Has Modern Society Left Honor Behind? An Interview with Prof. Tamler Sommers

“When we look back on honor cultures like the Mafia…They embrace values that are precisely what are lacking in our lives—like that fierce, passionate loyalty that Sonny has. He’s not thinking about his own self-interest. He’s thinking about the fact that that guy beat up his sister, and he needs to pay for it.”

Dr. Tamler Sommers is an associate professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston, where he specializes in issues relating to free will, moral responsibility, punishment, and revenge. He also hosts the bi-weekly podcast Very Bad Wizards, alongside psychologist Dr. David Pizarro. In May 2018, Professor Sommers published his third book Why Honor Matters, a discussion of the role of honor in modern society. On July 5th, he joined Merion West to discuss honor’s complicated relationship with modern society.

In your book Why Honor Matters, which you published this spring, you place honor in the modern context of Western society that looks at it as dated or backward. My first question is: how did Western society come to view honor this way?

That’s a good question, and it’s really complicated. I think there’s a lot of factors that lead into that. Honor cultures traditionally tend to be smaller because honor emphasizes values like community and loyalty. In honor cultures, people have a heightened concern for their reputation and their status within a group of people. So, in well-functioning honor cultures—and even most non-well functioning honor cultures—people know each other, know their reputations, and their relative worth within the community.

When modern life became large, industrialized, and largely anonymous, the environment for honor as a value to flourish was no longer conducive. It’s hard to care about your reputation when we interact with people in this anonymous way where nobody really knows who you are. Think about how often you interact with somebody that doesn’t know your name, or if they do, they forget it ten seconds later because you gave them your credit card or something like that. I think just economic, ecological, and social life became non-conducive for these kinds of values to flourish, at least at the national level.