Thread by @EveKeneinan

Honor Cultures
vs
Dignity Cultures
vs
Victimhood Cultures (Shame Cultures)

This is not well-enough understood yet.

We are undergoing a major shift in the very FOUNDATIONS of how we CONCEPTUALIZE morality, good and evil, right and wrong.

Nietzsche was right that Christian values cannot stand without God, so we slide into something MORE PRIMITIVE.

Nietzsche hoped for something like a return to HONOR culture, which was HEROIC but also EXTERNALIZED. One’s worth was what THE GROUP thought about one.

DIGNITY culture makes the individual SELF-SUFFICIENT.

Homer represents, in a way, the transition, where Achilles fights an inner conflict between his KLEOS, his glory and his ARETĒ, his virtue.

Socrates completes the transition: the man of VIRTUE does NOT NEED anyone’s approval.

Honor is at best an afterthought.

It DOES NOT MATTER if all or most of Athens condemns Socrates, because he is a man of superhuman virtue.

HE ALONE convicts Athens of wrongdoing at his trial.

This was something almost UNTHINKABLE before.

THE THING to understand is that TODAY we are moving out of a VIRTUE culture INTO a shame culture.

“Virtue signaling” is NOT an empty gesture. It is HOW ONE IS MORAL in a SHAME culture: by publicly DISSOCIATING with the “problematic” and ASSOCIATING oneself with “the correct."

“CANCEL CULTURE” is DISSOCIATION culture. When something/someone is identified by the herd as “problematic,” the “good person” DISSOCIATES him- or herself.

The problematic thing is cancelled, ostracized, blotted out.

I can’t make this point strongly enough.

We most STOP seeing virtue signaling as MERE hypocrisy or moral affectation. Something deeper is at play. From the point of view of VIRTUE culture, it LOOKS LIKE empty vanity, but it comes from an entirely different point of view.

This is why the members of a SHAME culture (ironically) have NO SHAME in their self-righteous denunciations.

SHAME is, for them, an EXTERNAL THREAT.

They feel shame ONLY when denounced by the herd. Hence the groveling apologies.

No one with a sense of DIGNITY would ever make a groveling, abject apology for something he regards as not even wrong in the first place.

But DIGNITY belongs to a DIGNITY/VIRTUE culture. It is essentially absent in a SHAME/VICTIM culture.

Again this peculiar SHAMELESSNESS is what allows people to “time travel” and e.g. pretend that America in 2020 is just as bad if not worse for black people than America in 1820.

Nietzsche had this right: how we understand TRUTH is a MORAL PHENOMENON.

Without DIGNITY, no one can have REDLICHKEIT—intellectual honesty—and when that ceases, useful narratives outweigh truth at once. One is not ASHAMED to lie blatantly for the approval of the herd.

The reason we are tearing into two factions is that we are working with two distinct moral “operating systems,” the older VIRTUE/DIGNITY one and the newer VICTIMIZATION/SHAME one.

They CANNOT coexist indefinitely.

Back to Jonathan Haidt’s commentary on Microaggression and Moral Cultures
academia.edu/10541921/Micro…

This is among the 2% of sociology that isn’t rubbish. It is in fact one of the most important things you can read to understand WHAT IS GOING ON in our age.

Haidt comments:

I am drawing quotations from this page of Jonathan Haidt’s blog:
righteousmind.com/where-microagg…
where he breaks down/comments on the sociological study that distinguishes HONOR cultures from DIGNITY cultures from VICTIMHOOD cultures.

I am convinced that this shift in our very MORAL FRAMEWORK is a KEY CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTION needed to understand what the hell is going wrong with the world today.

Those who would DEFEND traditional VIRTUE culture are going to have to relearn how to ARGUE FOR something everyone took for granted since the time of Socrates.

IF you stand on your DIGNITY and say “I did nothing wrong. THEREFORE, I will not apologize” you may expect the SHAME culture outrage mob to double down endlessly in their hatred for you.