[btilly]

Question. How would you suggest I square your claims about Arab society with the observed fact that every year thousands of girls die in Arab countries from honor killings. And the fact that, as https://www.statista.com/statistics/1019538/mena-arab-respon... shows, in many of these countries, significant minorities think that such killings are justified.

Killing your own child suggests to me that kinship means rather less than it does in Western cultures.

[rayiner]

Honor killings happen because kinship ties are so strong. The individual becomes completely subsumed within the family. Anything that brings shame to the individual is imputed to the whole family. Moreover, controlling reproduction becomes extremely important because that is how kinship links between families are created.

[btilly]

I know that I am showing my cultural biases. But the entire way of thinking that you are describing strikes me as fundamentally evil. Subsuming the individual to the social unit is at the heart of the worst excesses of racism, nationalism, etc. If you look for the worst mass crimes in history, you will find this idea at the core.

Conversely, liberty starts with valuing humans for the individuals that they are. And not as mere appendages which serve a larger whole.

[rayiner]

I would say it’s complicated. Religion reflects culture, and culture reflects technological and environmental realities (e.g. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/people-ate-pork-mi...).

Nomadic desert life is brutally hard—I suspect that if a tribe of Arab nomads had the individualism of people from San Francisco they’d all quickly die of starvation. Independence of the individual from the extended family unit isn’t all that viable absent market economies, social safety nets, etc. Independence of women from men isn’t all that viable in an environment where survival requires physically demanding and dangerous work (herding animals, fending off intruders, etc). Even in modern western society, the old depend on the young for survival; the physical safety of women is underwritten by armed men, etc. We just have layers of abstraction (Social Security, police departments, etc.) that allow those things to be done at arm’s length. In a pre-modern society those social dependencies all collapse into the family unit.

I tend to agree that, as all these economic and technological predicates for individualism arose, Christian societies were better positioned to take advantage. On the flip side, my personal belief is that modern western societies have taken that too far, to the point where they’re no long even viable as societies. The future of Europe, for example, looks to be Islam. Maybe a moderated, more secular version, but probably still quite different than the culture that prevails today.

[btilly]

I agree that a number of Western countries did take advantage. But I wouldn't say that the divide was Christian vs non-Christian. There is a lot in Christianity which can be quoted to support very non-individualistic ideologies. It is that certain societies which happened to be Christian had did develop individualistic ideologies.

But Christian countries have our share of organizations such as the Mafia where family and ethnic group are paramount. Christian history is full of brutal totalitarian states and violent killing.

Separately https://www.pewforum.org/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-p... suggests that rumors of an Islamic future for Europe are premature. And as Muslims integrate, their advantage in birth rate is likely to decline, and net conversions are away from Islam. As a result, long-term, I see no reason why Islam will grow to be more than a significant minority.

[rayiner]

Some Christian societies are more individualistic than others, but almost no non-Christian societies are individualistic. And even the Christian societies that aren’t individualistic are still much more so than virtually anywhere else.

Even the ones that integrate are going to be far less individualistic than native born Europeans. Cultural legacy Carrie’s through for generations—and that’s likely to be especially true for European Muslims given how segregated they are.

[meheleventyone]

> Subsuming the individual to the social unit is at the heart of the worst excesses of racism, nationalism, etc.

Is it though? I don’t think I’ve found more individualistic societies to be less racist or nationalist.

[btilly]

They may be racist and/or nationalist, but you don't tend to get ethnic cleansing or organized genocides.

[krageon]

This has to be sarcasm. You don't have to look that far back to know that this is just untrue. There are ethnic cleansings and organised genocides everywhere (regrettably), with very little evidence it has something to do with a specific type of culture.

[dmm10]

Would the early United States be considered an "individulistic society"? If so then consider the continental level genocidal practices which that society consciously adopted. Remember that all of North America was populated before the westward expansion. Feel free to extrapolate backwards in time.

