Honor killing in Pakistan

[Skeptic Ginger]

No, apparently their brains are not as evolved...

This post demonstrates you don't understand the science of which I speak. Citations will follow but see also my post above.

 

[SatansMaleVoiceChoir]

Afghanistan has had a long, long history of foreign influence.

Indeed it has.

The Russians used the most brutal methods to impose liberal values.

They certainly did. Until they were fought to a stalemate.

The Arab mujahideen that supported the Taliban were imposing their own values. All the different tribes have different cultures in their own way, and there's a huge urban/rural divide. In fact, there's far more cultural imperialism at the moment from the people supporting honour killing, or bombing girls' schools, than those opposing it.

Afghanistan had always been divided as you say; until the Taliban were effectively invited to take control. Once again, Afghanistan is divided. Yeah, there's a central government, but it means absolutely nothing out in the sticks where the Mullah or village Tribal Elders run the show. The people know that the Taliban are out there waiting for us to leave, and some of them will even welcome them back. Even many that won't welcome them gladly will at least know there will be a stability of sorts.

 

[westprog]

Don't get that. Because part of our culture is wanting to interfere with other cultures, we should be allowed to interfere in other cultures? Is that right?

If cultural imperatives hold, obviously. If cultural imperatives don't hold, then equally we are permitted to interfere in other cultures.

And where does our 'right' come from?

That depends on whether you hold to absolute or relative morality.

Where do you stand on their cultural right to wage jihad on infidels, and killing as many infidels as you can will guarantee you a good spot in heaven?

I disapprove. But then, I'm not a moral relativist.

That is precisely the reason for not doing it. Who is making the argument that we enforce more enlightened mores, by the way? I ask, because soldiers deploying to Afghanistan are absolutely forbidden from imposing their ways and values on the locals, and are encouraged to observe local customs and traditions wherever possible and practicable.

Yes, and for practical reasons, that's probably a good idea. The British ran India for hundreds of years by observing most local customs, but didn't hesitate to ban abhorrent customs when they felt they had the power to do so. I don't see any merit in trying to enforce rules without having the power to do so, but I equally don't see any reason not to enforce them if the power is available.

 

[SatansMaleVoiceChoir]

This post demonstrates you don't understand the science of which I speak. Citations will follow but see also my post above.

Please demonstrate that of which you speak. I'm dying to know how this:

The majority of evolved human brains. In case you hadn't noticed, morality is a function of the human brain and it evolved so that most of us are born with certain preset values.

doesn't mean what I think it does. I'm also very intrigued by the idea that we are definitely born with preset moral values.

Oh, and regarding your post above; how are you judging 'normal'?

And while you're citing, please don't forget to show me exactly how soldiers overcome the moral inhibition towards killing by defining the enemy as 'other than human'. Thanks.

 

[westprog]

Of course they do. And societies become culturally cruel from time to time. But it doesn't last and they drift back to normal.

I can see absolutely no historical evidence for this statement.

The point is, when societies are off on the cruel side of the continuum, there is truth when other humans take note and speak up. To claim, "It's their culture and you can't judge them by your culture", is not true. There is a human norm one can judge other cultures by.

If one were to look at all of recorded human history, the evidence would come out strongly in favour of cruelty as the norm. It's omnipresent.

The reason that Western values are better (insofar as they are) is not because they conform to some imaginary biological health standard. It's on a far more abstract basis.

Of course, an alien observing this discussion from a global viewpoint would find the spectacle of enormously rich westerners commenting on the lives of people kept in poverty and ignorance by their own policies rather odd. It's been estimated (though I don't know how accurately) that to maintain an average Westerner in his standard of living costs the lives of three third world individuals. It may not be literally true, but as a parable at least it's accurate.

Of course, as we see among immigrant families in the West, prosperity doesn't automatically outweigh culture, though there's probably a strong influence.

 

[SatansMaleVoiceChoir]

I don't think that's remotely true. Jim Crow and lynching and brutal suppression don't negate the huge difference between slavery and freedom, no matter how circumscribed. There was very little impetus from freed slaves to return to their previous circumstances.

