[lit-ideas] Honor: A History
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 9 May 2006 07:29:20 -0700
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 on 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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