“War made the state,” said the political scientist Charles Tilly, “and the state made war.” Tilly was talking about actual states, but the same could be said about metaphorical states: states of mind, or perhaps of the soul.

Capture of the SS Mayaguez

On May 12, 1975, a military swift boat commanded by the Khmer Rouge captured the U.S. container ship Mayaguez off the Cambodian coast.

Peter Berger in his classic essay “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor,” demonstrated how societies where honor matters have a thick sociology while those with a thin social sphere are dominated by ideas of human “dignity.”