Honor and Relationships

A concept that occurred to me this morning as I was shaving my head arises from this exchange between myself and Cass:

Cass:

People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor.

What does that even mean? It's one of those wonderfully vague statements that people love, because of course whatever they want to do is right and honorable.

Reminds me of Newt Gingrich's list of incredibly vague statements that 90+% of Americans were supposed to agree with... so long as no one tried to figure out what they actually meant.

Grim:

What does that even mean? ...

I have given a definition of honor (which is linked on the sidebar). It ultimately means that you may do whatever you want, provided you give due consideration to the duties you owe to those to whom you stand in certain relationships. Different relationships have different duties -- you owe more to your father than to a stranger, more to your countrymen than to foreigners, more to friends than to those who have proven to be your enemies (but even something to them -- perfidy is always a violation of honor)....

That's why Zell Miller came down so hard on John Kerry. It wasn't the policy disagreements that provoked such a powerful response. It was Kerry's constant betrayal of people whom he owed duties of honor. Every time he had a duty -- to fellow sailors, soldiers, countrymen -- he would elect self-interest instead.

So all that the Jacksonian is saying is that doing what Kerry does is wrong. You're free to follow your self interest -- subject to the demands of honor.

So here's the concept that occurred to me. A whole lot of digital ink has been spilled lately on men and relationships, and how contemporary men -- especially the youngest generations -- don't take their duties to those relationships seriously enough. Young men don't treat their girlfriends right, they don't want to get married to them and undertake those responsibilities, you hear even middle-aged men talking about the joys of prostitutes and so forth.

What if honor is the way men think about relationships? It's far from meaningless: Jackson himself suffered two broken ribs in a duel over an insult to his wife (a man called her a 'bigamist,' because she had married Jackson without realizing her previous husband had not properly filed for divorce when he abandoned her), and its concerns provoked Zell Miller into one of the greatest political speeches of my lifetime.

There are a lot of cultural forces that have reasons to want to destroy honor as a concept at the core of American life. I am not an ally to any of them, but some of you are. There are not a lot of clear exponents of honor to stand against those forces: it's hard to think of any cultural figure since the death of John Wayne who has stood up for it reliably and without exception as something to which men should aspire. As a consequence, the concept has been weakened in our culture over the last generation.

Perhaps it has costs from some perspectives -- a sense of an honor-bound duty to fellow American citizens probably accounts for close to 100% of my disagreements with Tex's libertarian view of economics and politics, so from her perspective those might be costs because they keep me from joining her in advocacy of those positions. If I'm right that honor is the way that men take relationships seriously, though, it strikes me that there are opposing costs even if you are an advocate of one or another of those forces that have an interest in dismissing the concept.

Comments Policy

We've had an uptick in traffic, and with it some new folks commenting. I'm going to repost the comments policy. This version is nine years old, and is I think the most recent version. It's served us well in keeping the discussion interesting.

Please be welcome, so long as you will adhere to this form.

I adopted [this policy] from the sadly-defunct Texas Mercury, a fringe publication but one whose bold assertion of well considered and unusual ideas I always enjoyed:

As we see it, modern society has all the important ideas of life exactly backwards: we are completely against the belief in sensitivity and tolerance in politics and raffish disregard in private life. The Texas Mercury is founded on the opposite principles- our idea is of tolerance and polite sensitivity in private life and ruthless truth in politics. Be nice to your neighbor. Be hell to his ideas.

Comments failing to uphold those principles run the risk of being deleted without warning. In the year and some months since I adopted that as the policy here, I've added one additional point: hit-and-run comments, as well as anonymous comments, will generally be deleted. If you're a regular here, and willing to stand up and fight for what you believe, you can say pretty much anything that isn't a personal attack on a fellow reader. If you're just wandering through, or unwilling to leave your name (even a false name you'll stand by will do, e.g., "Grim"), pass on. This is a hall, and regular readers are honored guests not to be troubled by cowards.

Fair enough? Well, fair or unfair, those are the rules.

I haven't had to delete anything, as everyone's been polite and have usually said interesting things. I do want to emphasize that, while anonymous comments are fine, standing policy here is that you should pick a pseudonym to sign them with so we can keep straight who is saying what, and to assert both ownership and responsibility for what you say.

