One thing I have advocated, without much success, is that children be taught social rules (when they are ready) in exactly the same way they are taught and teach each other games. The point is not whether the rules are right or wrong. Are the rules of 5-card stud poker or hopscotch right or wrong? It’s that we’re playing a certain game here, and there are rules to this game just as in any other game. If you want to be in the game, then you have to learn how to play it. Different groups of people play different games (different rules = different game), so if you want to play in different groups, you have to learn the games they play. When you develop the levels of understanding above the rule level, you’ll be able to understand all games, and be able to join in anywhere. You won’t be stuck knowing how to play only one game.
My problem with selling this idea is that people tend to think that their game is the only right one. In fact, being told that they are playing a game with arbitrary rules is insulting or frightening. They want to believe that the rules they know are the ones that everyone ought to play by; they even set up systems of punishment and reward to make sure that nobody tries to play a different game. They turn the game into something that is deadly serious, and so my idea simply seems frivolous instead of liberating.
I’d be concerned that this phrasing would raise more sociopaths… because that’s how they think about morality.
The idea of teaching relativism for moral specifics is good, but consider that there are aspects of morality common to all sustainable cultures. Powers’ framing would describe these as “common game elements” or “aspects common to all these different games”. I think they should be emphasized/emotionalized as a little more than that (even if they aren’t), so to avoid sociopathy (if that’s even possible).
Less specifically, and with more confidence: emotional intelligence is a thing, and children need to be taught that, too. Perhaps Powers could achieve this by teaching kids that “feeling good about doing good things” is part of the game, and maybe one of the objectives of the game.
I’d be concerned that this phrasing would raise more sociopaths… because that’s how they think about morality.
Sociopaths and mature adults share that conception. Both of these groups of people tend to have also discovered that it is usually not in their best interest to discuss the subject with people who do not share their maturity or sociopathic nature respectively.
The reason a sociopath must arrive at the insight Powers proposes we teach earlier is that they cannot survive without it. Where a normal individual can survive (but not thrive) with a naive morality a sociopath cannot rely on the training wheels of guilt or shame to protect them from the most vicious players in the game before they work things out.
I predict that Powers’ curriculum would produce no more sociopaths, make those sociopaths that are inevitable do less damage and result in a whole heap less burnt out, anti-social (or no longer pro-social) idealists.
You’re awesome. Specifically, you communicate useful insights often. I tend to agree with you, but when I don’t, I’m glad to have read you.
Making incompetent sociopaths more rational would create new harms as well. They would be better able to fool people and would erode the trustworthiness of “normal-seeming people” a little. But since there are already many competent sociopaths, and because normal people are situationally also selfishly destructive (self-serving bias+hypocrisy), we have institutions that mitigate those harms.
Also, I agree that preventing damaged people from running amok (in the extreme killing N people and then themselves) would be fantastic.
Making incompetent sociopaths more rational would create new harms as well. They would be better able to fool people and erode the trustworthiness of “normal-seeming people” a little. But since there are already many competent sociopaths, and because normal people are situationally also selfishly destructive (self-serving bias+hypocrisy), we have institutions that mitigate those harms.
That sounds right to me. I suspect the main difference that improving social education for all children would have on sociopaths is that it would knock some of the rough edges off the less intelligent among them. The kind of behaviours that are maladaptive even for sociopaths and may lead them to do overtly anti-social things and wind up sanctioned.
But since there are already many competent sociopaths, and because normal people are situationally also selfishly destructive (self-serving bias+hypocrisy), we have institutions that mitigate those harms.
The models I have for competent sociopaths and high status individuals are approximately identical for basically this reason.
The analogy I use in my head instead of games is languages. They both have rules, but “games” implies something fake, not productive, and not to be taken seriously. “Languages” are tools we’re accustomed to using for everyday functional reasons, and it’s clearer that breaking their rules arbitrarily has a more immediate detrimental effect on their purpose (communication).
The most common way I use the metaphor explicitly is during a misunderstanding with a friend. “Wait—what does X mean in Sammish? Z? Ohh, now I get it. In Relsquish, X means Y. That’s why I thought you were talking about Y.”
