Ambiguous Biblical Commandments: Edward T. Hall's Informal Culture
Harrison Road near my house--an old two-lane highway that's now a suburban traffic artery--has a posted speed limit of 40mph, but if you drive that speed, a line of cars collects behind you. Logically, speed limit ought to mean the fastest you drive, but, in effect, it means the slowest. Hardly anybody drives below 40mph on Harrison, and they're a hazard. The norm is between 45 and 50. In American culture, everywhere but in speed traps, "40" on a speed limit sign means "45 or a little faster." A Criminal Justice instructor told me that he taught this. "We don't want people staring at their speedometers."
Rules of behavior seldom mean literally what they say. Speed Limit 40 doesn't mean, Drive slower than 40mph, but the logical opposite: Drive somewhat faster. A cop never tickets for 45mph, and may let 55mph off with a warning, but surely tickets 70mph. The wording is rigid, but enforcement flexes at the discretion of officers within informal guidelines. Simple rules in a complicated world require wiggle room. This may be universal, but the mechanisms for achieving flexibility vary from culture to culture.
The wiggle that makes a speed limit tolerable is embedded in what Edward T. Hall calls informal culture, patterns of unthinking expectation absorbed from experience. "Participants in an informal situation are not fully conscious of what is going on. They only know that under a certain set of unstated rules they act in a certain way and depend on other people to react appropriately. This informal expectancy is often frustrated when there is a conflict between two patterns within the context of their own culture or in the more familiar case of a cross-cultural situation" (Hall, The Silent Language, 1990, p. 80). Nothing in the DMV handbook tells us to drive five miles an hour over the speed limit. It's seldom a topic of conversation, but after a while on actual streets, most drivers know it. Once learned, it seems common sense so that we are confused when we others ignore it. Hall illustrates this in a cross-cultural conflict between Hispanics and Anglos in a small Western town in the 20th century.
Hall, who lived in New Mexico and studied the two cultures as an anthropologist, noted how they differed in their understandings of law, government, and family. The Spanish family is trusted to resolve problems in contexts where the law is not. Smoothing out legal difficulties using family connections is not seen as dishonest, but honest cops enforce the law as written. Sancho, an honest cop in a tiny Hispanic town, arrested anyone driving over 15mph within the city limits because that was the law. Anglos and Hispanics alike came to traffic court for speeds as low as 16mph. Hispanics with friends or relatives on the court--most of the tiny town--tended to be forgiven and found innocent, but strangers were fined. Of course, these strangers, usually Anglos, were outraged by Sancho's unreasonableness. He violated an unwritten law of their land, that a speed limit doesn't mean what it says.
Anglo law makes common-sense exceptions at the enforcement level. "With us," Hall writes, "law courts, and particularly enforcement officers, are not supposed to be harsh" (p. 81). Americans are individualistic and pragmatic. When a law is too strict, we simply disobey it and police ignore it. It languishes "on the books," enforced only in notorious cases. Ignoring mild speeders is good Anglo practice, not neglect of duty. This, like all rules of informal culture, functions outside the control of any individual or ruling group. If the county decides that drivers actually shouldn't exceed 40mph on Harrison, strict enforcement will only irritate them. It's political suicide. The practical way to slow traffic below 40mph is to post 30mph on the signs.
Other brief rules of behavior, such as the Ten Commandments, are also unworkable in their literal senses, inevitably modified by the informal cultures in which they are read. "Thou shalt not kill" gestures in a benign direction, something like, "Life is good," but Moses (who delivered the law) and later patriarchs (who supported it) killed routinely, and other parts of Mosaic law say "thou shalt kill" for offenses as minor as insulting a parent (Leviticus 20:10). Even if, unlike Buddhists, we apply the commandment only to human beings, it makes no literal sense. A more accurate translation, "Thou shalt not murder," simply offloads the commandment onto whatever informal culture it is read in. (God help us, not the one of Moses with capital punishment for misdemeanors.) All that the commandment ends up saying is, "Don't kill when you shouldn't." Its meaning changes with the shifting winds the informal culture of whoever is reading it.
