their blood samples showed elevated levels of testosterone and of cortisol, a stress hormone. They behaved more dominantly toward the experimenter and shook his hand more firmly, and when approaching another accomplice in the narrow hallway on their way out, they refused to step aside to let him pass.92
Is there an exogenous cause that might explain why the South rather than the North developed a culture of honor? Certainly the brutality needed to maintain a slave economy might have been a factor, but the most violent parts of the South were backcountry regions that never depended on plantation slavery (see figure 3–15). Nisbett and Cohen were influenced by David Hackett Fisher’s Albion’s Seed, a history of the British colonization of the United States, and zeroed in on the origins of the first colonists from different parts of Europe. The northern states were settled by Puritan, Quaker, Dutch, and German farmers, but the interior South was largely settled by Scots-Irish, many of them sheepherders, who hailed from the mountainous periphery of the British Isles beyond the reach of the central government. Herding, Nisbett and Cohen suggest, may have been an exogenous cause of the culture of honor. Not only does a herder’s wealth lie in stealable physical assets, but those assets have feet and can be led away in an eyeblink, far more easily than land can be stolen out from under a farmer. Herders all over the world cultivate a hair trigger for violent retaliation. Nisbett and Cohen suggest that the Scots-Irish brought their culture of honor with them and kept it alive when they took up herding in the South’s mountainous frontier. Though contemporary southerners are no longer shepherds, cultural mores can persist long after the ecological circumstances that gave rise to them are gone, and to this day southerners behave as if they have to be tough enough to deter livestock rustlers.
The herding hypothesis requires that people cling to an occupational strategy for centuries after it has become dysfunctional, but the more general theory of a culture of honor does not depend on that assumption. People often take up herding in mountainous areas because it’s hard to grow crops on mountains, and mountainous areas are often anarchic because they are the hardest regions for a state to conquer, pacify, and administer. The immediate trigger for self-help justice, then, is anarchy, not herding itself. Recall that the ranchers of Shasta County have herded cattle for more than a century, yet when one of them suffers a minor loss of cattle or property, he is expected to “lump it,” not lash out with violence to defend his honor. Also, a recent study that compared southern counties in their rates of violence and their suitability for herding found no correlation when other variables were controlled.93
So it’s sufficient to assume that settlers from the remote parts of Britain ended up in the remote parts of the South, and that both regions were lawless for a long time, fostering a culture of honor. We still have to explain why their culture of honor is so self-sustaining. After all, a functioning criminal justice system has been in place in southern states for some time now. Perhaps honor has staying power because the first man who dares to abjure it would be heaped with contempt for cowardice and treated as an easy mark.
The American West, even more than the American South, was a zone of anarchy until well into the 20th century. The cliché of Hollywood westerns that “the nearest sheriff is ninety miles away” was the reality in millions of square miles of territory, and the result was the other cliché of Hollywood westerns, ever-present violence. Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, drinking in American popular culture during his cross-country escape with Lolita, savors the “ox-stunning fisticuffs” of the cowboy movies:There was the mahogany landscape, the florid-faced, blue-eyed roughriders, the prim pretty schoolteacher arriving in Roaring Gulch, the rearing horse, the spectacular stampede, the pistol thrust through the shivered windowpane, the stupendous fist fight, the crashing mountain of dusty old-fashioned furniture, the table used as a weapon, the timely somersault, the pinned hand still groping for the dropped bowie knife, the grunt, the sweet crash of fist against chin, the kick in the belly, the flying tackle; and immediately after a plethora of pain that would have hospitalized a Hercules, nothing to show but the rather becoming bruise on the bronzed cheek of the warmed-up hero embracing his gorgeous frontier bride.94
In Violent Land, the historian David Courtwright