I’m thinking about the Corey Comperatore story. Would a liberal husband be as quick and eager to sacrifice his life for his family as a conservative? Would a husband be as quick and eager to sacrifice his life for his wife’s if she was a feminist?
I’m not aware of the concept of honor playing a big role in any of liberalism’s important texts.
Rony Guldmann writes in his forthcoming book, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression:
* Ralph Peters observes that the Obama administration was blindsided by the outrage provoked by its decision to release five terrorist prisoners in exchange for the return of one Sergeant Bergdahl, who was reported to have deserted his post in Afghanistan before being captured by a Taliban-allied group. The administration’s surprise, writes Peters, reflected “a fundamental culture clash” betokening the administration’s contempt for Americans “so dumb” as to join the military rather than attending Harvard. Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice praised Bergdahl for serving “with honor and distinction.” But she failed to appreciate that desertion is among the very worst transgressions a soldier can commit against his comrades, and is not at all like “sleeping in on Monday morning and ducking Gender Studies 101.” The problem wasn’t just the strategic wisdom of the prisoner exchange, but the cultural values which it ratified, the imposition of liberal norms to the detriment of military virtue.
* Dissenting in United States v. Virginia, which held unconstitutional the Virginia Military Institute’s policy of excluding women, Justice Scalia wrote that “[i]n an odd sort of way, it is precisely VMI’s attachment to such old-fashioned concepts as manly ‘honor’ that has made it, and the system it represents, the target of those who today succeed in abolishing public single-sex education.”151Writing for the Court, Justice Ginsburg had assumed the posture of the hard-nosed technocrat painstakingly scrutinizing the facts before her, asking how much evidence is required to prove that women cannot adapt to a VMI education. But Justice Scalia’s suggestion is that the narrow terms of Equal Protection review conceal the true stakes. Those who pushed to overturn VMI’s historical traditions were concerned, not to uproot irrational preconceptions about women’s capabilities, but to advance an agenda of social engineering, to discredit an ideal that they despise as archaic and benighted. Manly honor is simply incompatible with a hygienic conception of life. Liberals will chalk up their reservations about “manly honor” to concerns about sexism and gender inequality. But conservative claimants of cultural oppression trace this high-mindedness to a specific cultural ethos. “It is male individuality, exuberance, and aggressiveness,” writes F. Carolyn Graglia, “that must be most stringently curbed and disciplined to meet the requirements of bureaucratic success.” Bureaucracies are “more hospitable to the effete, androgynous male who fits the feminist mold of manhood.”152Liberalsopposemanly honor, not to promote gender equality, but by virtue of their primordial attraction to the disciplined conformism of an institutional ethos. A hygienic conception of life cannot tolerate male individuality, exuberance, and aggressiveness, which are now condemned as dangerous atavisms that threaten our rational social order. Equal protection review is merely the ideological façade behind which liberalism targets these atavisms. Here as elsewhere, conservative claimants of cultural oppression see the political as emerging out of the ostensibly apolitical. Where the elites contrapose equality to inequality, conservatives see a contest between the elites’ supposedly higher civilization and the half-savage relics of past times, themselves. This deeper layer of social meaning explains the selectivity with which feminist principles are actually applied. Ingraham notes that while a global rap superstar can “get away with carrying out a simulated rape of a young woman on the stage, ”such shenanigans would have provoked a deafening outcry from elites had they been performed by American soldiers stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Inevitably, the performance would be cited as incontrovertible evidence of the military’s misogynistic culture.
* The pre-modern world was one that inverted the existentialist motto, so that essence precedes existence, a world in which one’s power to define the meaning of one’s life is shaped and constrained by an objective order of things, the background against which people made sense of themselves as agents. Living a full life meant recognizing one’s place within this order, which in turn meant acknowledging one’s dependence on it. For the success of one’s life was a function of whether it instantiated this order. This pre-modern “order of things” could be rejected rather than embraced. Hence the possibility of sin or dishonor. But it could not be disregarded, because one was then defined by sin or dishonor.
