In 1946, the pioneering anthropologist Ruth Benedict introduced a distinction between guilt cultures and honor-shame cultures in her book about Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, which was based on research that she had conducted for the U.S. Office of War Information during WWII. I have no basis for assessing whether she was insightful about Japan. However, the distinction has been applied in other settings: for example, to characterize the US South. I will return to that application shortly.

A key passage is on p. 222:

True shame cultures rely on external sanctions for good behavior, not, as true guilt cultures do, on an internalized conviction of sin. Shame is a reaction to other people’s criticism. A man is shamed either by being openly ridiculed and rejected or by fantasying to himself that he has been made ridiculous. In either case it is a potent sanction. But it requires an audience or at least a man’s fantasy of an audience. Guilt does not.

People constrained by guilt ask whether they are violating a rule or principle. This makes them inflexible but also self-regulating. People constrained by shame measure their worth according to current prevailing norms, which can change (p. 170). Benedict adds that early American (Puritan) morality was all about guilt. The only observer who ultimately mattered was God. “But shame is an increasingly heavy burden in the United States and guilt is less extremely felt than in earlier generations” (p. 223).

For what it’s worth, I would resist reifying any culture–treating it as an entity that causes people to think and act in certain ways. I would rather define cultures as networks of ideas and practices. Each person’s network is unique, but we can statistically generalize about the ideas and behaviors of populations. Then we would not see shame-honor as something that affects people, but as one way of generalizing about populations. A norm may prevail in a population because many individuals actively teach and model it, but there will usually be exceptions to any view, and the causal pathways go from persons to persons (e.g., from parents to children), not from a culture to many people.

David French is a Southern Christian with center-right political credentials who is concerned about the far right in the South. He applies Ruth Benedict’s notion of honor-shame cultures to his own region and faith tradition to explain the rise of MAGA.

To get a flavor of this analysis, consider the vast torrent of opinion online. There are always examples of Northern or Coastal liberals who make demeaning remarks about Southerners, Christians, or Trump and his supporters. For someone who identifies with any of those categories and who uses an honor-shame framework, any statement of this kind brings shame. It doesn’t work to say that the offended person holds a secure (or even favored) social position, that the insult is unrepresentative, or that a good person turns the other cheek. Those responses imply a guilt framework instead of honor-shame. Honor-shame demands revenge.

I can imagine that someone who identifies with MAGA might be insulted by my use of this framework to characterize him. But it’s not coming from me. I learned it first from David French. Then I used Google, Google Scholar, and DuckDuckGo to search for “shame honor” and “southern.” I found a rich and thoughtful conversation.

This discussion is not taking place in academia or in secular circles. Even the general concept of “honor shame culture” yields strikingly few recent references on Google Scholar, suggesting that it is not much used by academic anthropologists nowadays. The people who use it are evangelical Christian pastors and missionaries.

They write thoughtful essays criticizing honor-shame as an obstacle to Christian ethics and belief. I find it plausible that New Testament Christianity makes explicit arguments for guilt instead of honor. (In that case, Ruth Benedict’s analysis of Japan may have been rooted in Christian thought.) One of many relevant Biblical texts is Galatians 1:10: “For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.”

It appears that the recent discussion was instigated by Jayson Georges’s 2016 book, The 3D Gospel: Ministry in Guilt, Shame, and Fear Cultures, which I have not read. Google Scholar finds citations to this book in 157 publications. They are definitely scholarly, but not what I would call (acknowledging my own bias) “mainstream.” Instead, almost all of the citations are in missionary studies or Christian education journals.

For what it’s worth: I would not treat honor-shame as an underlying causal factor that explains Southern Christian culture or MAGA (because I would not interpret any cultural phenomena as causal in that way). But I can believe that honor-shame notions are relatively prevalent in the US South, drawing on old traditions yet coexisting and conflicting with other ideas and impulses. I would also explore how whites’ honor-shame is connected to racism throughout the USA.

Further, I do not like honor-shame. Although guilt has its own problems, it is better to try to live according to principles than to feel shame and a need to respond whenever others criticize you. Although not a Christian, I can see a principled and attractive Christian theological argument against honor-shame. After all, it really is better to turn the other cheek.

Finally, people who criticize White Southern Evangelical politics from within–from a principled, theologically based position–may be well placed to combat tendencies that are causing trouble for the rest of us.

This is one of many examples of how actual participation in White Evangelical Christianity can promote challenging moral conversations that yield nuance and self-reflection, whereas merely identifying as a White Christian without seriously participating in the religion is related to antidemocratic and illiberal tendencies.

