The ups and downs of honor

The ups and downs of honor.
Author: Weber, Eugen. Source: The American Scholar v. 68 no1 (Winter 1999) p. 79-91 ISSN: 0003-0937 Number: BHUM99005684 Copyright: The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.

The oldest poem in our Western tradition opens with a quarrel about honor. The Greeks, who have spent several years besieging Troy, take time off to sack a neighboring city. From the plunder, a girl, the daughter of the priest of Apollo, has been allocated to the Greek commander, Agamemnon, king of kings. When the girl's father comes to plead for her return, Agamemnon refuses the rich ransom he offers. So Apollo sends a plague upon the Greeks, and Agamemnon is forced to hand her over. To save face, he confiscates another captive maiden who has been bestowed upon Achilles, the greatest fighter among the Greeks. Achilles has a big ego and a quick temper, but he cannot resist, because Agamemnon can call on more men than he can. So he does the next best thing: he drops out of the siege and goes to sulk, while the rest of the Greeks get walloped.
Many have read the book or seen the movie, but few have fathomed that the function of this tragedy, as of many others, is to glorify and heroicize ugly motives and ugly deeds. If we look at it afresh, without the respect due to a classic, we will discover that the Iliad, chapter 1, presents two gang-leading thugs, Achilles and Agamemnon, facing each other down, trading threats and insults over loot and women, and that the whole poem turns on plunder and pride and the sport of killing.
Similar sentiments move another heroic figure, Roland--a reckless young fool who accepts combat at odds of ten to one; who refuses to call for help when only reinforcements can prevent annihilation; who sacrifices his men, his friends, and himself; and who endangers the interests of his lord and country in order to satisfy an ideal that even his best friend does not accept. Yet Roland's values were widely admired for centuries. It was of Roland that the minstrel sang to the troops of William the Conqueror before the Battle of Hastings, and it was to Roland that the Crusaders looked for inspiration, as did Pizarro's men in Peru as late as the early sixteenth century.
The real campaign that Charles the Great conducted south of the Pyrenees in 778, when Roland lost his life in a mountain ambush set by more-or-less-Christian Basques, was waged to support one Muslim prince against another; and Charles's and Roland's Franks destroyed not Muslim Saragossa but Christian Pamplona. The Song of Roland is no more a handbook of what we would call chivalry than the Iliad is. It shows no sense of sportsmanship, no fair play, no chivalrous treatment of opponents. Roland gloats about previous victims, he brags about what he has done, he boasts of what he's going to do, and he taunts his victims when he's through with them, just as Achilles drags Hector's corpse through the dust. Roland's vainglory brings to mind the bumptious dances that football players execute after sacking a quarterback. They are exhilarated, and they show it in their uncouth prancing.
George Fenwick Jones, to whose brilliant Ethos of the Song of Roland these pages owe a great deal, cites a quotation from Aristotle about young people that provides a clue to Roland at Roncesvalles, as well as to some football players: "They are passionate, hot-tempered, and carried away by impulse, and unable to control their passion. For owing to their ambition they cannot endure to be slighted, and they become indignant when they think they are being wronged. They are ambitious of honor, but more of victory; for youth desires superiority, and victory is a kind of superiority." Hope of fame and fear of shame, passion for victory and for superiority, apprehension of the shame of defeat--all these drive Roland, who is interested in public displays of courage because his honor depends on what other people think. And Roland is not alone.
In 1961, one of the great film epics of the Kennedy era presented Charlton Heston playing another hero--El Cid--as the embodiment of today's notion of nobility: a brave, patriotic Christian who battled fanatical Muslims from North Africa. In historical fact, Rodrigo Diaz, an eleventh-century figure, was first called Sidi (which means "lord" or "boss") by his Arabic-speaking friends, and he was no more Christian than his Muslim allies. Richard Fletcher's Quest for El Cid tells us that Diaz was a condottiere: a hard, harsh man interested only "in pay and plunder," who pillaged churches, despoiled women and children of property and legacies, broke promises, and hampered his king, Alfonso VI of Castile, in the war against the Muslims. He did so because he had to avenge the loss of honor inflicted on him by one of the king's great vassals, so he ravaged the lands of his foes and shamed the Christian king. As for his relations with the fair sex, medieval Spanish treatments of the legend realistically focus on the alleged ladylove Ximena's efforts to preserve her patrimony from the warrior who threatened to seize it by right of conquest. Softer feelings were not part of the repertoire of eleventh-century gangsters.
