Humiliation and Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence.

• Author: Waldron, Jeremy

I

Though he teaches law at the University of Michigan, William Miller is a historian specializing in the saga literature of medieval Iceland. His earlier book was entitled Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland.(1) His new book, Humiliation, is a discussion of the way in which the themes of the saga literature bear on the world we study and inhabit as professors and practitioners of law.

At first glance, the world of Bloodtaking and Peacemaking seems radically different from the peaceful order of a modern lawgoverned society. The saga world is a world of violence and vengeance, insult and affront, envy and shame, status and gift: a world in which Nordic heroes confront one another aggressively not only in their warfare but also in their socializing, a world in which all conversation "hover[s] on the edge of insult" (p. 85) and thus on the edge of violence. It is a world in which life and limb are valued in inverse proportion to dignity: a leg may be hacked off casually in response to the slightest affront, and men who are exquisitely sensitive to others' opinions of them think nothing of killing another if his opinion does not tally with their own.

Of course, no sooner does one say that saga Iceland differs in these ways from our own world than one backs away from the observation, smiling foolishly. Is mayhem spurred by honor altogether unknown in the United States, one of the most violent industrialized societies on earth? How else are we to explain the fact that young men die in Los Angeles or New York for wearing the wrong colors in the wrong street? How else can we describe the proliferation of drive-by shootings among gang members in an apparently unending cycle of affront and retaliation?

One of the aims of Professor Miller's new book is to show us that we are not as distant from the honor-ridden culture of the medieval sagas as we might think. He does not, however, locate the similarity between the saga world and modern America in the culture of drug dealers, Crips and Bloods, and assault weapons. Instead, he finds counterparts for Egil, a Viking warrior who seeks to kill a man for offering him an excessively valuable gift (pp. 15-16), and Gudrun, "who smiles and converses casually with the man who wipes his bloody spear on her sash right after he has killed her husband" (p. 95), in the placid streets of Ann Arbor, among middleclass professionals, politely attending one another's cocktail parties or reading groups. The dust jacket of Humiliation describes it as an "unsettling look at how ancient codes of honor figure in the social discomforts of everyday life." Those who do battle in Miller's contemporary sagas are pompous academics, fatuous sexual harassers, professors trying to talk dirty in working class bars, the hapless hosts of misbegotten dinner parties, and parents who have miscalculated the gift that their child should bring to another's birthday. In short, Humiliation is a book about us, its probable readers -- people who, though living in a violent country in a violent century, are perhaps least likely to think of themselves in those terms.(2)

II

Part of the reason for making this the comparison -- rather than using the drive-by shootings, and so on -- is that Miller is more interested in the culture of honor, shame, and humiliation than in the specifically violent form in which that culture manifests itself in the saga literature. The point of the book is not to show that we are as violent, in our own way, as the Vikings were, but rather to show that certain structures of interaction and meaning that are crucial to an understanding of the way people spoke, thought, and acted in the saga world also hold the key to much of the way in which we speak, think, and act in polite society.

All the same, Miller is unwilling to let the issue of violence drop entirely from his discussion. Chapter Two of the book is called "Getting a Fix on Violence" and raises familiar questions about the definition of violence: Can an insult be violent? What about a threat? Can violence exist in an omission as well as in the active infliction of harm? Is the law violent? Is there a distinction between violence and (legitimate) force? His discussion of these issues adds little to the extensive literature on the subject,(3) and I found this the least convincing chapter in the book; certainly it is a distraction from the main line of analysis.

