Customer Reviews

Honor: A History

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Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor's at the stake.

- Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 4

Shakespeare's words regarding the nature of honor are a common refrain in James Bowman's work, and it was an understanding of the same that motivated me to read this monograph. I had hoped to take away an understanding of why something so insubstantial as honor was so prized throughout history over more tangible things, including money, land and even life itself. "Honor: A History" answered this question well in excess of my expectations, and I am pleased to say that one can expect to take away much more than a simple answer to a simple query.

I had, in fact, asked my question largely upon false premises, as my understanding of honor was a postmodern and watered-down appreciation. Fortunately, in the first section of the book, Mr. Bowman defines honor, at its simplest, to be thought of well amongst one's peers. In its most primitive form, honor means that a slight will not go unchallenged. However, as cultures do vary, the notions of honor are not static across all societies, and the notion of "cultural honor" is explored in depth, with particular focus on how Christianity shaped the cultural honor of the West.

The next section keeps its focus on the West and explores the decline and fall of Western cultural honor. The beginning of the end of Western honor is placed in 1914, at the beginning of the Great War, and the decline reaches its terminus at 1975, with the end of the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. Three central causes, namely, modernized warfare, psychotherapy and feminism, which Mr. Bowman identifies as the primary factors in the waning of Western cultural honor, are tracked throughout these fifty years, and the consequences of the same are detailed though major historical events.

The third and final section looks at the West as a post-honor society under a microscope. A number of post-honor phenomena are explored, including honor-guilt, honor-nostalgia and a fascinating postulate of celebrity as a "pale after-image of cultural honor". Mr. Bowman then sums up his work by tackling the most fundamental question raised by all of the foregoing: can honor be revived, and if so, why do we need honor?

My largest criticism of this book is that its focus on Western society is a bit too narrow. To my best knowledge, no one has addressed the concept of honor as well as Mr. Bowman to date. The repeated use of late-20th/early-21st pop culture references to, inter alia, "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City" cement this work temporally, when it really does deserve to be read long after such HBO television series are largely forgotten. As a writer for National Review, Mr. Bowman should be expected to approach his work from a modern day perspective, but it would be a shame if his book, like the notion of honor itself, was ever thought to become outdated.

Harvey Mansfield's recent book "Manliness" caused quite a stir when it was published early this year. At the risk of overly simplifying his erudite work, "Manliness" is a defense of what he calls "assertiveness." Dr. Mansfield gives only a tepid defense of such behavior, believing it to be fifty percent positive and fifty percent negative.

Personally, I would describe "assertiveness" as a defining element of being a male, common to almost all species and expressed in violence and sexual adventurism. Male behavior also has an unfortunate bully mentality, a tendency to subordinate itself to superior force and assert one's power over lesser beings. Manliness, to my mind, is the concept which regulates such behavior and directs it into socially useful channels, and encourages one to defend one's concept of Right against overwhelming odds. A bar fight is male behavior, the Normandy invasion was manly behavior.

Mr. Bowman would consider my concept of "manliness" to be a peculiarly Western and archaic version of honor. It is hard to compare the two books: Dr. Mansfield's book is a work of philosophy, while Mr. Bowman's book is a history of a social concept (and also an enthralling cultural history of the twentieth century, as viewed through the prism of that concept).

Mr. Bowman's book, however, is by far the more important of the two. First, because, by definition, "assertiveness" doesn't need anyone to defend it. It is still the most important quality to have to succeed in business, and, increasingly, in other professions. Even its avowed enemies fall prey to it, as witness Gloria Steinem's pathetic memoir of the short period of time when she was the main squeeze of an alpha male. Honor, on the other hand, has no defenders. Abandoning honor has liberated men from their obligations and the main beneficiary of the concept - civilization - has no defenders.

Another reason why Mr. Bowman's book is far more important is because he addresses perhaps THE fundamental difference between the West and radical Islam. The first section of the book - where Mr. Bowman discusses primitive honor systems, which have been largely maintained in Muslim countries - and the last - the "where do we go from here?" - section should be required reading for any soldier, politician, commentator or critic interested in the War on Terror.

After the first section, Mr. Bowman takes us on a tour of the evolution of honor in the Western world from something similar to the primitive form common in most of the world to that fragile, but refined concept the Victorians bequeathed to us. From there, Mr Bowman takes us through the decline of the concept through the last hundred years.

