James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. A native of Kane, Pa., he has lived in Old Town since 1991. His 2006 book "Honor: A History" argues that understanding the concept of honor is indispensable when attempting to understand the culture of the Islamic world.
In the book, you say that the breakdown of traditional honor culture in the West contributed to the attacks on 9-11, and you call for a revival of cultural honor. What has been the response to the book so far?
My point was that breakdown has left us very ill-equipped to understand a primitive honor culture like that out of which the 9-11 attackers and others, including the insurgents in Iraq today, have sprung. It's important to understand, however, that the Western honor culture, when we had one, was very different from that of the suicide bombers. I call my book "Honor: A History" because it's only in the West that honor has a history, having been transformed from something not unlike the Islamic honor culture by pressure from Christianity. That Western — and especially Anglo-American idea — of gentlemanliness is probably unrecapturable now. But I am encouraged by the amount of interest there has been in the book since it came out. It suggests to me that I am not alone in thinking that there is something missing from our culture that we ought to make an effort to get back.
In the introduction, you write: “On the left, failure to avoid conflict is taken as ipso facto evidence of political and diplomatic failure.” After Vietnam, you write, “honor was reserved for the draft avoider and evader, shame for the dutiful draftee or volunteer solider.” What do you think is the future of the American left?
I think that the future of the left will vary inversely with that of our vestigial honor culture. Where the honor culture revives, the left will be weakened; where the honor culture is further eroded, the left will be strengthened. Up until now, the pacifist left has been terrifically successful, but within a fairly narrow band of the population. It is dominant in academic life and the media and reaches out from there to social elites and those who aspire to join them. This cultural dominance has made inroads into the simple patriotism of the majority and may eventually reduce it to a minority if there is not more of an intellectual counter-movement on the right than there seems to be at the moment.
You mention a concept of “tyranny of the face” as part of an honor culture that is increasingly dying out in western civilization. Yet “saving face” seems to be predominant in American politics. Why do you think this is the case?
Saving face is predominant in all politics. It’s only a utopian superstition that it could be otherwise and that politicians could be taught to adopt a therapeutic openness about their doubts, fears and failures instead of the kind of self-confidence that even the left still expects in a leader. All this is as a consequence of what I call in the book “reflexive honor,” that is, the kind that seems to be a permanent feature of the human condition. My main concern is with what I call “cultural honor,” which is what has so badly eroded in the West and which practical and reflexive honor needs to back it up. Politicians will always try to “save face”; what they lack today is the language to explain what they are doing to ordinary people, which makes them look merely stubborn. Or stupid.
You write that the American tormentors at Abu Ghraib prison “understood the importance of honor to the Iraqis better than their superiors.” Why do some people have a better understanding than others?
As I mentioned earlier, the pacifist and utopian left commands the cultural heights, including the educational establishment. A sense of honor is something that educators have been busy educating out of people for nearly half a century now. Accordingly, it is likely to be the least-educated people who retain the strongest sense of honor.
You use the HBO series “Sex in the City” a number of times as benchmark for western culture. What is it about that show?
It’s not just that show. I also use “The Sopranos,” “Seinfeld,” and “The Simpsons.” What all of them share is their characters’ confusion — which often has comic results — owing to the breakdown of cultural honor. The gangsters on “The Sopranos” retain a strong cultural memory of that Sicilian honor that motivated their fathers and grandfathers in building up “the family business,” but they are also devotees of the more modern and honor-less consumer society that is constantly playing havoc with their sense of family and tradition. On “Sex and the City” this confusion comes about because the heroines have been educated into a feminist expectation that they should be able to enjoy the same sort of adventurous and varied sexual experiences that men do without quite being able — or always being able — to shed the shameful feeling, which comes from reflexive honor, that they are behaving like sluts when they do.