TOXIC HONOR

The more I travel, study history and read the papers, the more convinced I become of the superiority of rationalism. With that attitude, I should spend all my time traveling to northern Europe and Japan.

However, fate has also seen fit to send me to many places where people think with their viscera and gonads instead of their brains. The more I see it in action, the more convinced I become that societies that place personal "honor" before everything else are truly cursed.

This value system has ramifications that pervade the societies infested with it. It is, in my view, the most toxic value system on the planet. The term toxic is carefully chosen and meant to be taken with the utmost literalness because societies pervaded by this value system are deeply poisoned spiritually.

Almost everybody will react to an attack on their honor, but in many societies people are expected to restrain their impulse to get revenge: to forgive or simply ignore insults, and most members of those societies succeed to a greater or lesser extent.

But in societies dominated by the "honor" ethic, it's permissible, often demanded, to seek revenge. In many places, this cycle of revenge creates blood feuds that last for generations, or results in periodic flare-ups of mass violence or ethnic cleansing.

If there's a single attribute that defines the "honor" mentality, it's the notion that private killing over personal grievances is acceptable. But in addition to the most obvious manifestations of blood feud and vendetta, the "honor" mentality includes a constellation of other attributes.

Most conspicuous is male domination, which often includes systematic degradation of women and extreme paranoia regarding female sexuality and possible infidelity.

Honor and "Honor"
We use the word "honor" in two ways. One meaning denotes a set of largely internal attributes: trustworthiness, loyalty, courage and truthfulness. The other denotes an externality, as in the expressions "graduation with honors" or "honorary degree."  

The dual usage arises from the notion that honor given externally by others should arise from behavior that exemplifies the internal kind of honor. Thus, Winston Churchill was given honorary U. S. citizenship (honor in the external sense) because his leadership during World War II exemplified honor in the internal sense.  

It is perfectly possible, and all too common, to be vilified externally for pursing internal honor. It is also possible to achieve honor in the external sense without having the internal variety, in some cases through deliberate deception. The student who graduates "with honors" by cheating on exams is the perfect example.  

When describing other societies, our failure to distinguish between the two types of honor leads to gross misunderstandings. So far I have always put "honor" in quotes except when referring explicitly to internalized honor. I am convinced that "honor" is a gross mistranslation of words from other languages.

While these concepts in other languages may overlap some of the elements of what we term honor, the "honor" mentality just as often impels people in other societies to do things that are grossly dishonorable by our standards.

The "honor" mentality can blow up a school bus, then demand satisfaction when someone calls it cowardice to blow up a school bus. It can force women to live lives totally dominated by male authority, then become indignant when that domination is portrayed in a documentary. 

When a concept has a label that is diametrically opposed to the normal sense of the term, it's the wrong label. This has nothing to do with value judgment (although my value judgment is clearly stated), it is simply a matter of using words accurately.

If you translate a foreign word as "red," and notice that people always use it when describing grass, it's obvious that your translation is faulty. If you translate a foreign word as "honor" and find it often used to describe dishonorable acts, it's equally obvious that your translation is faulty.

And I'm not at all interested in the argument that it's their concept of honor. Their concept has a label in their language, but if it doesn't correspond to our concept of honor as we use the word in English, then it's a faulty translation. If all else fails, use the foreign word, but don't mistranslate.

It's considered bad form in many circles to criticize another culture's values. In addition, the social science literature contains a number of rationalizations for the "honor" mentality. One is that every value system makes sense to the people that hold it. Another is that every value system exists for a reason.

Well, of course. The problem is that you can make these assertions about any value system whatsoever. Rape and genocide and embezzlement also exist for a reason, and make sense to people who think a certain way. That doesn't tell us whether the values are morally acceptable or even whether they are beneficial to those who adhere to them.

So I regard it as trivially obvious that the "honor" mentality exists for a reason and makes perfect sense to the people who adhere to it. I don't doubt it for a moment. I merely claim that these values debilitate the societies that hold them. Smoking makes perfect sense to a nicotine addict, but it can nevertheless kill him. Not exercising makes sense to a couch potato but it will only make his problems worse.  

"Thar" — the Arabic word for "honor"
Although this "honor" mentality tends to be a feature of what anthropologists sometimes call "shame" cultures, "shame" is not really an accurate term either. There really is no specific term in English to describe this value system.