Anyone familiar with Mr. Bowman's sparkling book and film reviews and media criticism for such publications as TLS, the New York Sun, the American Spectator and New Criterion will know what an engaging tour guide he is. He touches on everything from Shakespeare to comic books with confidence and insight. One example: I have been a great fan of the unfairly forgotten novelist James Gould Cozzens for many years, but it wasn't until I read "Honor" that I realized that in Cozzens' works about professionals maturing in their professions, his concept of maturity involved leaving behind one's idealistic sense of honor and learning to compromise with real life, so in "Men and Brethren," an Episcopal priest facilitates an abortion for a married parishioner who has conceived a child with her lover and in "The Just and the Unjust," a young prosecutor overcomes his scruples to make a deal with the local political boss. It takes an acute critic like Mr. Bowman to make you see old things in a whole new light.

Mr. Bowman also encourages one to look at the concept of honor anew. One revelation for me was the importance of reputation for the maintenance of an honor system. As a child of post-war America, I had always assumed that the personal code of honor of the sort Humphrey Bogart proclaimed in Casablanca was at least equal to and perhaps superior to the earlier form, but "Honor" shows why this is not so. Of course, anyone outside of an "honor group" in modern America has to rely on a personal code of honor because society itself no longer respects honor, but that is really the central problem.

Hard as I looked for errors, I only found a few matters on which I would interpret things differently.
1. George MacDonald Fraser, I would argue, is not an "honor debunker," because when he writes about someone who really is a man of honor, like Rajah Brooke in "Flashman's Lady," he pulls out all stops. Fraser instead is concerned with false reputations for honor, although "honor groups" often find such reputations important (see John Ford's "Fort Apache").
2. Although Mr. Bowman does a splendid job of debunking that old canard that the firing of Douglas MacArthur preserved the concept of civilian control over the military, there is also a strong Constitutional argument that MacArthur (as well as the Admirals in the so-called "Admiral's Revolt" of a few years earlier) was right to respond honestly to Congressional inquiries and that the firing of both MacArthur and the Admirals led to an emasculated Joint Staff in the 1960s who sat on their hands while the Johnson Administration deliberately lied to Congress.
3. Jimmy Stewart's character may have been a poor gunslinger in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence," but that didn't make his honor an illusion. He did after all stand up to Valence and by printing the legend and not the fact, the newspapers preserved that honor since John Wayne killed Valence from ambush, which is not an honorable act.
4. Many of the subjects in the book "Stolen Valor" may have been trying to claim victimhood, but I suspect that a lot more of them were ashamed of having missed serving and were trying to differentiate themselves from others of their generation who had no qualms about their evasions.

Mr. Bowman acknowledges that the literature on honor is vast and that his book is only the first stab at the subject. Nevertheless, Mr. Bowman has read widely, wisely and well. Although his command of the literature is astounding, there are a number of old friends I would have liked his insights on, such as Anthony Powell's Dance sequence (with its juxtaposition of old honor and no honor), the old Sgt. Rock comics (in which an infantry company served as a classic "honor group"), the movie "Falling Down" (which pitted two men with similar codes of honor against each other), J.P. Marquand's "Melville Goodwin, USA" (which is a corrective of sorts to his pre-war anti-honor writings) and the movie "Hamburger Hill" (where U.S. soldiers refuse to accept the victimhood offered to them by the media).

Mr. Bowman also touches on subjects which could be books in themselves: how luck and acquisition of wealth have replaced trial by combat, how certain minorities have retained their codes of honor not just at the street gang level, but at the level of their elites, how honor may have led German officers to attempt to assasinate Hitler but also ensured their failure to do so, how the development of a personal sense of honor has led to a fracturing of society's concept of what honor means (many people I know prefer Ashley Wilkes' code of honor to Rhett Butler's) and how the loss of Anglo Saxon dominance of society may have been caused by their willingness to abandon the concept of honor.

Mr. Bowman remains "deeply pessimistic" about the possibilitry of a resoration of honor in society, even as he demonstrates that the concept is necessary for survival. He might be overly optimistic about that. The media is willing to sacrifice its reputation for truth and impartiality in its opposition to our efforts in the Middle East. Recently, The New York Times rewrote the last letter home from a dead GI so that instead of sounding proud of his service and accomplishments, the Times made him seem disillusioned and discouraged. To call this monstrous and ghoulish attempt to steal a dead man's honor "dishonorable" is to lend a dignity to the act it does not deserve. If the opponents of official policy succeed in ending our efforts to create a democratic and tolerant form of Islam, then as Islam becomes the majority in Europe over the next fifty years or so, the West will find a restoration of the honor code that it has shunned for the last 90 years, but it will not be an honor system we have seen since the early Renaissance.

