The word has mostly positive connotations for us--it's a good thing to be a man of honor, or to give one's word of honor. But I've always thought there was something fishy about honor and the honor culture from which it originates--it seemed to be too concerned with reputation and public perception rather than with virtue, too concerned about being well thought of and "honored" and not concerned enough about living a life of interior integrity, as if one's standing in society mattered more than one's standing before God--or that both were the same thing.
And the more you learn about honor's origins the fouler the smell. They lie in a primitive warrior ethic, which in turn is a part of the master/slave complex. Honor is accorded to both parties in conflict so long as neither backs down. It's is better to fight and die than to refuse the fight and submit to the other. Submission is always dishonorable and slavish. The logic of the duel, a practice that lasted well into the nineteenth century in America in the South and West, and the the blood feud follow this basic honor logic. In an honor culture, if one has been dishonored in any of a number of complex ways, it's as if someone took away your existence, and the only way you can get it back is by killing the one who took it from you.
Duels and feuds point to the real meaning of honor, which is that the humiliation of losing face must be saved by annihilating the one who caused you to lose it or dying in the effort. Better to die saving face than to live with the humiliation of losing face because in an honor culture, the individual human being is completely identified with his reputation--he has no existence apart from it. Honor has hardly anything to do with courage; it has almost everything to do with the fear of humiliation and the social consequences that follow from it.
James Bowman's book, Honor: A History, does a very effective job of laying out the contours of the honor culture as it played out in the West. There are several layers of influence that led to its destruction, not the least of which is its fundamental tension with Christianity. There are reasons why the poor and powerless, those with the least honor, are given a kind of preferential treatment in the Christian tradition, and why the wise, the rich, and the powerful are often deconstructed, so to say, by the spirit of the gospels. These people who think they know who they are as defined by their place in the honor framework, don't really have a clue, and their sense of honor makes them invulnerable to the kind of grace that might give them that clue. Pharisees and Sadducees in the Gospels, had the highest status and the most honor, but they were incapable of recognizing transcendent truth when it walked among them because it was in the form of a no-account from the hinterlands.
But apart from the fundamentally subversive relationship Christianity has with the honor culture, other forces came to bear in the modern period which eventually led to its dissolution. The honor complex in the West was severely weakened during the nineteenth century, despite the Victorians' attempt to maintain it against this larger corrosive current, and it toppled after World War I. The Great War was widely perceived among the younger members of the European elite to have been fought for no reason other than to preserve the 'honor' of the ruling class, which continued the carnage for fear of the disgrace that suing for peace would bring. It's not cricket to quit no matter how much pointless carnage ensues. Charge of the Light Brigade, and all that. Those Lost Generation survivors of that carnage saw the folly of the honor system, and bitterly rejected it in the twenties. Hemingway, Remarque, Sassoon, Fitzgerald, and so many others. But the question arose: What would fill the vacuum created by its rejection?
Bowman is good in laying out the how this played out in the 20th Century, and how the unofficial culture of honor skepticism supplanted the official honor culture and how the consumer culture that emerged filled that vacuum with a muddle of inadequate or pernicious substitutes--celebrity, for instance, and pop-psychological therapeutic ideas about self-esteem and authenticity. I enjoyed very much his discussion about how the old honor culture and the new therapeutic culture meet comically in The Sopranos. In one episode, Johnny Sack wants to have another mafioso executed because he made a joke about his wife's weight problem:
Then [when the honor culture flourished] the mortal insult, the insult to a woman's honor, would have been against her chastity or fidelity. Now, having assimilated the therapeutic language of "sensitivity" and "appropriateness" rather than honor, he [Uncle Junior, who alone takes Johnny's side on this] and Johnny Sack both find it natural to assume that an insult against her self-image or self-esteem, even the mention of so obvious a fact as that she is considerably overweight, is as bad or worse. Like Tony himself on occasion, Johnny and Junior find it easy to confuse honor--that old-fashioned thing they have been brought up to respect without entirely knowing what it is--with the self esteem which is its therapeutic equivalent.
"Who does he think he is, Sir Walter Raleigh," says one of the incredulous mafiosi upon learning that Johnny wants one of his colleagues whacked for something so trivial. For Johnny it's a matter of perverse principle--it's a question of honor--but the bottom line is that honor is just a cover up for the rage he felt in losing face, and he would kill a man to expiate that humiliation. That's what honor demands.