The nice thing about this model is that, in a game, you expect everyone to know the rules before you sit down to play. If someone doesn’t follow them, they’re either too ignorant to play or cheating. When you’re talking to someone who speaks a different language from you (even if they’re just different versions of English, like Sammish and Relsquish are), occasional confusion is a matter of course. When you misunderstand each other, no one has “broken” the rules; it’s just a mismatch. You identify that, explain in other words, and move on, with much fewer hard feelings or blame.
Haha. Yes, it is. I don’t get to say it much, because I’m Fizz to almost everybody who knows me in person—so I refer to myself as speaking Fizzish instead. I didn’t think it was worth the trouble of explaining that for the sake of the example, though. :)
I’d be concerned that this phrasing would raise more sociopaths… because that’s how they think about morality.
The quote doesn’t talk about morality. I take it to be about social rules such as what is considered proper dress, table manners, rudeness and politeness, playing nicely, and so on. At a certain age (as WTP alludes to) children become capable of understanding above that level, and they will need a proper upbringing in what is good and real at that level as well. There’s another quote of WTP I could give in this connection, but I’ve used up my quote quota for this month.
There’s another quote of WTP I could give in this connection, but I’ve used up my quote quota for this month.
If you share it in a multiply nested reply to another comment then it is not included in the ‘quote quota’ - it’s just the same as including a quote in any other conversation.
(ie. Your interpretation about applying to social rules rather than morality and ethics themselves seems right and I am interested in hearing the quote you have in mind.)
If you happen to believe that people ought to live all bunched up together, be nice and refrain from violence, keep their promises and commitments to each other, take care of the helpless, do their share by helping with the unpleasant or boring jobs, teach the young, love truth, and be respectful of the environment, that’s fine. What you should do is go around talking to people, trying to persuade them that they will be better off if they act like this, explaining to them the advantages of this kind of behavior toward others and the disadvantages of other ways of behaving, and so forth. The more of them you can persuade, the more people there will be in the world who want the same things you want, and who will help get them in situations where one person alone would be ineffective. Nothing the matter with that.
But if you tell them they should do all these things because there are social forces that make them necessary or right, then you’re lying. The truth is that these are things you want to happen. You may have lots of good reasons for wanting them to happen, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with telling people what convinced you and seeing whether the same things will convince others. But trying to convince people that there are forces other than you that demand the behavior you want in some objective way is just an empty threat; anyone who disagrees with you can nullify your argument by claiming knowledge of other forces that demand a different kind of behavior. Since you’re both making up these external forces in your imaginations, nobody wins.
“It is generally undesirable for members of my own culture / social class to murder each other without just cause.”
Before you respond, note that “Person X committed murder in Society Y and it was okay,” is not a counterexample. You will need to present an entire culture which was
sustainable, and
has no general aversion to unjust intra-class murder.
… and, I guess if you’re still going for it, one which existed in Europe since 1000BC.
That’s like saying that in modern-day U.S., the culture is “totally casual about people killing each other, any social class, no reason necessary,” and justifying that by linking to a web page discussing the penalties for murder in present-day American law.
As that Wikipedia page will tell you, wergeld was a legal penalty for killing imposed on the guilty person. Today, punishing murder with fines sounds unusual (though perhaps not so much when you consider that wrongful death torts still exist), and this is indeed a sign of significant cultural change, but the idea that killing people was seen as an OK casual thing to do among the old Germanics, or any other historical people, is just ludicrous.
You’re committing fallacy of reinterpreting past cultures in terms of your own culture.
Weregild was not a penalty, and had nothing to do with guilt. It was debt towards family to compensate for their economic loss with no consideration of “guilt” whatsoever. Wikipedia doesn’t say so, but it was debt of extended family to extended family.
Thinking in terms of “guilt” doesn’t even make that much sense to cultures that organized society in terms of clans or families instead of individuals. Such cultures used to be very common. Even as late as 19th century there was no legal personhood for most women, and there still isn’t much of it for young people (they’re treated as children instead far longer than makes sense; more or less like women were treated in earlier times).
Weregild was not a penalty, and had nothing to do with guilt. It was debt towards family to compensate for their economic loss with no consideration of “guilt” whatsoever. Wikipedia doesn’t say so, but it was debt of extended family to extended family.
As you say, these people were illiterate, and they didn’t leave much record of their feelings and abstract opinions in these cases. But the fact is that if you killed someone, you’d be obliged to submit to legal sanctions, and if you failed to do so, you were in big trouble. This is not a situation that follows after acts that are considered “totally casual,” and whatever were the old Germanic words used to describe people in this situation, “guilty” seems to me like an accurate modern English translation. The fact that these sanctions were administered at clan level changes nothing.