UPDATE DECEMBER 31, 2011; A MIA CULPA: ONE POINT ON WHICH I DISAGREED WITH MR. BOWMAN WAS HIS DATING OF THE TIME THAT THE NOTION OF HONOR DISAPPEARED IN THE UNITED STATES. HE DATES IT FROM WORLD WAR I, BUT I ALWAYS CONSIDERED IT AS HAVING LASTED THROUGH WORLD WAR II. HOWEVER, AFTER A RATHER LONG REFLECTION, I CAN SEE HIS POINT AND CAN OFFER A CONCRETE EXAMPLE. NATIONS AND CULTURES, LIKE FISH, ROT FROM THE HEAD DOWN, SO YOU SHOULD EXPECT TO SEE THE CORRUPTION OF THE CONCEPT OF HONOR TO OCCUR FIRST AMONG THE ELITES OF SOCIETY AND YOU FIND IT IF YOU GO TO THE UNIVERSITY CLUB ON FIFTH AVENUE IN NEW YORK, ONE OF THOSE EXCLUSIVE OLD CLUBS FREQUENTED BY THE RICH AND POWERFUL (AND THE ONE YOU USUALLY SEE IN THE OLD NEW YORKER CARTOONS, WITH THE OLD DUFFERS IN THEIR EASY CHAIRS A HALF STORY ABOVE A BUSY SIDEWALK IN A COMMERCIAL PART OF TOWN). YOU WILL FIND ON ONE SIDE OF THE LOBBY A LIST OF THE CLUB MEMBERS WHO WERE KILLED IN WORLD WAR I, NUMBERING OVER 20 NAMES. ON THE OTHER WALL, YOU WILL SEE THE MEMBERS WHO DIED IN WORLD WAR II. THERE ARE ONLY EIGHT. IF YOU CONSIDER THAT THE US MILITARY WAS ENGAGED AGAINST THE ENEMY ABOUT THREE TIMES AS LONG, HAD ABOUT FOUR TIMES THE CASUALTIES AND TEN TIMES THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE ENGAGED IN WORLD WAR II THAN IN THE FIRST WAR (WHICH SHOULD HAVE EXTRAPOLATED TO A DEATH ROLL OF AS MUCH AS 200 MEMBERS AND NO LESS THAN 60, DEPENDING ON THE MEASURE YOU CHOOSE), IT BECOMES VERY CLEAR THAT THE ELITES OF AMERICAN SOCIETY HAD BEGUN TO CHECK OUT OF THE DUTY TO DEFEND THE COUNTRY SOME TIME BEFORE THE REST OF THE PUBLIC DID. ONCE AGAIN, YOU CAN DISAGREE WITH MR. BOWMAN, BUT IF YOU DO, YOU WILL RARELY BE CORRECT.

The book is very readable and I learned a lot from it. The concept of honor has indeed become almost alien to those of us in the West. But it is a large part of what fuels the men and women of those societies we find ourselves at odds with in the Middle East. We must try to understand the honor which motivates our enemies and our potential allies, and it should be required reading for the policy-makers and major writers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Bowman points out that there are still honor cultures in America, such as in some ethnic groups and in the military. His own accounts of his later guilt from avoiding service in Vietnam are especially poignant now. Iraq has resurrected the ghost of Vietnam, both for those who served, and those who did not.

I really appreciated the way the author disentangled the concept of honor from Islam. Many of those strictures we find harshest in Islamic society actually predate Islam. However, as Bowman points out, Muslim countries do not have a history of divorcing their culture from their religion.

The reasons for this are simple. Jesus stood against much of the honor code of the Middle East. "He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword," and "Turn the other cheek," were invitations to step off the honor-driven cycle of persecution returned with persecution, and violence returned with violence. We Christians have largely not lived up to these ideals, but they have influenced the history of Western law and our political philosophy nonetheless. There is a built-in distrust of honor for honor's sake in our society. Part of this is due to disillusionment with past wars, and part is due to our Christian philosophical heritage.

Bowman posits a return to honor, so that we can effectively interact with the rest of the globe. I am not so sure I buy into this. I take Christ's invitation seriously, and think that it probably offers the only way out of the cycle of violence in our world. But is unlikely that this utopia will come about short of another or a final divine intervention. For now, we must at least educate ourselves and understand honor as a motivator for friend and foe alike.