Yet Rodrigo Diaz, the Sid, really was a virtuous knight, because virtue meant manliness--not righteousness or moral worth, but effective action. The closest we can get to the term virtu is power, strength--better still, force, as in "May the Force be with you!" And the virtuous Rodrigo, like the virtuous Roland, is fier, which means not just proud but, in that time, fierce, ferocious, as in Fierabras, the hero of a medieval romance who, well known for his frightful strength, could kill a man with one blow of his bare fist, just as Roland could cleave a pagan and his saddle in half with one blow of his sword.
If manly might is all, then mercy is a sign of weakness, ruthlessness is the concomitant of force, and the terror they inspire is mixed with admiration. Arrogant, turbulent, and dangerous, the ferox adolescents who terrorized Cicero's Rome or Tybalt's Verona were admired for their spirit and courage, feared for their reckless ferocity. This comes out in the German word Ehrfurcht: a compound of honor and fear, which we might translate as respect in the Mafia sense, but which the dictionary translates as reverence or awe.
Thus honor--in the sense that lasted for many centuries--is power, and the glory that comes from power, and the fama, or fame, that reflects a reputation for power. Infamy is the loss of public esteem that goes with losing power and reputation; and with infamy goes ignominy, literally losing your name--a good name that is important to the individual, to the lineage, to the clan. Name, fame, stand for personality, which was, in the most concrete sense, regarded as property. This is why actors, who had no stable personality, had no honor; why the code of Justinian marked them with infamy; and why Rousseau denounced the actor's art as counterfeiting. Honorable men had integrity: they assumed their birth, their kin, their role, and took the consequences.
But honor was usually reserved for the wellborn. Roland calls the traitor Ganelon "culvert, malvais hom de put aire"--vile man of base birth--and this is revealing because culvert, from colibertus, a freedman, becomes our coward, which is what you would expect from a lowborn fellow. Archbishop Turpin, on the other hand, is a "chevaler de bon aire"--a knight of good family, hence debonair. Turpin is a gentilzhom--a gentleman. The term derives directly from the Latin genitus, born, implying wellborn, of good stock; hence the gentleman is strong, handsome (the ill-born are ugly), and generous (generosus has the same root, the same sense). Humble folk, Virgil and Montaigne agreed, have a propensity for small-mindedness and fear. Pride may be a vice, but it keeps you from meaner courses. The vulgar are stingy, they are miserable (another term derived from Latin), and so they are miserly, whereas the rich (a word related to kingship and abundance) are powerful. Lack of wealth means lack of virtu. The poor are weak, shiftless, cowardly, literally losers to be scorned. The wealthy are strong enough to take from others and to have a large following attracted by success and largesse.
When Achilles and Agamemnon clash, the one with more and better soldiers has the upper hand. How do you get more and better soldiers? you pay them more and better. The very term soldier originally meant a mercenary who was paid a solde, a wage, in Roman gold coins called solidi--from which the English coin the shilling derived. The allegiance of one's soldiers depended on generosity. The Franks loved Roland because he gave them lots of loot--gold, silver, garments, mules. That is what war was really about--and often still is today in Africa and in the Balkans--because, as the Spanish used to say before they began to lose their wars, warfare is a quicker and more honorable way to wealth than trade. Trade takes time and patience; warfare is about pillage, robbery, and (ideally) fighting those who cannot fight back. The spoils of war subsidize yet another form of honorable behavior: magnanimity--greatheartedness, meaning the openhandedness that attracts valiant followers.
