Honour Culture

March 23, 2019

By AHNZ

Moral Cultures Theory is an ethnographical tool to help make a bit of sense out of human history. Risky business: Stereotyping individuals and peoples. So, you need to remember you’re doing it and to use the tool wisely. Better to have a rude filtering tool though than to have to look at the full radioactive blast of New Zealand history full in the face unfiltered. Here I’m going to take an honest crack at laying out one of the 4 moral cultures: Honour Culture.

Honour Cultures

“They were so generous as to tell us they would come and attack us in the morning.”- Captain Cook upon encountering Maoris, 1769

Some of us solve problems hands on, personally. Some of us are blunt practical people who think in concretes with no time or imagination for high highfalutin abstract ideas. The intersection of these two conditions is the formulation of a class of people called Honour Culture.

K’plah in Klingon and ‘ka pai’ in Maori mean the same thing- AHNZ

“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”- Robert E Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarbarian

Here, then, is a set of people distinguished by taking problems personally and solving them personally. The barbarians, Vikings, the Native Indians and Maoris before colonisation. Chinese, Japanese, Persian, Islamic warlords. Feudal British, the old Labour Unions, the biker gangs, the West Side Story immigrants. There are seldom in the mainstream but we always have strains of Honour Culture in society. Why shouldn’t there be? Didn’t human society spend tens of thousands of years running this operating system?

“The increase of the mana of the tribe is always tika. There is no law beyond this”. – Eric Schwimmer

The New Zealanders that Cook made First Contact with had been in the grip of HC for hundreds of years. Revenge, utu, and reputation, mana, is the driving force of HC because reputation matters most. The personal ranking within a strict hierarchy, a great collective wheel they are bound to and a part of. The imperatives to perceive all as slight or a surrender, and to respond with vengeance or obedience, are couched in the only terms this mind can apprehend: magical thinking, taboo, warding spells, charms, curses, superstition of every sort.

Not Unique

As much as “indigenous” peoples around the world try to tell others they have unique distinguishing features it’s quite untrue. Primitive peoples are blandly repetitive with the same jargon and songs and superstitions you’ll find the world over. When someone like Professor Mason Durie tries to codify Maori philosophy it only shows all the more the same collectivist and superstitions repeated from the antiquity of any culture you can name.

“Thanks to the studied neutrality of the Queen, two great courtiers were allowed to commit murder after murder with complete impunity. Both in the brutality of their tactics and in their immunity from the law, the nearest parallels to the Earl of Oxford and Sir Thomas Knyvett in the London of Queen Elizabeth are Al Capone and Dion O’Banion, Bugs Moran and Johnny Torrio in the Chicago of the 1920’s. It is against this sinister background of rival court factions with their hired killers and ‘cutters’, of sporadic murder and violence in the streets of London, and of occasional pitched battles in the countryside, that the wisdom of Elizabeth’s tactics must be judged.”- Stone (1967)

[Image above from the show Deadwood (2004) depicting an Honour Culture society in America’s Old West]

Superstitious and Paranoid

Honour Culture folk are plain, open, often refreshingly frank. If they took things a bit less personally they’d be Slave Culture and full of guile but that would be an anathema to them hence the warning to Cook who also said, “I have always found them of a brave, noble, open and benevolent disposition, but they are a people that will never put up with an insult if they have an opportunity to resent it.” But they’re also superstitious and paranoid. Always scanning for slight and ready to answer it.

“..wandering and watchful glances which he frequently threw around him, as though distrustful of everyone”- Col Wakefield on Te Raupraha

“..we determined to pass the night in the forest and we prepared to sleep there comfortably by the side of a large fire which [Te Rauparaha]…had kindled. He said he did not sleep much and would take care to keep the fire well supplied with fuel.”

The above quotes about the famous Maori warrior Te Raupraha (pictured at top of post) characterise his HC appropriate paranoia. Ambush and surprise common HC (and thus Maori) war tactics. Constant vigilance/paranoia is a virtue in that world.

We’ve All Been There

Honour Culture phases sweep our societies periodically in the great Rock/Paper/Scissors rotation of the 4 Moral Cultures. I’ve empasised Maori Honour Culture quite a bit above but certainly the Maori world has cycled in and out of HC several times just like any other society does. Within modern history many nations have come out of a hard HC.

“In this story, one of the most decisive transformations has been that of the unenlightened factious territorial warlords of the fifteenth century into the cultivated capitalist parliamentary oligarchs of the eighteenth.”- Stone (1967)

The British passed through a long hard HC into to DC (Dignity Culture) as a Great Revolution¹ between 1580 and 1620. Americans in the 1860s (Civil War.) The Russians only in the 1870s. New Zealand Colonial Honour Culture gave way to Dignity Culture about the same time as the USA and Russia. New Zealand Maori Honour Culture was filled with blood-feuding and utu to rival any of the above nations and made the great leap into DC during Missionary times and another from the turn of the C20th.