The whole substructure upon which the honor complex is built is absurdly primitive, and yet Bowman is right to worry about the vacuum its loss has created and the silliness that has come in to substitute for it. But he's wrong to argue for honor's revival, as he does in his last chapters. His argument, to me at least, seemed oddly out of joint with the entire thrust of his exposition until he tacked in on near the end. It is basically rooted in neocon cant that we are in mortal danger from primitive enemies who seek to destroy us, and because they operate within the honor complex, so must we if we are to prevail in this struggle to the death. It's as if 9/11 was Osama's way of slapping the U.S. with his glove, and we have no honor if we didn't respond to the challenge.
I'm not particularly interested to refute his argument in detail, because I find it silly. While terrorism is a real problem, it doesn't threaten our survival, and our response to the terrorist threat should have little or nothing to do with any idea of national honor. Terrorism is a criminal act, and it should be treated as such. It doesn't need to get any more complicated than that. And any argument that assumes that at this point in our confrontation with terrorism that our survival requires that we descend to the level of terrorists is just classic wingnuttery. It's steeped in a quasi-hysterical fearfulness that I've described time and again here that makes us stupid. We need courage and poise in the response to any threat. But we need to be intelligent, and we don't need some primitive honor code to dictate our policies. Prudent defensive measures, aggressive police work, and a commitment to realistically, intelligently come to grips with the fact that there are legitimate reasons for resentment toward the U.S. are sufficient to deal with threats posed by primitive mindset of terrorists.
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But while it's good riddance to honor, I would like to suggest an alternative solution to what should replace it and its already in place whether we're consciously aware of it or not--it's the concept of "integrity." Integrity is an interior capacity that embraces virtues such a courage, compassion, principle, and so much more, but it does not depend on one's standing in the world--either for us as individuals or as a nation. A man or woman of integrity may or may not be honored; it's irrelevant to what integrity requires. It's primarily interior; it's a quality of soul, or more accurately it's an achievement of soul. And governments simply have to be clear about what they stand for and what they will not tolerate, and the honor code has nothing to do with it.
But let me address this issue of interiority and its relationship to integrity. I accept, to use Charles Taylor's terminology in A Secular Age, that there has been a fundamental movement in history away from the embeddedness characteristic of outward-directed, premodern societies and toward disembeddedness characteristic of modern and postmodern societies, and with this development the emergence of what Taylor calls the interior-focused, disconnected "buffered self". [Quick summary if you're unfamiliar with the book: Extreme embeddedness--animistic/totemic societies; intermediate embeddedness--medieval Christianity; intermediate buffered self--Renaissance through Enlightenment individualists and rationalists; extreme buffered self--Camus's Mersault comes to mind as a literary depiction of the buffered self's condition of soul, but Camus himself is perhaps a better exemplar.]
I don't look at the emergence of the lonely, alienated, meaning-starved, inner-directed, buffered self as a negative, but rather as a culmination, or as the maturation of seeds that germinated with the Greeks and the Jews, which is the central gift that the West has given to the world. The Jews' refusal of the embeddedness of the fertility cults of their neighbors on the one hand, and on the other, the leading Greeks' easy dismissal of traditional embedded ideas for almost any imagined possibility were the beginning of a process that has reached its maturity in the last century. Socrates was executed for his efforts to disembed the youth of Athens from their pious embeddedness in traditional ideas about the gods.
We are all buffered selves to the degree that we have left the womb of premodern embeddedness and inhabit a world where it is no longer possible to live according to the wisdom of the tradition as a "given", but to live instead in a world where one has to think things out for himself and choose, and choosing is the activity that lies at the heart of the work that leads to integrity. The Buffered Self is free in an unprecedented way, and with that freedom comes an enormous burden of responsibility, and the future of the earth and mankind depend on what humans do with this freedom. And it's understandable that many people are not interested in accepting the burden and will seek any means to avoid it. The conservative avoidance strategy has been to reject the emergence of the buffered self as a mistake that must be corrected by restoring premodern, transpersonal traditionalist social codes--like the honor complex.
