At PJM, Bruce Bawer, author of the must-read book, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, has an important piece today on how Europe is moving backwards with respect to Gay Rights. This bit jumped out at me:

This made me think about a conversation I had the other night (or at least, I mostly listened in on) concerning Honor/Shame cultures -- the implication being, in the part of the discussion I'm think of, that the Middle East is an H/S culture while we in the West are beyond that and have trouble understanding it.

We do have trouble understanding it, but it's not that we don't understand and that we ourselves aren't governed by h/s, it's just that we have trouble understanding the degree to which other cultures are governed by the Honor/Shame paradigm when compared to our own. It's all a matter of degree.

We in the West have all sorts of h/s rules and regulations that govern our day to day dealings without even being noticed by us, in the same way the act of hand shaking and saying, "Hi, how are you," are governed by unwritten social rules we rarely give any thought to. Let's call them the "Laws of the Common Man" so as to distinguish them from written Constitutional Law and formal Common Law.

These are the rules that run within social groups from the gang on the corner to the kids on the playground to dictating your range of choices when someone insults your girlfriend. The LotCM aren't written, but they are known, implicitly understood to members of the group. Action and reaction are predictable. Defend your honor or risk shame, and shame within a social group, even in the enlightened West, has consequences.

BUT, the West is also governed by the Rule of Law, and the Rule of Law is completely dominant over the LotCM. It is dominant, but the law of the street still exists, though its space for operation is limited. We in the West have had this fight, and given Law a place of domination and dicatorial power over Honor. Dueling, for instance, was already being put out to pasture through this conflict way back when Alexander Hamilton took one in the gut. Burr and Hamilton had to weight their desire to satisfy their preferences for honor against the sanction of Law (and Church Law, which was against the act). They made one decision in 1804. It would likely go a different way today.

Not so in the East, particularly the Middle East, where the LotCM still holds the dominant position. Thus, legislatures that can't or won't stop honor killing, and populations who scream for revenge and leaders who, far from trying to calm the waters, stir them up. They haven't had their legal Altalena yet.

So then we have immigrants coming from such places, who did not grow up under a Western style Rule of Law-type system (or, put another way, where the Law was little more than a codification of their own tribal Honor standards). Their proclivities may be held in check for a time while members of the group are low and there is little choice but to remain subservient to Law, but what of when the numbers rise, and do so in localized fashion, so the decision between following the Law and performing as per the dictates of group Honor becomes skewed. That's trouble. And add to that a legal system, as in Western Europe, known for easy penalties and deference to cultural difference...suddenly you're sitting on a powder keg. You have law enforcement run by multiculturalists afraid to interfere by enforcing their own standards when what's really needed is Rudy Giuliani-style zero tolerance.

Sharia, when it crosses a Western border, becomes the Law of the Common Man for many, since there is no formal system of enforcement for such things (nor should there be), and we have a step back down in human behavior from a Law Code to a Law Understanding. Perhaps especially for those who did not grow up in the East, but grew up here and are "rediscovering" their roots piecemeal, with little guidance or oversight, informed and influenced by thugs at home and abroad.

It's a problem.