Sunday, November 23, 2014

Ruminations 54: On the Cultural Semiotics of "Honesty" in the U.S. and "Zhi" in China and Their Consequences for Surveillance Legal Cultures

 (Zhi--ten eyes--modern form)

Over the last century national societies have been engulfed in a great debate about the acceptability of surveillance as part of the basic framework of governmental operation.  Part of the framework for this debate centers on the cultural consequences of the meaning of words.  Our political and policy arguments are always complicated by the cultural meaning of words, of the force with which words are embedded in cultural assumptions about "right," "wrong," "good", evil" and the character of the people to which these definitions apply.  

We can reference this cultural semiotics as the parallel language secreted within our discourse whose power to shape the meaning and effect of words can substantially affect the way in which people attach meaning and inference, the way in which they attach value and instructions for "right" or "proper" conduct.  This cultural semiotics produces quite distinct instructions depending on language.  This is particularly evident in the differences between instructions embedded in the meaning of English and Chinese words.

One of the most interesting examples of this cultural embedding--this secondary language of meaning that tends to drive debate from out of the sub-conscious bedrock of our culture--is attached to the meaning and cultural consequences of the word--honesty, or Zhi.  It is in that culturally compelling parallel language/instruction that one can become aware of the way that the word can implicate both personal traits and a permission to allow outsiders  to control behavior.  And one can see in the cultural semiotics of "honesty" and "zhi" the instructions for the development of a surveillance society.

For Chinese language and culture, the cultural meaning of honesty appears to contain both internal and external drivers.  That is, the word itself embraces instructions for self discipline and also the expectation that the state of honesty is a communal effort and requires substantial disciplinary observation for the state of honesty to be attained and maintained.  Honesty, in this sense, also references surveillance--surveillance of the self and surveillance of and by others. 

Ancient style of Zhi

The cross at the top represents number ten, below is the eye, the left part represents people.  One can understand visually the parallel meanings: "Ten Eyes are watching you, that's honesty. " Or it could also be interpreted this way: The cross at the top represents two crossing lines, in order to measure whether the line is straight or not, you need eyes. So it also means "using your eyes to measure straightness."

In the modern style of Zhi, the left part is no longer appear in modern Chinese character, although Korean and Japanese still remained the ancient style. Zhi means straight, straight forward, not making alterations, and consequently being honest. It is always used in the terms of Zheng Zhi (正直) . Zheng 正 is staight, proper, right, fair. So Zheng zhi means integrity, a character that describes the quality of being honest and fair. 
But whose eyes are watching? On the one hand it is clear that such surveillance is an exogenous exercise.  It is the community--family, village, society, state, and deities, that watch--and are watched.  Conformity to norms, integrity, following the straight path, being contained within the borders of expectation--all of these signify the parallel meaning of honesty.   On the other hand, it is the inner eye that must watch and must control, the manifestation of personal conduct, especially in relation to others.  The ten eyes ensure that a person guides herself on the straight path, the path that allows no deviance.  Honesty, then, provides a measure of proper conduct, and also gives the community permission to observe, and discipline.  Honesty, then, provides a subterranean and culturally semiotic permission to view as permissible--as some of the sets of ten eyes, the manifestation of discipline from shuanngui () to the monitoring of internet communication.  All of those are manifestation of the disciplinary aspects of honesty, required of the individual and imposed through the community. Legal analysis follows the cultural semiotics of the term.  


The West, and especially the cultural embedding of meaning in English, follows a different path.  This from Seth Lobis, "Honesty" A Frank Look at the Word, In Character--A Journal of Everyday Virtues (April 1, 2007).
My brief history of “honesty,” modest by comparison, will confine itself to the noun form. What interests me in particular is the relationship between “honesty” and “honor,” the older of the two and the one closer to the root. “Honesty” derives from the Old French (h)oneste, which in turn derives from the Latin honestas. The Latin noun was formed from the adjective honestus, likely deriving from honos, “honor,” which is of uncertain etymology. The Roman linguist Varro suggested onus, “burden,” as the root of honos, as if honor weighs us down morally. In his encyclopedic work Etymologiae, likely composed in the seventh century of the Common Era, Isidore of Seville defined honestas as honor perpetuus, literally “perpetual honor,” and then more straightforwardly as honoris status, “the condition or state of honor.” Around 1930, the classical philologist T. G. Tucker suggested that the root of honos was *ghen-, to “make big, full,” but a definitive derivation remains elusive. The first definition of honestas given by the Oxford Latin Dictionary is “Title to respect, honourableness, honour,” followed by “Moral rectitude, integrity,” in which sense it was frequently opposed to utilitas, “expediency.” Cicero refers to a dissensio, or conflict, between the two, and Horace praises Lollius for preferring the honestum to the utile. Less frequently honestas was used in the sense of “Decency, seemliness,” one of the early secondary senses of “honesty” in English.

In the fourteenth century, when it first appeared in English, “honesty” was very close semantically to “honor.” In the earliest attestation given by the OED, from Brunne’s Chronicle (completed around 1340), the noun “honeste” denotes “Honour conferred or done; respect.” This is also the sense of “honeste” in 1 Corinthians 12:23 as it appeared in Wyclif’s Bible, a late-fourteenth-century English translation of the Vulgate. The point of the final clause of the verse, “and tho membris that ben vnhonest han more honeste,” is that we show the body’s more shameful-seeming members more respect. The word “honeste” appears elsewhere in Wyclif’s Bible in the sense of “Honour gained by action or conduct; reputation, credit, good name.” Thus it was possible — at least until the end of the sixteenth century — to lament the loss of one’s honesty. “Honor” has been used continuously in this sense from the beginning of the thirteenth century.
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In the mid-sixteenth century, “honesty” was first used in what the OED refers to as the “prevailing modern sense” — “Uprightness of disposition and conduct; integrity, truthfulness, straightforwardness: the quality opposed to lying, cheating, or stealing.” At that time two other senses unattested in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were current. “Honesty” could denote “Honourable position or estate; high rank; respectability” and, less commonly, “Honourable or respectable people,” as in “the honesty,” a collocation rife with Mood, in Empson’s sense.
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After the middle of the seventeenth century the lexical skein of “honor” and “honesty” began to unravel, as the older senses of the latter fell into disuse. But the relationship between the two terms remained close.
The West focuses on the individual and on honor as a quality that defines honesty--as reputation, standing, status.  Its overtones sound in status within the community and within the family.  It touches on inner discipline through the tools of social behavior. (Carlin A. Barton, Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)). Discipline was external and internal--shame and the loss of status. Surveillance does not enter into this equation in the way it might under Chinese cultural semiotic relations. Surveillance is the Greek chorus--an undifferentiated mass representing an idealized community that comments but does not project itself into the action, it is not the moving force of the mechanics of shame and of status around which honesty is structured and against which it is measured. Honesty is relational in the sense that it acquires substance only in relation to what outsiders think of the object of honesty. And that also assumes an embrace of the rule systems that define the social order.  Honesty suggests adherence to rule of law norms, to morals and ethics, to right conduct measured against rules. It also suggests truthfulness and freedom of deceit from fraud.  Surveillance may but need not follow from these notion.  

Honesty is thus an idea that permits, though does not require, privacy and private space.  It requires only the public manifestation of formal conformity to rules and expectations, of self discipline, but not of surveillance.   Why? Perhaps because of the cultural intuition that even in the failure of surveillance, DIShonesty, like DIShonor, will always surface because such a personal flaw will eventually be impossible to evade.  In this context, surveillance becomes more problematic and less intuitively necessary or rigth.

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