Fighting: As Southern as Pecan Pie

Last weekend, a tired neighbor of mine came home late from a night of drinking, probably sporting a headache and some sort of nausea. He looked up, saw a bunch of people in the breezeway being loud, and asked them to be quiet. He then walked into his apartment.

Sensing some sort of threat, one of the upstairs people became enraged. “I’m a kill somebody,” he said, removing his shirt in one remarkably smooth and seemingly practiced motion and revealing the somewhat flabby body below. “What he say? What he say?! I don’t play around!”

His friends tackled him to the ground. They begged him to consider the fact that maybe the tired neighbor did not want to fight – not because they truly believed this, but because the guy who took his shirt off always gets into fights over nothing.

The next day, the tired neighbor asked if he had seen me the night before.

“Yeah,” I said. “I saw you ask those rednecks to be quiet. It was really funny. After you left, one of them took his shirt off and swore he was going to fight you.”

“I don’t remember that at all,” said the tired neighbor. “I would have killed that guy. Those guys are on my sh*t list anyway.”

“What?” I started thinking. “You’re just like them?”

“Yeah,” his roommate said, “you could have killed someone last night and not even known.”

They laughed together at how much more badass they are than my other neighbors, then walked inside.

I just don’t understand it.

Why all of this aggression? Why the preference for violence?

The numbers consistently show that “rates of violence in the southern United States have historically been, and continue to be, much higher than the rest of the United States (Baron & Straus, 1988; Gastil, 1971; Nisbett, 1993; Nisbett & Cohen, 1996; Nisbett, Polly, & Lang, 1995).”

(I left in all the studies that support the point to make the quote seem stronger.)

Why might this be?

I believe the answer lies with a tradition I initially became acquainted with when I first came to Alabama. I started to observe many fights that didn’t have to do with lunch or drug money for the first time in my life. A strange concept known as “honor,” seemed to be at the root of these altercations.

At the slightest perceived insult or affront, Southern men believe they must protect their reputation through violence.

“Honor” is a concept that I can only grasp for fleeting moments. It will come to me in the middle of breakfast with striking clarity. In mid-mastication of a Cheerio I will see the light.

My great-grandfather on a horse. My country, tis of thee –

Then just as quickly as it comes it is lost again, forever to be obscured by the fact that I think it’s completely ridiculous.

Dr. Joseph A. Vandello, an assistant professor of Psychology at the University of South Florida, writes that the Southern honor tradition probably stems from the region’s frontier-land roots.

“The South,” writes Vandello, “for much longer than the North, remained a frontier region with little adequate law enforcement to effectively redress grievances in a formal manner. This absence of an effective legal system able to handle disputes and enforce laws also contributed to norms where each individual felt the need to stand up for himself and his family, through violence if necessary.”

In addition, the South, unlike the North’s agricultural-based settlers, was settled by herders.

“People from herding-based cultures ... are constantly susceptible to having their livestock (and thus, their primary source of wealth) rustled away. This vulnerability to theft creates norms for men to have tough exteriors that make it clear they will stand up to the slightest threat, including insults to their character.”

OK, that makes sense. Southern men need to act all tough so people don’t steal their livestock.

Oh wait, that doesn’t make sense, because Southern men don’t usually have livestock anymore. I mean, I’m pretty sure my neighbors don’t have herds of goats in their apartments.

There are also plenty laws and formal ways to address interpersonal conflicts, so what gives?

Despite the change of conditions in the South, the old ideas of honor remain, yet now without any real function except to elevate the levels of violence above those of the rest of the country and to cause an amazing number of skull-and-tiger T-shirt-clad people watching MMA matches at Hooters. Honor no longer holds any positive purpose.

The honor tradition in the South may not mean that every male is overly touchy, self-important, and macho.

The phenomenon by which an entire culture can have a counter-intuitive social norm is called “cultural lag,” and this comes from a discrepancy between what one personally believes and what one perceives others believe.

For instance, a study from 2008 concluded that Southern men say that they respond with violence to certain situations at only a slightly higher rate than Northern men.

However, those same Southern men said that their peers are much more likely to respond with violence than did Northern men.

This means that while Southern and Northern men hold the same personal beliefs, Southern men perceive others to be much more aggressive, thus stirring the pot for much more violent incidents to occur.

The reason the South’s cultural intransigence is because a.) our idea of honor stems from an outmoded cultural model derived mostly from dudes in cowboy hats and b.) we think everyone else is way more aggressive than they actually are.