So honor is renown, glory, riches, power; but these have to be won and preserved by valiance--valor, bravery. And the temerity of Roland goes with stoutheartedness. The Latin for temerity, estultie, is easily confused with the Latin word for folly, stultitia. But the original popular sense of both terms survives in the Swiss Grisons usage of matti (madmen), applied to wild young men and village bullies, and in the Spanish loco (crazy), used as a term of praise or self-praise for gangland heroes. It survives also in the sobriquet of a famous Western gunfighter, James Butler Hickock, whom we remember as Wild Bill Hickock because of his admirably impetuous actions and reactions. No wonder that when George Armstrong Custer, Hickock's almost exact contemporary, led a cavalry charge near the Little Bighorn River from which not one man came out alive, the New York Herald extolled the charge as "mad" and praised the catastrophic Custer's "strong impulses, greathearted friendship and bitter enmities, nervous temperament, undaunted courage, will and determination.".
The Song of Roland shows little respect for moderation and much for recklessness. Oliver counsels prudence, but Roland is the hero. In the Middle Ages, in the Wild West, or in today's inner cities, prowess must be proved over and over again. Reckless bravado is as characteristic of cinematic cowboys as it was of knights, and indeed the typical showdown in films like High Noon looks much like the knightly joust.
There have always been societies, and there are societies today, that respect and reward Roland's kind of honor. And the reason for this is not mere foolish romanticism. When insecurity reigns, a temper that is short and ferocious is an asset. Security rests on the capacity to make yourself feared, and a man who demonstrates readiness to repay a slight or injury (real or imagined) is feared, appreciated, and honored. In the villages of eighteenth-century Languedoc, as in the Old West, a reputation for honnêteté, personal honor, rested on being feared: "for it is on this that, in the absence of peaceful guarantees, the true security of the strong rests." That is precisely what the American sociologist Ruth Horowitz tells us in an essay called "Honor and Gang Violence," which makes very clear that gangs base their operations on the ideology of honor, just as the Mafia does.
Status, explains Horowitz, "is achieved in part through the deference and appreciation others show a person about his fighting skills." Another sociologist, Tricia Rose, remarks that "the hard invincible young black male who has no chinks in his armor, who is always ready for battle, grandly refusing most forms of emotional vulnerability, is an asset in today's urban zones." The world of honor is comparative, hence competitive, as each champion, whether Achilles, Roland, or a gang member in the 'hood, strives to outdo the others. Gang history, like ancient and less ancient history, is a litany of competitive aggression that challenges, confirms, or alters authority and status--the precarious pecking order that we call social or international hierarchy. So none of this is new.
In the Volsung Saga, a Viking kills a king in battle, and the bard tells us that "Helgi now saw his status increase considerably by having killed so powerful a king." Status pays off. Praise and price have the same Latin root--pretium--which means value, or wages, or reward, and which could, in Middle French and English, mean all these things as well as esteem and honor. All of which makes sense: high reputation earned high rewards, beginning with high wages.
The twelfth-century romance Fulk Fitzwarine has Fulk and his brothers "cross the sea to seek honor and distinction." Maurice Keen's Chivalry reminds us that in the spring of 1177, about the same time as the fictional Fitzwarines were setting off on their voyage, a couple of young men from the household of King Henry II of England (the husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine) went into partnership to attend every tournament they could and share the profits. They crossed the sea as Fulk had done, and in the next ten months they captured and put to ransom 103 knights. So they made money. Even more important, their record caught the eye of powerful patrons who could provide pensions and preferment. In 1180, when one of the two young champions, William Marshal, Guillaume le Marechal, fell out of favor with his Angevin king, he got offers of employment from two of the greatest lords of the age: the count of Flanders and the duke of Burgundy. But he resisted temptation and died earl of Pembroke, wealthy and honored.
Thus martial prowess is good for the gallant knight, the preux; and prouesse, the prowess that evokes the respect made up of honor and fear, also means utility and profit. Preux derives from the Latin prodesse--being serviceable or useful. And prowess is both: prowess is profitable. It also (this is important) helps to economize on effort, because a reputation for prowess keeps people off your back, protects your person, your property, your power. Hobbes pointed out that "honor consists only in the opinion of power"--meaning the opinion that other people have of your power and of you. Which is why honte--shame--follows defeat, and why being bested in a contest that is always about more than sport hurts your honor.
Roland explains that if he does not fight he will be honi, which means both defeated and scorned. There is no honor in losing. The heroine of Corneille's Le Cid points out with perfect logic that, however, brilliant her lover's glory (that is, his reputation), when people hear that he is dead they will believe he was defeated:.
