Honor: A History

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.

James Bowman is one of the best writers in conservadom. I have followed his work for years at The American Spectator and The New Criterion so there was no question that, sooner or later, I would pick up this book. The text is an outstanding piece of social and cultural history which makes it fairly unique among current titles. Bowman's erudite discussion of a lost value among men is both compelling and educational. Rare is the conservative who possesses anywhere near the level of literary knowledge that this author does. His exploration of honor throughout time includes the elucidation of so many classics and great minds that you will feel as if you are taking a western civilization course as you flip the pages; although, nowadays, such classes are verboten. This explains why the concept of honor as well, in both its manly and patriotic sense, has become beyond the pale. No better explanation for our cultural decline can be proffered. As honor goes so does humanity.

The facile assumption that others think as we do is only true in part and gets us into conflicts which blow up in our faces. I recommend Bowman's book because it opens up a vital subject which has become unknown territory in the West. It is not so in the rest of the world, which in its turn shows the same incomprehension of our 'Post-Honor' culture.The earlier part of the book is a tour de force examining the European history of honor culture, using literature and film extensively to make the points. Sceptical as I am of the use of fiction to research fact I found this readable, illuminating and responsible in execution. Two-for-the-price-of-one in fact, because I think I learned about the literature as well as the sociology.When, at the end of the book, Bowman suggests what we should be doing about the dissonance between Western and Eastern (OK, Muslim) ideas of honor, we are in very different territory. It is nearly always thus. Brilliant analysts and critics become mere humans when they tell us how to put the world to rights. One is entitled to conclude that Bowman is to the right of the political average. But is the political average right to be so left? Personally I like a healthy dose of debunking of prevalent thought. Good on you, Bowman. But feminists of a sensitive disposition should not read this book.Now for my own theory. Imagine you live in a country where it is absolutely expected that you will supplement your modest salary by collecting bribes. Where you are held in contempt if you do not use your position to provide jobs for your family and friends in preference to the most able. Someone wrongs your family, but you know that the police can be bought and are a lot less effective even than in Western countries. Your standing depends on getting justice despite the state's inability to provide it. Would you and I, in that situation, not have the inclination to take the law into our own hands to preserve the honor on which life can depend? Would we not do our utmost, if male, to project an image of masculine aggressiveness and live up to that when necessary in order to prevent worse?Bowman touches only briefly on this aspect of honor culture, its role as a survival and coping mechanism. It's worth a chapter.At the moment I don't know of a better book on the subject. It should certainly make you think. And that is surely the most important role of a book.

James Bowman has produced not only a brave and eloquent challenge to the dictatorship (terrorism?) of PC culture, but a work which offers practical, step-by-step solutions to the socio-psychological impasse caused by runaway political correctness. His focus is mainly on the twentieth century, and how First World War carnage, fetishized egalitarianism and radical feminism have upset the delicate balance achieved during the Victorian Age and earlier between Christianity and honour culture, leading to the psychotic free-for-all known as Western democracy or globalisation. This in turn is predicated on vacuous celebrity, the apotheosis of victimhood and outrageous ideas about masculine and feminine demeanour - abhorrent to those from traditional societies (and doubtless our own ancestors, could they but see us now).This may sound like a recipe for a long, tiresome disquisition, but Bowman's brilliant anatomy is anything but. Each beautifully crafted sentence punches well above its weight thanks to the critical and diagnostic skills of this extraordinary author, parsing historical events and cultural icons in a manner rarely seen in the humanities (a worthy successor to Gibbon, Burckhardt and Huizinga). His canvas is exceptionally broad, embracing both Walter Scott and 'The Sopranos' (blockbusters that updated honour to cater for the needs and preoccupations of their respective audiences), and skewering the essential message behind Mallory's Arthur as neatly as the Korean debacle of General MacArthur. I guarantee you will never look at a work of literature or a historical event in quite the same light after reading this book.Martin Luther supposedly nailed his famous challenge to Roman Catholicism onto the door of Wittenberg castle church on October 31 1517. Scholarly consensus now has him mailing it to the Archbishop of Mainz, after which a more public act (involving nails?) led to the 95 Theses being printed, translated and distributed across Europe, sparking off the Protestant Reformation. We badly need an abridged version of Bowman's "History" to save us from the many-headed hydra busy dismantling the great achievements of Western civilisation in the name of Robespierre's 'Liberté, egalité, fraternité' and Wollstonecraft's 'Vindication' (published two years later, 1792). The self-obsession, mendacity, carnality and cupidity of our new (gynocratic) despots, so evident in the media, entertainment industry, academia and politics (religion has just left the starting gate) outdoes the wildest excesses of the Catholic Church in its darkest days. But this dazzling and cleverly argued book charts a possible way forward: a political, social and philosophical reformation as essential now as the religious one was in 1517. The spear-wielding figure on the cover (Aphrodite/Astarte of the Siphnian Treasury, Delphi), goddess of the dawn as well as love, beauty, pleasure and procreation, would surely approve.

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