Well obviously I cannot speak from experience, but I doubt that (especially initially) a whole lot changed for the slaves except they technically 'owned' themselves, for what THAT was worth at the time.

How old does something have to be to qualify as culture? The white SA's were in South Africa for as long as many of the black SA's whom they were oppressing. They had had their view of non-white people's for almost as long as they had contact with them.

I'd be hard-pushed to say given the amount of different Western backgrounds that make up the White SA population - it'd be hard to pin them down as a unified 'culture', or when they started existing as one. What I would say though is that they maintained their Western morals and values (which if were honest are Christianity-based), but did not clean up their act as quickly as the rest of us did. As I said, I personally see them as 'wayward children' who needed a nudge to behave, as opposed to us meddling in a long established culture going back thousands of years.

 

[SatansMaleVoiceChoir]

If cultural imperatives hold, obviously. If cultural imperatives don't hold, then equally we are permitted to interfere in other cultures.

Still not sure - dumb it down for me please.

That depends on whether you hold to absolute or relative morality.



I disapprove. But then, I'm not a moral relativist.

Same again - I'm not usually this lazy about research, but it's been a long day, and I know I won't find any definitions that won't require me to do some serious reading and thinking. I don't mind appearing dumb at the moment!

Yes, and for practical reasons, that's probably a good idea. The British ran India for hundreds of years by observing most local customs, but didn't hesitate to ban abhorrent customs when they felt they had the power to do so. I don't see any merit in trying to enforce rules without having the power to do so, but I equally don't see any reason not to enforce them if the power is available.

I think what it boils down to for me is 'can' does not automatically equal 'has the absolute right to'.

The British thought they'd banned many customs - all they did was drive them underground and make their practice more enthusiastic. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom taught me that.

 

[westprog]

I'm also very intrigued by the idea that we are definitely born with preset moral values.

That's probably true - however, those values probably allow for say, the extermination of the Neanderthals while loving our children. It's quite obvious that human beings have empathy for their own group. It's also clear that they are capable of hatred or indifference to others. The boundary seems to be enormously variable - such that children who are normally loved and treasured can be viewed as a hostile enemy under certain circumstances.

 

[westprog]

Well obviously I cannot speak from experience, but I doubt that (especially initially) a whole lot changed for the slaves except they technically 'owned' themselves, for what THAT was worth at the time.

I would go by what the slaves thought about it.

I'd be hard-pushed to say given the amount of different Western backgrounds that make up the White SA population - it'd be hard to pin them down as a unified 'culture', or when they started existing as one. What I would say though is that they maintained their Western morals and values (which if were honest are Christianity-based), but did not clean up their act as quickly as the rest of us did. As I said, I personally see them as 'wayward children' who needed a nudge to behave, as opposed to us meddling in a long established culture going back thousands of years.

If Western culture can change, then so can other cultures. In fact, it's quite plausible that honour killings, suicide bombings etc, are the teething troubles of a cultural transformation.

 

[SatansMaleVoiceChoir]

Of course they do. And societies become culturally cruel from time to time. But it doesn't last and they drift back to normal.

So our morally evolved brains spontaneously devolve/regress simultaneously across an entire society, then after an unspecified period, they all evolve BACK to where they were before?

Or am I failing to understand the science?

The point is, when societies are off on the cruel side of the continuum, there is truth when other humans take note and speak up. To claim, "It's their culture and you can't judge them by your culture", is not true. There is a human norm one can judge other cultures by.

So who or what is this norm? Who set the 'norm' by which all others can be judged? I bet it was a Westerner. It was a Westerner wasn't it?

 

[SatansMaleVoiceChoir]

That's probably true - however, those values probably allow for say, the extermination of the Neanderthals while loving our children. It's quite obvious that human beings have empathy for their own group. It's also clear that they are capable of hatred or indifference to others. The boundary seems to be enormously variable - such that children who are normally loved and treasured can be viewed as a hostile enemy under certain circumstances.