Even as late as 19th century there was no legal personhood for most women,
That is true when it comes to property rights, contract law, etc. for married women. But it doesn’t mean that killing women was legal, married or not. You are making invalid analogies.
Weregild was not a penalty, and had nothing to do with guilt. It was debt towards family to compensate for their economic loss with no consideration of “guilt” whatsoever.
The wikipedia page also says that
The payment of weregild was an important legal mechanism in early Germanic society; the other common form of legal reparation at this time was blood revenge.
Emphasis added. How is legal blood revenge consistent with the interpretation of murder as nothing but an economic debt owed to the family?
ETA: Besides which, even if murder were only bad because of the financial loss to the extended family, murder would still be bad. Giving a reason why murder is bad isn’t to say that murder is not bad.
There was no “murder”, no “guilt”, and no “penalty”, and no “legal reparation” (in narrow modern sense) anywhere here. These concepts make no sense in such cultures. Intentional killing is treated identically to a common accident.
You might be confused by historical record, as cultures without centralized states and legal systems it brings tends to lack writing as well—so most of our records come from highly unusual subset of cultures with centrally enforced law, relatively individualistic societies etc.
There was no “murder”, no “guilt”, and no “penalty”, and no “legal reparation” (in narrow modern sense) anywhere here. These concepts make no sense in such cultures. Intentional killing is treated identically to a common accident.
Your disagreement is with the terminology used in your own cite. But the terminology doesn’t matter. If your cite is anywhere in the neighborhood of accurate, then these cultures held that something wrong had happened — that is, some imbalance had occurred that had to be righted — when one person caused the death of another. Perhaps they considered intentional killing to be no worse than a common accident. But another way to say that is that they considered unintentional killing to be just as bad as intentional killing.
You might be confused by historical record, as cultures without centralized states and legal systems it brings tends to lack writing as well—so most of our records come from highly unusual subset of cultures with centrally enforced law, relatively individualistic societies etc.
If the cultures you want to use for your argument left sparser evidence, then that means that you should be less confident about your interpretation of the moral thinking that was behind the written laws that they did leave behind.
In fact, you have a greater burden of proof than your interlocutors. You are saying that a culture that left less evidence was different in a particular way from most of the cultures for which we have better evidence, whereas your interlocutors are saying that the less-evidenced culture was probably about the same in this particular way. That means that your hypothesis is more complicated, and so a priori less likely.
For another example—killing own babies was extremely widespread, not even condemned in any way in most cultures including pre-Christian Rome. It was just as casual as abortion is today.
Or killing family members who disgraced your family in any way (your judgment) is widely praised in many cultures.
You’re right about this. Attitudes towards infanticide vary greatly between cultures, and in many cultures, both past and present, the recognized authority of the senior family/clan members has included the power to enforce their will, and the standards of behavior, by threats of death against the subordinate family members.
But again, all this always happens within a legal structure with clear rules about what constitutes unlawful killing, and serious penalties for those who kill unlawfully. This legal structure may have the form of unwritten folk custom, but people living under it are no more capable of ignoring it than the citizens of modern states can ignore the codified criminal laws. (In fact, even less so, since many laws nowadays are enforced only sporadically or not at all, and flouted widely and openly.)
You might be confused by historical record, as cultures without centralized states and legal systems it brings tends to lack writing as well—so most of our records come from highly unusual subset of cultures with centrally enforced law, relatively individualistic societies etc.
You don’t have to reach for misty prehistory, or even for particularly exotic and remote parts of the world, to find examples of traditional societies where the formal state-enforced law is largely irrelevant. For example, there are still ongoing clan blood feuds in some places in the Balkans, specifically in parts of Albania. These examples show a huge problem with informal revenge-based folk justice, namely that vengeance for individual killings can easily escalate into out of control clan warfare. Yet all this only goes to show how serious a transgression it is.
Easy, before Christianization Germanic (and some other Indo-European) cultures were totally casual about people killing each other, any social class, no reason necessary.
You were to provide an example of a culture where murder without cause wasn’t generally undesirable. But instead you pointed to a cultural that quantified exactly how undesirable they considered murder to be. It looks like they imposed pretty heavy fines, especially for the murder of those with high status. So they must have considered the murder of such people to be pretty undesirable.