For all Rodrigo's glory whilst alive and kicking, Once they have heard he's dead they'll know he took a licking.
Le Cid was staged in 1637, but this view of honor had begun to change in the late Middle Ages, because ransom became increasingly important, hence morally acceptable to both winners and losers. The emblematic date for a process that had been going on at least since the Hundred Years' War is 1525, when Francis I, king of France, defeated and captured at Pavia, writes back to his mother not, as is popularly believed, "Tout est perdu fors l'honneur" (All is lost save honor), but, more significantly, "Of all things, all that I have left is honor, and my life w hich is safe." So now you could keep your honor and your life, if you could afford it. And if surviving defeat no longer meant infamy, that was because several processes had been at work to rationalize the transition.
The Christian church had always argued that honor was associated with the sin of pride and was thus unchristian. But this argument never got very far, even among churchmen: witness the combative Archbishop Turpin, and even Cardinal Richelieu. God was an awesome liege lord more at home in the Old Testament than the New. He was expected to reward his vassals, avenge their wrongs, and help them kill their foes. Christian charity offered opportunities for ostentatious magnanimity, but Christian humility reeked of humiliation. It was not the encouragement or threats of God, saints, or clergy that tamed warrior predators, but the pressure and cajoling of more forceful authorities. Princes trying to impose order and discipline on unruly subjects had been working to discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate violence, with the former strictly in their hands and those of their agents. The pursuit of personal honor challenged the ruler's power, hence his honor; it threatened the welfare of the realm, as in the nobles' impetuous charge at Agincourt; and it destabilized the law and order of both prince and state. That's what The Three Musketeers is about. It was important to harness the hero to the interests of the patria, the fatherland, and to the interests of the crown. Hence when Corneille staged Le Cid in the days of Louis XIII and Richelieu, he enlisted Rodrigo's unruly passions in a more patriotic task: defending Spain against her enemies.
As for the king's honor itself, it learned to answer to allegedly higher standards that also put the state first. That is why princes could break treaties, when honorable men could not break their word. That is why Francis first gave Charles V, his captor at Pavia, his word of honor as a knight and king to carry out the Treaty of Madrid, then broke his word, and, finally, eluded Charles's challenge to a duel. This was not the sort of record that would be appreciated by the man who had dubbed Francis a knight ten years before Pavia, after the victory at Marignan. Bayard, who died shortly before his king was captured, was, as his fellows dubbed him, the Chevalier sans peur et sans reproche (the knight without fear and without reproach). Reproche in the Song of Roland means the blame or shame that follows upon cowardice, or upon defaulting on a promised ransom, or upon otherwise breaking the word you have pledged. And Chaucer, in the Canterbury Tales, makes a point of letting us know that his "parfit gentil knight" was very keen on keeping his word. By this standard, Francis could not have taken part in a tournament, or belonged to a noble order of chivalry, or mixed as an equal with his peers. By the standards of Roland's Franks (and remember that franc meant free), Francis after Pavia was caitif: from the Latin captivus--unfree and hence a wretch.
Since those times, however, lawyers had learned to argue that princes must operate by different standards from those affecting other men, and humanists had related honor to moral considerations rather than to manly and mundane virtues. Agrippa d'Aubigné, the Protestant knight, failed to prevent his prince, Henry IV, from selling his soul for Paris. Paris was worth a mass. But was it worth surrendering your religion, hence your honor, and becoming a recréant? D'Aubigné had to admit that "our kings have learnt to Machiavellize." The more detached Montaigne, whom Henry admired, knew that fortune was inconstant, values multiple, inflexible principles misleading. Montaigne suggested that honor lay not necessarily in winning, but in fighting a good fight. This is just what Pierre de Coubertin said three hundred years later, and Grantland Rice repeated soon thereafter: what mattered was "not that you won or lost, but how you played the game." Those who won still wrote the rules, but by the sixteenth century, even more by the seventeenth, kings could claim to place national interest above reproche, and intellectuals like Montaigne helped to rationalize their efforts by shifting honor from public regard to personal self-esteem.
