To Sommers, honor and the struggle to achieve it are important parts of a good life, fostering values like “courage, integrity, solidarity, drama, hospitality, a sense of purpose and meaning.” And it is these very things, he argues, that 21st-century Americans are lacking. Indeed, Sommers finds the decline of honor responsible for many social problems. Anti-immigration rhetoric, he writes, plays on selfish fears, trying to portray immigrants as threatening—all members of ISIS or MS-13. Sommers argues that this line of attack could be challenged by an appeal to Americans’ generosity and hospitality, which are central values in any honor-based culture. Why not rally people around the slogan “We’re not cowards; we’re Americans,” Sommers asks, encouraging people to see fearfulness as an insult to the nation’s self-respect?
Again, Sommers sees our dysfunctional criminal-justice system as a casualty of America’s disregard for honor. Because society is motivated by fear instead of pride, Americans tolerate mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline—any amount of injustice, so long as crime statistics go down. Sommers is particularly sensitive to the way that the current justice system ignores the honor of both criminals and victims. In honor-based cultures, he emphasizes, the victim of a crime is responsible for avenging it, because he or she has been personally injured. In American law, on the other hand, a crime is not considered an attack against a person, only against the state and its laws. As a result, victims play little role in the punishment process, and are denied the chance to regain their lost honor. Nor can criminals repair their honor by making amends to those they have injured. As a result, trials rarely satisfy the deepest needs of individuals or of society. [...]
Yet Sommers’s idealized picture of honor ignores many of the ways it actually manifests itself in our society. Take his examples of problems for which honor is the proposed solution—fear of immigrants and fear of crime. Sommers does not adequately consider the possibility that, in fact, it is not fear that motivates these political positions, but hatred—specifically, racial hatred. It is no coincidence that it is black and Latino youth who are the primary victims of mass incarceration, or that it is Latino and Middle Eastern immigrants who are most demonized by immigration opponents.
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