Impact of Christianity was very shallow at first, and limited to social elites. It took something like century or two for it to really replace previous norms.
Game players usually evolve some sense of honour which avoids them breaking the rules, and although they know the rules are arbitrary, they aren’t willing to change them at any moment. If more frequent breaking of the rules is what you fear.
I wish my mother had used this strategy, instead of the completely arbitrary-sounding “this is just the way you are to do things” which just caused a counter-reaction.
Grownups have already learned the reason to follow the rules: it’s what society expects, so your life will be easier and you will be able to accomplish more if you follow them. But for the most part they learned it by osmosis, intuition, and implication—as you presumably did when you grew up—because nobody made it explicit to them, either. I think that most people don’t explain this to their kids because they don’t understand it themselves; they’ve never verbalized the reason, so they’re just passing on the social pressure which worked for them.
The sad thing about this is not only that it leads to parroting “courtesy” without real understanding. It’s that without being able to articulate the purpose of the social contract in general, one can’t evaluate the reasons for specific clauses within it. When they seem arbitrary, they’re difficult to remember, and even more difficult to respect. Consciously examining the structure allows you to see patterns in it (e.g. if X is rude, putting someone in a position where they must do X is also rude), as well as compare their implied goals against your actual goals.
For example, there are a few situations where I consider a clear understanding of the situation more important than courtesy, and will press someone to explain something which would otherwise be rude to ask for. But, unless they already know me well not to need it, I’ll also explain what I’m doing and why, so they know it’s not simply out of disregard. Like many things (grammar, musical composition), you have to understand the rules well before you can break them intelligently. It’s a lot more acceptable to violate the social contract if you understand why the part you’re violating exists and have made a conscious choice not to follow it.
I suspect that, for that reason, real understanding of society and its rules would make social change easier and bring the rules themselves more in line with peoples’ actual goals. The key word there is “real,” though. Just a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Eh? On looking it up [1], it seems about as sensible as any other children’s game. It encourages dexterity and fitness, it’s spontaneously played by children, and it only needs a stick of chalk and a pebble. Whence this burst of antipathy to a game mentioned only in passing?
[1] It was played when I was a boy, but in the culture I grew up in, it was exclusively a girls’ game. I never figured out what the rules were just from seeing it played in the street.
You know what children’s game is wrong? Elbow Tag. It requires a large group, but at any given moment, only two people are actually playing. If the chasee is faster than the chaser, there is an equilibrium state that lasts until the chasee has mercy on the rest of the group and voluntarily lets someone else play...but even if that happens, since the new chasee is rested and the chaser is the same, you’re normally back in the same boat.
Ugh. I have no idea what wedrifid has against hopscotch, but I empathize with the sentiment.
It sounds like it is a game that mostly allows people to demonstrate superior status by proving how inconsiderate of others they can get away with being. I consider that a bug. I have more respect for games in which people can gain status by proving how skilled they are at said game. (There are other ways to flaunt the ability to be inconsiderate and attention seeking that don’t waste game playing time.)
I think that this quote misses an important point—and am in agreement with Academician.
Although the particular social etiquette habits of different cultures vary widely, many of them serve similar, underlying purposes.
Kurt Vonnegut makes my case beautifully, and as gently as always in ‘Cat’s Cradle’. Without going into the plot, there is a ‘holy man’ (actually, a rationalist in an impossible situation, IMHO); followers of this holy man, when they meet each other, undertake a ritual called “the meeting of souls” (or similar) :- they remove their shoes and socks, and sit down, legs extended, foot to foot.
Abstract: Ritual forms of social etiquette are human and beneficial (if not essential): the form that they take is non-essential.
There is a higher order of information in this than in the assumption that all rituals are simply arbitrary game-playing.
William T. Powers
I’d be concerned that this phrasing would raise more sociopaths… because that’s how they think about morality.
The idea of teaching relativism for moral specifics is good, but consider that there are aspects of morality common to all sustainable cultures. Powers’ framing would describe these as “common game elements” or “aspects common to all these different games”. I think they should be emphasized/emotionalized as a little more than that (even if they aren’t), so to avoid sociopathy (if that’s even possible).
Less specifically, and with more confidence: emotional intelligence is a thing, and children need to be taught that, too. Perhaps Powers could achieve this by teaching kids that “feeling good about doing good things” is part of the game, and maybe one of the objectives of the game.