This cannot work. It leads to what I call "Lot's Wife Syndrome" and "Zombie Traditionalism", a calcification of human life into dead forms. The liberal avoidance strategy, even though it is far more comfortable with the idea of disembedded freedom than most conservatives are, lies in a rejection of the fundamental tension that defines us as human and that pulls us in two opposite directions. I refer you to Ernest Becker's treatment of this fundamental tension in his The Denial of Death, but the key idea is that we are both angels and beasts, and that a central integrating task is to live in this tension without denying one side or the other.
Modern Liberalism is rooted in a rationalist scientism that denies the spiritual side of human nature and in thinking of humans as talking animals and in rejecting the spiritual side as delusional and the principal cause of modern/postmodern alienation. For these, alienation is a problem caused by our loss of connection to nature, so we must become more like the animals and celebrate our instinctual life. That's what it means to be authentic--to be natural and spontaneous. Authenticity is the only virtue, and the authentic man or woman is not alienated. I'm simplifying here, and this subject could use more nuance, but you know what I mean.
Authenticity is not the same thing as integrity. Integrity is a soul-shaping work; it's something that must be achieved. Authenticity is simply doing what comes naturally. Authenticity has devolved into different ways of running around naked, and if there's any work involved it's getting rid of the inhibitions that restrain us from doing so. The banal private lives of Hollywood celebrities are monuments to this quest for authenticity, i.e., sterile self-absorption, and its tedium in recent decades has been raised to the apogee of self-conscious banality in Woody Allen's so-called serious films, which I find unwatchable.
We celebrate authenticity because it presents itself as organic and natural rather than synthetic or contrived, but the truth is everything is contrived. The real question is not whether something is natural or contrived, organic or synthetic, but whether it is synthesized from materials that are real, i.e., true and good, or materials that are delusional, I.e., dream stuff when the dreams are wish fulfillments for safety, recognition, or power. The honor system I critique above was built from a recognition need fantasy.
The challenge posed to the buffered self is the use of his freedom to become more deeply real, i.e., true and good. This is a work, and as such a synthesizing or integrating project. Everything depends on humans figuring out what this means for him or herself, and eventually in the developing some collective wisdom about it, becuase right now there is precious little of it.
The challenge of freedom has been at the center of any serious anthropology from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche through Sartre and the contemporary postmodernists. I think of thee people as first wave if by that we mean the people who first accepted that the new reality was that little or nothing is given to us from a culture that has become come disembedded, disenchanted, and deeply secular except the opportunity for the exercise of freedom. First wavers were struggling to define what kind of meaning and purpose are left for human beings in a world where the framework of "given" meanings handed down from the tradition has collapsed.
They didn't cause its collapse; they simply accepted it as their contemporary condition and as the context for the discovery and exercise of levels of human freedom that were not possible earlier. But while freedom is something to be celebrated, it comes with a cost, and a part of that cost is how free humans have become cut off from one another. There are no given connections--even in families anymore. Connections have to be worked for, developed, achieved; they can never be taken for granted.
So liberation from repressive social constraints has little to do with freedom correctly understood. The constraints have fallen, and the challenge is no longer to break down what no longer constrains, but to choose to develop new constraints, new disciplines, that will function to help grow and give shape to a soul life and community life that without constraints sprawls wildly. The challenge is to find forms help individuals to work together to help one another to develop an integrated soul life. Some of those forms are to be retrieved from the tradition, but there's a difference between retrieval and wanting to go premodern-native, which is the conservative mistake, but also the liberal mistake when going native means joining an ashram, or returning, hippie-like, to nature, or moving to the Third World where one can still lose oneself in not-yet disembedded cultures where the buffered self and disconnection is less common.
Retrieval requires first the acceptance of one's alienation as a kind of wandering in the wilderness. It requires the acceptance of having become a disconnected or buffered self and accepts the discomfort that comes with that as transitional, perhaps a purgative precondition, a dark night of senses and soul, for moving on to whatever's next. It then requires accepting the fundamental task to choose to connect in a world where connections are no longer given or easy, where connections must be worked for with people who very often have little natural capability for real connection. It requires seeking a connection with people who in fact we might perceive as our enemies. Integration is the strategy; retrieval is one of many tactics such a strategy draws upon.
There's very little established wisdom about how to effect this work, but I'm convinced that's what we're supposed to be doing now. I think the 20th Century was the period during which the last remnants of the old thing--the customary traditional thing in which the honor systme played a prominent role--where torn down, and the 21st Century marks the beginning of the work to build something new.
