”—the Cavalier South of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia, founded by the inheritors of the medieval knightly tradition of horsemanship and skill in battle; the mountain South, originating in eastern Appalachia and moving southward and westward decade by decade; the plantation South, based on growing cotton; and the western South, based on the herding of cattle in dry plains and hills that could sustain no other form of agriculture. Of the explanations that we will cite for southern violence, certain ones apply plausibly to some of these regions but less plausibly to others.

Four major explanations have been offered for the southern tendency to prefer violence: the higher temperature of the South and consequently the quicker tempers of southerners, the tradition of slavery, the greater poverty of the South, and the putative “culture of honor” of the South. We argue that the role of “honor” is independent of, and probably greater than, any role played by the other three.

Temperature.

It has been suggested that at least a part of the violence of the South can be accounted for by the characteristically higher temperatures of the South.¹⁴ It is indeed possible to show that variation in temperature in a locality is associated with the number of violent crimes there,¹⁵ and we will examine the role played by temperature in the most dramatic form of violence, namely homicide.

Slavery.

Slavery has long been held responsible for the violence of the South.¹⁶ Abigail Adams was of the opinion that whites inflicted on themselves the same sort of violent treatment that they accorded their slaves.¹⁷ Thomas Jefferson concurred, in his Notes on Virginia, as did many other thoughtful southerners. John Dickinson, an eighteenth-century revolutionary from the eastern shore of Maryland, believed that the institution of slavery led to southern “pride, selfishness, peevishness, violence.”¹⁸ Tocqueville also believed that slavery was responsible for the South’s violence, but he emphasized, rather than the “contagion” from treatment of the slaves, the idleness encouraged by slavery:

As [the Kentuckian] lives in an idle independence, his tastes are those of an idle man … and the energy which his neighbor devotes to gain turns with him to a passionate love of field sports and military exercises; he delights in violent bodily exertion, he is familiar with the use of arms, and is accustomed from a very early age to expose his life in single combat.¹⁹

At several points in this book we will assess the evidence for and against both aspects of slavery as explanations for southern violence.

Poverty.

A third explanation for the greater violence of the South has to do with poverty. The South is poorer than any other region of the country and always has been; in each region of the country and in every sort of population unit, from rural county to large city, poverty is associated with higher homicide rates.

A variant of the economic explanation focuses not on absolute income or wealth but rather on disparities in income. Some argue that inequality in wealth breeds violence. We will attempt to assess the role of poverty and inequality in the violence of the South both in rates of homicide and in preference for violence as a means of conflict resolution.

Violence and the Culture of Honor

We believe that the most important explanation for southern violence is that much of the South has differed from the North in a very important economic respect and that this has carried with it profound cultural consequences. Thus the southern preference for violence stems from the fact that much of the South was a lawless, frontier region settled by people whose economy was originally based on herding. As we shall see, herding societies are typically characterized by having “cultures of honor” in which a threat to property or reputation is dealt with by violence.

Virtue, Strength, and Violence

Cultures of honor have been independently invented by many of the world’s societies. These cultures vary in many respects but have one element in common: The individual is prepared to protect his reputation—for probity or strength or both—by resort to violence. Such cultures seem to be particularly likely to develop where (1) the individual is at economic risk from his fellows and (2) the state is weak or nonexistent and thus cannot prevent or punish theft of property. And those two conditions normally occur together: Herding, for example, is the main viable form of agriculture in remote areas, far from government enforcement mechanisms.

Some cultures of honor emphasize the individual’s personal honesty and integrity in the sense that honor is usually meant today. That has always been one of the ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Violence and Honor in the Southern United States
• 2 Homicide Rate Differences Between North and South
• 3 Differences Between Northerners and Southerners in Attitudes Toward Violence
• 4 Insult, Anger, and Aggression: An “Experimental Ethnography” of the Culture of Honor
• 5 Collective Expressions of the Culture of Honor: Violence, Social Policy, and the Law
• 6 Culture of Honor: Manifestations, Explanations, and Destinations
• Appendixes
• References
• About the Book and Authors
• Index