Probably isn't going to cut it for me. I fully accept we are born with certain survival instincts, or behaviours 'built in' (or at least quickly developed) to ensure our chances of survival. When it comes to morals though, I am of the firm belief that these things are learned. I am also happy enough to believe that damage to certain parts of the brain can prevent someone learning certain morals, or 'wipe them out'. As it stands though, I do not believe we are born with morals 'baked in'.

 

[westprog]

Still not sure - dumb it down for me please.




Same again - I'm not usually this lazy about research, but it's been a long day, and I know I won't find any definitions that won't require me to do some serious reading and thinking. I don't mind appearing dumb at the moment!



I think what it boils down to for me is 'can' does not automatically equal 'has the absolute right to'.

Mr A thinks he has the right to control his family, using any means that he wishes. Mr B thinks he has the right to stop Mr A from doing certain things to his family.

I don't see these two rights as being of different standing. If Mr A has the right to kill his daughter, Mr B has the right to stop him doing it. If Mr B has no right to interfere in the affairs of Mr A, then Mr A has no right to restrict what his daughter does.

Adding culture to this doesn't really effect matters.

The British thought they'd banned many customs - all they did was drive them underground and make their practice more enthusiastic. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom taught me that.

Certain customs might have persisted, but were undoubtedly diminished. Suttee, for example, was undoubtedly repressed. The Thugs, whoever they were, were eradicated. Other customs were allowed to persist unmolested. Rudyard Kipling taught me that.

 

[SatansMaleVoiceChoir]

I would go by what the slaves thought about it.

I'll be honest and admit I don't know what the SLAVES thought of it, but I do know a little of what the Whites thought of it, and it didn't seem to change a great deal.

If Western culture can change, then so can other cultures.

I'd say that's a given; I personally believe that we in the West (speaking from a UK perspective) can be quite open to change and adapt quite quickly. Any culture can, and probably will change - it's all just a matter of time.

In fact, it's quite plausible that honour killings, suicide bombings etc, are the teething troubles of a cultural transformation.

Plausible, but in the case of Honour Killings, 3000+ years is a loooooong teething period. That said though, I think Honour Killings are becoming more unacceptable within that culture.

 

[SatansMaleVoiceChoir]

Mr A thinks he has the right to control his family, using any means that he wishes. Mr B thinks he has the right to stop Mr A from doing certain things to his family.

I don't see these two rights as being of different standing. If Mr A has the right to kill his daughter, Mr B has the right to stop him doing it. If Mr B has no right to interfere in the affairs of Mr A, then Mr A has no right to restrict what his daughter does.

Adding culture to this doesn't really effect matters.

Many thanks. I completely understand what you're saying, but don't necessarily agree. It is all about culture. If killing your daughter is the cultural norm, then Mr B, although he technically has the legal right to stop Mr A, would probably not do it because he would think it the correct thing to do. In his country, although his Government may outwardly kind of condemn these killings, and they may (or even may not) have some half-assed laws in place, they only half-assedly enforce them, so they're not even a real deterrent to Mr A. He basically knows that his neighbours fully approve of his actions because it is morally the right thing to do in their culture.

What you're suggesting in a roundabout way is that Mr B, from London, hops on a flight to Mr A's country and bursts into his home and stops Mr A killing his daughter, saying "No, I have every right to stop you doing this, because it's not done in MY culture!"

You see what I'm getting at?

Certain customs might have persisted, but were undoubtedly diminished.

Definitely.

Suttee, for example, was undoubtedly repressed. The Thugs, whoever they were, were eradicated. Other customs were allowed to persist unmolested. Rudyard Kipling taught me that.

Mr Kipling. He does make exceedingly good cakes.

 

[Kaylee]

I don't think that's remotely true. Jim Crow and lynching and brutal suppression don't negate the huge difference between slavery and freedom, no matter how circumscribed. There was very little impetus from freed slaves to return to their previous circumstances.

Indeed, but there was also appetite for abolishing slavery within, and as has also been pointed out, the plight of freed slaves was barely improved at all once they had their freedom. Not one I would chalk up as a victory, personally.