* the early modern theorists saw commercial prosperity as an antidote to the temptations of vainglory. Just as the people would be ruled by the ruler, so the ruler would be ruled by his interests—which had now been set in opposition to mere passions like honor, with all their arbitrariness, idiosyncrasy, and unpredictability. In a similar vein, Robert Kagan notes that liberalism could have harnessed individual egoism to commercial expansion only by first overcoming an older order grounded in “intangible goods” like the glory of the king, the honor of the nobles, or the republican virtues of pagan antiquity.13The dismissal of “intangible goods” as mere vainglory is part and parcel of the repudiation of anthropocentricity and the rise of the disengaged subject who can “step back” from inherited teleologies. Whereas commercial expansion can be measured non-anthropocentrically, honor and glory presuppose thicker cosmologies, an intuitive sense of things’ significance that counts as irredeemably subjective within the modern naturalistic worldview.
* Liberals’ exasperation over conservatives’ preoccupation with “intangible” or “merely symbolic” goods like national honor, the moral fiber of society, and so forth is merely the latest iteration of the social ideals by which the modern age has always set itself against a benighted teleological past. The sharp dichotomization between the “symbolic” and the “substantive” is simply one way of articulating the subtraction account-driven contraposition between superstitious pre-moderns self-indulgently succumbing to the allure of inherited teleological regimes and self-critical moderns with the discipline to resist these temptations. To borrow from Hirschman, where conservatives are governed by the passions, liberals are governed by the interests.
* The targets of the elites’ “ordering impulses” were once the borderline paganism of those fascinated by charged objects, the peasantry’s predilection for malingering at the expense of productive labor and village-consciousness at the expense of nation-consciousness, its raucous and often violent street carnivals, and most importantly the honor ethic of the warrior classes, whose vainglorious impulses were incompatible with the smooth functioning of a commercial society.
* Lamenting the gender integration of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) ordered by the Supreme Court in United States v. Virginia, Justice Scalia concluded his dissent by remarking that it was “powerfully impressive” that a public institution would require all first-year students to keep VMI’s “Code of the Gentlemen” on their person. The Code, part of which Justice Scalia includes in his opinion, specifies: “Without a strict observance of the fundamental Code of Honor, no man, no matter how ‘polished,’ can be considered a gentleman. The honor of a gentleman demands the inviolability of his word, and the incorruptibility of his principles. He is the descendant of the knight, the crusader; he is the defender of the defenseless and the champion of justice…or he is not a Gentleman.”
* …honor is, as Peter Berger observes, as little respected in contemporary culture, and especially among intellectuals, as is chastity. Honor and chastity are both atavisms in a modern society, dismissed “as ideological leftovers in the consciousness of obsolete classes, such as military officers or ethnic grandmothers.” Whereas insult to honor was once deemed a serious social, and possibly legal, offense, someone who now fights to defend his honor will be seen as neurotic, abnormally sensitive, or hopelessly provincial. These judgments are now the received wisdom. After all, honor cannot be translated into non-anthropocentric terms. And this is what enables liberals to dismiss “traditional values” like honor as so much empty bluster, the symptoms of emotional conflict and intellectual confusion rather than genuine goods.
[Peter Berger:] “In a world of honor, the individual discovers his true identity in his roles, and to turn away from the roles is to turn away from himself—in “false consciousness,” one is tempted to add. In a world of dignity, the individual can only discover his true identity by emancipating himself from his socially imposed roles—the latter are only masks, entangling him in illusion, “alienation” and “bad faith.””
* The problem for the conservative is that he still clings to a world of honor, whether this be through the Code of the Gentleman, the preternaturally clean-cut look of conservative think tank interns, the patriotism of Sarah Palin rally attendees, or any number of other ways. And this is the ultimate source of liberal animus. The liberal’s reaction to the Gentleman will be informed not primarily by what he does or believes, but by what he is. The Gentleman’s original sin isn’t his chauvinism or classism, but the form of consciousness that facilitates these qualities, his indisposition toward the disengagement that would compel him to see through his sense of honor, to see through his hero-system.
