When Honor is at Stake

Think about Hamlet’s observation there for a moment. To be great is to quarrel over nothing when honor is at stake. Is honor that important? Does Greatness hinge on honor?

James Bowman’s Honor: A History is one of those remarkable books which make you notice the world in a new light. I read it shortly after it was published in 2006; I just reread it with a reading group. Once you see the argument, it all seems so obvious that understanding the modern age requires understanding the nature and history of honor.

First, what is honor? “At its simplest, honor is the good opinion of the people who matter to us, and who matter because we regard them as a society of equals who have the power to judge our behavior.” You have an honor group, a set of people in front of whom you would never want to act dishonorably. One of the remarkable things about honor is that even as the notion of honor has collapsed in the West, its vestigial remains are still there, influencing how you act.

In its original form in the West (and in the form in which it still exists in much of the world), honor meant bravery for men and chastity for women. (Even in our post-honor world, men are insulted if called a wimp and women are insulted if called sexually promiscuous, which given the way we normally talk about displays of strength and the idea of chastity is rather remarkable.) In an honor culture, if you insult me, I am honor bound to reply, in a forceful and violent manner. The failure to reply to an insult is dishonorable; my peers would think I am a wimp. The basic features of honor have some effects on other character traits: “A man who is brave in battle and willing to fight for his honor will also, it is generally assumed, keep his word and behave generously to his subordinates and inferiors.”

Honor cultures are the norm in human history. What happened in the West? The first step in the demise of honor came with the spread of Christianity. “Turn the other cheek” is not exactly the same as “punch back harder.”

Where honor was local, Christianity was universal; where honor was elitist, Christianity was catholic and inclusive; where honor was warlike, Christianity was pacifist; where honor treated women only as property, Christianity treated them as human beings, if not yet as the equals of men. Though the two traditions continued to exist side by side for centuries, rarely (we should say, perhaps, too rarely) interfering with each other, honor could hardly fail to be influenced by the existence of Christianity in such close proximity.

The uneasy coexistence of an honor culture and a Christian culture fell apart in the early 20^th century. Bowman traces the collapse to three things which hit simultaneously. Trench warfare in World War I made it the first war in which there was little honor to be found in battle. The rise of psychotherapy changed the focus of attention from external acts to internal states of mind. Feminism undermined the idea of separate honor codes for men and women. The honor culture could not survive, but that does not mean the notion of honor evaporated. Instead, honor went underground and has cropped up in all sorts of was.

Consider warfare. The collapse of the public acknowledgement of honor as a motive has had two dramatic effects on the ways that wars are conducted since World War 1. First, the explanation of why a country is going to war can no longer be that honor is at stake. Instead, the justification for going war must be framed as a moral crusade:

This idea of war-making as a matter of morality rather than honor had the effect of raising the bar for the justification of any future war. Henceforth, it was already beginning to be plain, it would be necessary to paint all enemies as Hitlers or would-be Hitlers. The state of affairs later helped to create the sense of betrayal and deception that grew up during the rhetorical battles over the Vietnam War

Hitler, the communist threat, weapons of mass destruction—in none of these cases was it acceptable to simply state that the nation has been insulted and will now punch back even harder.

The conduct of war has also been altered. As Douglas MacArthur, one of the last great generals from the age in which honor was paramount, once said, a nation at war has three options: “Either pursue it to victory; to surrender to the enemy and end it on his terms; or what I would think is the worst of all choices—to go on indefinitely and indefinitely, neither to win or lose, in that stalemate; because what we are doing is sacrificing thousands of men while we are doing it.”

We have obviously decided to take that third route. We simply do not talk about military victory anymore. Imagine a President who said simply, “Our goal is to utterly crush our opponents on the battlefield.” Nothing else. Just that. No nation building or spreading democracy or ending injustice. Our goal is to win the war. Period.

An interesting way to see the effect of this collapse of honor on the modern mind is nicely illustrated in an anecdote Bowman tells in which I think he misses the point.

When I was a teacher, I once asked my pupils to choose a hero of theirs to talk about in class. One boy insisted on taking Captain James Kirk of the Starship Enterprise as his only confessed hero—as a protest, I took it, against the idea that there could be, or perhaps should be, any heroism at all in the real world. Heroes were becoming by definition fantasy figures.

Now obviously I don’t know what motivated the student being described, but I do know my own mind. My childhood hero was also Captain Kirk, but not because I thought heroes were fantasy figures. Bowman’s book explains my Kirk fascination perfectly. In the 1970s when I was growing up in California, nobody celebrated honor. If asked for a real life hero, I could not have named a soul; I never learned the idea of a hero. Then I started watching Star Trek and here was this guy who embodied bravery and fearlessness and cleverness and did all these amazing things with an omnipresent smirk. Where else in my life did I see people like that? Is it any wonder he was my hero? Rightly to be great is to find quarrel in a straw when honor is at stake. My childhood self admired honor even though I was never told that such a thing existed.

Where does the collapse of honor leave us? On this, Bowman’s book, I am sad to say, does not give a lot of room for optimism. Residual honor is not going away, but the lack of a language in which to talk about honor does not make it obvious how we can rebuild a culture in which honor is channeled in productive ways.