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See also: individuals in cultures: the concept of an idiodictuon; the prospects for an evangelical turn against Trump; active church membership may counteract problematic religious messages; church attendance, religious identity, and politics (revisited).

Last week, The New York Times published a piece entitled, “Democrats Once Vowed to Stop Oil and Gas. Now They’re Not So Sure.” (Subtitle: “As the midterm elections approach, many leading Democrats are rethinking their approach to climate change.”)

Today, Paul Krugman has a post entitled “Donald Trump, Champion of Renewable Energy” that predicts the Iran war will shift the world economy to renewables, concluding: “Thus Donald Trump has in practice become the world’s green energy champion.”

What is the state of play?

During the Biden Administration, I am not sure to what extent Democrats and environmentalists argued for reducing carbon consumption. There is often a difference between the main themes that politicians express and what voters hear in the media. What jumped out at me was a reluctance to discuss the environment at all. When the president of one of America’s oldest and most famous environmental organizations, the Sierra Club, published his endorsement of Kamala Harris, he wrote exclusively about her support for abortion rights, not even mentioning the climate. Thus I am not sure that the Democrats were rhetorically committed to keeping fossil fuels in the ground.

Biden did take modest actions to block new oil and has extraction. However, by far the main strategy of 2020-2024 was to subsidize green energy. In fact, the Democrats’ policies could be attacked from an environmentalist angle because they did not impose new taxes or federal restrictions on carbon. But the Democrats adopted a strategy that I happen to endorse.

Their basic strategic insight was that interests are upstream from policy. In the USA and many countries today, the most powerful interests support cheap carbon. These interests encompass not only corporations and investors but also many regular people whose livelihoods depend on carbon. Therefore, policies will always revert to promoting carbon. However, by encouraging new industries that are green, the government can support interests that will begin to demand favorable policies and will no longer care about oil and gas.

This strategy is completely consistent with what Democratic candidates are saying now. According to the Times, Senator Ed Markey “said he isn’t abandoning the Green New Deal and legislation he has sponsored to prohibit new federal oil and gas leasing. But these days, he said, ‘I talk about the positive vision for what clean energy represents as a solution to the affordability crisis.'” This is a way of describing what he and others actually began to accomplish during the previous administration.

Then Trump was reelected, closely aligned with the oil and gas industries and hostile to green energy for both ideological and idiosyncratic reasons. I think that he and his people fully grasped the logic of the Biden-era policies. Krugman opens his post, “On Wednesday the Interior Department announced that it would pay the energy developer Invenergy $765 million not to develop three offshore wind farms. … Trump has so far committed $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to killing renewable energy projects.” This seems like an irrational waste (and contrary to Trump’s self-interest in lowering energy costs) unless the administration fears that green economic interests will grow in our country and ultimately take down oil and gas.

But the irony is that Trump has raised the global cost (and the perceived risk) of oil, which is unlikely to return to its previous levels. The Iran crisis hit just as renewable technologies were becoming much cheaper, and Chinese companies were dramatically increasing their production of solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. Hence Krugman’s point that Trump is a green energy champion at the global level.

From an environmental perspective, it doesn’t matter whether a solar panel is manufactured in the US or China. It would be good for the globe if the US consumed less carbon and produced more green technology, but it’s worth keeping our economy in perspective. The US accounts for 13% of global carbon emissions and about 16% of global manufacturing capacity. The world can make progress without us. (And we are making slow progress here, with our carbon intensity falling–at least through 2024.)

From a national economic perspective, the US would be much better off with the Biden-era policies. For one thing, US auto manufacturers would have a chance to develop electric vehicles to compete with Chinese cars globally, and American consumers would have cheaper and better alternatives. However, I am far from despondent about the effects of Trump’s policies on the US economy, which is diversified, enormously well capitalized, and dynamic. Maybe China will continue to dominate the world’s markets for batteries and solar panels, but maybe not, and in any case, there are other markets.

I think Democrats and environmentalists should indeed support diversified and cheap energy, leaving ambitious anti-carbon policies for later. There is much more to be gained by supporting green technology now than by struggling to trim carbon consumption against deep and broad opposition. However, no one really controls these trends, and some of them are turning favorable.

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See also: the Gulf War and the energy transition; the major shift in climate strategy; the theory of the Biden environmental policy may be proven right; what if climate change isn’t a tragedy of the commons?; A Civic Green New Deal etc.