On Justice Thomas

Scalia remains my favorite, but here's the piece Cass mentioned on her favorite Supreme Court Justice.

Honesty Per Se

Author at "happyplace" writes:

Instances of enormous dogs getting freaked out by tiny, helpless creatures is probably the best evidence I've come across for a benevolent architect of the universe. I'm surprised that YouTube videos—such as this one, featuring a 14-month-old Great Dane's nerve-wracked reaction to a fluffy, little gosling—don't factor more often into theological debates.

Well, the reason they don't is just what this competing article is mocking.

As humans, we are so quick to default to preconceptions, but these mental shortcuts often harm our way of thinking. In many cases, preconceived notions blind us from approaching situations in new ways. To challenge that idea, we put a falcon and a rabbit in the same room. You’re probably thinking, “Oh, the falcon immediately killed the rabbit,” because that’s what you’ve been taught to think.

And in this particular case, yes, that is exactly what happened. Almost instantly. Your preconceptions were 100 percent spot-on.

It’s so beautiful when the animal kingdom surprises us, when predators don’t act like senseless killing machines. Unfortunately, this was not one of those times.

This room was way too small for the bunny to have any chance. It took about an eighth of a second for the falcon to completely disembowel the rabbit and begin feasting on its entrails...

Honesty in Physics

The mouseover text is the most honest part.

"Of these four forces, there's one we don't really understand."
"Is it the weak force or the strong--"
"It's gravity."

OPSEC, Public Affairs, Same Thing Right?

Headline: "Disclosures of Battle Plan by Pentagon Startle Many."

The Obama administration has been eager to show momentum against the Islamic State after a conference last week dramatized the hurdles to countering the terrorist group’s propaganda. But the Pentagon may have gone too far in sharing its military planning.

Let me guess what happened.

UPDATE: The Washington Post asked Central Command why they went public with a detailed war plan, and are being told by an unnamed "senior" official -- military officials have ranks, guys -- that it's an intentional information operation designed to get ISIS to flee.

I imagine this senior official is covering some administration butts with this story, but if it's a true story then (a) you just blew it by telling them that's what you're hoping to accomplish, and (b) it didn't work in Second Fallujah, when we were facing many of the same people and they were facing American Marines and Cavalry and not Iraqi Army units as their primary opposition. It's the Iraqi Army that has the tradition of fleeing or surrendering at the first sign of the stars and stripes, not the Islamic State.

I mean, if it's important

I think we were just discussing this:  (1) What Court Order? and (2) Plurality of Dems believe the President should ignore court rulings if it's important.

Jacksonian America

After reading Tex's last link, I came across this quote in the next article down.

[Jacksonians] have, in historian David Hackett Fischer’s phrase, a notion of natural liberty: People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor. If someone infringes on that liberty, beware: The Jacksonian attitude is, “If you attack my family or my country, I’ll kill you.” And he (or she) means it. If you want to hear an eloquent version, listen to Sen. Zell Miller’s speech endorsing George W. Bush at the 2004 Republican National Convention.

That sounds like a good paraphrase of what I believe.

President Caulfield

From Kevin Williamson on whether President Obama really doesn't much like his country:

There is a personality type common among the Left’s partisans, and it has a name: Holden Caulfield. He is adolescent, perpetually disappointed, and ever on the lookout for phoniness and hypocrisy. His is the sort of personality inclined to believe in his heart the declaration that “behind every great fortune there is a great crime.” (He also believes that this is a quotation from Honoré de Balzac, whose works he has not read, when it fact it comes from Richard O’Connor’s The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur.) He believes with Elizabeth Warren that the economy is a rigged game based on exploitation and deceit rather than on innovation, productivity, and competition. He believes with Barack Obama that the only reason (e.g.) Staples does not pay its part-time associates more or schedule them for more hours is so that it can pad its executive pay and protect its “billions” in annual profits. (He believes that Staples, whose financials he has not read, makes “billions,” when in fact it does no such thing.) Say an admiring word about Steve Jobs and he’ll swear that there are four-year-olds working 169 hours a week in Chinese sweatshops producing iPods at the point of a bayonet. He believes that most people get into Harvard and Yale because they have influential parents (that’s the University of Texas, unfortunately), that rich Americans mostly inherit their money (in reality, about 15 percent of their assets are inherited, less than for middle-class families), that the U.S. goes to war abroad to enrich contractors at home, and that the entire history of Latin America must be understood through the prism of the United Fruit Company’s maneuverings in 1954. 