The social science literature commonly describes this mentality as "feuding," but though feuding is common in such societies, the term "feud" tends to obscure other aspects of the value system. 

Words from other languages like "vendetta" and "machismo" aren't really satisfactory because they have been taken into English and at best cover only a part of the attributes of this value system. What we need is a foreign term unfamiliar in English.

There's a Spanish word, pundonor, a contraction of punta de honor or "point of honor," but it's not really satisfactory for two reasons. First, its components are too similar to English to avoid confusion and second, it's really not fair to saddle Spanish culture with the term. While we can find this attitude in Spanish cultures, it's much more virulent, destructive and unmoderated by humor and common sense in other parts of the world.

Until I find a more accurate term, I will use the Arabic word thar, "blood vengeance," for this value system. The term embodies many of the attributes of the "honor" or "feud" mentality, has no semantic baggage attached to it for English speakers, and comes from one of the largest languages and cultures where these values are widespread.

The thar mentality can be said to include these features. They vary in degree from person to person and place to place but if we find all or most of them in a society we can justly apply the label thar.

• Extreme importance of personal status and sensitivity to insult
• Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing
• Obsessive male dominance
• Paranoia over female sexual infidelity
• Primacy of family rights over individual rights

Nothing better illustrates the thar mentality better than the fury directed by Islamic militants against Danish and Norwegian cartoons of Mohammed, or most recently the Regensburg speech of Pope Benedict XVI.  

Sacrilegious art in other cultures can offend and get people angry but the lunatic response of radical Islamists is in a class by itself. It's the shrieking, out of control petulance of a three-year old throwing a tantrum.

People infected with this attitude will be utterly incapable of recognizing wrongdoing by their own society, utterly incapable of taking criticism or recognizing the need for correction.

This is remarkably close to the image of Hell painted by C. S. Lewis in his books Perelandra and The Screwtape Letters: a paralyzing self-absorption that imprisons the individual in hate and impotent rage while simultaneously blinding him to any possibility of escape.

The Degradation of Women
Thar-dominated societies aren't merely male-dominated, but subject women to extreme degrees of degradation. Part and parcel of the thar mentality is extreme paranoia (take that term in the literal, clinical sense of mental illness) regarding female sexuality and possible infidelity.
 
The Taliban in Afghanistan made it virtually impossible for women to get medical care because that would require them to be seen by men who were not their husbands.

Women who were raped by the Pakistani army in Bangladesh during that country's war for independence were often abandoned by their husbands, despite an intense government campaign on their behalf. At that, they weren't badly off. In many other thar-dominated societies, it is common for rape victims to be killed by their own families.

The practice of female genital mutilation so widely practiced in Africa and the Middle East is specifically designed to deprive women of sensation because it is felt that women who can experience sexual sensations are more likely to be unfaithful.

French filmmaker Pierre Rehov, interviewed about his film Suicide Killers on MSNBC's "Connected" (July 15, 2006), had this to say:

I came to the conclusion that we are facing a neurosis at the level of an entire civilization. Most neuroses have in common a dramatic event, generally linked to an unacceptable sexual behavior.  

In this case, we are talking of kids living all their lives in pure frustration, with no opportunity to experience sex, love, tenderness or even understanding from the opposite sex. The separation between men and women in Islam is absolute. So is contempt toward women, who are totally dominated by men.

This leads to a situation of pure anxiety, in which normal behavior is not possible. It is no coincidence that suicide killers are mostly young men dominated subconsciously by an overwhelming libido that they not only cannot satisfy but are afraid of, as if it is the work of the devil.

Since Islam describes heaven as a place where everything on Earth will finally be allowed, and promises 72 virgins to those frustrated kids, killing others and killing themselves to reach this redemption becomes their only solution.

Condemning Thar
Thar drives much of the world's terrorism, and in the short term the fight against terrorism is frustrating. But in the long term Western society is doing precisely what terrifies thar cultures the most.  

We are generating forces that foster individual autonomy and especially demands by women for more equality. These forces attack the very root of thar: the whole fabric of status, hierarchy and authority that creates the reward system in thar cultures.

Condemning thar and refusing to translate it as "honor" may prove to be a critical ingredient in defeating Islamic terrorism.

Steven Dutch is Professor of Natural and Applied Sciences at the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay.