Now it can be told. I’ve been just a bit embarrassed by the
uniformly good reviews of Honor: A History so far. Not
that there have been that many. But that’s sort of the point. When
the New York Post,
the Wall Street Journal, the New York
Sun, National Review,
The American Spectator [Paul Beston’s review is
posted
today — Ed.] and the Weekly Standard all agree that it’s a good
and important book, isn’t that enough in itself to explain if not
to justify why no more mainstream or liberal publication has
bothered to review it at all? It’s true that New York
Times columnist John Tierney gave the book and me a flattering
write-up, but otherwise I have been stuck in the
right-wing journalistic ghetto. It was in the hope of avoiding this
fate that I deliberately avoided, as far as possible, anything Ann
Coulterish, so as not to give, say, the New York Times Book
Review any excuse for ignoring it as a winger book. Even if
the Times had given me the Harvey Mansfield treatment, which I commented
on last March 22, it would have been forced to show, as it did in
that case, its own incapacity for understanding or intelligently
criticizing a serious argument about honor and so made my point
about the Post-Honor Society.
Well, now at last a negative critique has appeared in, of all
places, Wired, or at least the Wired website, and it does precisely that. It’s by a
guy called Clive Thompson who bills himself as a contributing
writer for the New York Times Magazine. He starts off with
an ironic claim that all you need to do to understand international
affairs is to spend a bit of time with a video game called
Saints Row which, like other games (such as Grand
Theft Auto) that are based on gang and criminal culture, has
to do with acquiring and keeping respect. That’s also the subject
of Honor: A History, which he claims to have read.
Actually, that’s not true. He only claims to have “been reading”
it, which may mean that he only picked it up for ten minutes before
putting it back on the shelf. At any rate, he proceeds to skip over
everything in the book concerning the ways in which the Western
honor culture has to be distinguished from that of gangsters and
terrorists — which is virtually everything in the book — to
conclude that I am proposing we emulate gangsters and terrorists!
“Is it just me,” he writes archly, “or are other people unsettled
to discover that neoconservative thinkers are openly embracing the
same sort of ethics contained in gangsta video games?”
Hmm. It’s maybe a little more sophisticated than the number
Walter Kirn did on Harvey Mansfield in the New York Times,
but not much. Yet his willful misunderstanding of the book may have
been partly motivated by the following curious statement: “Say what
you will about gamers, but we actually know that Saints
Row is a fantasy.” Actually we don’t. In detail it’s a fantasy
all right. The people you pretend to kill in it are only images on
a screen. But in conception it is based on something real. It may
be true as Mr. Thompson says — I’m not so sure myself — that the
“middle-class kids” who play these games are “perfectly aware that
in the real world, this macho kill-‘em-all carnage achieves
precisely nothing….They know the relentless, violent pursuit of
honor and respect rarely leads anywhere but jail, poverty, and epic
levels of bloody retribution.” But even if they do know this, there
are an awful lot of gangsters and terrorists in the world who do
not or, if they do, who don’t care. It was about them that I was
writing, not kids playing video games. He’s the one who brought
them up. But the pretense that I was thinking of video gamers
rather than real terrorists is presumably what’s behind his
supposition that I am “so far down the rabbit hole” as to claim —
as I do not — that “Iraq, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have actually
worked — that they have stricken our global enemies with fear, and
raised our respect meter to a juicy ‘full’.”
Here’s what I do claim. All wars are ultimately wars for honor.
It’s just that some of those who fight them know this and some
don’t. The point of my book was to show that we Americans (or most
of us) don’t know this anymore, because we have lost our own honor
culture — which, when we had one, was very different from the one
we now confront in the Islamic world. That’s why, on the official
level we have to make up impressive sounding moral (ending tyranny,
establishing democracy) or prudential (WMDs) reasons for fighting
while at an unofficial level we are always tending to slide back
down into the same kind of primitive, street-level honor culture
that the enemy inhabits, as at Abu Ghraib — where, by the way, as
soon as the Americans moved out and the agents of the new and
democratic Iraq moved in the other week, the torture seems to have
re-commenced. You have to try real hard not to
understand this, or to make it the equivalent of my advocacy of
America’s adopting the Islamic honor culture, let alone my
applauding our lapse into the custom of the country at Abu Ghraib.
But then Mr. Thompson does try real hard. I’m gratified to see how
hard he has to try to come up with his bogus critique. It suggests
that he couldn’t think of a legitimate one.
Incidentally, I’m told that the podcast of my recent interview with the Wisconsin
Public Radio show, “Here on Earth with Jean Feraca,” is now
available to anyone who wants to download it for the next two
months. I recommend it to Mr. Thompson. It’s probably a bit easier
to understand than the book, and it’s certainly a lot shorter.
