Honor, Violence, and Civilization

As further evidence that academics frequently miss the obvious one need look no further than the 1996 study by two mid-western psychologists on the proclivity of white Southern males to resort to violence when their honor is challenged. The latest clap-trap from the pointy-head class is enough to underwhelm Southerners who have long known that good ole’ boys like to get into a scuffle now and again over questions of propriety and good manners.

Psychologists Richard Nisbett (University of Michigan) and Dov Cohen (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) conducted a series of, it would seem, rather risky experiments with their collegiate charges and concluded from them that insulting a non-Hispanic white man from the South can be downright dangerous. The professors’ toil has led them to postulate that white Southern boys, when insulted or threatened, tend to experience a testosterone surge normally absent in their gentler northern brethren. The unleashing of this most politically-incorrect hormone accounts for the South’s much-maligned “culture of honor.”

Neither Nisbett nor Cohen claims to impugn white Southern manhood, and most of us indeed greet the results of their study with a good deal of prideful chest-beating. Years ago, in my dissipated youth, when I dabbled at being a Southern rocker in the days of the original Allman Brothers Band, Lynard Skynard, and the Marshall Tucker Band, a female groupie (I suppose there are other varieties on today’s music scene) said she liked Southerners best because they were still “real men.”