Is honor an obsolete concept?

James Bowman is interviewed by Christina Hoff Summers on his new book "Honor: A History":

Christina Hoff Sommers: You show that the Western concept of honor has lost much force and is becoming obsolete. Can you tell us what you think is the most serious consequence of this ongoing diminishment?

James Bowman: The most serious? That would have to be in the corresponding diminishment of our will to live as a society and a culture. Honor is among other things an assertion of collective identity. We are this and we are not that. We are American and not Islamicist. When we are attacked, it is a counter-assertion by someone else that he is that and not this. He is Islamicist and not American. Honor is the name that used to be given to the will to assert the one identity over the other. If you attack me because I am American, honor dictates that I must counterattack and defeat you because you are Islamicist—since you have shown me that being an Islamicist means being an enemy of America. But nowadays we find something disreputable about this kind of assertion and counter-assertion of identity. It is fundamentally at odds with the multiculturalist orthodoxy of the last 30 years. What we ought to have learned from the terror attacks of September 11th and subsequent events is that multiculturalism has sapped our will to fight back and thus to survive. If American patriotism has to be expressed at the expense of non-Americans, even non-Americans who want to kill us simply for being Americans, we are ashamed to express it.

I think that Bowman exaggerates the extent to which Americans have given into multiculturalism. The response of Americans to 9/11 and the re-election of George W Bush in the face of a problematic war in Iraq should disabuse us of the notion that we have given up the will to fight for our distinctive identity as Americans. We certainly do not defend our identity in the simplistic manner that Bowman describes, of painting all Muslims as our enemies because our enemies are Muslim. The American sense of honor is not bound up in blood and soil nationalism, and so traditional ideas of national honor cannot be applied to us in a wholesale manner.

Sommers: In your book, you mention an unusual recent addition to London’s Trafalgar Square. The Square, designed in 1844 as a tribute to Admiral Horatio Nelson for his victory at Trafalgar against Napoleon, includes a number of statues commemorating British war heroes. But last September, the commission in charge arranged for a large marble sculpture of a naked, armless, pregnant woman to be placed in the square. It is entitled “Alison Lapper Pregnant.” Alison Lapper is a British single mother who was born without arms and with underdeveloped legs. Ms. Lapper hailed the sculpture as a tribute to “femininity, disability and motherhood.” The Mayor of London said that Lapper had to struggle to overcome “much greater difficulties” than the men celebrated in the square. What does this addition to Trafalgar Square tell us about the fate of the Western honor culture?

Bowman: When an honor culture breaks down, honor itself doesn’t simply cease to exist. Rather it is transmuted into other forms, though forms which are mostly useless in terms of their survival value. One such alternative to traditional honor culture is to be found in the exaltation of victimhood. The statue of “Alison Lapper Pregnant” placed among British war heroes is a good illustration of how the cult of the victim consciously seeks to supplant more traditional ideas of honor. Several people pointed out at the time that Admiral Nelson lost an arm, and an eye, and was eventually killed in the service of his country, but he was honored not because of what he had suffered but because of what he had achieved, which was the defeat of the Napoleonic navy and the establishment of British maritime supremacy for a century afterwards. The enshrinement of an image of Lapper in the same precincts is a deliberate statement of the contrary principle that it is victimhood alone which is worthy of honor. Lapper herself made the point when she compared herself favorably to Nelson by saying, “At least I didn’t get here by slaying people.” No, indeed! But national greatness and autonomy, which are invariably the products of slaying people, are correspondingly devalued and denigrated. Once again, the decline of traditional honor proceeds pari passu with the loss of national identity and finally even the will to survive as an identifiable people distinct from those who would destroy that identity.

I would agree with Bowman that victimhood is a poor foundation upon which to build a collective identity. There is something petty and ungrateful about the refusal of many people to honor those people of the past and present who are willing to fight and die to preserve a nation from defeat in war. Perhaps it is the disastrous legacy of the wars of the 20th century that makes people imagine that such notions of national honor are to blame for all that is bad with the world, and that only a worship of the opposite values, the "turning of the other cheek" and the "meek shall inherit the Earth" mentality can restore peace and justice to the world. But such thinking is merely sticking one's head in the stand. There can be no arguing with the fact that only cultures which are willing to defend themselves with force and violence, if necessary, will perservere.

Sommers: You describe a shocking case in a Pakistani village where, in 2002, a young woman was raped by members of a tribal council to “avenge their tribal honor.” In what respect does the Western post-Enlightenment concept of honor differ from the concept of honor we find in this village?

