Christina Hoff Sommers has a fascinating interview with author James Bowman, whose book Honor, A History looks to be an excellent analysis of the concept of honor throughout history. Bowman makes a very interesting point about the importance of the concept of honor in society:
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.
His argument is interesting, if deeply un-PC. In the World Wars, Americans had no problems with defining the enemy – to the point of virtually dehumanizing them. In the Second World War, the term “Jap” was used with impunity, while the popular media and culture were firmly behind the war effort. The martial dichotomy of “us” versus “them” could not have been more stark – the Japanese and Germans were portrayed as barbarous, unchivalrous, and the very definition of evil. Yet at the same time, those prejudices quickly passed once the war was over and the American government began the lengthy and expensive process of rebuilding the nations they had once shattered.
In this war, our government and society has gone out of their way to avoid portraying all Muslims as terrorists. We’re frequently reminded that Islam is a “religion of peace” and that we are not at war with Islam as a whole, but only one violent fringe of it. This is one of the first wars in human history where one combatant has gone out of the way to avoid offending the sensibilities of their enemy, from heated debate over bombing during Ramadan, to false accusations of Quran-flushing, to worries about cartoon images of Muhammad. While it is true that we are not fighting all of Islam, and many in the Muslim world are at least our nominal allies, it is also true that the enemy we are fighting views our compassion as weakness and does not fight by any of the rules of civilized warfare. At what point does our desire to avoid offending Islam become a fatal weakness in a war against those who justify atrocities in the name of Islam? It’s a fair question to ask.
Bowman is right in pointing out that the concept of honor is greatly diminished, even dying, in modern society. The notion of the proper gentleman barely exists in our society today – instead of holding doors open for women, men in popular entertainment call them “hos” and treat them like sexual chattel. Concepts like self-sacrifice, duty, and patriotism have become little more than empty words for many in our modern society. As Bowman observes:
Every child still knows what it means to lose face, to become contemptible, in the eyes of his fellows, though he may never have heard of the word “honor.†The honor culture, when we had one, was able to work with this raw material by teaching that it was not only a willingness to assert oneself against others that was honorable but also such qualities as standing by one’s friends, telling the truth and being respectful towards women. All of those things we still value, sometimes in spite of ourselves, which is why it’s still a compliment to call a man a gentleman, but we have been taught by a dominant, liberalizing ideology of almost a century’s standing that the whole package, as it were, is obscurely scandalous. To claim gentlemanly status for oneself would be, if anyone dared to do it anymore, not only an insult to the ladies (which would be ungentlemanly) but an assertion of moral superiority to others of a kind which we now find intolerable.
It’s that concept of moral authority that some find so reprehensible. We don’t like to be preached at – even when we deserve it. As a case in point, take the recent commencement address by a student at the University of St. Thomas, Benjamin Kessler. As Colleen Carroll Campbell tells it:
Kessler began the contested portion of his speech by reflecting on his university’s newly instituted travel policy, which prevents unmarried and gay faculty members from sharing rooms with their sexual partners while chaperoning students on official school trips. Kessler argued that his school was right to enforce Catholic values lest the Catholic-university community be “scandalized†by unmarried partners putting their own desires ahead of the common good. He then cited contraception as another example of individuals choosing self-gratification over lasting happiness and the welfare of others, and defended the Catholic Church’s proscription against contraception. “Birth control is not good for the female, the male, nor the long-term health of the relationship,†Kessler said. “Birth control is selfish.â€
As many in the audience booed and some cheered, Kessler continued in a steady voice: “We all make selfish choices. I am no different in this. We all do. You can ask my parents, you can ask my friends, you can ask my rector, who sit with you today. I also make selfish choices. I am no different in this. I am no different. Regardless of the past, regardless of what’s happened in the past, we must change for the future.â€
Kessler then hailed his fellow graduates as a sign of hope and urged them to reject selfishness and find “true, lasting happiness†by following the examples of “Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., St. Thomas Aquinas [and]—dare I say it?—Jesus Christ. … I can only hope to meet each of you years from now and see that you are happy, truly happy. Truly happy because you gave, gave, gave, and gave with the end of the community in sight. Truly happy because you lived unselfishly.â€
Leaving aside the issue of whether Kessler’s challenging speech was appropriate graduation speech material, the reaction to Kessler’s comments was extreme. Kessler and the school were both forced to apologize – despite the fact that the University of St. Thomas is a Catholic institution and what Kessler said so happens to be perfectly in accord with Catholic teachings. What Kessler was trying to uphold was a sense of personal honor and self-sacrifice that is sadly anachronistic in today’s society. The fact is, as loathe as we all are to admit it, today’s society is deeply selfish. The rampant sexualization of our culture doesn’t lead to authentic happiness, it leads to a culture of instant gratification that is ultimately unsatisfying. Christianity’s whole message is that a life lived solely for the self is utterly worthless, and each of us has an obligation to something greater than oneself.
Sadly, Kessler’s message, right if sharply worded, has little currency in today’s world. The concepts of honor, chivalry, and self-sacrifice have been replaced by a culture of the self – a culture that is simply less coherent than a society that respects honor.
