What is the consequence of this? It means the most succinct description of a culture is to say the most honorable and most shameful acts within this culture. Example, explaining hacker culture to my mom:
The most honorable thing a hacker can do is to make software that solves a problem that a lot of people (especially other hackers) have, and then give it away for free. The most shameful thing a hacker can do is to steal someone else's work and pass it off as their own. [1]
A description of science culture would be similar, replacing 'software' with 'insight'. What other cultures can we describe this way? Scouting culture:
The most honorable thing a Scout can do is to maintain a long and faithful service to the group, and to the well-being of the surrounding community and nature. The most shameful thing a scout can do is to betray the group, society at large, or destroy nature.
I would say that scouting as a culture is less self-centered than other hobby cultures, in the sense that the well-being of things outside the culture itself, weighs so heavily on the scale. If you're reading this, objecting that "my hockey team helps the homeless in the community!", then you may be right that your group cannot be called self-centered. What I would ask as a follow-up question however is: "To what extent does helping the homeless raise your status within the hockey team?" It is this internal status measuring, rather than the outside world consequences, that I'm interested in right now.
(A common theme in all cultures taken as examples so far is that altruistic behaviour to the in-group is very rewarded, and egoistic behaviour is punished. Can we think of counterexamples to this? I would say that competitive cultures such as competitive mathematics and programming, and business and law are counterexamples. In cultures like this, it can be honorable to trick or outwit someone in the in-group at their expense. However, it usually comes with some unspoken rules about what is considered fair play. The culture here is more iron-law: it is more shameful to allow oneself to be brought harm to, than to be the one who passes out the harm. Is this the default? Actually, I doubt it. The most competitive cultures have something else in common: they have an external evaluating agent. One's 'score' is not set by the peers, but by a central authority. The honor passed out by the central authority is not absolute, but relative, and therefore a finite resource. So the cruelty of the most competitive cultures is the cruelty of zero sum games. I'm making a prediction: even prehistoric nomad cultures, that occasionally attacked and killed each other, were not as competitive as Harvard Law School. The bounded consequences of competitiveness at HLS does enable more egoistic behaviour, however.)
What can we say about online culture, on say twitter or reddit? Not much in general, since the same comment can either yield praise or raise a mob depending on which subreddit/ twitter cluster it is posted. So according to this model, online culture is very fragmented, which sounds about right.
Why are honor/shame markers good definitions of culture? For one thing, they are very actionable. They tell you what to do in order to be accepted by a culture. Do the honorable things, and do not do the shameful things. It is very direct. Even if the actionability is not relevant, for example if we are investigating an ancient culture, it is still very relatable. Knowing that cattle and horse theft was considered a worse crime than manslaughter in the Old West tells us more about what life was like on the frontier than seeing a bunch of boots and revolvers, I think.
A problem with culture-as-behaviour evaluation is that it is not easy to infer from archaeological evidence. Well, measuring culture as behaviour is perhaps not a mean, but an end, for archaeology.
Let's take a negative approach for a minute and consider: what measures are bad, or inefficient, at defining a culture?
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