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Tuesday, March 25, 2003

From Realwomenonline, tangential to the existence or non-existence of Salaam Pax:

The blogosphere has been pretty hard on Arabs and I have chimed right in. One of the things that us Yank-bloggers have had the most sport with is the fact that, Arabs have an "honor-shame" culture. This is supposed to be alternately risible and terrible, especially juxtaposed with our Western, rational-fact-based-transactional-impersonal culture. I mean, they've got narghilas, we've got cruise missiles, which culture is superior?

Diane goes on to explain that, of course, she is a big fan of the latter. Rational fact-based societies, that is, not cruise missiles. However, it strikes me that there is a fundamental error going on here.

The idea of the "shame" culture is familiar to me through E.R Dodd's barnstorming The Greeks and the Irrational. He antithesised it with "guilt culture", that is cultures in which behaviour was conditioned by how you would feel about yourself rather than how others would feel about you (very crudely). Christians have a guilt culture, because ultimately your actions have ethical singnificance because of the impact on the soul. Western societies evolve this into the idea of the conscience, and developing thought can be divided roughly into the idea of a transcendent or integral (either innate or developed) ethic preventing wrongdoing (even when violating a societal ethic would be advantageous, it would still be wrong), or various forms of enlightened self-interest (even when violating a societal ethic would be advantageous, it would ultimately act against my interest - this runs from Utilitarianism to Kantian categorical imperatives).

Notionally, since directives in shame cultures are external and directives in guilt cultures are internal, the directives in guilt cultures need to be internally consistent and logical. This thesis is so untenable it need not detain us too long here.

Dodds pointed out that elements of guilt and shame culture exist in a mixture in every society. He also reminds us that the difference between "rational" and "irrational" is not sharply delineated, nor easily assignable.

Bush and Saddam both, in the sheer unassailability of their conviction and their apparent indifference to both guilt and shame may well be pioneering the first steps of the guilt-free, shameless culture of the future. I sincerely and certainly hope not. However, whether or not that is the case, antithesising "Arabic" and "rational", in effect, strikes me as somewhat unwise.

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