Equally unhelpful out of context is the sixth commandment. Today, we understand adultery to be intentional sex outside marriage by a married person (some may stretch the commandment to prohibit fornication), but it had both a narrower and a wider meaning in the laws attributed to Moses. A woman could be executed for adultery if she married while falsely pretending to be a virgin (Deuteronomy 22:13-22) or didn't scream loudly enough when raped (Deuteronomy 22:24). A woman's adultery could be unintentional or when neither she nor her partner was married, but men were guilty only if they infringed other men's breeding rights. Adultery was an economic offense against the family, depriving patriarchs of legitimate heirs. Polygamy was practiced by pious men, especially when a first wife was was infertile, but polyandry was seen as an abomination. Husbands were free to screw multiple women, including servants, concubines, and prostitutes, but wives were killed for sex with anyone but their husbands.
In a crude violation of our own informal culture (but less so of the South two hundred years ago), no less exemplar than Abraham marries his half-sister, rapes a slave at the wife's request (there is no hint of asking Hagar's consent), and later sends the slave and their son out to die when the wife becomes jealous. His grandson Jacob, after cheating a brother out of an inheritance, marries two sisters, his first cousins, and impregnates the slaves both of them.
Of course, some traditional cultures and cults still practice this extreme double standard, with honor killings of female family members. On the spectrum of Abrahamic cultures around the world and throughout history, the sixth commandment is consistent only in prohibiting unlicensed sex, with no agreement what sex is licensed or how licenses should be enforced. Modern Western culture is unusual in that it prohibits child marriage. This is a historically recent innovation. Shakespeare's Juliet is thirteen. Another recent innovation is requiring the sexual consent of a young woman, not merely her father, guardian, or owner. I've chosen to direct six Shakespeare plays but never The Taming of the Shrew, which a local group has produced twice recently--not because it isn't entertaining, but because of the rape culture that it embodies.
Hall distinguishes again between informal Anglo and Hispanic sexual cultures. My traditional culture--going back to Alabama in the 1940s--tends to assume that men are sluts, easily seduced by a willing woman, but women are selective. A custom of unsupervised dates, parents trusting their daughters, was based on this. The system works only if the the woman's selectivity is honored, if no means no--if rape is rare and punishable. "The Latin countries to the south," Hall writes in 1959, "make a different assumption. A man is thought of as being incapable of resisting his libidinal impulse if the situation is such that he can succeed. Women are conceived of as frail creatures who could not possibly stand up to any man" (p. 80).
Based on these assumptions, an attractive woman must be constantly sequestered or chaperoned. If she puts herself in an unguarded situation where she can be raped, she shares guilt with her rapist. If sex is possible, sex is assumed. Being alone together justifies a forced marriage or a husband's revenge. A man caught in such a situation who denies that he forced himself on the woman is dishonored for that reason alone: "Aren't you a man?" In such informal cultures, adultery need not involve actual sex. A woman's failure to ensure her husband's honor is enough.
As universals, the fifth and sixth commandments mean nothing more specific than, "Regulate your violent or sexual activities to fit the expectations of the people you live around--specifically the formal laws as modified by (often contradicted by) informal culture." At the interface of two cultures, this can be ambiguous. Two American volunteers in the Ukrainian army were recently captured by Russia. Of course, they were trying to kill Russian soldiers, but this only violates the fifth commandment if the killing is "murder," if it violates applicable cultural rules. Different rules apply on different sides of the front. For Ukrainians and Americans, the prisoners are soldiers subject to the rules of war. The rule is, "Thou shalt kill enemy soldiers." According to the Geneva Convention, as prisoners of war they must be treated humanely and eventually repatriated, but Russia has just declared the Americans criminals and denied them Geneva protections. With a shifting of the front in Donbas, the Americans changed from heroes to murderers and face the death penalty. The Ten Commandments aren't very helpful here.
The Zen-like commandments of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount are even less clear as rules. At best, they are are moral winds blowing in a spiritual direction, the kind of thing that may be a basis for meditation, but opaque or impossible as laws in a law-book. I have reflected at length earlier on love of neighbors, love of enemies, the Golden Rule,* which are part of our verbal culture--words a high percentage of people salute--but almost impossible to locate in the informal culture. The sign says 40mph. Only God (or your culture) knows what it means.
* https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2022/06/love-of-enemies-refusing-to-dehumanize.html; https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/01/practical-selfishness-and-public-good.html; https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2022/07/agape-corinthian-hymn-of-love.html
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