I'm quoting westprog because I agree with what he said. But I'll add two quick comments --

I suspect that the wealthy southern slave owners would disagree with you about an appetite for abolishing slavery within. Non-American, Yankee, and slaves opinions probably didn't count as far as they were concerned.

Anytime slavery is banned is an amazing accomplishment. It's true that historically one doesn't go from the slave class to equal opportunities overnight. But in the USA we moved from slavery based on race to an African-American President in about 6 generations. That is remarkable, and probably compares extremely well with just about any other country's history.

<snip> How old does something have to be to qualify as culture? The white SA's were in South Africa for as long as many of the black SA's whom they were oppressing. They had had their view of non-white people's for almost as long as they had contact with them.

Again, that was a fire that was already burning within. Nelson Mandela was already doing serious jail time for protesting apartheid before we in the West really caught on.

However, that is one area that I would have had no problems with the application of some serious (non-military) force, given that white South Africans are all descendants of western cultures, and generally hold to the same values and standards as the rest of us. I would not have considered the 'West' an external player in this, and would have considered it 'reining in our unruly children'. It's not like the White SAs could even claim apartheid as 'cultural heritage' any more - certainly not by the late 70's, early 80s.

Again, I'm quoting westprog because I agree with what he has to say -- and I'll add a few more comments.

I think the anti-apartheid movement in other countries goes further back than that. Here's a wiki article saying that an anti-apartheid movement began in Great Britain back in 1959.

The world is very interconnected, and I suspect that most freedom movements are helped along by individuals and countries physically removed from the conflict, sometimes for altruistic reasons and sometimes for non-altruistic reasons. If you read the BBC link about Great Britain's efforts to ban the slave trade in the Atlantic it was also self-serving in that it got caught up in GB's expansionism goals. The USA revolution against GB was helped by countries, including France, that had their own reasons for wanting to see GB lose some colonies.

As far as Western values -- which ones? It's hardly been homogeneous. Europe's history is bloody and minorities of all sorts of ethnic groups and creeds were brutalized. At about the same time the USA was undergoing the Civil War (over slavery) -- many wealthy Eastern Europeans (OK, not Western Europe but not that far away either physically or in shared philosophies) were asserting that serfs should not be considered fully human. HG Wells book, The Time Machine, was not written in a historical vacuum. I hesitate to Godwin the thread, but the ideas behind anti-apartheid were probably not that separate from the ideas behind Hitler's dream of "living space" for the "master race" and that was probably rooted in the same ideas behind the wide spread popularity of eugenics in the Western World prior to WWII. So ... which Western Values? And if you don't distinguish moral values from other cultural values ... why do so with South Africa?

Lack of freedom, rights and dignity in one part of the world has the potential to encourage lack of freedom, rights and dignity in other parts of the world. None of us are an island. IMHO, I think that is why so many people feel comfortable with the idea of helping people, regardless of who they are or where they live secure freedom, rights and dignity. And that is also why so many people of a more tyrannical nature, also feel comfortable with trying to take freedom, rights and dignity away from others.

 

[westprog]

I'll be honest and admit I don't know what the SLAVES thought of it, but I do know a little of what the Whites thought of it, and it didn't seem to change a great deal.

What the (Southern) whites thought of it at the time, and what they decided that they'd thought about it once they'd had time to think about it were very different things. At the start of the war, preservation of slavery was the key, single issue. Twenty years after, it had nothing to do with it.

 

[TimCallahan]

Going back to the incident I cited in the OP, I found that the girl's mother is now expressing some remorse at her act of pouring acid on her 15 year-old daughter for looking at boys(from the article, emphasis added):

"I deeply regret my action. I am repenting as I should not have done this. She was very innocent. I feel like killing all my kids,” the mother of eight told AFP.

Given her idea of a solution to her psychic pain, maybe here not feeling remorse was preferable. I also love this quote from the article about the father's justification for not taking their daughter to a hospital (emphasis added):

The parents waited two days to take Anusha to hospital, but Zafar insisted this was simply because they could not afford to take her until a local doctor gave him some money.

