The one-sided honor war
James Bowman’s Honor: A History is reviewed by Jonathan Rauch in the National Journal:
Boiling Bowman’s richly nuanced 327 pages down to four paragraphs does the book a cruel disservice, but this is journalism, so here goes. Honor, for Bowman’s purposes, means “the good opinion of people who matter to us.” The basic honor code requires men to maintain a reputation for bravery, women a reputation for chastity. If a man is insulted, injured, or disrespected, he must avenge the offense and prove that anyone who messes with him (or “his” women) will be sorry.
The West’s history is rich with traditions of honor, and equally rich with examples of its dangers and follies, among them the duel that killed the most brilliant of America’s Founders. Singularly, however, the West has backed away from honor. Under admonitions from Christianity to turn the other cheek and from the Enlightenment to favor reason over emotion, the West first channeled honor into the arcane rituals of chivalry, then folded it into a code of manly but magnanimous Victorian gentlemanliness — and then, in the 20th century, drove it into disrepute. World War I and the Vietnam War were seen as needless butcheries brought on by archaic obsessions with national honor; feminism and the therapeutic culture taught that a higher manly strength acknowledges weakness.
“Yet we are, in global terms, the odd ones out,” Bowman writes. Outside the West, traditional honor codes remain strong, and nowhere is that more true than in the Muslim world. In the modern Islamic world, few share the West’s view of honor as outdated and unnecessary. “The honor culture of the Islamic world predates its conversion to Islam in the seventh century,” writes Bowman. Islam overlaid itself above honor and, unlike Christianity in the West, did not challenge it. Today’s militant jihadism takes the ethic of honor to extremes, fixating on manly ferocity and glorious vengeance.
Thus, Bowman writes, “America and its allies are engaged in a battle against an Islamist enemy that is the product of one of the world’s great unreconstructed and unreformed honor cultures.” Jihadism wages not only a religious war but a cultural one, aiming to redeem, through deeds of bravery and defiance, the honor of an Islam whose glory has shamefully faded. It aims, further, to uphold a masculine honor code that the West’s decadent, feminizing influence threatens to undermine.
This does seem to explain quite a bit. HT to VDH, who offers a small suggestion on how to respond today:
[T]here is one, one small thing we can do to in the West to help out those in the Middle East: quit blaming ourselves and fantasizing what we might do to be liked. Leaving Iraq won’t solve the problem—no more than did saving the Kuwaitis, the Bosnians, the Kosovars, the Afghans from the Russians, or the Somali Muslims from hunger. Giving the Egyptians $50 billion or the Jordanians and Palestinians billions as well didn’t do much either. Indeed, Hamas now considers widening their war by attacking Americans for withholding our largesse. You see, we have no right not to give Islamists our millions just because they won’t promise not to destroy our ally Israel.
But what would help is simply this: every time a victimized talking head from the Middle East started in on Israel, Bush, Blair, etc. someone could interrupt and politely said, “Sorry, that’s old. No mas. We are tired of the whining. Go get a life.”
Ultimately, of course, if the other fellow is always insisting that we apologize or fight a duel, we have to fight — but it is foolish to do so on his terms.