This review appears in the September issue of
The American Spectator. To subscribe, click here.
Honor: A History
by James Bowman
(Encounter Books, 381 pages, $25.95)
Nearly five years ago, on a clear Tuesday morning, the United
States was attacked by men who claimed to “love death more than you
love life,” a sentiment so alien to our ears that even now, no
matter how many times we have heard it or variants of it repeated,
we seem unable to grasp its implications. Only crazy people, we
reason, think that anything could be more important than
self-preservation.
Yet on that same day we were astonished by the deeds of other
men who also set self-preservation aside, though they did so in the
service of goals very different from the homicidal and suicidal
ideology of the terrorists. These were the firemen of New York, who
went into the smoldering World Trade Center towers with a good idea
that they would not be coming back out. Three hundred and
forty-three of them perished. Before embarking on their brave and
sacred mission, some even asked for absolution from the department
chaplain, who would himself be killed that day. If these men could
speak to us, they would likely not say that they loved death more
than they loved life, but rather that some things were worth
risking and even losing one’s life for-rescuing people in danger,
for example. They might also say that failing to do so would be
dishonorable.
The firemen, like members of the military, exist within the
remnants of what James Bowman calls Western honor culture, a code
of conduct that evolved over many centuries before ebbing in the
century just past to the point that we can barely recognize it
anymore — except when someone does something so stunningly,
obviously honorable that we are reawakened to the majesty of
old-fashioned virtues like courage and sacrifice. Something like
this recognition occurred in the early days after the September
11th attacks, but the glow inevitably faded. The culture soon
reasserted itself, more comfortable celebrating victims than
heroes, let alone targeting enemies.
Such a mentality leaves us ill equipped to understand the
motives of those enemies, who conduct themselves according to a
primitive code of honor that is nearly synonymous with murder. Not
so long ago, the West valued honor just as highly, if differently.
And to hear James Bowman tell it, our long-term survival may depend
on a new birth of honor.
ANYONE WHO HAS READ Bowman’s film reviews (he is TAS’s
film critic) knows that he specializes in identifying deep-seated
cultural assumptions beneath the surface of even the most
innocent-seeming popular fare. He can take apart a romantic comedy
or a crime drama in a way that leaves the reader wondering about
manners, history, the roles of men and women, and other subjects
not normally on the marquee at multiplexes. Often, the assumptions
he exposes have to do with the idea of honor.
In his new book, Honor: A History, he crafts an intricate
scholarly argument that takes the decline of Western honor far
beyond a phenomenon of changing manners into an underlying force of
much of 20th-century history, as well as a crucial signpost on the
road ahead. His sources range from military and political history
to psychology and religion, from the pages of Sir Walter Scott to
the latest barbarism uttered by Madonna. There is so much to digest
here it is dizzying.
“As near a thing to a cultural constant as has ever existed,” he
writes, honor is “the good opinion of the people who matter to us.”
Where it applies to individuals, the term has always denoted
courage for men and chastity for women, and it carried with it
certain expectations: When a man was slandered or otherwise
wronged, he had to strike back, lest he lose the good opinion of
those he valued. Honor was about externals. It meant essentially
one’s reputation, quite apart from whether that reputation was
warranted.
In its early form in the West, honor wasn’t terribly different
from what 21st-century Islamicists practice now, but the West is
the only honor culture to have evolved beyond this primitive model.
It did this, Bowman believes, largely as a result of its collision
with Christianity, a competing value system at odds with honor in
almost every respect. Instead of honor’s public emphasis,
Christianity was about the inner qualities of the individual.
Reputation, which could be founded on deceit, clashed with the
Christian emphasis on ethical integrity, which served as no
guarantor of reputation and in fact often worked against it.
Christ’s teaching to love our enemies and do good to those who
persecute us planted a seed in Western civilization that would make
its honor culture more advanced and humane than any other. The
evolution of Western honor culminates for Bowman in the
Victorian-era Christian gentleman, who upheld the traditional
martial virtues while also extolling fair play, whether in sports
(beginning to take their modern form in 19th-century England) or in
the affairs of the world. There were certain things a gentleman
would not do, even on the battlefield, especially with the echoes
of Christ’s counsel — however distant — in his ears.
From this cultural pinnacle, however, the West gradually turned
its back on the idea of honor, to the point where we now have what
Bowman calls an anti-honor culture.
BOWMAN DATES THE BEGINNING of honor’s decline to the First World
War. With its epic scale of killing, along with concurrent social
developments such as feminism and psychotherapy, the war was
instrumental in discrediting the honor ideal. Honor came to be
widely viewed as a cause of the bloodshed, an outdated code
incompatible with modernity. The progressive tide turned in favor
of individual autonomy, private psychological reality, and utopian
political movements.
With the discrediting of the honor culture, though, its
civilizing aspects fell by the wayside as well. Bowman believes
this brought tragic consequences during the Second World War, when
the Allies committed what he calls the 20th century’s “original
sin”: civilian bombing on a massive scale. The issue for Bowman is
not whether the Allies had justification for doing what they did —
he seems to concede them that — but the impact of the deeds. Once
the culture of fair play and Christian mercy had leveled whole
cities, it handed an effective rhetorical weapon to practitioners
of terror, who could point to the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and justify their own infinitely less worthy ends.
(Conservative readers are likely to find this the most
controversial assertion in the book; liberal readers will be
assaulted by outrages on nearly every page.)
Notwithstanding the moral ambiguity of civilian bombing, World
War II was soon enshrined as the Good War, and Bowman believes this
has had the effect of making our subsequent wars Bad Wars,
conflicts whose aims cannot be justified in comparison with a fight
to save humanity. Nor can they be explained by appealing to an
abandoned sense of national honor. This apparent vacuum of moral
purpose played an important role, he believes, in the government’s
struggles to explain our wars in both Vietnam and Iraq. When the
Bush administration’s legalistic WMD rationale fell apart, there
was no anchoring principle to explain the invasion of Iraq. A
century earlier, honor would have supplied it.
AWAY FROM THE FIELDS OF WAR and foreign policy, honor’s decline had
other far-reaching effects. The new supremacy of the individual
psyche helped create the inward-looking antihero, an individualist
who stands outside institutional loyalties whenever possible. This,
too, Bowman links to the aftermath of the First World War, when
soldier poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, among other
influences, taught a generation that the claims made by nations,
governments, armies, and churches were only veils for the
corruption at their core. Inevitably, this line of thinking bred
cynicism. “When people see through things,” writes Bowman, “the
first thing they see through is honor, whose essence is the
preservation of appearances.”
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.