[btilly]

The early United States was on the way to being an individualistic society, but hadn't arrived. In particular the natives who they killed they saw as part of a group, and not as individuals.

There is a long and complicated history in English speaking people of "rights for me, but not for thee" which started with the king, was broadened to nobles with the Magna Carta, was broadened to rich landowners with the establishment of Parliament, was in the process of being broadened to free white men around the time of the American Revolution and has piecemeal been given to other groups over time.

What today we consider "universal rights" were historically not universal. Our awful treatment of others is tied to our not granting rights to them. And our awful treatment of ourselves (for example in totalitarian societies) is tied to our being subsumed in something greater.

[DyslexicAtheist]

some of these countries have become so good at institutionalizing injustice via their privatized prison systems that this form of ethic cleansing is not even visible any more with the naked eye.

When a large group of your population is unable to financially afford justice that's a form of ethnic cleansing.

Genocide is horrible, but what could possible be more evil? Here is what: masterminding it so that a large group of your population no longer sees it for what it is and would rather point at another country for its concentration camps than solve their issues at home.

> but you don't tend to get ethnic cleansing or organized genocides.

How would you describe the US private prison system, or gitmo if not "organized genocide"?

[Thorrez]

>gitmo if not "organized genocide"?

There are 39 prisoners in gitmo. In its total lifetime there have been 780 people. 9 died in custody. I wouldn't call that genocide.

[MaxfordAndSons]

You can find the idea of the individual being subsumed to the kin group to be disconcerting or strange (I do), without categorizing it as a "fundamentally evil" way of thinking. Honor killings are an extreme end of the spectrum of behaviors exhibited by people with this belief system; but there are equivalently extremes in the behaviors of people with Western, liberal-individualistic belief systems. Both belief systems are just survival strategies evolved by different groups of humans exposed to different historical and environmental contingencies. Both can be perverted to justify extreme evil acts, just as both can fairly point to the extremes, in themselves and the other, and declare them as evil. And note, this isn't cultural relativism: one can respect the sovereignty of the Islamic value system without excusing honor killings, just as one needn't cast Western liberal individualism as "fundamentally evil" because taken to it's extreme people have used it to justify mass shootings of strangers.

[6354dhjgasd]

> but there are equivalently extremes in the behaviors of people with Western, liberal-individualistic belief systems

These are?

[MaxfordAndSons]

Killing strangers for minor violations of your property rights... killing multiple strangers in a rage of entitlement... calling police to kill or punish strangers who are having mental health crises for minor violations of public behavior ordinances... basically killing or punishing strangers for any old reason. I'd venture to guess we do orders of magnitude more of it per capita in the West than people in Muslism countries do honor killings of kin.

[6354dhjgasd]

> Killing strangers for minor violations of your property rights

You give no examples. Also I'm in the UK and can't remember the last time anyone was killed for trespass or other minor violations (okay, one or two over a decade I think).

> killing multiple strangers in a rage of entitlement

You give no examples. Post some evidence, overall numbers of such cases, details please.

> calling police to kill or punish strangers who are having mental health crises for minor violations of public behavior ordinances

You give no examples - post summary details.

> basically killing or punishing strangers for any old reason. I

You give no examples.

> I'd venture to guess

so no evidence whatsover

> we do orders of magnitude more of it per capita in the West

The US is not 'the West'. Perhaps you'd like to consider the UK, Germany, Scandinavia....

I suspect you're right in thinking honour killings aren't common (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honour_killing_in_Pakistan#Pre...> "The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan lists 460 cases of reported honour killings in 2017, with 194 males and 376 females as victims"), but it's the extreme point of a pervasively oppressive/intolerant system which can ruin lives without actually killing people.

[remarkEon]

If you’ve spent some time outside of the west, and what the west conceives as “comparable with the west”, you’ll find that there are many cultures that are what you describe as “evil”.