To these changes there was yet one more strand, and it concerns people long considered less than honorable. The cascade of contempt between social groups was endless. There was, of course, no honor for servants or actors or hangmen; nor for the physically disadvantaged, or those belonging to the wrong religious persuasion, like the Jews. But there was none either for laborers and carters, carriers and linen weavers, washerwomen, jugglers, bailiffs, or constables. German master artisans who sought admission to a guild had to swear that they descended from honorable parents--free men, not serfs--who were themselves not the offspring of priests, or bastards, or executioners, nor of millers, barbers, bath attendants, minstrels, skinners, or tanners. Some of these exclusions are mysterious, some less so. Bailiffs and millers appear in such lists because they were associated with mean and crooked tricks; bath attendants because bathhouses doubled as brothels; skinners, tanners, and barbers because they belonged to unclean professions, as did executioners (and washerwomen). Finally, some oaths mention not being descended from Wends, a native tribe of the German-Polish borderlands. This would be like a nineteenth-century American being required to swear that he has no Indian blood: a reminder that ethnic identity and ethnic slurs were no less familiar in thirteenth-century Germany than they were in biblical Palestine, in ancient Greece, or in early modern Spain. One could be despised by one's betters as peasant or artisan, and derive satisfaction from despising inferiors even less honorable than oneself.
Courts of justice, even though they recognized honor as an essential value, refused to consider it in contests between persons of low extraction. From the viewpoint of magistrates on the eve of the French Revolution, what brought disgrace to people of high estate would barely attract notice among the lower orders. But ambition takes no account of birth, and as early as the fourteenth century, Piers Plowman sneered that "soap-sellers and their sons for silver are made knights." This, of course, continued to be true: witness the career of Sir William Hesketh Lever, who founded Lever Brothers (today's Unilever) on soap and detergents, and ended up Lord Leverhulme. By the seventeenth century, similar tales of social promotion had already provoked the express approval of that relentlessly rational philosopher Thomas Hobbes: "Riches are honorable because they are power. Poverty, dishonorable." Racine held similar views: "Without money, honor is mere malady.".
Henceforth, what used to be an adjunct of honor could become a title to honor. Bourgeois and tradesmen aspired to the honorability hitherto ascribed only to warriors and the wellborn. The Perfect Tradesman of the seventeenth century refers to honor (and to honoring bills of exchange); a German Jewish tradeswoman of the same century seeks "wealth and honor" for herself and her children; and so do members of the liberal professions, especially men of law, who insist that for their services they should receive not pay, which is demeaning, but honoraries. In 1671, the prince of Condé, cousin of Louis XIV and one of his great captains, offers the kind a splendid dinner in his castle at Chantilly. Condé's steward and chef, Clément Vatel, is shamed because the roast is short at a couple of tables and, worse, because the fresh fish has not arrived in time and no banquet is complete without a fish course. "I have lost my honor," says Vatel. "This is a disgrace that I shall not survive." He goes to his room, props his sword against a panel, and skewers himself three times just as the fish reaches the kitchen door. Condé weeps over his corpse, and the name of Vatel is forever engraved on France's gastronomic roll of honor.
The seventeenth century is when the word virtue begins its evolution toward what it means today, and when honesty, which in Middle English and early modern French was equivalent to honor (it had the same Latin root), starts to acquire the banal bourgeois meaning we accept today. In this view, honorability becomes respectability: a reputation for fair dealing, honoring your contracts, paying your debts. It can now be described, as Jeremy Bentham put it, as "a kind of fictitious object of property." No wonder that in Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, bankruptcy is presented as "the most dishonorable action of all those that can dishonor a man"; or that the aged Gustave Flaubert ruined himself to save the family name from the shame of his nephew-in-law's bankruptcy. Those were the days, perhaps; but not the days of Roland. Or of D'Artagnan.
This bourgeois version of honor, however important, never attracted much attention, let alone sympathy, among intellectuals or opinion makers. The values of The Three Musketeers continued to be more popular than the values of The Perfect Tradesman, and, in the age of enlightened despots, Montesquieu's man of honor, like Homer's, still placed his personal honor above the interests of his country or his prince.