Sociopaths and mature adults share that conception. Both of these groups of people tend to have also discovered that it is usually not in their best interest to discuss the subject with people who do not share their maturity or sociopathic nature respectively.
The reason a sociopath must arrive at the insight Powers proposes we teach earlier is that they cannot survive without it. Where a normal individual can survive (but not thrive) with a naive morality a sociopath cannot rely on the training wheels of guilt or shame to protect them from the most vicious players in the game before they work things out.
I predict that Powers’ curriculum would produce no more sociopaths, make those sociopaths that are inevitable do less damage and result in a whole heap less burnt out, anti-social (or no longer pro-social) idealists.
You’re awesome. Specifically, you communicate useful insights often. I tend to agree with you, but when I don’t, I’m glad to have read you.
Making incompetent sociopaths more rational would create new harms as well. They would be better able to fool people and would erode the trustworthiness of “normal-seeming people” a little. But since there are already many competent sociopaths, and because normal people are situationally also selfishly destructive (self-serving bias+hypocrisy), we have institutions that mitigate those harms.
Also, I agree that preventing damaged people from running amok (in the extreme killing N people and then themselves) would be fantastic.
That sounds right to me. I suspect the main difference that improving social education for all children would have on sociopaths is that it would knock some of the rough edges off the less intelligent among them. The kind of behaviours that are maladaptive even for sociopaths and may lead them to do overtly anti-social things and wind up sanctioned.
The models I have for competent sociopaths and high status individuals are approximately identical for basically this reason.
The analogy I use in my head instead of games is languages. They both have rules, but “games” implies something fake, not productive, and not to be taken seriously. “Languages” are tools we’re accustomed to using for everyday functional reasons, and it’s clearer that breaking their rules arbitrarily has a more immediate detrimental effect on their purpose (communication).
The most common way I use the metaphor explicitly is during a misunderstanding with a friend. “Wait—what does X mean in Sammish? Z? Ohh, now I get it. In Relsquish, X means Y. That’s why I thought you were talking about Y.”
The nice thing about this model is that, in a game, you expect everyone to know the rules before you sit down to play. If someone doesn’t follow them, they’re either too ignorant to play or cheating. When you’re talking to someone who speaks a different language from you (even if they’re just different versions of English, like Sammish and Relsquish are), occasional confusion is a matter of course. When you misunderstand each other, no one has “broken” the rules; it’s just a mismatch. You identify that, explain in other words, and move on, with much fewer hard feelings or blame.
That is very fun to say. Rel-squish!
Haha. Yes, it is. I don’t get to say it much, because I’m Fizz to almost everybody who knows me in person—so I refer to myself as speaking Fizzish instead. I didn’t think it was worth the trouble of explaining that for the sake of the example, though. :)
The quote doesn’t talk about morality. I take it to be about social rules such as what is considered proper dress, table manners, rudeness and politeness, playing nicely, and so on. At a certain age (as WTP alludes to) children become capable of understanding above that level, and they will need a proper upbringing in what is good and real at that level as well. There’s another quote of WTP I could give in this connection, but I’ve used up my quote quota for this month.
If you share it in a multiply nested reply to another comment then it is not included in the ‘quote quota’ - it’s just the same as including a quote in any other conversation.
(ie. Your interpretation about applying to social rules rather than morality and ethics themselves seems right and I am interested in hearing the quote you have in mind.)
Ok then:
-- William T. Powers
I like the first paragraph in particular.
Care to name a few that I cannot counter with some European culture of last 3000 years, without even going any further?
“It is generally undesirable for members of my own culture / social class to murder each other without just cause.”
Before you respond, note that “Person X committed murder in Society Y and it was okay,” is not a counterexample. You will need to present an entire culture which was
sustainable, and
has no general aversion to unjust intra-class murder.
… and, I guess if you’re still going for it, one which existed in Europe since 1000BC.
Easy, before Christianization Germanic (and some other Indo-European) cultures were totally casual about people killing each other, any social class, no reason necessary.
That’s like saying that in modern-day U.S., the culture is “totally casual about people killing each other, any social class, no reason necessary,” and justifying that by linking to a web page discussing the penalties for murder in present-day American law.
