{"id":156547,"date":"2024-07-21T03:08:33","date_gmt":"2024-07-21T11:08:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=156547"},"modified":"2024-07-21T03:49:01","modified_gmt":"2024-07-21T11:49:01","slug":"is-honor-a-virtue-in-liberalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=156547","title":{"rendered":"Is Honor A Virtue In Liberalism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m thinking about the Corey Comperatore<\/a> 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?<\/p>\n

I’m not aware of the concept of honor playing a big role in any of liberalism’s important texts.<\/p>\n

Rony Guldmann writes in his forthcoming book, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* 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\u2019s surprise, writes Peters, reflected \u201ca fundamental culture clash\u201d betokening the administration\u2019s contempt for Americans \u201cso dumb\u201d as to join the military rather than attending Harvard. Obama\u2019s National Security Advisor Susan Rice praised Bergdahl for serving \u201cwith honor and distinction.\u201d 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 \u201csleeping in on Monday morning and ducking Gender Studies 101.\u201d The problem wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

* Dissenting in United States v. Virginia, which held unconstitutional the Virginia Military Institute\u2019s policy of excluding women, Justice Scalia wrote that \u201c[i]n an odd sort of way, it is precisely VMI’s attachment to such old-fashioned concepts as manly \u2018honor\u2019 that has made it, and the system it represents, the target of those who today succeed in abolishing public single-sex education.\u201d151Writing 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\u2019s suggestion is that the narrow terms of Equal Protection review conceal the true stakes. Those who pushed to overturn VMI\u2019s historical traditions were concerned, not to uproot irrational preconceptions about women\u2019s 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 \u201cmanly honor\u201d to concerns about sexism and gender inequality. But conservative claimants of cultural oppression trace this high-mindedness to a specific cultural ethos. \u201cIt is male individuality, exuberance, and aggressiveness,\u201d writes F. Carolyn Graglia, \u201cthat must be most stringently curbed and disciplined to meet the requirements of bureaucratic success.\u201d Bureaucracies are \u201cmore hospitable to the effete, androgynous male who fits the feminist mold of manhood.\u201d152Liberalsopposemanly 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 fa\u00e7ade 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\u2019 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 \u201cget away with carrying out a simulated rape of a young woman on the stage, \u201dsuch 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\u2019s misogynistic culture.<\/p>\n

* The pre-modern world was one that inverted the existentialist motto, so that essence precedes existence, a world in which one\u2019s power to define the meaning of one\u2019s 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\u2019s place within this order, which in turn meant acknowledging one\u2019s dependence on it. For the success of one\u2019s life was a function of whether it instantiated this order. This pre-modern \u201corder of things\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

* 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\u2014which 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 \u201cintangible goods\u201d like the glory of the king, the honor of the nobles, or the republican virtues of pagan antiquity.13The dismissal of \u201cintangible goods\u201d as mere vainglory is part and parcel of the repudiation of anthropocentricity and the rise of the disengaged subject who can \u201cstep back\u201d from inherited teleologies. Whereas commercial expansion can be measured non-anthropocentrically, honor and glory presuppose thicker cosmologies, an intuitive sense of things\u2019 significance that counts as irredeemably subjective within the modern naturalistic worldview. <\/p>\n

* Liberals\u2019 exasperation over conservatives\u2019 preoccupation with \u201cintangible\u201d or \u201cmerely symbolic\u201d 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 \u201csymbolic\u201d and the \u201csubstantive\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

* The targets of the elites\u2019 \u201cordering impulses\u201d were once the borderline paganism of those fascinated by charged objects, the peasantry\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

* 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 \u201cpowerfully impressive\u201d that a public institution would require all first-year students to keep VMI\u2019s \u201cCode of the Gentlemen\u201d on their person. The Code, part of which Justice Scalia includes in his opinion, specifies: \u201cWithout a strict observance of the fundamental Code of Honor, no man, no matter how \u2018polished,\u2019 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

* …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 \u201cas ideological leftovers in the consciousness of obsolete classes, such as military officers or ethnic grandmothers.\u201d 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 \u201ctraditional values\u201d like honor as so much empty bluster, the symptoms of emotional conflict and intellectual confusion rather than genuine goods. <\/p>\n

[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\u2014in \u201cfalse consciousness,\u201d 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\u2014the latter are only masks, entangling him in illusion, \u201calienation\u201d and \u201cbad faith.\u201d”<\/p>\n

* 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\u2019s reaction to the Gentleman will be informed not primarily by what he does or believes, but by what he is. The Gentleman\u2019s original sin isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t