I was watching Alexander last night (well not the whole thing, its to long and I needed to get to bed) and Alexander was trying to pump up his soldiers with a speech. This speech mentioned honour a lot which got me to thinking about the concept of honour. It is many different cultures and religions, such as the Japanese in WWII, the idea that a woman having premarital sex sullies the family honour, the mediavel chivalry, and so forth. Is the concept of honour inherent in humans? Is it justa fancy way of saying we are civilized, they are barbarians? Is there such a thing as honour really?
Probably, at least partly. For example, if chimpanzee A helps chimpanzee B in a fight, and B later does not later help chimp A, chimp A is likely to attack B. That looks like a precursor of honor to me; “You watch my back, I’ll watch yours”. It seems to support an instinctive basis for honor, as does the universality of the concept.
It’s not inherent. If it were, everyone would just know it, and we wouldn’t have to make speeches about it or talk about it all the time. Instead, just from the examples in the OP, we can see that the concept is constantly reinforced in everything we do and say to one another. What that does is to provide a dynamic set of rules in each culture about what is and isn’t honorable.
If honor was inherent, we’d have month-old infants that know to not vomit on their mothers because it’s not honorable, and toddlers that know not to keep interrupting Mum and Dad louder and louder to get what they want because that’s not honorable either, and children that never yank toys out of each other’s hand, because that’s not honorable either.
Honor is learned.
Language is inherent, yet we still need to learn. Walking is inherent, yet we need to learn.
The capability to learn language is inherent. If you read about instances of feral children, such as Amala and Kamala, the pattern that emerges is that if a human is not exposed to and encouraged to participate in language, that person will not be able to use language. Same for walking upright.
So yes, we are all born with the capability to learn the rules of a society, vis a vis what is considered honorable and what is not, but the rules themselves can be almost anything, depending on that society’s structure.
That’s how instinct seems to work in humans; it provides the basic pattern, learning provides the details. Children don’t need much exposure to language; if they are in a good sized group they can make their own almost from scratch. Deaf children in Brazil did just that when large numbers were gathered together, and an attempt was made to teach them lip reading. The teachers failed at that for most, but while they tried the kids evolved their own sign language, without adult help.
What language we learn is a matter of culture, but the ability and many of the basic rules appear built in. I suspect many aspects of human nature are this way, including honor.
I think you need to give us a clear definition of ‘honour’ here. As has been pointed out, many primates seem to display behaviours indicating an innate sense of ‘fair play’, which is pretty widely regarded as a pre-requisite for honourable behavour.
On the other hand, social mores with regard to things like pre-marital sex fluctuate enormously, so those aren’t nearly as universal.
From a USA Today article on Steven Reiss’ book Who Am I?: The 16 Basic Desires that Motivate Our Action and Define Our Personalities:
I am not in a position to evaluate his thesis, but there you have it.
I think a honour is a part of a soceity’s culture and values. Values have 2 broad apsects to it – one is what things are worthing working towards for, and the other is how one shall conduct and behave itself. As every culture seems to have a different definition of “honour” (For example, the concept of face for Chineses differ slightly from that of the Japaneses), I largely believe that honour is part of upbringing and culture.
But I think for most people who are conditioned to be presentable in society, an aspect of honour might be that of personal pride.
Being rated is part of every culture. Somebody always ends up at the top of the social structure. So there are always things that help you gain or lose status. Anything that makes you lose status, if it’s not your fault, is a matter of honor to be rebutted.
See, making statements like that is potentially misleading. By way of example, consider music (the sociology of which I recently did a research project on). Many people in Western culture think of music as being composed of notes of a certain pitch and duration, in accordance with the scale that they’ve learned. But that scale arises not during the act of composition, but afterwards, as a reflective act on music that already exists independent of our efforts to parse it into separate units. One could just as easily notate music based on timbre, volume, continuous pitch, etc.
Using this analogy, we can see that Reiss’ thesis is not incorrect in and of itself - perhaps you can indeed describe any social context in terms of those sixteen attributes. However, if there are any hidden assumptions that those sixteen are somehow more fundamental or real than any other way of describing what a personality is, those are wrong.