The lost sense of honor

Public Interest, Fall, 2002 by James Bowman

HONOR, though it has been in bad shape for most of the last century, has never really gone away. What has more or less vanished out of our culture is much of the language of honor and shame that was familiar to our parents and grandparents, and this is a matter of profound cultural significance.

For example, at his sentencing to life imprisonment for espionage last month, the former F.B.I. agent Robert Hanssen said: "I apologize for my behavior. I am shamed by it. I've betrayed the trust of so many. I opened the door for calumny against my totally innocent wife and children. I've hurt them deeply. I've hurt so many deeply."

Unless the reporter didn't hear him correctly, Hanssen's saying that he was "shamed" is an interesting social datum. Twenty or thirty years ago, he might have said that he was "ashamed,"--the word used then to express one's response to shame. Shame always came from outside, as a result of public exposure. Shame was something that lay in the power of others. In other words, you didn't get to decide if you were shamed or not. At best, your saying that you were shamed would have been seen as a mere statement of fact.

It's true that some people who were shamed by the things they did, and therefore ought to have been ashamed, didn't recognize the fact and so were not. Such people were called shameless--or, in Latin form, impudent--since the sensitivity to their own shame in the eyes of others that would make them (presumably) ashamed of themselves seemed to be absent.

But either Hanssen was not quite at home with this old-fashioned language, so familiar to earlier generations, or else (more likely) his choice of the word "shamed" in preference to "ashamed" was itself a shameless attempt to control a process that is inherently not subject to control.

The word not spoken

I mention this incident as an example of how difficult it often seems for our contemporaries to understand or use correctly the language of shame--and of honor, shame's complement and opposite. These words have a musty, old-fashioned air about them which makes us reluctant to use them ourselves and nervous when other people use them--even when, as in Hanssen's case, we cannot do without the concepts to which they correspond. Recently, for example, a brigadier general who was being questioned by Bob Franken of CNN was repeatedly asked why "we"--the American people--should believe that what he was saying was the truth. Exasperated, the brigadier finally answered: "Well, as a commissioned officer in the armed forces, I can assure you that what I've said is the truth."

What is the missing word in that statement? My guess is that the officer thought that he would look silly, pompous, and out-of-date if he had said "on my honor as an officer and a gentleman"--and yet he was clearly, if rather comically, hoping that the mention of his commission would convey this idea to the reporter.

One consequence of the unavailability of the language of honor is that neither the brigadier nor Franken appeared to have been aware that the former had grounds for complaint against the impudence of Franken's question. Franken was already calling into question his honor, and under the old dispensation, his victim would have been perfectly within his rights to box the man's ears, horsewhip him, or otherwise administer some humiliating physical chastisement. For these things too are part of the language of honor that we no longer speak.

True, the word honor does still appear in our public discourse, but nearly always in a context designed to stress its archaic and lapidary character-in the phrase "Duty, Honor, Country," for instance-and one which implies no necessary understanding of what the word might mean. General Colin Powell's authorized biography, written by David Roth, is titled Sacred Honor after the thing the Founding Fathers (who were profoundly interested in all questions of honor) said they had committed to the struggle for American nationhood. But the word itself hardly appears in Roth's book and never with any kind of explanation.

The only semi-substantive use of the word "honor" in the book comes in response to Roth's question to former President George Bush as to whether he thought Powell was the source of the information about the private deliberations within the administration over the Gulf War which appeared in Bob Woodward's book The Commanders. Here is what the former president said:

I couldn't tell. But I put my faith in people. And I say, "This guy would never do anything to hurt me or anything to blow himself up, to be a peacock. It's out of character." I put my bet on a human being, and with Colin I never have any doubts of any kind. I know the book caused concern in certain quarters, but it never did with me because I had total confidence in the man's character. For me it was a question of integrity and honor. There's no one that has those more finely honed than Colin Powell.

Significantly, this statement about honor is prefaced by the contemporary-apologetic "for me," which is our way of saying that honor is a personal choice, like everything else. If your idea of honor is to blab to the media everything that you have discussed in confidence, then so be it. It's just not "for me."