The American Spectator

Buy the Book

X-Ray Vision

By Paul Beston on 9.21.06 @ 12:07AM

(Page 2 of 2)

The modern idea of seeing the sham underneath official messages helped create what C.S. Lewis once called "men without chests," who believe that "peace matters more than honour and can be preserved by jeering at colonels and reading newspapers." Ultimately such thinking devolved into postmodernism, which sees sham at the heart of everything, even itself. Yet we somehow retain a hunger for the old virtues, even as we make war on the language that describes them and the attachments that make them possible.

Bowman sketches some cultural shifts necessary for honor's rebirth, which range from ambitious to virtually unthinkable, and he acknowledges how steep a mountain we will have to climb. He manages a tone of enlightened skepticism while never quite resorting to despair.

Early in the book, when describing the cynicism of returning World War I veterans, Bowman refers to their "X-ray vision," but the phrase applies rather well to his own work. Reading Honor is something like examining X-rays of a thousand cultural injuries, only to discover they are all broken in the same place. Readers not yet un-chested by relativism will embrace Bowman's masterful scholarship while deciding for themselves whether honor plays the central role he ascribes to it in the history of the last 100 years. In a culture less overrun by fashion, his book would be on the reading tables of all the people whose good opinion still matters.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Foreign Policy, Trade, Sports, Religion, Islam, Books, Military, Iraq