As that Wikipedia page will tell you, wergeld was a legal penalty for killing imposed on the guilty person. Today, punishing murder with fines sounds unusual (though perhaps not so much when you consider that wrongful death torts still exist), and this is indeed a sign of significant cultural change, but the idea that killing people was seen as an OK casual thing to do among the old Germanics, or any other historical people, is just ludicrous.
You’re committing fallacy of reinterpreting past cultures in terms of your own culture.
Weregild was not a penalty, and had nothing to do with guilt. It was debt towards family to compensate for their economic loss with no consideration of “guilt” whatsoever. Wikipedia doesn’t say so, but it was debt of extended family to extended family.
Thinking in terms of “guilt” doesn’t even make that much sense to cultures that organized society in terms of clans or families instead of individuals. Such cultures used to be very common. Even as late as 19th century there was no legal personhood for most women, and there still isn’t much of it for young people (they’re treated as children instead far longer than makes sense; more or less like women were treated in earlier times).
taw:
As you say, these people were illiterate, and they didn’t leave much record of their feelings and abstract opinions in these cases. But the fact is that if you killed someone, you’d be obliged to submit to legal sanctions, and if you failed to do so, you were in big trouble. This is not a situation that follows after acts that are considered “totally casual,” and whatever were the old Germanic words used to describe people in this situation, “guilty” seems to me like an accurate modern English translation. The fact that these sanctions were administered at clan level changes nothing.
That is true when it comes to property rights, contract law, etc. for married women. But it doesn’t mean that killing women was legal, married or not. You are making invalid analogies.
The wikipedia page also says that
Emphasis added. How is legal blood revenge consistent with the interpretation of murder as nothing but an economic debt owed to the family?
ETA: Besides which, even if murder were only bad because of the financial loss to the extended family, murder would still be bad. Giving a reason why murder is bad isn’t to say that murder is not bad.
Your paradigm blinds you to reality.
There was no “murder”, no “guilt”, and no “penalty”, and no “legal reparation” (in narrow modern sense) anywhere here. These concepts make no sense in such cultures. Intentional killing is treated identically to a common accident.
For another example—killing own babies was extremely widespread, not even condemned in any way in most cultures including pre-Christian Rome. It was just as casual as abortion is today.
Or killing family members who disgraced your family in any way (your judgment) is widely praised in many cultures.
You might be confused by historical record, as cultures without centralized states and legal systems it brings tends to lack writing as well—so most of our records come from highly unusual subset of cultures with centrally enforced law, relatively individualistic societies etc.
Your disagreement is with the terminology used in your own cite. But the terminology doesn’t matter. If your cite is anywhere in the neighborhood of accurate, then these cultures held that something wrong had happened — that is, some imbalance had occurred that had to be righted — when one person caused the death of another. Perhaps they considered intentional killing to be no worse than a common accident. But another way to say that is that they considered unintentional killing to be just as bad as intentional killing.
If the cultures you want to use for your argument left sparser evidence, then that means that you should be less confident about your interpretation of the moral thinking that was behind the written laws that they did leave behind.
In fact, you have a greater burden of proof than your interlocutors. You are saying that a culture that left less evidence was different in a particular way from most of the cultures for which we have better evidence, whereas your interlocutors are saying that the less-evidenced culture was probably about the same in this particular way. That means that your hypothesis is more complicated, and so a priori less likely.
taw:
You’re right about this. Attitudes towards infanticide vary greatly between cultures, and in many cultures, both past and present, the recognized authority of the senior family/clan members has included the power to enforce their will, and the standards of behavior, by threats of death against the subordinate family members.
But again, all this always happens within a legal structure with clear rules about what constitutes unlawful killing, and serious penalties for those who kill unlawfully. This legal structure may have the form of unwritten folk custom, but people living under it are no more capable of ignoring it than the citizens of modern states can ignore the codified criminal laws. (In fact, even less so, since many laws nowadays are enforced only sporadically or not at all, and flouted widely and openly.)
You don’t have to reach for misty prehistory, or even for particularly exotic and remote parts of the world, to find examples of traditional societies where the formal state-enforced law is largely irrelevant. For example, there are still ongoing clan blood feuds in some places in the Balkans, specifically in parts of Albania. These examples show a huge problem with informal revenge-based folk justice, namely that vengeance for individual killings can easily escalate into out of control clan warfare. Yet all this only goes to show how serious a transgression it is.