In his initial summary, Miller says that although violence is a contested category, the contestation tends to be at the margins: There is, he says, "an incontestable core to violence -- when fist meets face -- that shades by degrees into more and more contestable claims of violence in which political and normative agendas predominate" (pp. 7-8). Later, however, he describes the core of the concept as "boundary-breaking" (p. 65) -- the violent person is one who violates boundaries -- and he concedes that the boundaries whose breaking seems incontestably violent are themselves ambiguous and contestable (p. 60). If this is so, then the image of a core of easy cases, "about which no sane person would dispute the appropriateness of the interaction being labeled violent" (p. 59), surrounded by a penumbra of hard cases will not do; contestation is present at the core as well. Now, there is nothing wrong with the idea of contestability-at-the-core, particularly for a concept that is, as Miller rightly observes, as fraught with social and political significance as "violence." But the discussion would have been clearer if the author had made explicit reference to the various models of conceptual indeterminacy that philosophers and political theorists have developed -- persuasive definitions,(4) open texture,(5) essentially contested concepts,(6) among others(7) -- as a framework for explicating the kinds of problems that an analysis of violence involves.

Instead, the discussion just meanders along, exploring what Miller calls "the content of our intuitions about violence" (p. 55): violence is not the same as coercion (p. 64); not all pain is violent, nor is all violence painful (pp. 66-67); face-to-face encounters seem more violent than the use of lethal technology from a distance (p. 69); omissions can be cruel but not violent (p. 70); violent females are considered more deviant than violent males (p. 73); and so on. There is nothing wrong with these musings, but they lead nowhere; no framework is provided for assessing them, and so they add little to the overall argument of the book.

The chapter is marred further by an unhelpful preoccupation with the issue of who decides -- the victimizer, his victim, or the observer -- when the violence of some encounter is called into question. Questions like "Who decides?" or "Whose perspective is privileged?" are interesting only when something specific turns on the characterization at issue, in other words only when somebody's verdict -- "This encounter was (or was not) violent" -- is supposed to have some particular effect in the world. Certainly, as Miller points out, the concept of violence is linked to that of legitimacy (p. 78): to call a forceful political action violent is usually to condemn it as illegitimate, while to call it nonviolent is to attempt to surround it with some aura of Gandhi- or Martin Luther King-like sanctity. Evidently, however, one and the same action can be condemned as illegitimate by some and commended as legitimate by others; since the term "violence" clusters together a number of different characterizations and concerns, both sides may accurately be drawing attention to important features. The question "Who decides?" is worth asking only if society as a whole needs to take a stand on the issue so that some determinate consequence -- a legal consequence, for example, or a political consequence like official willingness to enter into negotiations with a dissenting group -- can accrue. Only under such circumstances do we need to ask: "Whose description is being accepted as society's characterization?"

III

Is our society more violent than medieval Iceland? Are the sagas of the American West more violent than those of the Nordic heroes? We are constantly tempted, Miller says, to make such cross-cultural or transhistorical comparisons:

[W]e seek to know whether it was better then or is better now, whether the grass is greener on the other side or whether there is no place like home. If answers to such questions are forthcoming, one of the chief criteria informing them will have to do with the relative quantity and quality of violence in the cultures .... [p. 7]

Miller believes this temptation should be resisted. Despite his earlier talk of an "incontestable core" to the concept of violence -- "first meets face," and so on -- he concedes at the end of Chapter Two that we simply do not have the conceptual equipment to enable us to make these comparisons. For not only are our own intuitions about violence "made up of inconsistent notions operating at different conceptual levels" (p. 90), but also

the concepts embodied in our word violence may not have lexical counterparts in the other culture[.] In other times the "violence problem" was not an easy conceptual dumping ground for everything ranging from sport to child abuse. Old Norse had no word that ran the semantic range of our violence. Nor for that matter does French violence. Many core French uses of the term would seem metaphorical, tendentious, or vastly extended in English. [p. 91]

On the other hand, if we were to retreat from the attempt to compare measurements of violence and to compare instead measurements of more easily operationalized phenomena like injury, fighting, coercion, or fear, we would beg important questions about why these, or some subset of them, are the appropriate dimensions for comparison. Security from fear, and the absence or suppression of physical combat may matter to us. But why should our concerns be...