A New Look at How America's Culture of Violence Developed and Spread
Why does it seem like America is so uniquely violent? A groundbreaking new study tracks the spread of honor culture.
One of my favorite documentaries is Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine. Well, I use the term documentary loosely here, as Moore himself has acknowledged that his films are more like op-eds — you’re not getting a balanced picture so much as you’re getting one man’s point of view.
But what made Columbine a stronger film than most of Moore’s work what the agnosticism in some of his conclusions. Moore, for instance, has plenty to say about Charleton Heston, the late actor who headlined a National Rifle Association rally not too long after the Columbine tragedy. But he also acknowledges that high gun ownership in Canada does not seem to be associated with the levels of violence we have here in the United States. After the film concludes, you’re left with a bunch of hypotheses about American violence, but you still don’t quite understand why it is we seem to have way more shootings and homicides than any developed country and even many poor nations.
I first watched the movie in a high school classroom where a buddy of mine, a staunch conservative who to this day would probably hurl himself into a volcano rather than vote for a Democrat, admitted he kind of liked Moore after watching Columbine.
And yet despite how much I appreciate Moore for making a nuanced movie in this case, I do have to slight him for leaving out a pretty obvious explanation for why America has as much violence as it does.
No, I’m not talking about poverty — high poverty does not produce the same levels of violence in say, Ghana or Vietnam, as it does in the United States.
Nor am I endorsing the racist theory of the case. Yes, violent crime rates amongst young African American men are higher than most other categorizations, but the vast majority of black people never commit any kind of violent crime at all. Heck, if you look just at white Americans, we still have alarmingly high levels of violence. And if you expand your analysis beyond the United States, you’ll find that many black-majority nations are actually safer than the United States is. The aforementioned Ghana is actually safer, on average, than the U.S. is. Race, after all, is a social construct, not a biological fact. While it may be useful to talk about why men — across societies and history — tend to be much more violent than women, it’s not super useful to talk about race.
Instead, what I wish Moore had talked more about is honor culture and how it’s contributed to the spread and resilience of violence in the United States. A recent study published in the prestigious journal PNAS did just that.
The causes and consequences of the American South’s honor culture
In the 1990s, a social psychologist named Richard Nisbett conducted research looking into the American South’s unique culture. Nisbett and others had noticed that the South had far more violence than the rest of the country; shootings and homicides in the region were astronomical. Many of these acts of violence stemmed from seemingly trivial interactions — disputes over what someone had called someone else, for instance.
Nisbett published research showing that many Southerners uphold what is called an anthropology a culture of honor. Honor culture, as it’s often called, is one where protecting your reputation is paramount. If someone insults you, threatens your property, or undermines your manhood, you have not only a right but an obligation to respond aggressively.
He did experiments where he found that the cortisol levels — that’s the hormone related to stress — went way up when southerners were insulted compared to people in other regions of the country. Southern culture was different and it made a real difference in how the study participants internalized threats to their reputation.
Where did this culture come from? The conservative economist Thomas Sowell has written extensively about how much of the South was settled by Scots-Irish who imbued that culture onto the region — a culture that then spread to African Americans, who were brought there as slaves. But is there some way we can show that honor culture is helping drive violence?
Carrying a risk of violence with them
Gabriel Lenz, a political scientist at UC Berkeley, worked with a team to study that question through the lens of internal migration. Their study, which was published in PNAS late last year, provides ample reason to believe that not only has honor culture helped drive violence in the South, but the spread of that culture promoted violence across the country.
Lenz told me that he was interested in the question of violence in part because of his own life’s experiences. He had grown up in Canada and would cross the border into Detroit and experience bad neighborhoods for the first time.
“I’ve always just wondered, like what went so wrong?” he told me.
In this study, he and his colleagues looked at white Americans who grew up in the South and frontier states — where honor culture is common — and what would happen when they migrated to other regions of the country.
Why white residents? Because as the majority group in the United States, white residents were not geographically concentrated in certain regions and had wide variation in homicide rates. African Americans, for instance, have always overwhelmingly lived in the South. By focusing on white residents, they were able to compare white residents who on paper were similar — demographically, that is — but who moved to the same regions from different regions of the country.
What they found is that white residents born in historically more unsafe regions like the South carried an elevated risk of being killed in homicides even after they had moved to safer states. White residents who moved to those same locations from comparatively safer states did not carry the same risk.
To buttress their results, Lenz and his colleagues carried out a set of surveys of migrants. They found all the telltale signs of honor culture beliefs — witnessing violence at some point in your life, distrust of institutions, embracing the idea that you shouldn’t back down from a fight.
In our conversation, Lenz explained the historic rise of honor culture in these states as a response to the lack of authority or government infrastructure.
“The culture of honor is very intuitive for anybody in a high violence situation — usually places where the government’s not there,” he told me. “If you quickly learn that you’re on your own to protect yourself — your family, neighborhood, gang, community, whatever — you quickly learn what protects you is having a reputation of being scary. Because that might deter people from harming you. It’s a defensive response.”
Peace through cultural change
Conversations about how culture drives violence quickly devolve into food fights. At this point, a lot of Americans roll their eyes at lectures about “toxic masculinity” from the left or “black culture” from the right.
Part of the reason for that is that the vast majority of men don’t commit any violence at all. The same is true for African Americans. But that doesn’t mean there is no cultural component to American violence.
Simply looking at economic status, racial classification, gender, or age does not explain the elevated levels of violence we see in America — especially in the American South.
But the honor culture thesis — when paired with easy access to guns — does help explain why there’s so much violence in this country. Trivial arguments that could be resolved by shrugging your shoulders and walking away are turned into gunfights when you:
Believe that your life itself depends on defending your reputation and/or your community’s honor.
Have a firearm handy.
Although it was not the topic of study for this paper, Lenz also acknowledged that this is important data that could help explain elevated crime rates among black Americans. As Sowell noted years ago, the majority of black Americans were brought to the South; the honor culture that impacts the white residents studied by Lenz impacts them as well, even as they moved to far-flung locations like Oakland and Chicago.
But what can we do about all this? Part of the solution might the kind of peacebuilding work that violence interrupters and youth mentors and faith leaders around the country do.
But another solution is to recognize that sometimes culture flows from the legal and political environment. The book Ghettoside, for instance, painstakingly chronicles how under-policing in black-majority communities helped create a Wild West environment where people felt like they had no choice but to take the law into their own hands. No detective is going to come and solve your son’s murder. So you might as well round up the boys and go shoot it out yourself.
To the extent that we have seen cultural change around violence in America, it’s been driven in part by better and more effective policing and criminal justice.
“The government just needs to really try to convince black Americans that it could be different, and that they’re safer, and that the state will come when they’re called…treat them fairly, treat them with respect, and we’re dealing with the legacy of that — those weak institutions, weak government,” Lenz told me.
I must have misunderstood this article’s conclusion, because I thought it said that Black communities need more policing. Given the kind of interactions that have driven distrust over the centuries, it’s hard to see how more of this failing, and violent same is not going to make a bad situation worse.