[btilly]

And, for example, when you encounter things like Afghanistan's "dancing boys" (fathers literally sell their sons to powerful men as sex toys), are you inclined to shrug your shoulders and look the other way at such "cultural differences"?

Yes, there are many things that are accepted in other cultures as normal that I am happy to condemn. If you can't find it in you to condemn at least some of them, then I think that there is something wrong with you.

[remarkEon]

I've personally witnessed these "dancing boys" in Afghanistan, and no I didn't shrug my shoulders. I'm not sure why you think I disagree with you. I'm pointing out that this insistence on the principle of "equality of culture" is a western proclivity that is both naive and wrong.

[rayiner]

Note that I don’t disagree with you in general. I’m no cultural relativist. I just think the post-1960s individualist secular liberalism is a civilizational dead end that’s already correcting itself.

[insanejudge]

> Subsuming the individual to the social unit is at the heart of the worst excesses of racism, nationalism, etc. If you look for the worst mass crimes in history, you will find this idea at the core.

Do you have anything other than the jordan peterson paraphrase to back this as a cause, as opposed to the actual dangerous ideologies? One could just as easily state as absolute fact that subsuming the individual to the societal unit is at the heart of the greatest accomplishments of humankind.

This idea is a straightforward false dichotomy presenting the only alternative to absolute individual liberty as complete subjugation of free will, and used to provide some truly absurd explanations for things, such as 'honor' being the actual problem in this case, not the 'killings'

[6figurelenins]

It's in the definition, and predates "jordan peterson" by about a hundred years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivism#Origins_and_histo...

> One could just as easily state as absolute fact that subsuming the individual to the societal unit is at the heart of the greatest accomplishments of humankind.

Do you have a benevolent dictator in mind?

> complete subjugation of free will

The fundamental problem of religion (politics, generally) is that you agree to submit to an all-merciful, all-benevolent, all-knowing entity. The reality of the deal is rather less satisfying.

[btilly]

Sure. If you read Enlightenment Now you'll find several chapters devoted to how many of the horrors of the 20th century can be traced back to ideologies which subsume the individual into groupings involving some subset of ethnic group, nationality, and social class. They are doubly dangerous if they are then paired with utopian ideals. Because if the ends justify the means, and the ends are a perfect good, you can rationalize ay horror.

You can find similar points of view in many previous writers from points as distant in the ideological spectrum as George Orwell and Ayn Rand.

[FooBarBizBazz]

This is sort of a tangential post starting from your phrases "Killing your own child" and "honor killings". I eventually try to link it back to themes of loyalty to "family" vs. "nation" vs. universality.

1.

> Killing your own child

I can't hear this phrase without thinking of Abraham and Isaac. It's the story that the whole of the Old Testament revolves around.

(And then the New Testament goes to heroic lengths of reinterpretation? Or have I just gotten too much Girard in my head? I'm never sure how much to celebrate it as reformist (moving past the animal sacrifice cult of the Levites), vs. to detest it (continuing to worship the obscene god of the burning bush. But then how do you carve out that the Commandments are actually decent?). I'm also not quite sure that I'm really all that big a fan of Jesus himself; I may actually prefer the religion of Paul. But it was Jesus who was responsible for the Beatitudes, and for his famous and beautiful "whole of the law" summary. So I'm not sure. His radical anti-family message, combined with his urgency (and his apparent contempt for his disciples?) have never sat right with me. But maybe the urgency at least is essential.)

And supposedly the version we get in the Torah is the "Hollywood ending", whereas in the original (late neolithic?) story Isaac is simply killed and Abraham is rewarded. So the original is even worse.

(Or perhaps the fact of the "Hollywood ending" to Abraham and Isaac is itself an innovation to be celebrated, and we can view the Old Testament itself as part of that same Girardian process of reform, of yet-worse human sacrifice religions. A good thing about this is that it creates less of an Old Testament vs. New Testament binary/dualism; it expands the field of view.)