The concept of honor does not require women to be second-class citizens, nor does it require social stratification, nor racism, nor injustice. Learning from the mistakes of the past does not require one to jettison all that was good. What kind of society we have when the gentleman is replaced by the pimp as the dominant cultural avatar for young men?
Honor demands of us, and we prefer to remain unmoved. Honor requires us to have a strong identity as men and women, Americans, and defenders of a noble tradition of civilization, and we prefer to tear down distinctions rather than revel in them. Honor asks us to subjugate the self, while our culture continues to make “self-esteem” more important than any abstract concept of the good. All of these things are regarded as anachronisms at best and façades for oppression and injustice at worst.
To the question of who is responsible for the long decline of the concept of honor, the short answer is we all are. If we ever wish to regain those values, no government program can do it for us, we have to change our culture to meet the expectations of honor.
Being gay is a selfish choice? I’m not sure that’s anywhere in Catholic teaching.
Content of the speech aside, the student should be forced to apologize for speaking on a completely inappropriate topic for a graduation ceremony.
Ummmm, I hate to point out the obvious here, but there’s a big difference between WWII and the current war–we’re not fighting a country. In the 1990s Iraq War, there were numerous references to “towel heads,” “sand n—ers,” and things like that. Right now we are fighting a specific subset of a people, and we have clearly vilified al Qaeda and bin Laden in the popular media. It is also much more difficult to villian-ize someone who hasn’t attacked you in any way, which is why making a popular villian out of al Qaeda is easy and making one out of all Iraqis and all of Islam is very hard.
Of course, this is to say nothing of the assertion that being racist is somehow linked with maintaining honor. It is also to say nothing of the assertion that honor is properly defined in terms of cultural identity.
Also, conservatives seem to have in mind some idealized, utopian vision of the past that just didn’t exist. For example, many men in American history would be considered “gentlemen” with honor who also raped their slaves.
That’s a good point. Also, we went out of our way to distinguish the Iraqi people from the Iraqi regime. Our goal was never to conquer Iraq, but to topple Saddam.
An assertion I wouldn’t make.
However, that I would argue is largely correct. Isn’t the very definition of patriotism defending the cultural honor of one’s country? The two concepts are very much linked. Honor is larger than cultural identity, but there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with making one’s nationality a point of honor. Nor is there anything wrong with one wishing to defend one’s national honor – be it in sports (the Olympics) or in combat.
Which is true, and that’s why I said “Learning from the mistakes of the past does not require one to jettison all that was good.” As Bowman said, we wouldn’t ever want to go back to a society in which women were relegated to second-class citizenship, but at the same time a culture that is rampantly and often violently sexual doesn’t do much good for either men or women.
The point is that your view of the past is flawed. It seems odd to me to say that people who raped their slaves had honor, but people today are losing it. It’s odd to say that a society that didn’t allow African Americans to sit in the same part of the bus had honor, but today our honor is declining. The rustic, happy, utopian America where everyone was a fine upstanding member of the community just didn’t ever exist.
Because that’s not what I’m saying. The people who “raped their slaves” had honor in some matters, but certainly not in all – even at the time that behavior would have been considered deeply reprehensible. You can have a society in which women are still treated with respect, but not denied equal rights under the law. It is certainly possible to have a society where true patriotism is considered a virtue without descending into militant nationalism. The argument that “raping slaves” is intrinsic to the concept of “honor” just doesn’t hold any water.
The problem we face is that the culture of the self has eclipsed a culture that tries to uphold the honor of others, and that just isn’t healthy for a society.
Of course it didn’t. Conservatives aren’t generally fans of utopia. But at the same time, those who foolishly reject centuries of tradition aren’t any wiser.
Umm yeah find where I made that and I’ll eat the shirt I’m wearing. Right now.
Again, I’m not sure how you can argue that a culture in which raping slaves was ok was a culture that “tries to uphold the honor of others.” But I’m profoundly convinced you’ve been reading way too much Buckley.
It seems that the argument you are making is that in some areas people in past generations had honor and in some areas the people in past generations did not have honor. If that’s so, the same can be said for people today and I’m not exactly sure how that means that honor has been “killed.”
Is the shirt cotton? I believe cotton goes well with red wines…
You’re trying to insinuate that “honor” is a code-word for the prebellum South, which just isn’t true. For that matter, there has never been a period in American history where sexually assaulting slaves was considered “OK”. It did happen, but I rather doubt that the culture of the time would have accepted anyone who openly admitted it.
And you can never read too much Buckley…
That’s a fair summation.
The difference being that we have less of a concept of honor today than we have had in the past. For instance, referring to a woman as a “ho” would have been unthinkable even a few decades ago. In education, nearly half of Dartmouth students admitted to cheating on tests. Things that were once culturally unacceptable have become commonplace, and there was a very good reason for those cultural prohibitions.
In another thread, I noted that the majority of poverty in America is based more on bad behaviors than bad luck. People were once expected to graduate high school, to not have children out of wedlock, and to act in a responsible manner. Those societal guidelines helped keep people from making those mistakes and falling into severe poverty. Today, those societal guidelines are treated as passé, and we’ve seen a relative explosion of poverty because of it.
