Review: Liberalism with Honor
| Author: | Sharon R. Krause |
| Review Date: | 11/03/2003 |
| Basic Summary: | Harvard Professor of Political Science argues that we must restore honor in order to defend liberty. |
Sharon Krause wants to resurrect honor. Lamenting the dichotomy in modern political theory between those who assume (and often endorse) a society of self-interested actors and those who endorse (and often assume) a society of virtuous citizens, she uses honor to bridge these two spheres. By uniting the individual's self-interest with society's need for virtuous actions, she argues, honor can be a powerful political force in the defense of liberty. We have done ourselves a disservice by rejecting honor as archaic, when it can be modern and progressive.
By her own stated yardstick, Krause's book is a failure. Although she is fairly convincing in identifying honor as a necessary "spring" that propelled the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass to action, Krause's premise that we will need this spring for future Martin Luther Kings and Elizabeth Cady Stantons is left an unproven assertion. But what if liberty's past battlegrounds are only skirmishes in the future? If we don't need any more revolutionary leaders, then no need to restore honor to bolster these leaders.
To many, of course, it is self-evident that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants." But it is not that simple. Liberty has taken hold deeply and broadly since Jefferson wrote those words 200 years ago. Democracy has gone from being an radical experiment in one nation to being the unchallenged system of the majority of the world's countries. Rights have been extended from landed, white men to women and blacks and soon gays. Our education system encourages students to think and speak more freely than any people ever have.
And while it required a great leader to fight Jim Crow, it requires no great leader to prevent its revival. After each victory for liberty, people internalize their new freedom and demand it ever more. Today, the great majority of Americans consider black civil rights as intrinsic and as necessary as freedom of speech. More importantly, where are the challenges to existing freedoms? Time has proven the bankruptcy of all intellectual challenges to our current freedoms. Once democracy was attacked as a risk to social stability, and once black civil rights were attacked as a threat to biology. Who still believes these critiques?
If no one does, then our freedoms are secure, even if the public is apathetic to the source of its rights, or uneducated in their history. Absent a compelling challenge, our rights are guaranteed. We can see this logic at work with gay rights. The older generations may believe that gay rights will destroy the family, but once gay marriage becomes a right - and it will soon - that argument will be disproven once and for all. Then gay rights will become as secure as our rights won more than two centuries ago.
It is possible that there are still new liberties that must be won, even if old liberties no longer require defense. But if there are liberties unrealized, what are they? Krause herself admits that we now live in "a polity in which the gap between our principles and our practices has become increasingly narrow." What groups still lack their rights? What major freedoms have we ignored? If existing liberties require no defense, and there are no new liberties to win, then we do not need honor to strengthen our wills to fight for good.
Let us assume, however, that we will need to fight for our freedoms in the future - either in defense of an existing right or to secure a new one. Even so, Krause offers little reason to believe that these struggles will demand honor. Her criticisms of virtue and self-interest are strong, but they are abstract. They never explain how honor is critical, if in its absence we have somehow managed to maintain and even expand our freedoms.
Maybe we don't need honor to bridge self-interest and compassion because democratic politics force the two to work together anyway. Take the invasion of Iraq. Krause argues that neither compassion nor self-interest alone could support this kind of action:
Equality of conditions [in a democracy] makes individuals unwilling to inflict pointless suffering, but also may render them unwilling to sacrifice for one another...[people] take pleasure in relieving the pains of another if they can do so without much nuisance to themselves...Self-interest, like "general compassion," can keep things running smoothly in the ordinary course of affairs so long as no serious conflicts emerge and persons can get along without much bother.
But if this is true, and Krause is correct that we have lost our sense of honor, then something else must be filling in for it, because we did invade Iraq!
I would argue that in Iraq we witnessed an honorable outcome precisely because the selfless and the self-interested were evenly balanced on the national level, negating the need for them to be balanced in one great leader. To draw a crude caricature, the self- interested wanted to invade Iraq to guarantee national security, while the selfless wanted to help Iraqi civilians avoid war. The self- interested were forced to promise to rebuild Iraq in order to appease the selfless. The result was a war both virtuous and advantageous, without falling back on honor.
Which is not to say that honor is without value. Ignoring, for a moment, the grand defense of liberty, and focusing on the mundane, we find many people who are both self-interested and virtuous, yet who lack the assured self-direction that Krause defines as integral to honor. Instead, there are millions afflicted with our modern form of schizophrenia - desiring to be virtuous, but unwilling to give up their luxuries. Bombarded by messages that tell them to act upon only one urge or the other, they vacillate wildly, from the peace corps to corporate law to spiritual sabbaticals.
Honor would allow these people to resolve the contradiction that has frustrated them. But that requires a generally accepted code of honor, and there is no such thing today. Indeed, no code of honor could find acceptance today from the many groups that make up our splintered society. Even if society were split only one way, into liberals and conservatives, who could imagine these two groups agreeing to general principles of conduct?
This is the great unanswered question in Krause's book. We can accept all of her assumptions - believe that liberty needs defense, that honor propels the guardians of liberty, etc. - and still see no way to reverse the 40 years of hyper-individualism and accelerated social disintegration that have extinguished honor.
It is unfair to both the reader and to Krause to reverse myself now and briefly say that, all these problems notwithstanding, this is an excellent book. But the truth is that this review is a long argument precisely because the book engaged me enough to demand such a treatment. Its thesis is thought provoking, even if it is not ultimately compelling. The book could even stand merely as an introduction to honor - a concept poorly understood by many of us, but necessary to a complete understanding both of history and of contemporary world politics. The pleasure of wrestling with the concept through the thick ideas of this book should not be underestimated.