(There may also be a Yahwist vs. Elohist conflict I have yet to understand, which may help me tease apart good from bad parts of the Old Testament.)

2.

> honor killings

Not long ago I quoted Genesis 34, which disturbs me for several reasons -- that it celebrates an honor killing being one of them.

(Actually, maybe I'm wrong? Because they do not kill Dinah? More on that in a second.)

That the enemy clan is treated as a unit to be destroyed rather than the individual man is another. How can that possibly be justice?

(Some people will claim that Shechem raped Dinah. NIV translates it that way, but KJV doesn't. I don't believe the NIV translation. First, because those societies still exist and "consent" isn't really something they think about in judging these cases. And I mean, it says right there at the end that the Israelites kill the men and take their wives captive, presumably to be raped. Second, because Shechem is said to speak kindly to her and request her hand in marriage. And third because Hamor et al act as though good relations should be possible with the Israelites. KJV doesn't say "raped", it says "defiled" (more than once), and, given the rest of the chapter's focus on circumcision, I honestly think that the fact that he had sex with her with his intact penis is the thing they found offensive. Symbolic of course of his being an Other. A belief that comports with the rest of the Old Testament's repeated admonishments not to marry outside the Tribe (e.g., Samson and Delilah). I think it's much closer to a Black man being lynched for having the temerity to sleep with a white woman.)

...which brings us to, of course, the central role of genital mutilation to the story, which is another reason to be disturbed by it.

The complete rejection of an apparently good-faith effort towards peace and mutual assimilation is a fourth reason to be disturbed, but consistent with the particularism/separatism of the rest of the Old Testament.

And a fifth is the trickery involved. "Yes, yes, we can all get along! Undergo our painful and irreversible initiatiation!" ...and then be slain without mercy while you're still recovering.

I had the TV on the other day and saw a Rick Steves visit to Auschwitz/Birkenau, in which I was similarly disturbed by the amount of trickery involved. The victims were told to bring their luggage, so they would believe that they were being resettled to live good lives in another place. The sign over the gate famously said "Arbeit macht frei", another lie. All to avoid panic while their killing was planned. All like the promise of the sons of Jacob in Genesis 34:15-16.

All the more tragic because so many of those Jewish victims had assimilated into German society (not necessarily abandoning Judaism, but just treating it as another religion in the Liberal style, instead of as an ethno-nationalist thing), and they and the German gentiles they lived more-or-less peacefully among (until the Nazis riled them up) were essentially living as Hamor had promised,

> 9 And make ye marriages with us, and give your daughters unto us, and take our daughters unto you.

> 10 And ye shall dwell with us: and the land shall be before you; dwell and trade ye therein, and get you possessions therein.

which would have been the desirable outcome.

If it isn't clear yet, while Shechem may be a little dumb here (sort of a Romeo character), I think Hamor's the good guy, consistently trying to steer the situation towards a peaceful and mutually beneficial outcome.

We could really use Dinah's point of view here. I choose to interpret her as a sort of Juliet, stuck between these Montagues (Israelites) and Capulets (Hivites).

...

Can we bring it back to the themes of "kinship" and "Arab culture" (or, culture in the Middle East) vs. "Western culture"? To the themes of grandparent post?

Well, my interpretation of Genesis 34 is that it is anti-"miscegenist". Which would be, if not about kinship, then at least about nationality. And certainly not universalist.

And Abraham/Isaac is about sacrificing blood kin for the demands of a god who is arguably the personification of a nation.

So perhaps this is about nation vs. family -- dishonor to the nation outranking loyalty to kin.

Of course, this is all a bit inbred, so "nation" largely is "kin". Maybe then this is a meme that wants to create loyalty among genes at, say, the cousin-level degree of relatedness, at expense both of loyalty to specific children, and also of sympathy to outsiders. I'm thinking about ant colonies and cancer cells now. It's a choice to privilege a certain scale of "incorporation" -- what is the "body" we care about?