Honor in our time

Here's an interview Christina Hoff Sommers did with James Bowman about his book "Honor: A History," to which I linked in the previous post. The first thing it reminded me of was how much more comfortable I am raising my sons in the South (well, insofar as Dallas is part of the south, which is a matter of debate, but on the matter of male-female relations, it's definitely more Southern than NYC) as opposed to New York City. One day, when Matthew was only three, Julie was on the playground in Brooklyn with him, and trying to teach him manners, asked him to step aside and let the little girl behind him climb up the slide ahead of him.

"Ladies first," Julie said. She got in return a sneer from the little girl's mother. Typical.

So many of the simple courtesies that made life so gracious and mannerly, even when I was growing up in the 1970s in small-town Louisiana, are now lost to us, or very soon will be. I hate it when small children call me by my first name. I hate it when adults encourage my children to call them by their first name. They can call them "Mrs. Smith" or, as Louisiana kids of my generation were taught (charmingly) to do, "Miss [First Name]," even if they're married. The point is to convey respect to elders. In my town when I was a child, if a kid ever spoke to an adult as if on equal terms, it was considered a shameful thing for that child, and in turn for his parents, who were presumed not to have raised him right. Practicing good manners was considered a matter of personal honor. So much of that seems gone now in our time of egalitarianism.

Anyway, Bowman's talking about something much more profound than mere courtesy, but courtesy, in traditional Southern culture, is inseparable from personal honor. Here's an excerpt from the Bowman interview, but you really should read the whole thing:

Christina Hoff Sommers: You show that the Western concept of honor has lost much force and is becoming obsolete. Can you tell us what you think is the most serious consequence of this ongoing diminishment?

James Bowman: The most serious? That would have to be in the corresponding diminishment of our will to live as a society and a culture. Honor is among other things an assertion of collective identity. We are this and we are not that. We are American and not Islamicist. When we are attacked, it is a counter-assertion by someone else that he is that and not this. He is Islamicist and not American. Honor is the name that used to be given to the will to assert the one identity over the other. If you attack me because I am American, honor dictates that I must counterattack and defeat you because you are Islamicist—since you have shown me that being an Islamicist means being an enemy of America. But nowadays we find something disreputable about this kind of assertion and counter-assertion of identity. It is fundamentally at odds with the multiculturalist orthodoxy of the last 30 years. What we ought to have learned from the terror attacks of September 11th and subsequent events is that multiculturalism has sapped our will to fight back and thus to survive. If American patriotism has to be expressed at the expense of non-Americans, even non-Americans who want to kill us simply for being Americans, we are ashamed to express it.