Historical territorial conflict predicts strict cultural norm-enforcement centuries later

Evidence

There is evidence that supports the idea that conflict and warfare bolster group social solidarity. In an ambitious cross-cultural investigation spanning 33 nation-states, Michele Gelfand and her colleagues measured something related to social solidarity. They looked at the degree to which nations are “tight”—that is, do they have strict social norms that apply to many situations? How important is conformity to these norms? How much deviation from norms is tolerated and do people get punished for violating these norms? They found several interesting things. First, there was considerable cultural variability, with some cultures such as Turkey, India, and South Korea being very tight, and others, such as Iceland, Ukraine, and New Zealand being “loose.” Next, Gelfand and her colleagues set out to understand what factors explain this cultural variability: what explains the strictness of norm-enforcement in some places but not others? They identified a number of important antecedent conditions. Among those factors were historical levels of territorial conflict—that is, they found that, all else being equal, conflict a hundred years ago increased the odds of strict norm-enforcement today. … Tighter nations were also more religious—and that makes sense too if world religions are a group-mobilizing force. … But Gelfand’s findings point to the fact that, when cultural groups feel threatened, they tend to suppress internal discord in order to mobilize the group for collective action against the perceived threat. Often social mobilization takes a life of its own and persists, even after the threat is long gone. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 457

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the fumi-e mechanism: Japan’s sustained external threat correlating with strict ritualized orthodoxy enforcement is exactly the tight-culture dynamic Gelfand describes.
• QUESTION: Does Japan’s historical isolation/conflict profile place it among ‘tight’ nations in Gelfand’s data, and does that correlate with the sustained enforcement of religious orthodoxy against Christians?