Bowman: Western ideas of honor underwent a process of evolution that, for some reason, never happened in Islamic—or, indeed, any other—honor cultures. I believe we owe the difference to Christianity. Christianity was anti-honor in a way that Islam never was. Radical ideas about loving your enemies and doing good to them that insult you could never easily co-exist with any honor culture hitherto known to man. As a result, the two things—the Christian religion and the honor culture—existed separately and side by side for centuries, but not without exerting some influence on each other. When the aristocratic honor culture finally died out in the 18th century, honor was reinvented partly by integrating it, for the first time, with Christian principles. One of the most striking things about the old Western honor culture, when we compare it to the ones to be found elsewhere in the world, was the status it gave to women. Nowhere else do we see the exaltation of women—sometimes described as putting them on a pedestal—that was characteristic of chivalry in the West.

All honor cultures make women’s honor—by which is meant their chastity or fidelity—the property of their male family members, for it is up to fathers, brothers or husbands to protect it, and to challenge other men who threaten it. The process is all bound up with status, of course, but we see this in a particularly virulent form in a primitive and tribal honor culture like the one in Pakistan. The woman “sentenced to be raped” had done nothing wrong, but apparently her younger brother had been molested by some men belonging to a higher caste family. When he refused to keep quiet about it, he was charged, almost certainly falsely, by the other family with having done something to compromise the honor of one of their women, so his sister had to be raped in revenge. It was their way of reasserting the family’s superior status and wiping out the stain on their honor of the boy’s accusation. It all makes a weird kind of sense in that culture in a way that it never would have done in the West, certainly not when chivalry towards women still had a good name among us.

The Pakistani rape incident is a perfect example of the "blood guilt" mentality that I excorciated in my post on Christ on the Cross. The idea that people collectively share in the guilt of one of their own that commits a crime, and that punishment can be exacted on a representative of that group regardless of their innocence of the crime, is barbarism, pure and simple. Also, the idea that the honor of families, fathers or husbands are to be judged by the sexual propriety of their female members is probably the biggest obstacle to rescucitating the concept of honor in the modern world. When a word becomes tainted with pracitices that are rejected by a society, it becomes difficult to find a new expression of that word that doesn't hearken back to the old meaning.

The one word that probably expresses the idea of honor in its most positive meaning, without the past baggage, is integrity. It's most literal meaning, that of something that remains intact and whole, expresses the idea that a person or a nation will not allow itself to be defiled or degraded. It is commonly used, or misused, by politicians and companies to describe themselves, and it is taken to mean someone whose word is of value, who honors his commitments and stands up for himself, his values and his friends, family and community.

Sommers: You recognize that the Western honor culture is inherently unstable. Not only is it subject to constant attack from within, but it requires an uneasy accommodation between Enlightenment ideals of equality and democracy with medieval ideals of chivalry and elitism. Can this marriage be saved?

Bowman: I’m rather pessimistic about this. The various anti-honor orthodoxies of our time are too powerful. But we have to take some encouragement from the fact that the trick, or something like it, was done once before. When Edmund Burke responded to the French revolution—even before its worst excesses—by announcing that “the age of chivalry is dead,” he didn’t know that, even as he wrote, the age of chivalry was being re-imagined in a form that seemed and for a while actually was compatible with ideals of freedom, democracy and equality. The heroes of this re-imagining were the European romantics inspired, first, by the American Founding Fathers and then by Sir Walter Scott, and it produced what I call the Victorian accommodation between traditional honor and those new ideas of human progress. The reasons for the breakdown of this wonderful synthesis are many and complex, but it is not entirely clear that the breakdown was inevitable. The problem is, can honor be re-re-imagined without simply turning back the clock, which is always a fool’s errand? It’s possible, but I don’t see a great imaginer, in the mold of Scott, on the horizon.

At the risk of irritating Skipper, I'd have to say that the LOTR trilogy is as good or better than Ivanhoe in displaying those traits of courage and self sacrifice that we associate with honor. Bowman seems to be stuck on the 19th century Victorian image of the honorable gentleman and thus blinded to those expressions of the honor concept in the modern media. Honorable characters still capture the imagination of moviegoers, and even such characters as Jack Dawson in "Titanic", played by Leonardo DiCaprio, evince those qualities that we once termed chivalrous. I think that Bowman has found a worthy topic to reintroduce to society with his book, but it would be a shame if he is successful in convincing us that we are no longer an honorable people.