Give Holden Caulfield a television show and you’ve got Chris Hayes.

Faith and credit

Spengler on markets, trust, and democracy:

Something other than mere trading skills was required for an investment-driven economy, and that was long-term credit, a concept that derives from the Latin credere, “to believe”. It is not an exchange of one peasant’s eggs for another peasant’s barley, or Mexican silver for Chinese silk, but rather a commitment of the savings of whole populations to grand ventures that would pay interest because they drove growth.

Capital markets, moreover, create a kind of democracy. If the whole of society relies on the public debt as a store of value, the value all the savings of society is gauged directly or indirectly against the benchmark of public debt. But that also puts power in the hands of the market: the market has the power to tell the government whether it is doing well or badly, by selling or buying the public debt. It is not simply that the government creates a market that provides convenience and advantages to the people: it becomes dependent on the people’s faith in its policies. When that faith is shaken, as in southern Europe two years ago, and confidence flees the government debt market, the result can be catastrophic. Free capital markets require governments to win the faith of the people.

* * *

That is the Jewish genius: to be able to inspire faith (or what is usually called “confidence” in markets) to make possible long-term investments in capital markets involving millions of participants. The investors in a bond or stock issue are not linked by ties of family or personal loyalty, but rather by contract, law and custom. Their obligations extend beyond the ancient loyalties of family and clan. That may seem obvious on first reflection. But most countries in the world lack functioning capital markets, because faith is absent. The public does not trust the government to enforce contracts, or the management of a company not to steal money. That is emphatically true in China, which is struggling to create modern capital markets rather than depend on state banks and shadow financing. In backward countries, trust is inconceivable outside the narrow circle of blood relations. Firms remain small because trust is restricted to family members.

. . . In the absence of faith, there never will be enough lawyers to enforce contracts, or policemen to arrest embezzlers, or watchdogs to extirpate government corruption. Something more fundamental is required: a sense that the law is sacred, and if any of us breaks the public trust, all of us are damaged. Our rabbis of antiquity said, “All of Israel stands surety for each other.”

Adam Smith’s invisible hand isn’t enough. Capital markets require more than the interaction of self-interested individuals: they require a common sense of the sanctity of covenant, of mutual obligations between government and people, and between one individual and the next. That is why the United States of America is the most successful nation in economic history. It was founded by devout Christians who hoped to construct a new nation in emulation of ancient Israel.

Like reading Anne Frank's diary

This piece about life in Mosul under ISIS has been linked all over the place lately.  It's chilling.  There's an interesting discussion of the crisis in faith that some of Mosul's Moslems are now facing, as they ask the question, "Is this really what my religion is about?"

Automatic delete feature

I read the other day about some kind of Mission-Impossible-style self-destruct mechanism, to be triggered by a possible invasion of Tea Partiers in 2017,  that had been built into the New York City ID program for otherly-documented individuals who, through no fault of their own, had suddenly found themselves in a country not their own without proof of having complied with any tiresome and unjust immigration procedures.  I didn't pay much attention, assuming it was the kind of thing we saw at the end of the Clinton administration, with spiteful outgoing administration staff trashing computers so that life would be as unpleasant as possible for the incoming administration.  Gateway Pundit posted about it today, and I now realize that the purpose of the destruct button was that some bright soul realized that the IDs-for-future-Democratic-voters program involved a formal registration, in which people with, shall we say, questionable legal status had supplied government workers with their names and contact information, and the government workers were so indiscreet as to have filed it with official and permanent government records.  It brings to mind the classic scene in "Red Dawn" when the invading Russian/Cuban forces round up all the trouble-makers by pulling out the county gun-registration files.  Or perhaps a sea captain burning his secret orders when his ship is boarded.

The Rule of Law?

One of Cassandra's evergreen complaints is that people on the right complain about certain wicked tactics from the left, but then turn around and do the same things when they are in power. Today's example appears to me to be a clear-cut reversal on the duty of an executive to enforce the law, rather than declining to do so when he doesn't care for the law.

I believe the antecedent act was the President's refusal to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, which went so far as to refuse to defend it in court when people sued to overturn it. Turnabout: fair play?