Then came such prophets of the new age as Rousseau and Robespierre, who would allow no disagreement between society and its members that could not be resolved by society in its own favor. Licit violence would be a monopoly of the state. Forcing men to be free meant forcing them also to be free from archaic traditions. The Revolution thus tried to eliminate what Robespierre dismissed as feudal extravagance, a category that included duels as affairs of honor. As it turned out, though, the Revolution was also about obtaining access to feudal extravagance. The Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars confirmed the old ideas of heroism and swashbuckling and honor; and the egalitarian principles of a revolution that allowed everybody access to what had been aristocratic privilege meant that all Frenchmen now had the right to duel.
Englishmen, who had long asserted the free man's right to maintain his honor, hence to duel, were turning against what was increasingly denounced as a crude, murderous, ruffian activity; and according to V. G. Kiernan's The Duel in European History, English schools encouraged boxing as "an innocent mode of settling disputes" that still preserved "the sense of honor and spirit and gallantry." But the nineteenth-century French went into dueling as Americans have gone into jogging--with the editorial staffs of monarchist and republican newspapers challenging each other en masse; with George Sand calling out Alexandre Dumas over the chastity of the duchesse de Berri; and with an apparently sane bourgeois like Victor Schoelcher, the man most responsible for the abolition of slavery in French colonies, having the propensity, when serving in his father's shop, "to challenge customers who perversely carped at the price of his wares.".
Dueling in this new era soon became a form of conspicuous consumption and thus a way of showing off, which meant that it could be replaced by other self-promoting activities. A right accessible to all loses value. Honor, so long concerned with serious things--survival, status, significant rewards--was relegated to frivolous encounters in which serious interests were seldom at stake. An authoritative French treatise called Point d'Honneur, published in 1920, admitted that duelists ran the risk of appearing ridiculous because duels had become "a form of publicity." The encounter "fought" in 1958 between the dancer Serge Lifar and his impresario, the marquis de Cuévas, over a ballet bore this out. So did a case described by V. G. Kiernan: in 1985, two men being tried in Edinburgh for armed robbery invoked their right (never formally abolished in Scotland) to have their case tried by battle against the Queen's champion. The court decided that the right invoked was no longer valid but that, in any case, John and Paul Burnside had forfeited their right to trial by battle when they failed to throw down a white glove before their accusers.
Thus dueling slowly declined into absurdity; and so, on the whole, did considerations of honor and dishonor. The legal profession, for example, which had been much concerned with the nobility of its calling, found other fish to fry. In 1908, the American Bar Association's Canons of Professional Ethics had bound lawyers to use only "fair and honorable means." In 1969, the ABA junked the Canons because it was "designed for an earlier era" and full of "quaint expressions of the past." One of the quaint expressions that it dropped was "honor." Perhaps the ABA had assimilated the spirit of Emerson's sally: "The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.".
The same depreciation can be observed in public functions, which had been described as "honors" since late Roman times. Members of Parliament had been called "honorable," as our congressmen are called today, and the French had taken over the English usage. The French have sensibly dropped this, and in English-speaking countries we no longer attach meaning to the usage. We know that, as Montesquieu warned, honor is easily placed in contradiction with honors, and that one can be covered in infamies and dignities at the same time.
So the intermediate, or civil, notion of honor seems to have run its course. Evidence and public belief suggest that it has gone out of date; and it has done so, in part, because the geographical and social mobility that we enjoy help to devalue lineage and reputation. Mobility affords escape from your clan's fama or infamia, as from your own. Our forebears knew that recognition affects infamy as it does fame. They were suspicious of nomadism and nonentity because, as a seventeenth-century Dominican friar explained, "obscure folk" were "able to conceal their origins by moving from one place to another," the better to deceive past and present neighbors. In mass societies, the forest hides the trees; in cities, anonymity conceals individuals and their status. But honor goes with recognition, whether of birth or of fame.
The Latin term nobilis originally meant known, well known, hence necessarily recognizable. Nobles were easy to know, and so were the ignoble. In localized cultures and societies, the famous and infamous were recognized at once, and steps could be taken to see that infamy would be hard to flee. Sixteenth-century France, Germany, Bohemia, Poland, and no doubt other places produced defamatory texts and pictures designed to publicize the dishonor of individuals who defaulted after having pledged their honor. Today, such shortcomings don't qualify for Most Wanted lists. Inevitably, as Ben Jonson made one of his characters declare, "Contempt of fame begets contempt of virtue"--meaning, we know, contempt of honor. True in Jonson's seventeenth century, this is still true today, especially in realms well known to those who read newspapers and watch television.