Except that I gave the example of “a society that didn’t allow African Americans to sit in the same part of the bus” right here and last I checked busses weren’t invented until well after 1860.
I’m giving you examples–The guy that carved Mt. Rushmore probably opened doors for ladies, but he also belonged to the KKK. I’d bet the people in the army that thought it was a good idea to give blankets with smallpox to Native Americans probably walked on the outside of the street. People might not have called women “hos” in the 1800s, but the word “f-ck” is about 500 years old. There have been obscene words since there has been language.
For you to use the fact that Dartmouth students admit to cheating as proof of something changing, you’d need to know how many Dartmouth students admitted to cheating in an earlier time period–I’d bet you’d be surprised. And while things like this are happening at Dartmouth, Princeton still uses the “honor code,” where students are just trusted not to cheat and no one proctors tests. It’s believed to be extremely successful.
Now, to say that poverty happens because it is more acceptable to call women “hos,” you ignore the crushing poverty in inner citties in America at the turn of the century–when, presumably, there were fewer children out of wedlock (although prostitution was extremely rampant). There was also this thing called “The Great Society,” which succeeded in lifting millions of people out of poverty in the late 1960s, when “honorable” behavior was on the decline.
I’m just not buying this idealistic, “honor-driven” society argument, and I surely don’t buy at as a means to save society.
Except all of those examples are based on a fallacy of composition – that because those previous societies are arguably more honorable that being honorable implies that we should also join the KKK and send black people smallpox-infested blankets. Certainly there have been obscene words for centuries – but that doesn’t mean that they’ve been as blisteringly common as they are now. Hell, a generation ago kids would get their mouths filled with soap for issuing such utterances – today schoolyards make Def Comedy Jam look tame.
Could be, although I’d bet that the rates were far, far lower than they were now.
Actually, I’d say poverty happens in a large part because the expectations that society as a whole placed on the individual are no longer there – only part of which is the way women are objectified.
True. Technology has made poverty less of a problem, but the Great Society did virtually nothing to reduce poverty rates in this country – in fact, they went up. The most effective antipoverty program in modern history was Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform bill which did have a lasting effect in moving people from dependency to independence. It was probably the best thing Clinton ever did for this country.
If one compares societal movements such as the sexual revolution of the 1960s to increases in out-of-wedlock births, poverty, and crime, you get a very strong correlation between the decline in personal ethics and poverty.
It may not “save society”, but would it really hurt to try?
The point with the examples is that former societies weren’t as honorable or as desirable as you think–that honor has not been killed. You seem to share the Charles Murray view of the time before the New Deal as this period when people banded together without government help to take care of sick people and feed the poor. History just doesn’t support this claim.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, from 1963 when Lyndon Johnson took office until 1970 as the impact of his Great Society programs were felt, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century. Since then, the poverty rate has hovered at about the 13 percent level and sits at 13.3 percent today, still a disgraceful level in the context of the greatest economic boom in our history. But if the Great Society had not achieved that dramatic reduction in poverty, and the nation had not maintained it, 24 million more Americans would today be living below the poverty level.
Poverty rate of African Americans in 1960: 55%. 1968: 27%.
Sounds to me like you’ve been drinking too much of the Kristol Kool-Aid.
And, if we’re getting progressively worse, why have teenage birth rates and crime rates fallen in the past 10-15 years, and why have they continued to fall as more people have gone into poverty in the past 6 years?
Johnson inherited a booming economy originally created by Kennedy’s massive tax cuts in 1960s – the rate of poverty fell before Johnson took office. By 1970, poverty had already begun to inch up. Correlation is not causation – the Great Society failed to fight poverty over the long term, and cost trillions of dollars – and threatens to bankrupt this country in a generation.
Mainly because of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which fundamentally reformed the welfare system, also due to the fact that the last 10-15 years saw a massive economic increase. Poverty rates correlate very strongly with economic factors – which should be obvious. Even though most poverty is based on social factors, economics have an impact – and an economy that’s in recession will naturally have a higher level of poverty. The 1996 bill changed the system so that people tended to have smaller periods under the poverty line, which has helped poverty stay relatively low during the 2000-2003 recession.
And then
Indeed that is true, but it also suggestive of causation. Given what we know of poverty today – that a majority of it is due to a few societal factors, there’s significant evidence which suggests that societal changes are a causative factor for poverty.
You’re drinking the Kool Aid again. If it’s true that “societal changes are a causative factor for poverty,” and if it’s also true that things that undermine your mythical “model American society where everyone had values” are the societal changes involved, then I’m not sure how you would explain that the percentage of people living in poverty was cut in half between 1959 and 1974–the very heart of the sexual revolution.
And if social changes are a causative factor, why, in the face of this massive decline in poverty, did violent crimes more than triple, property crimes quadruple, murder more than double, and rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and vehilce theft more than triple?
Incidentally, if the Welfare Reform Act is responsible for the decline in teenage birth rates, I’m a little confused as to why the rates in teenage pregnancy started declining six years before the Act was passed.
Should I stop letting those pesky little facts get in the way now?