Editor’s Note: It is a morning filled with portents. All of them contain an element of unfamiliar uncertainty. With the 9/11 Anniversary coming this Saturday, we appear to have permitted the installation of a government that was partly responsible for a savage act that marked a generation. Marlow comments on that this morning with his acerbic wit. The Writer’s Section at Refuge Farm is looking on with befuddled disbelief. Despite the uncertainty of the times, Belmont Farms Distillery is open today. We may need it.

– Vic

08 September 2021

Marlow’s Coastal Empire

Honor

Could the ongoing, American-caused, Afghani cluster roiling America be boiled down to the American concept and practice of honor having morphed to a point where the word has virtually disappeared from America’s working vocabulary?

If so, then it seems to me that we are living in and being led by a post-honor society and leaders, respectively. Individual and collective honorability is no longer measurable nor a unifying distinctiveness of American culture.

The first hint of its demise during my adult life was the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers, which revealed America’s leaders early on during the mid 1960s Vietnam conflict knew and willingly participated in lying for years to the American public. No one resigned or publicly admitted their guilt or shame for their dissembling and needless ensuing slaughter of American soldiers. LBJ’s SecDef Robert McNamara can go crap in a hat for his part in all that lying. His scorching 1996 insider book was just a tad late and a bit of CYA. Hell, he didn’t even tell LBJ or SecState Risk what the study said.

Starting after the WW I trench slaughter, America’s 20th century concept of honor had slowly but surely begun to be discredited. No later than the early 1970s the word didn’t seem to exist anymore (see the 1975 skedaddle out of Saigon). Again no one resigned, was punished, or called to account, for that cut-n-run cluster or that monumental Charlie Foxtrot of Desert One in 1980.

I am not talking about some primitive reflexive sense of honor like losing face. It was more than just hitting someone back after they sucker punched us. That natural sense of honor still exists in some circles whether it can be successfully articulated or not in today’s pop cancel culture. Honor groups like the “family” (real or gang) and the military have, or had (yeah, I’m referring to America’s bloated senior commissioned officer cadres here), such “codes” and their mini-honor cultures.

America’s original honor codes were loosely based on our Revolutionary era confidence in man’s rational capacity. Our founding documents were rife with it — see we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor in our Declaration of Independence. Coupled with our republican form of democratization, America’s honor cultures singularly manifested themselves as systems of honor by merit and were totally detached from the European code of aristocratic honor. Deeds not by accident of birth were what mattered here is the US. We independent American men and women owed our allegiance to universal, ethical standards. Its practitioners were chivalrous and stood up for principles. This warrior honor code provided the foundation for the American nation-as-honor-group that served us well through WW II.

So, what happened to our American society-wide honor culture? Ideological changes in society between WW II and the 1970s contributed to American honor’s decline. Pop culture, psychotherapy and consumerism largely discredited the Victorian gentlemen ideal, making them appear outdated.

Since the 80s, our canonical notion of honor has, sad to say, become shameful. The power of old and new media in conjunction with that of our celebrity/influencer cultures has reversed that notion to almost the complete opposite of what it once meant. Displays of weakness, such as admittance of doubt and outpourings of emotion like outrage, have now become far more honorable, especially in the electronic arenas. It is unthinkable that any American leader today would cite the old notion of honor as a reason to go to war, yet at the same time it is always beneath the surface in any war. Such was the case in the currently unwinding War on Terror.

So, why might this thought experiment be important? Well, there was no such shift in the meaning of honor in other parts of the non-Western world, particularly in the Islamic regions. There, the old ideal of standing up for one’s principles, was and remains still very much prevalent.

In fact, maybe we should have considered that they saw the GWOT in some sense as their fight against the eradication of their honor culture.

Does this ring any bells?

Well, like, Duh!

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