I've been reading Harvey Mansfield's "Manliness" at the same time as this book and find they are a good complement to each other, though I find Bowman's much more interesting, readable, and important of the two. The cultural and anecdotal references Bowman uses to highlight and illustrate his analysis are effectively employed and seldom over-used. The book never came close to being tedious. Just a terrific read all round.

A most interesting work which looks at honor over history and over the entire world. His pictures of honor change as you use these glasses to observe the situations.

It is interesting that you don't hear much about honor these days in the Western World. Perhaps the concept has been replaced by a rule of law, but with an underlying feeling that it is OK to break the law in many instances - indeed it is probably impossible to go through life without breaking a few laws - speeding comes to mind, as does the prolific use of drugs - then there are all those laws that you don't even know about (it's illegal to lead an animal here after you've been drinking).

Certainly the feelings about honor were different in places like the American west (at least in the movies). And the apparent differences in the Islamic world, Japan (in their own view and in our Western view especially during World War II), and other cultures.

This is a most interesting book that covers an interesting subject very well.

James Bowman narrates with panache the history of honor. Bowman makes a distinction between what he calls the reflexive honor and the cultural honor. The reflexive honor is all about not losing face. Think for instance about a child involved in a snowball fight who will have to hit back to avoid a public humiliation. The reflexive honor prospers around the world to this day because it reflects an enduring trait of the human condition. The cultural honor is made up of the traditions, stories, and habits of thought of a particular society about among other things the proper and improper use of violence. In contrast to the reflexive honor, the cultural honor fell in disrepute in the West after the slaughter of WWI. Pacifism, feminism, and psychotherapy have each played an important role in downgrading the western cultural honor in the last eighty years.

Despite this public demotion, cultural honor is still alive in the background. Honor has been built in the DNA of the U.S. armed forces since the birth of the country. Some university campuses still feel very strongly about the enforcement of honor systems and honor codes. Similarly, criminal gangs need honor for their survival and prosperity. The current war on terrorism can be construed as a legitimate reaction to an honor sullied on 9/11. More generally, respect, self-esteem, pride, and credibility, which are cherished concepts in the U.S. society, could be considered the current heirs to the derided honor culture in the West.

Bowman draws the attention of his readers to the fact that the honor culture has not yet experienced the same transformation in the Islamic world. As Bowman correctly points out, the honor culture was already in existence before the conversion of these lands to Islam in the seventh century C.E. Unlike the West under the influence of both Judaism and Christianity, the Islamic world generally does not make a clear distinction between the spiritual and temporal realms. Turkey has been a major exception to this rule thanks to the legacy of Mustapha Kemal Atatürk.

At the end of his book, Bowman pleads for the rehabilitation of the cultural honor in the West to guarantee the continuity of its values in the aftermath of 9/11. Bowman identifies four major obstacles to that revival: the defeat of the western hatred and fear of war, the social acceptance of inequalities besides pecuniary ones, the rupture with the celebrity-culture death star, and the revitalization of the political, social, and intellectual assumptions about the differences between the sexes in the U.S.

Bowman sounds too pessimistic about the future of the honor culture in the West. Cultural honor is like a chameleon that can change its hues to adapt to its environment. Western democracies are inclined to conduct peaceful foreign policies and go to war in self-defense as Michael Mandelbaum reminds his readers in "The Ideas that Conquered the World." Recently, Israel went to war with Hezbollah in self-defense and to reestablish its honor and power of deterrence that had been sullied repeatedly before the unprovoked incursion of Hezbollah into Israel in July 2006.

HONOR could've been featured in our History Shelf area, but is reviewed here for its broader interest to not just history buffs but fans of philosophy and social science. James Bowman, who's written for Wall Street Journal and is currently a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Institute, describes how the Western honor system is manifested in our society, how it always differed from concepts in other parts of the world, and where its roots lie. From early records of civilization and ideas of honor to hoe the ideal evolved through the centuries up to modern times, Bowman's document covers the evolution of values and its tests in modern times.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Early in his book Bowman, in his discussion of Malory and the legend of Camelot notes: "Honor cultures always tend to be nostalgic about the past...since honor's tendency to venerate the authoritative and traditional naturally creates built in dissatisfaction with the present." (p. 44) He is warning us against the rose colored glasses of nostalgia distorting our vision, presenting an idealized and inaccurate impression of times past. Yet this is precisely what he presents - a tribute to the noble gentlemen of the Victorian era, and a dark vision of the "honorless" world in which we live now.