So, imagine this: These parents poured acid over their 15 year-old daughter for looking at boys. Over 70% of her body was burned. Then they let her linger in unimaginable pain for two whole days before having the decency to get her medical care.

 

[Craig4]

Which amounts to forcing other cultures to conform to our values and standards.

Which is fine. Some cultures are better than others. There's no problem with cultural imperialism when it is aimed at altering an inferior cultural construct.

 

[SatansMaleVoiceChoir]

I'm quoting westprog because I agree with what he said. But I'll add two quick comments --

I suspect that the wealthy southern slave owners would disagree with you about an appetite for abolishing slavery within. Non-American, Yankee, and slaves opinions probably didn't count as far as they were concerned.

Yes? I'm sure many White South Africans didn't agree with abolishing apartheid at the time either. It doesn't change the fact that there was a huge shift from within the US regarding the morality of slavery.

Anytime slavery is banned is an amazing accomplishment. It's true that historically one doesn't go from the slave class to equal opportunities overnight. But in the USA we moved from slavery based on race to an African-American President in about 6 generations. That is remarkable, and probably compares extremely well with just about any other country's history.

Well done USA!

Again, I'm quoting westprog because I agree with what he has to say -- and I'll add a few more comments.

I think the anti-apartheid movement in other countries goes further back than that. Here's a wiki article saying that an anti-apartheid movement began in Great Britain back in 1959.

And there were pre-apartheid Black Rights groups in SA in 1948.

Back to my original point; The desire for change was already present to a certain extent in both America and SA prior to pressure from external powers.

The world is very interconnected, and I suspect that most freedom movements are helped along by individuals and countries physically removed from the conflict, sometimes for altruistic reasons and sometimes for non-altruistic reasons. If you read the BBC link about Great Britain's efforts to ban the slave trade in the Atlantic it was also self-serving in that it got caught up in GB's expansionism goals. The USA revolution against GB was helped by countries, including France, that had their own reasons for wanting to see GB lose some colonies.

Returning to my original point; Western Countries pressing other Western Countries to change elements of their culture is fine - it's not even something that happens often as the fundamentals of Western culture rarely differ - I don't personally seeing that as interfering.

Does anyone know if any Middle Eastern Countries applied any international pressure to America to end slavery, or to SA to end apartheid?

As far as Western values -- which ones? It's hardly been homogeneous. Europe's history is bloody and minorities of all sorts of ethnic groups and creeds were brutalized. At about the same time the USA was undergoing the Civil War (over slavery) -- many wealthy Eastern Europeans (OK, not Western Europe but not that far away either physically or in shared philosophies) were asserting that serfs should not be considered fully human. HG Wells book, The Time Machine, was not written in a historical vacuum. I hesitate to Godwin the thread, but the ideas behind anti-apartheid were probably not that separate from the ideas behind Hitler's dream of "living space" for the "master race" and that was probably rooted in the same ideas behind the wide spread popularity of eugenics in the Western World prior to WWII. So ... which Western Values? And if you don't distinguish moral values from other cultural values ... why do so with South Africa?

Because Western cultural values are fundamentally Christian-based across the board, and White South Africans are descended from the West, and their culture is essentially a Western culture.

Lack of freedom, rights and dignity in one part of the world has the potential to encourage lack of freedom, rights and dignity in other parts of the world. None of us are an island. IMHO, I think that is why so many people feel comfortable with the idea of helping people, regardless of who they are or where they live secure freedom, rights and dignity. And that is also why so many people of a more tyrannical nature, also feel comfortable with trying to take freedom, rights and dignity away from others.

Obviously that is your opinion, but I seriously doubt that another culture is going to emulate the worst aspects of a seperate culture (such as honour killing), simply because "Well, THEY'RE doing it!" - especially if those elements don't 'fit' into their culture. Honour Killing is something that has been going on for 3000+ years in the Middle East - it didn't pop up overnight.

 

[SatansMaleVoiceChoir]

Which is fine. Some cultures are better than others. There's no problem with cultural imperialism when it is aimed at altering an inferior cultural construct.

So who judges which cultures are better, and what is the standard they are judged by?