Democrats who controlled the Legislature in 2009 changed the law so that same-sex couples could sign up for domestic partnership registries with county clerks to secure some – but not all – of the rights afforded married couples.

Wisconsin Family Action sued last year in Dane County circuit court, arguing that the registries violated a 2006 amendment to the state constitution that bans gay marriage and any arrangement that is substantially similar.

Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen refused to defend the lawsuit, saying he agreed the new law violated the state constitution. Then-Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, hired Madison attorney Lester Pines to defend the state.

Walker, a Republican, replaced Doyle in January and fired Pines in March. On Friday, Walker filed a motion to stop defending the case.

“Governor Walker, in deference to the legal opinion of the attorney general that the domestic partner registry…is unconstitutional, does not believe the public interest requires a continued defense of this law,” says the brief, filed by Walker’s chief counsel, Brian Hagedorn.

Now, in fairness, this is an occasion where I think the Democrats are on the right side. I favor the Alabama approach to the question of whether gay unions are "marriage," but this exact approach in how to resolve the question of dealing with just what those unions are. This is exactly what we should do: create a separate institution for non-marriage partnerships that can be judged by its own standards. Thus, if for example adultery should prove to be less of a concern in partnerships containing only men -- as many "same sex marriage" supporters openly proclaim -- we don't end up with a watering-down of the protections against adultery in traditional marriages. (If anything, those are far too watery already.) Let them do the things they want, just keep a distinction so we aren't forced to collapse the categories when we come before courts of law. It's only sensible to believe that the needs of these kinds of unions might come apart, so we ought to have the ability to address that in the law.

Still, whether you're for this or against it, what I want to point out is that it is the same refusal to defend a law that we (rightly, I think) railed about as a failure of duty on behalf of any executive. If you're the chief executive and your oath includes enforcing the laws faithfully, you ought to do that. If you don't like the law, you could always resign and run for the legislature -- or just use the bully pulpit to suggest changes from the legislature. Making law is not your department.

The same issue is about to come around again, regarding this 'executive amnesty,' so it's a good time to decide if there's a principle worth defending here or not.

Once More, With Feeling

That Atlantic piece on Daesh/ISIS that Mike linked is getting sustained criticism from the academic left. They want you to know that it's really wrong to suggest that Daesh has any sort of Islamic legitimacy, and that suggesting otherwise is dangerous.

What? He Said It Was A Scheme.

George Monbiot suggests a... well, he himself calls it a "maverick currency scheme," so let's go with that.

A presidential theory of voting

Government is the thing we do together when we want to push each other around.

I prefer Scott Rasmussen's formulation.

The Case Against Scott Walker

Argued in the expected fashion at Daily Kos.

It strikes me that Republicans will only even possibly care about the claims under point two. If he's tied to significant local corruption, that's a problem. The other three points are not of interest except to his opponents, but even many of his supporters might be persuaded if there is truth to the corruption claims.

Socio-cultural revolutions

Pascal Emmanuel Gobry challenges the assumption that time has a one-way arrow when it comes to revolutionary progress.

Now, it's important for me to make clear what I am not saying. I am not saying that today's progressives are "the real racists." I am not saying that same-sex marriage or any other progressive social movement is the equivalent of racism. Today's progressives have at best a fuzzy lineage with yesteryear's, and all of us are implicated in this civilizational enormity; as one who is "conservative" by today's political standards but firmly in the camp of Enlightenment liberalism, i.e., a "progressive" on the scale of millennia, I don't exculpate myself from this legacy. Not all racists were progressives and not all progressives were racists (it was the French Revolutionaries who banned slavery in the French colonies, for example). No group — ideological, religious, or otherwise — comes out of that complex history looking good (which itself should warn us off easy narratives of Progress vs. the Dark Ages).

The Best Hole is a Fighting Hole

So we're in one. Let's cut it into the right kind.

Semper Paratus

A group of Norwegian Muslims will be forming a circle around Oslo synagogue after the celebration of Shabat this Saturday in a solidarity gesture called the Ring of Peace.

"If the Jihadists want to use violence in the name of Islam, they must go through us Muslims first," said one of the event's initiators.

That's awesome and deeply honorable, but be ready for them to come right through you. They're ready to do that. What's your plan when they do?