There was much to admire in Victorian conceptions of honor. But there was also much to condemn. It was for example not honorable to appear smarter than your peers, much less your superiors. The effect in the British military was to discourage intellectual pursuits, including the study of weapons, tactics or strategy. Orders were to be followed without discussion no matter how absurd. One dramatic example is the "Camperdown disaster", where the Mediterranean flagship sank because no one on the bridge would tell the admiral that his orders would result in collision with another battleship. This dark side of Victorian honor was paid for in blood during the First World War.

Next we are to believe that the honor culture was destroyed under the onslaught of psychiatry, feminism, and the brutality of modern warfare. So therefore the history of the last couple of generations is without honor. He uses the American response to 9/11 as an example, noting that there were people who counseled moderation & consideration of how US policies may have contributed to the attack. I'm not sure where Mr. Bowman was living at the time, but those of us living in the United States will remember those few voices even hinting at moderation being roundly condemned in the media and the general populace. Not since Pearl Harbor had American citizens been more united. There was a nearly universal demand for retribution, in exactly the sense Bowman describes as "reflexive honor."

The Anglo-Saxon world did not lose its culture of honor, as Mr. Bowman claims. But the culture did evolve over time, as it always has done. He points out that the word honor is rarely used anymore. While this is true, consider the word hero. The word is indiscriminately applied to soldiers, police and firefighters - those the civilian population depend on for protection. Hero once meant someone who took an exceptionally brave action, falling on a grenade to save the rest of the squad for example. Now hero means those with professions involving risk to themselves to protect the nation - in other words men and women of honor.

Mr. Bowman started out with the belief in the superiority of the Victorian past, the inferiority of the English-speaking world today, and carefully picked out examples of people, literature, film and behavior to support his point of view. Another author could have as easily done the opposite, "proving" that the Victorians were hypocrites and hence dishonorable, while the present time was the most honorable of all.

What frustrates this writer about Bowman is that despite these flaws he has some valuable things to say. It is worthwhile to look back into the past, and perhaps discover lessons of value to current times. He argues that the attack on the twin towers could be seen as a logical outcome of Americas limited or entirely lacking response to the series of terrorist attacks from the Carter presidency up to the day before 9/11. Yet it is not difficult to find historic parallels. In Victorian times for example contradictory, passive and penny pinching policies allowed the rise of the Mahdi in the Sudan, eventually terminating in a very costly war. Firm countermeasures at the start of the uprising could have saved thousands of lives at a fraction of the cost to the treasury.

This book will be a pleasant read for those ready to believe in the superiority of the Victorians, and the decay and corruption of present times. Those readers seeking a balanced and historically based book on the evolution of honor should consider Paul Robinson's: Military Honour and the Conduct of War: From Ancient Greece to Iraq.

This is a look at the concept of honor throughout history, showing the difference between the way the concept of honor has developed on the Western nations verses other places in the world. The author makes a compelling case that we should reverse our "aniti-honor" bent, and try to reconcile the notion of honor with our modernistic society, especially if we are to survive in any sort of clash against a purely honor based society.

One thing I think the author does miss, a bit, is the specific underpinning of the Jewish and Christian concepts of honor, that honor is bad if it accrues to the person. Honor is only honorable if it is for something greater than you.

This is a very intriguing thesis that cuts to the heart of much of the conflict today. If the route to the solution of our problems in the Middle East is an understanding of the source of the problem in the first place, then this book takes dead aim at that problem.
What an interesting expression! "...both encounter a sort of cultural phantom limb syndrome." (p. 35) I love it!
The tie in to the crusades is very interesting along with the historical recognition of when women first began being treated differently than they are still treated in the rest of the world.
When did the middle class begin to think of themselves as having a version of aristocratic honor? I would hate to think few read Scott anymore but I certainly remember thinking highly of Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward, the movie Rob Roy, the opera Lucia. Did I grow up with that sense of honor? And is this the reverse of other? (P. 97) The quote "the greatest dullness of the greatest number" is certainly one I will add to the collection I keep in RAM! While used with respect to the youth in between WWI and WWII it certainly seems useful now. Modern warfare, psychotherapy, and feminism collectively destroy honor.
This is one of the best books I have read in years.