[lit-ideas] Re: Honor: A History

I think it's saying something that the first line talks about the youngest 
children, what the youngest children know.  Therefore, honor is something 
patterned after what the youngest children know and do, and using it as an 
excuse to have a fight is, well, childish.  How about adults?  What do adults 
know and do?  Is there a reason why adults tell children not to fight, send 
them to their rooms, put them in time out?  If you are so enamored of honor, 
then honor killings by the mob and by fathers of chlidren who "disgrace" them 
must seem perfectly natural.  One of the hallmarks of being an adult is 
learning to rein in childish impulses to hit somebody, which honor discourages. 
 Honor is such a ridiculous idea that it should be expunged from the 
vocabulary, let alone have it dictate policy.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: Lawrence Helm 
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: 5/9/2006 10:29:30 AM 
Subject: [lit-ideas] Honor: A History


A lurker recommended the book Honor: a History by James Bowman to me.  He 
provided an excerpt from the book, presumably because it pertains to some of 
the things we have been discussing recently.  Here is the publisher?s site: 
http://www.encounterbooks.com/books/hohi/hohi.html 

Here is a review from National Review: 
http://www.nrbookservice.com/products/BookPage.asp?prod_cd=c6925 

Note to Irene:  Everything below the line was written by Bowman, not me.

Lawrence



"You can't expect, when you get somebody, that they won't get you back." It 
struck me as a neat summing-up of one of the earliest lessons we all learn--so 
early that most of us have no memory of a time when we have not known it - 
which is also the basis of what used to be called "honor."
-
The youngest children know without having the concept explained to them what it 
means to lose face, to be contemptible in the eyes of their coevals, and will 
risk almost any displeasure or punishment from the adults in authority over 
them, rather than submit to such humiliation. This is honor at its most basic. 
And so deep-seated is the response that it's almost impossible to imagine its 
replacement by some more benign principle of social interactions, either for 
individuals or for nations. In spite of the worthy efforts of our educators in 
"conflict avoidance" and "peace studies," the idea of a peaceful society built 
on such utopian models has proved to be as elusive as ever.

It would almost seem as if that most basic form of honor, that foundational 
social reflex to let others know one is not to be trifled with, is something 
that we must live with. Yet such a thought has become, over the last two or 
three generations, almost literally unthinkable. Ever since "the war to end 
wars" in 1914-1918, the utopian and pathological explanation of human 
conflict--that it has diagnosable causes in some personal, social or political 
illness and will end with the cure of that illness and thus the removal of 
those causes--has been taken for granted not only by the most progressive 
thinkers but increasingly by ordinary people. Some people engaged in "peace 
studies" have even invented a word, "bellicist," to describe those who still 
believe in this reflexive, hitting-back kind of honor as it applies to nations. 
Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether or not any such ideology 
as "bellicism" actually exists, part from the reality of actual warfare, we 
 can see that the coinage is meant to imply that pacifism is always a real 
alternative. If wars are the product of "bellicist" assumptions, then not-war 
will be the product of pacifist assumptions. It is utopian logic that has been 
with us for a very long time now, and even those who do not consider themselves 
pacifists have been aught to think of peace as the natural condition of mankind 
just as health is the natural condition of the body. War, in this view, is an 
aberration whose causes are always knowable and avoidable by sufficiently 
perspicacious statecraft. Of course there has never been a time when there have 
not been wars or preparations for war, but politicians of both left and right 
in American and elsewhere in the West have at least been forced to act as if 
they believed in the utopian view--which means that any wars they may choose to 
fight will have to be gone into more or less hypocritically.

On the left, failure to avoid conflict is taken as ipso facto evidence of 
political and diplomatic failure. On the right, as the war in Iraq has taught 
us, even the most conservative presidents, even when they are faced with an 
attack on their own country, must seek immediate, obvious and prophylactic 
reasons to justify any resort to arms. When America and its allies went to war 
in Iraq, it seems never to have occurred to anybody, conservative or liberal, 
pro-war or anti-war, that such a move could be, let alone should be, justified 
in terms of national honor. To that primitive way of thinking (if anyone had 
admitted to engaging in it), it would have been necessary to do something to 
show the Arab enemies of America and the West that they couldn't expect , when 
they got us, we wouldn't get them--and anyone remotely connected with 
them--back. Indeed, the more remote the better. Those who complained that the 
Iraq War did nothing to punish al-Qaeda for the September 11 attacks o
 n the United States were missing the point, as those schooled in old ideas of 
honor would have seen it. Precisely because Saddam Hussein's connections with 
al-Qaeda were as tenuous as they were, it would have made sense to those in 
primitive honor cultures to make an example of him, and so warn others who 
might be vulnerable to American arms and who were tempted to support 
terrorists, albeit slight and secretly, that they shouldn't even think about it.

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