West's Founding XI: Honor and Shame in Politics

This is an underappreciated area of philosophy, though it is where I have spent an awful lot of my time. West points out that political power is insufficient to actually govern, and as such that what the Founders called the "law of fashion" (see prior posts) ends up being the most important law of all. What people happen to honor, or are willing to shame, ends up governing a great deal more of human behavior than the positive law -- and can even alter whether or not the positive law can be enforced, or upon whom, as we saw in the non-prosecution of last year's BLM riots (versus the objectively similar behavior on display on 6 January, which are being aggressively prosecuted because of the comparatively unfashionable nature of the perpetrators).

West points out that politics not only ends up depending on these forms, it can influence them as well. Funeral orations, speeches in general, the granting of and celebration of military awards and decorations, and political symbolism are all ways of using honors to hold up ideals for aspiration. West has an extended discussion of the Great Seal of the United States that intends to show how the Founders held up the Roman model as a kind of ideal, and likened their project especially to Virgil's heroic treatment of the founding of Rome. 

To some degree this underlines a problem with this approach, which is that fashions change and therefore honors of prior generations wash out. The Founders may well have been just as careful in their construction of the symbolism of the Great Seal as he says; and perhaps it had their intended message, down to the untranslated Latin references to Virgil, in their own generation. No one except a few specialists now reads Virgil in Latin; almost no one reads Virgil at all. The symbolism is lost, the honors are not noticed, and the symbol now looks just like a weird pyramid with an all-seeing-eye atop it.

Similarly, the fashion of respect passed that caused the daughters and granddaughters of Civil War Veterans to erect so many monuments to their fathers and grandfathers at the close of those mens' lives -- the great period of Civil War monuments is 1900-1920, when a youth of 20 in 1860 would have been 60 to 80 years old. The Daughters of the Confederacy knew their fathers and grandfathers, as did the parallel Union organizations. They honored them as much for the men they had been later in life, acting as fathers and grandfathers, as for what they did in the great and terrible moments of their youth. But they also honored that, because they had grown up hearing the stories of sacrifice and suffering from their elders. 

None living today knew the men, nor heard their stories from them. And so, to us, the monuments -- which are honors -- are important only for our own purposes. Few of us care for them even for their historical interest; almost none care for honor itself so much as to revere the impulse to honor one's elders for its own sake. Therefore our present generation destroys such monuments for their own internal reasons, honoring themselves instead (and not apparently even caring whose monuments they are, or what they did, as witnessed by the destruction of monuments to Lincoln and Grant as well as Lee and Stonewall Jackson). 

These are titanic matters of the first importance to human society; few understand how powerful or how deep they are. West's chapter is a little dry, but at least its presence shows that he is cognizant that it is a topic that deserves discussion.