For December: Snow by Orhan Pamuk

By special request, we are reading something about Turkey. You can listen to an interview of the author by NPR's Steve Inskeep. The main character of the novel is a man named Ka, who is a poet expat living in Germany. He comes back to his hometown in Turkey after a long time away, in part because he is curious about a suicide "epidemic" among local young women. The book touches on politics, religion, the headscarf issue, religious fundamentalism, East and West relations. It is a challenging book - not entirely linear - but should be satisfying to read and we should learn something about Turkey, which is a country we have not read about yet.

For HRW's work on women's human rights in Turkey, see He Loves You, He Beats You.

October: The Honor Code

Type "honor" into a Google images search, and you will see page after page of military medals, soldiers, more medals, more soldiers. There are a few other images sprinkled in there: a kid pledging allegiance, an academic honor code insignia. Honor is about integrity, respect, high esteem. We think of a man of honor, honoring our word, bestowing honors, honoring our parents, our heritage, our nation, or god.

In his most recent book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, Appiah writes about how moral revolutions happen, and he suggests that there is an important role for honor to play here.

Specifically, honor is important to the processes by which human societies manage to travel from conflicting moral arguments to coherent moral actions. Appiah explores how socially accepted practices such as the duel, slavery, and footbinding came to be unacceptable practices. The basic idea is that opinions and behavior change when the practice is understood to be shameful or to damage the honor of the community-- behavior does not change because the practice is against the law, or because there are good arguments against the practice on moral or practical grounds.

This makes sense, and there are a lot of people who have spent a lot of time researching how shaming, peer pressure, and framing all influence social behavior that is harmful to others (for example, social psychologists have written on genocide in these terms The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence). Appiah suggest some interesting things in his book: for example, that modern cultures (such as ours in the US) tend to discount or underestimate honor- in our own society and in others'. He also goes into a lot of detail about honor.

Honor in Detail
Appiah begins with two simple points: Honor is about respect. The power of honor is partly in the threat of public shame if one fails to live up to standards of honor.

Respect can come from "esteem" for specific achievement: Competitive honor; or respect can come out of "recognition" of a particular quality (power or weakness) for which a person demands certain treatment: Peer honor.

Honor is part of personal networks of responsibility; it shapes collective identity, and the specificity of honor is specific to historical, social, and cultural contexts. Honor is socially defined, and it can change. Appiah suggests that we can use honor to frame morally problematic practices (such as honor killing) as shameful, dishonorable. This can displace an established belief that the practice protects honor, thereby weakening the force of the practice by undermining the most basic purpose of the practice for people.

Appiah does recognize the fact that peer and competitive honor overlap, in that people must work to retain their status in a peer group, just as they must work to attain status through achievement. I think it might be interesting to explore this in more detail. I have a feeling that these two types of honor interact quite a bit. Even within a peer group, certain achievements of men (for which they could earn high regard and competitive honor) would help solidify their class status and therefore their peer honor, while the very same achievements if accomplished by the sisters or mothers of these men would almost certainly not earn the women the same sort of high regard and peer honor, and might not even be recognized as a competitive achievement at all but rather a dishonorable and shameful thing. As long as we accept that men and women should "compete honorably" at different things, the framework seems to work reasonably well, but is this satisfactory? If the recognition of a person's human dignity is contingent on the person abiding by these standards of honor, then the danger is that they can lose the right to that respect if they unsettle those standards. It seems that human rights work still needs to rely on a deeper claim to respect. Even deeply dishonorable people have basic human rights, and although they can be detained, for example, they should not be tortured or detained indefinitely.

Looking at honor and shame as tactical elements is interesting, and important: the Justin, the Director of HRW's office in LA, recently pointed out how useful it is to have a specific and detailed understanding of honor codes and honor systems in human rights work: "in June 2010, we did a report on Female Genital Mutilation in Iraqi Kurdistan. Because Nadya Khalife, the researcher, is a Muslim woman from Lebanon, she had a particular grasp of the situation which led her to understand that women allowed it to be done to their daughters b/c they were convinced it was required by Muslim religion.  Since Nadya understood it is not, she went to the Kurdistan Islamic Scholars Union, the highest religious authority in the region, and persuaded them to issue a fatwa saying that the practice was not required by Islam.  Speaking to the clerics from within their honor system made her the persuasive advocate."

Honor in our Lives
In our discussion, we talked about different examples of honor in our own society:

• familial status (marriage, motherhood)
• professions (professor, doctor)
• associations (gangs, clubs)

We talked about gay marriage and how the respect  that is given to married couples is part of what makes marriage such an important issue: a married relationship and a married person carries a specific social value because it is honorable (we also talked about how marriage is different when we take into account race and class). At the same time, women who have children earn a certain type of feminine honor (and we are talking here about the honor gained from mothering children, not just having them).

Specific professions bestow honor: in a society with some educational and social mobility, this is a way of amending race, class and gender restrictions on how much honor/what type of honor is owed to people because of what class they belong to... but only amending. For example, if you are a woman in a predominantly male field of work, you will gain some access to the respect demanded by the profession but you are likely to have to work harder to "protect" and legitimate your professional honor and will often have to repeatedly "prove" that you deserve that respect. The same goes for class and race... we have specific codes for who automatically qualifies for honorable careers, based on background. Others can work hard and earn a place of honor, but it is often harder.

This brings us to the final example in our discussion: gangs. Gangs, we thought, could reveal a lot in terms of how important honor really is in our modern society. All three of these examples certainly illustrate social patterns in honor that lead us to ask:

Can honor ever be purged of its prejudices of race, class and gender?

The trouble, even discomfort, some of us have with honor as a social tool for change is in the gendered, classed, and raced implications of honor codes. We aren't the only ones who see this link between masculinity and honor: there are entire university courses dedicated to the subject! Appiah suggests that honor can overcome these problems, as society matures and embraces broader definitions of humanity and ethical responsibility...

Just as a thought experiment, what would it take for our society to look at successful diplomatic negotiations for peace with the same deeply motivating sense of communal honor as we look at successful military operations? Or to honor a new curriculum developer for their work on nonviolent conflict resolution in high schools to the degree that we honor inventors of cutting edge military technology? As a side note, on a Radiolab episode on Falling, poet and author Joan Murray talked about about the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel- it was a 63 year old woman- and who did not get the fame and fortune that she expected in part because she did not fit the popular assumptions of what a hero worthy of such admiration and honor should look like. The second person -a strapping young man- got that honor, and the money and fame that goes along with it. How different are we now in terms of our expectations about heroes?

Honor is part of personal networks of responsibility; it shapes collective identity. This is what Appiah calls an "honor world", in that people share a set of honor codes. The centrality of collective values and standards and identity are important, and I think it is very interesting that Appiah is attempting to deal with these issues as they influence morality. It is not so clear, however, that we can draw such a clear line between honor and morality nor between honor and oppressive practices as Appiah seems to suggest. We agreed, though, that honor and shame are often misunderstood, underestimated, and overlooked, and that they are still powerful social forces.