You were to provide an example of a culture where murder without cause wasn’t generally undesirable. But instead you pointed to a cultural that quantified exactly how undesirable they considered murder to be. It looks like they imposed pretty heavy fines, especially for the murder of those with high status. So they must have considered the murder of such people to be pretty undesirable.
Note that that continued until Christianity was still pretty popular. Thus, there were specific rules about the weregild for clergy members.
Impact of Christianity was very shallow at first, and limited to social elites. It took something like century or two for it to really replace previous norms.
Game players usually evolve some sense of honour which avoids them breaking the rules, and although they know the rules are arbitrary, they aren’t willing to change them at any moment. If more frequent breaking of the rules is what you fear.
I wish my mother had used this strategy, instead of the completely arbitrary-sounding “this is just the way you are to do things” which just caused a counter-reaction.
Grownups have already learned the reason to follow the rules: it’s what society expects, so your life will be easier and you will be able to accomplish more if you follow them. But for the most part they learned it by osmosis, intuition, and implication—as you presumably did when you grew up—because nobody made it explicit to them, either. I think that most people don’t explain this to their kids because they don’t understand it themselves; they’ve never verbalized the reason, so they’re just passing on the social pressure which worked for them.
The sad thing about this is not only that it leads to parroting “courtesy” without real understanding. It’s that without being able to articulate the purpose of the social contract in general, one can’t evaluate the reasons for specific clauses within it. When they seem arbitrary, they’re difficult to remember, and even more difficult to respect. Consciously examining the structure allows you to see patterns in it (e.g. if X is rude, putting someone in a position where they must do X is also rude), as well as compare their implied goals against your actual goals.
For example, there are a few situations where I consider a clear understanding of the situation more important than courtesy, and will press someone to explain something which would otherwise be rude to ask for. But, unless they already know me well not to need it, I’ll also explain what I’m doing and why, so they know it’s not simply out of disregard. Like many things (grammar, musical composition), you have to understand the rules well before you can break them intelligently. It’s a lot more acceptable to violate the social contract if you understand why the part you’re violating exists and have made a conscious choice not to follow it.
I suspect that, for that reason, real understanding of society and its rules would make social change easier and bring the rules themselves more in line with peoples’ actual goals. The key word there is “real,” though. Just a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Wrong. It’s an idiotic game. Makes no sense at all.
Eh? On looking it up [1], it seems about as sensible as any other children’s game. It encourages dexterity and fitness, it’s spontaneously played by children, and it only needs a stick of chalk and a pebble. Whence this burst of antipathy to a game mentioned only in passing?
[1] It was played when I was a boy, but in the culture I grew up in, it was exclusively a girls’ game. I never figured out what the rules were just from seeing it played in the street.
You know what children’s game is wrong? Elbow Tag. It requires a large group, but at any given moment, only two people are actually playing. If the chasee is faster than the chaser, there is an equilibrium state that lasts until the chasee has mercy on the rest of the group and voluntarily lets someone else play...but even if that happens, since the new chasee is rested and the chaser is the same, you’re normally back in the same boat.
Ugh. I have no idea what wedrifid has against hopscotch, but I empathize with the sentiment.
So the game teaches how to have cooperative fun. This is a feature, not a bug.
It sounds like it is a game that mostly allows people to demonstrate superior status by proving how inconsiderate of others they can get away with being. I consider that a bug. I have more respect for games in which people can gain status by proving how skilled they are at said game. (There are other ways to flaunt the ability to be inconsiderate and attention seeking that don’t waste game playing time.)
Don’t all games do that?
As does life itself. But different situations teach different aspects of a lesson in different ways.
I think that this quote misses an important point—and am in agreement with Academician.
Although the particular social etiquette habits of different cultures vary widely, many of them serve similar, underlying purposes.
Kurt Vonnegut makes my case beautifully, and as gently as always in ‘Cat’s Cradle’. Without going into the plot, there is a ‘holy man’ (actually, a rationalist in an impossible situation, IMHO); followers of this holy man, when they meet each other, undertake a ritual called “the meeting of souls” (or similar) :- they remove their shoes and socks, and sit down, legs extended, foot to foot.
Abstract: Ritual forms of social etiquette are human and beneficial (if not essential): the form that they take is non-essential.
There is a higher order of information in this than in the assumption that all rituals are simply arbitrary game-playing.