Knowledge And Decisions

Clearly, there is a loss of retrospective justice when individual B is shamed (punished) for conduct by individual A, especially if B is a contemporary rather than a parent, and still more so if B is a member of a subsequent generation, and therefore lacked any control over the past acts for which he is sharing the punishment. Offsetting this is the gain in social control, which apparently is considerable. One indication of the effectiveness of sorting and labeling by family rather than by individual is the vast difference in juvenile delinquency between American teenagers in general and teenagers of Oriental ancestry living in the same society, subject to the same temptations and public constraints. The virtually nonexistent delinquency among Japanese-American and Chinese-American youngsters has long been noted by those studying these groups, despite high and rising delinquency rates among American teenagers all around them.

Recent outbreaks of delinquency and violence among Chinatown youth gangs only highlight the factor of family honor as a control. These youth gangs have arisen since the arrival of large numbers of Chinese refugees from Hong Kong, where they were “Westernized” (i.e., atomized) before arriving in the United States. Neither Chinese genes nor Chinese culture in general seem to be related to control of delinquency, which seems to depend upon a whole social fabric building on family honor — a fabric destroyed as refugees tore themselves loose from their environments in China and converged on Hong Kong, where they arrived as individuals or as isolated families, and lived in a Westernized culture further undermining whatever remained of their original social values. Chinese-American delinquents and youth criminals are overwhelmingly of recent Hong Kong origin. Similarly, among Japanese-Americans, studies indicate that the rare young delinquents among them tend to come from outside the Japanese-American community. The virtual nonexistence of juvenile delinquency among those raised in the traditional Oriental community in the United States is striking evidence of the social effectiveness of sorting and labeling by larger units which are able to exert internal control over the individual better than public institutions can.

Similar principles have been involved in the Americanization of nineteenth century Jewish immigrants. When the massive immigration of Eastern European Jews to America began in the 1880s, there was already a small German-Jewish community in the United States, and they were alarmed at being categorized with their co-religionists from a wholly different cultural and socioeconomic background. Yet despite their initial efforts to disassociate themselves from the Eastern European Jews, the public at large tended to lump all Jews together, and to become more anti-Semitic as a result of the new unassimilated arrivals. Again, despite the retrospective injustice of such gross sorting and labeling categories, this provided an incentive for the more Americanized, cultured, and economically successful German Jews to assume some responsibility for helping the Eastern European Jews toward similar success and acceptability in their new culture. Similar things have happened in other ethnic groups: the Urban League played an acculturating role among blacks and the Catholic Church among the Irish, for example. Partly this was philanthropic, but partly also it was enlightened self-interest on the part of more fortunate members of a group who realized that they were inevitably being categorized with the rest of a group that was unacceptable to the larger society. Judging each person “as an individual” would have removed this incentive. The position here is not to claim that sorting and labeling categories should be larger than the individual. The point is simply to bring out the social trade-off that is involved between retrospective individual justice and prospective social control.