The period during which a few Western societies managed to persuade themselves that their security was assured as long as law and order were guaranteed by that idealized monopolist of violence--the state--has proved brief. What is coming back is the original, violent, practical model that a lot of reasonable, law-abiding people had come to consider as obsolete as chastity. These days, over growing patches of what had slowly, painfully, precariously become a civilized world, older and more primitive conditions are returning. "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold"; the authority of what we call authorities is questioned or ignored; bodies and institutions that are supposed to secure security contribute to insecurity--either by failing to act or, in countries where corruption is prevalent, by effectively erasing the line between criminals and police.
That is where, that is when, the codes and the mentality of old-fashioned honor re-emerge to dictate principles of conduct. Retaliation looks more effective than reprieve. Experience teaches that if you give way, more people push you. The logic of violence is crude but simple: violent reaction against transgression deters others who might follow suit. And there's little evidence that litigation affords a better chance of justice or satisfaction than forceful direct action does.
As in the late Roman Empire, as in the early Middle Ages, existing political, legal, and economic structures, when not inoperative, ignore you or betray you. Where authority is absent or alien or oppressive, who can redress your grievances? The only safeguard for property, for self, for self-respect, lies in yourself, in your protective associations, or in the patronage of a powerful figure.
The language that we work with can mislead us. We talk of norms, but where the norms of a given civilization have become abnormal, conforming to them has to be counterproductive. One can see this in a novel widely admired a generation ago, Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard. It describes nineteenth-century Sicily, where the cultivated nobleman is fated for extinction and the future rests with the Mafioso man of honor, dismissed as "one of those violent cretins capable of any havoc." But cretins capable of havoc are feared and respected, as berserkers once were in Norse society. The New York Times recently quoted a parole officer describing a juvenile offender: "He would always act first and think about his actions later." What the parole officer failed to mention was that in the offender's world, where danger lurks along with rival thugs to whom life is nothing, impulsiveness is a sound instinct and brutal alacrity can preserve life.
It was so in Roland's day, when to be isnel, kin to the German schnell--quick, prompt to act--was an attribute of bravery, and temerity was a manly virtue. And it was still so in early twentieth-century California, where the San Francisco Chronicle (September 21, 1924) greeted Wyatt Earp's visit with the title: "Terror of Evildoers is Here; Alive Because He Was Quick with Trigger." The German analogue of estultie--temerity--is stolto, which has given us the English stout, as in stouthearted, and the German stolz--proud. Pride, stoutheartedness, and temerity seem to go together. They certainly do so in Wilbur Cash's Mind of the South, where unreconstructed southerners are described as "fiercely self-assertive and sensitive and inordinately resentful of slights and snubs ... full of the chip-on-the-shoulder swagger of a boy who would knock hell out of whoever dared to cross him." That fits the boys in the 'hood just as it fit the boys around Troy. Virtue consists of action, and the reward of action, provided you survive, is the honor, the Ehrfurcht, that continues to acknowledge effective terror.
We are back in the realm of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Roland, a realm of small communities and face-to-face relations in hostile surroundings, where men prey and plunder as much for prestige as for material gain, where bands of young warriors like those that Tacitus described in ancient Germania--gangs held together by interest in booty, hope of fame, and fear of shame--gather around a leader selected or self-selected for enterprise and ferocity. Material conditions, appropriate ideological codes, and shortage of alternatives explained it then and explain it now.
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Yeats wrote this after the First World War and during the Irish civil war, but his words apply to other darkling ages when other barbarian gangs destabilized decaying civilizations; and they apply as well to the centuries of convalescence from chaos, when expedients were being turned into rules once more to create the norms that we were brought up to think of as normal. The rules are seeping out again, aggression is reasserting itself as the better part of valor, and a new kind of honor that looks disturbingly like the old kind of honor is seeping back in.
Added material.
Eugen Weber is the Joan Palevsky Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s. An earlier version of this essay was presented as the Flora Levy Lecture in the Humanities at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.