A long rumination on three cultures written primarily for my own benefit.

Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning argue that there are three forms of moral culture: honor culture, dignity culture, and victim culture.

They argue that honor culture comes about when centralized authority is weak or viewed as illegitimate. Since there is no recourse to it, individuals must fend for themselves, which can lead to preemptive aggression, vigilante justice, and feuds. Important values are bravery, deference to the powerful, and a reluctance to appear weak and vulnerable.

I'm not sure how that squares with dueling in the era of relatively strong states, which strikes me as a part of honor culture, but then I'm just a mere dabbler in these ideas.

Dignity culture seems to come about with the rise of states, and people resort to legal authority to resolve disputes or make efforts to resolve them privately without physical conflict.

It also seems to me--again, the mere dabbler--that dignity culture includes an element of stoicism, of controlling one's reactions to insults and slights, and shrugging them off instead of being highly reactive. Maybe it's the looming threat of one's victim being able to employ state authority against an offender that underlies the capacity to be dignified. There is, perhaps, less reason to worry that a non-reaction, which can be interpreted as evidence of weakness, will incentivize escalation.

Victim culture has a similarity to honor culture in that it is highly reactive to perceived slights, but where individuals are more likely to appeal for help from established authority than to directly retaliate. In this culture, victimhood can become a kind of badge of status.

In my perspective, because of that status, claims of victimization can also be used as a cudgel against others to delegitimize them. Some of these claims will be fair, and some people are victimizers whose actions or words should be delegitimized, but the very power of the victimhood narrative incentivizes its abuse, at least in a highly politicized society. When politics is merely war by other means, all weapons will be employed.

It could just be my age and my background, but I much prefer dignity culture to either of the others. (And, yes, I recognize that may involve accepting the value of the state more than I like to do.) I find the promotion of violence in an honor culture abhorrent (while recognizing why the individual in such a culture may have no choice--they are stuck in a collective action problem that appears to have a sub-optimal equilibrium). I find victim culture to be immature and self-absorbed, as well as providing a weapon that can be used to shut people up not for real offenses but just because the claimed victim can't be bothered to work up a logical rebuttal to the words/actions of the claimed victimizer. It can easily become a stifling culture of thought conformity. (This does not deny that real offenses do happen, and that many ought to be redressed.)

Only dignity culture really provides the space for real freedom of thought and word and for reasonable discussion and non-forceful resolution of disputes. It is the only one of the three cultures in which individuals do not seek to dominate others, and, so, I think, a necessary grounding to a classically liberal society.

It also comports most well with stoicism, which over the past few years I have studied a bit and made an effort to practice. A core concept in stoicism is that your response to what happens, including what others say and do, is largely within your control; it is your own choice. From this perspective, it is less true that "Joe offended me," than "I took offense at Joe's words/actions." It doesn't justify Joe, but it shifts the locus of responsibility and control. In so doing, it personally, psychologically, empowers the intended target of the offense in a way that victim culture doesn't. I think victim culture encourages psychological or emotional fragility, while dignity culture encourages emotional/psychological strength and resilience.

I make no pretense of being a paragon of dignity or stoicism (nobody who knows me well could do anything less than raise an inquiring eyebrow if I claimed to be). But I have been working on it. And with almost no exceptions, I find that the people I respect the most - and have respected the most throughout my life, since long before I heard the word "stoic" or began to think about what dignity means - are people who exhibit those qualities. I have come to aspire to model myself after them, however much my human frailty causes me to fall short.

But I am endeavoring to follow that path in a culture that seems to me to increasingly embrace the narrative of victimization. This is true on both left and right. (In our current political narrative, a claim of victim culture is most commonly directed at the left, but I don't think there's a serious claim that the populist right isn't wholly caught up in claims of victimhood.)

In this milieu, perhaps I'm just trying to become a dinosaur. If so, I hope to become a dinosaur with some modicum of dignity.

This is just ruminating about something on which I am in no way well-educated, and I could be full of crap. The whole idea of three cultures is crap, for all I know, as much as it seems to me to have at least some significant element of truth. But for the record, and for the interested, I liberally cadged my descriptions from the following source.

https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/honor-dignity-victim-cultures