Honor

The Americans do, in fact, have a peculiar notion of honour and it’s not surprising that Tocqueville was sharp enough to notice it. It’s pretty easy to realise when a Japanese person is talking about “face”, that you really don’t understand what he’s talking about, but if you pay close attention to the kinds of sentences that Americans construct around the word “honor”, you end up concluding (or at least I do) that I really don’t understand what they’re talking about.

Honor is the inexpensive commodity that stands in place of substantial virtuous acts. This is, to be sure, in no way a uniquely American thing, and while I can’t tell if in Tocqueville’s era America possessed some unique conception of honor, it sure doesn’t now.

For example, let’s consider Queen Elisabeth’s role as “fount of honour”. Knighthoods are a very inexpensive commodity. They cost the British state essentially nothing, and yet it is a great honor to get one. And what purpose do they serve? When Hong Kong was still a British colony, they served to keep the elite in Hong Kong from forming a nucleus of opposition to the colony’s basically undemocratic form of government. The cheap commodity – knighthoods – is substituted for the expensive one – democratic reforms.

In America, medals and awards serve to keep the middle and lower ranks in the military from thinking about why they’ve been sent off on dumb wars by a government that cuts their veteran’s benefits. Soldiers are repeatedly showered with praise for their honorable service, and indoctrinated to consider the awards they receive a great and desirable reward. A cheap commodity – honor – is once again substituted for the expensive one – consent.

This is in great contrast to, for example, WWII. American vets returning from that war tended to treat their medals and ranks as something of no importance in civilian life, but they were quite proud of the actual cause they fought in, not in simply having fought honorably. And, the state rewarded them with real, costly benefits – home loans, student loans, and medical care and it made some effort to ensure that they wouldn’t have to worry about their jobs. WWII is almost never cast as a matter of honor, but as a cause that had to be fought to prevent something awful.

Feudal honor purchased the service of vassals on the cheap. Paying wages would have cost more. That America’s honor has become the main reason to fight in Iraq suggests that the war’s supports are trying to buy something that ought to be very expensive for a bag of trinkets.

Scott: yes I get that, but the use of “honor” as a verb is much more common in American writing than “to honour” is in Brtish English; that’s the sense I don’t understand.

the simple and general opinions of men

ahh, Alexis, Alexis. We cut you plenty of slack for living in the 18th century.

4. Honor is the inexpensive commodity that stands in place of substantial virtuous acts… Knighthoods are a very inexpensive commodity. They cost the British state essentially nothing, and yet it is a great honor to get one. And what purpose do they serve?

This instrumentalist argument only works from the outside: it states that honor is valueless because the author does not participate in the system of value. The problem with all such ‘false consciousness’ arguments is that they presuppose some more true system of values (here “virtue”), often based on maximising self-interest (itself a complex, value-laden proposition). It’s true that Governments have often been instrumentalist in their use of honor, but if they aren’t then honor can be very expensive indeed.

…the state rewarded them with real, costly benefits

which were repaid in spades, in the same coin, according to principles that were well understood, by a government that could afford to do so.

America’s honor has become the main reason to fight in Iraq

Wow. Maybe we will see some progress, then.

Speaking of Nixon I think it’s actually Nixon’s famous “madman theory” that Shrub has been trying to implement. Unfortunately it’s been scaring our friends a lot more than it has our enemies…

The way I see it, ‘honor’ is just a set of absolute rules you’re supposed to follow unconditionally, like a robot.

“Standing by one’s friends and defying one’s enemies, whatever the price” may or may not be among these principle; instead it might be, for example, something like: defending the weak whatever the price, or don’t ever go against the family, or something.

Needless to say, it’s always better to find the best course of action by analyzing, thinking rationally.

During the 1973 Yom Kippur War Richard Nixon ordered the military resupply of Israel in its hour of need not because he was sympathetic to Jews – he wasn’t – but because he understood that the U.S. could not be seen to let a client down. Nine months later, he was accorded a ticker-tape parade through the streets of Cairo.

And about three months after that, he exited the White House by helicopter, flying over a banner hoist by Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst.

I think Marshall Salins had it right when he likened our situation to that of the Athenians in the heyday of their empire. We don’t really have the resources to control so large a region directly since our military strength is in the air and on the sea. We’re actually quite weak on the ground, and like the Athenians we have to rely on our ability to inflict terrible damage (aka shock and awe) to maintain a sphere of influence beyond our real power. To that end, a reputation for recklessness is more to the point than any consideration of “honor.”

If the U.S. faces a terror problem today, it is not because it is an obnoxious hyperpower or a rapacious globalizer, but because of the deep suspicion that it is not too ashamed to betray its friends or cut a deal with its enemies – in short, that it lacks a sense of honor.

That might be the single dumbest thing I’ve read this week. The reason that there is terrorism is because we are too likely to make a deal? To the extent that causality exists isn’t this, like, 180 degrees from the reality?

Surely this is the place to reference Nisbett and Cohen’s well known paper on Southern Honor culture, according to which cultures which put a high premium on honor – Dixie, for Nisbett and Cohen – exhibit, among other things, much higher rates of homicide than those that don’t. Cohen and Nisbett wrote out scenarios involving insults, aggressive behavior, and respect making behaviors – such as trying to increase the distance between oneself and others in walking – and used them to compare Northerners and Southerners – and found that Southerner males are much more likely to rank high on those dimensions that define keeping up an honorable appearance by means of aggressive behavior. The aggressive behavior, however, was transformed, in the minds of men imbued with the honor code, into defensive aggressive behavior – even if an objective observer would find it simply offensive.

I would guess that you could map the honor code population and the population that supports the President’s vanity war and you would get a nice, snug fit. And in fact there is an academic paper on that topic: Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s The Ethic of Honor in National Crises: The Civil War, Vietnam, Iraq, and the Southern Factor in the Journal of the Historical Society, Winter, 2005.

Here’s a nice quote: “From the Quasi-War with France to the Vietnam War,” argues David Hackett Fischer, both coastal and inland Southerners
“strongly supported every American war no matter what it was about or who it was against. Southern ideas of honor and the warrior ethic combined to create regional war fevers . . . in 1798,
1812, 1846, 1861, 1898, 1917, 1941, 1950 and 1965.” It is now feasible to add 2001 and 2002.” Wyatt-Brown also points out that the presidents who have led us into recent wars have all been Southerners. Or to put this in plain english: The rednecks are running the asylum.

20: Indeed, I often have the impression that American honor means nemo me impune lacessit. Corollary: to people who believe this, taking some small and petty country and hurling it against the wall with great force (to paraphrase Michael Ledeen) is an honorable act when its rulers or people can be construed in some way as having insulted us.

“Honor” is also a useful shorthand to denote titles in mass-market military history publishing.

I’m not denying that there may be an interior, affective and moral honor experienced by individual soldiers and officers, but scaling it up to the level of the nation (and nationalistic discourse) is a serious error.

The habitus of military personnel (both physical and interior emotions) is invoked by the media to deflect criticism of military policy on macro-political, strategic, and economic grounds.

When the media refer to the honor, struggle, sacrifice, etc. of our soldiers and their personal experience, to avoid discussing these larger political issues, it shows that the war is now indefensible in abstract terms.