Honor

If you speak French a book is "un livre." It’s not a book; it’s un livre. We say "chauffeur" and the French say "weekend": words swop.
In physics, "work" is "force through distance." In market economies, work is what you do Monday to Friday. In English tennis you "throw up" the ball to serve. "Chris throws up so beautifully," said Virginia Wade. In America we "toss" the ball.

In America we spied with our eyes, with cameras in the stratosphere, with cameras in satellites; in Russia they listened through the door, under the floor boards. WASPS know better than to talk on the street; the street is where a lot of "ethnics" live: of course they talk on the street. I was trained not to demonstrate with my hands when talking; Italians tend not to talk without their hands.
In England children should be seen but not heard; in America the kids’ behavior is the entertainment.

We speak different languages, we live different cultures. When we mix we live more different cultures than we’re ever aware of. And yet we have these ideas of monism: we are one people, one nation, one law ... one God. One mankind. One species, supposedly.

My life is a long record of this and that monism. I also am pleased to know a little French, a little German, a little Italian ... Just in English, I know a little Elizabethan, read Chaucer fairly well, for a modern, can ever read little Old English. On the tennis court I somehow, clumsily, get the ball up in the air for service whatever you call it. On the street I can keep mum with the WASPS, scowl with the misanthropes, or slap five with a brother. I like to eat Chinese, French, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Swedish ... or mix them any which way in my own cooking. But there’s one thing I never learn, or recognize only after I’ve blundered again: we don’t all have the same ethics. We don’t all have the same honor.

Oh, sure: sometimes we’re honorable by our own standards, and sometimes we are less than honorable. I mean that we don’t all have the same standards. Not only are there different standards of honor among different professions -- in business it was important to be able to tell which customer might lie, but more important to know if his check would probably clear -- but there are different standards among cultural groups -- the gypsy will cheat any non-gypsy, but will he cheat a gypsy? -- among this and that, but -- and here’s what will make people scream -- between the sexes!

I’m not ready to blog my question of Are Women Honorable? just yet. This is a promise to do so.

While here though, I’ll just say this: we have different histories.

Women gang together: to wash, to gossip, to gather food, to talk child-rearing ... Men gang together: to hunt, to wage war, to work, to pass laws telling others how they must behave ... The team hunter, the team soldier, have a very different history from the child-toting food-gatherer.
Ok, now there are women who go to work, who join the gang to pass laws ... But women don’t have a million-plus year history of it.

In business, I sold to dealers who I knew wouldn’t keep one item of our agreement, but whose checks usually cleared. That was their honor. That was the whole extent of their honor. (While there were many more who wouldn’t keep a single term of our agreement and whose checks bounced! They had NO honor: in business.
When a male tells me he’ll call me, I know there’s a chance that he’ll actually call me: whether I want him to or not. If a woman tells me she’ll call me, I know she probably won’t: unless she was the one who came up to me in the first place.

The whole issue gets very messy where the principal business is male/female. And there women have no team history.

I must admit: I, a "male," supposedly, have very little team history too.

PS One thing we’ll have to consider is that both men and women are predators: carnivores: even if we decide to go with veggies for a while, even if we buy our meat slaughtered and dressed by the market system (even if we let the farmer rip the carrot from the ground for us). Both men and women can hunt, but in general it’s the men who hunt the women. Thus the male is a carnivore and a sexual predator; the woman is a carnivore, but is simultaneously the hunted. Morality between hunters is one thing, morality between predator and pray may be quite different.
One may prefer to be truthful with the analyst. It does not follow that one must then be truthful to the lion, to the snake, to the mugger ... to the male predator?
But what if the male is just trying to ... sell insurance, hold the door ... Not everything a predator does is predatory.
The thief could steal the magazine, on another occasion the thief could pay for the magazine. No one steals quite everything.