Sunday, May 8, 2011

Every tub

The following is from a post and has been attracting all sorts of search engine interest lately. It's from a much longer post about Rob Roy so I've pulled it out here so people can read it in isolation from a lot of talk about a novel they probably have never heard of.


"Every tub has to sit on its own bottom." That was a line Count Basie picked up from one of his musicians and it became a business principle for him. When Bailie Jarvie and Owen are having a  discussion about Scotland's economic state in the novel Rob Roy, the very same expression comes up. "Na, na sir, we stand on our bottom ...." What it means in both cases is that everyone earns their own way.

That is an important line of demarcation between an honour and shame society and a guilt innocence society. In an honour and shame society honour is shared. I cannot have honour without sharing it with everyone in my in-group. If I try a phenomenon sometimes called tall poppy syndrome kicks in although that is a bit of a misnomer as tall poppies are encouraged so long as they remember that they are poppies and that their tallness is supposed to reflect glory on all the other poppies.

The reverse is also true. Any shameful act I perform will also bring shame on my entire in group. In an honour-shame culture the members of the in group will punish anyone who they feel brings shame on them. The most heinous example of this in our world probably being Muslim honour killings.

In an innocence-guilt society, everyone stands and falls alone. Count Basie came from an African-American subculture that still was predominantly honour-shame based but he broke with it when he set up his band. Every tub must stand on its own bottom is a rejection of the honour-shame culture Basie grew up. This was not without resistance from some other black musicians who saw this as selfishness.

No society is, as I've noted before, purely honour-shame or purely guilt-innocence. Every honour-shame society will trade with outsiders. So, for example, biblical laws that seemed to ban lending money at interest didn't apply when trading with outsiders. Even in a guilt-innocence society relations between very close insiders will have honour-shame aspects. If a married person commits some flagrantly outrageous sexual offence they drag their husband or wife down with them and innocence will not protect that husband or wife.

One of the ironic things about this is that the way to freedom is that the Basie band was justly famous because of its ability to function as a unit. It had the greatest rhythm section in all history and the leader of the band chose to be a part of that rhymn section instead of being a soloist.

Update July 12, 2011: Basie liked the idea so much he named a song "Every Tub". Here it is:

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