Quick tangent

Maori Moral Culture has long since falling into sync with New Zealand’s mainstream¹. As I write (2019) that mainstream is Slave Culture, as exemplified by the Treaty of Waitangi grievance industry. It’s sad to see a once proud HC people fall into begging. Note that they have as little or as much right to complain about historic cycles as Russians, Americans, or British do for being victimised by long-dead feudal warlords. Or, to be held responsible for compensation toward some other group your own ancestors hurt.

Ref. Parasitism by Victimhood.

What Eats HC and what HC Eats

Honour Cultures consume Slave Cultures. When a society has become too weak to assert itself and hold its boarders, turned into a bunch of Slaves that is, they will be devoured. This may take the form of an outside group moving in for an invasion. If not, the same society simply displaces its Slave folk with a new generation of Honour Culture folk.

The Anarchist History of New Zealand Project is to try to identify and date these transitional times. Fronter New Zealand was Honour Culture (Explorers, Sealers, Walers.) Maori Wars New Zealand was Honour Culture. Boer War, WW1, WW2 were all Honour Culture. Late 60s was HC: Muldoon vs Kirk, technology and production, independence from UK, Kelly Tarlton the explorer, Hauraki Pirates, Vietnam War. Each of these HC occurrences was preceded by a SC mainstream presided over by ruling VC. In 2019 it is again due that our culture be reinvigorated (or replaced) by an HC generation because we have reached a very high water mark of Outrage Industrial Complex and Political Correctness; Ref. Millennial Generation.

An HC meets its end at the hands of Dignity Culture (DC.) These transitions don’t have to be violent although if the incumbent doesn’t get out of the way they ensure it. The up-coming power has the energy and youth, the ideas and the comedy. The out-going power has grown stale in their luxury and uses censorship and bans, criminalisation.

“Was not Christ such a deviant, as well as Socrates? And is it not thus with all historical figures whose names we associate with great moral revolutions through which humanity has passed?”- Durkheim

“All lawgivers and arbiters of mankind…were without exception criminals because of the very fact that they had transgressed the ancient laws handed down by their ancestors and venerated by the people.”- Dostoyevsky

Think of Alexander the Great after conquest, after he went native by taking on the court life and the food and dress of the Persians he defeated. He became Dignity Culture like them, alienated from is rough-riding Macedonian Honour Culture warriors who won him his empire. No army could stop this alpha warlord but to Dignity Culture he was without defence. Dignity Culture made civilisation out of rude beginnings and with it great architecture and laws and art and music and technology and higher lifespans and health and welfare and peace. In my opinion New Zealand’s new HC has begun and some early starters are already looking for their DC future. Ref. 2020s: Dignity Culture Rising

What You Can Do

If you feel you’re a bit of a fish out of water in the world today maybe it’s because you’ve been biologically or memetically groomed to be Honour Culture in a world in which it is not mainstream. You’ve got a vital role to play in our society but you know that perfectly well without being told. Thump your chest, play your rugby, drink hard, ignore injury and risk and try not to initiate force.

To Victimhood and Slave Culture tribes I’d like to say not to disown or criminalise the rising HC. Things don’t need to get ugly. I know you are afraid, you’re afraid of change.

You are the natural prey of Honour Culture and you don’t want to go. Want to take away their free speech and their guns, their T-shirts and their websites, their alcohol and their drugs, their bikes and their cars. The more you tighten your grip the more they’ll slip through your fingers. Every act of suppression will create an equally radical and opposite reaction leading to a Hard Transition. Perhaps a civil war. None of us want that.

—

1. Not to neglect the fact that there is a non-mainstream subculture, an Honour Culture, alive and well (and Nazi admiring!?) which is also known as Gang Culture

ref. The Crisis of the Aristocracy, Lawrence Stone (1967)

image ref. Klingon from Star Trek TNG; Honour Culture gold

image ref. Conan the Barbarian (1982)

image ref Te Rauparaha; Alexander Turnbull Library

image ref. Prime Minister John Key takes part in the Maori blessing of the Singapore Kiwifruit Gooseberry office, led by a wood carver with pretensions of being Dumbledore.
Photo: New Zealand Ministry of Zespri (August 2015)

image ref. Frobisher; Ketel; University of Oxford collection

image ref. Massey’s Cossacks with batons, 1913; Alexander Turnbull Library

Like    Comment     Share