Tim’s Book choice for September 2011

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen” by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

 “The Honor Code” seems to have some clear lessons for activists.  The subtitle is “How Moral Revolutions Happen,” and the job of activists could fairly be described as causing moral revolutions.  So we should give some serious thought to Appiah’s argument that many important moral revolutions, such as those against dueling, footbinding and slavery, were driven by changing definitions of honor.  In asking us to consider what current practices will cause our descendents to ask “What were they thinking?”, Appiah points the finger at issues like our massive prison population, factory farming and poverty.
The first chapter, on dueling, was especially salient to read while in prison, a society where the term “fighting words” still has a very literal meaning.  (For the record, the most serious fighting words are “punk”, “bitch”, and above all, “rat”.)  The prison culture places a huge importance on a very well defined code of honor, and most people would get beaten up before even considering sacrificing their honor.  Prison culture is closer to the 19th century than anything I’ve ever experienced.
     Even though Appiah’s last chapter is called “Lessons and Legacies,” his reflections are mostly academic and abstract.  (He is a philosophy professor, after all.)  He never digs into how his insights on moral revolutions might apply to the moral issues he mentions in the preface.  So I guess that’s our job.  How do we, for example, shift our honor codes to the point that any politician would be far too ashamed to take money from a corporation?  What current issues would be sensitive to changing honor codes and which ones might be immune?
One of Appiah’s most important lessons, that I think the climate movement especially needs to learn, is that these moral revolutions were not driven by any new understanding or new moral arguments.  He points out that the moral arguments against each of these practices had been around for a long time and were generally accepted long before any change happened.  My favorite sentence from the book is this: “It wasn’t the moral arguments that were new; it was the willingness to live by them.” (p.161)  That is worth repeating in a movement that tends to think that everything will change once we announce new and better pieces of information or new and better responses to the deniers.
     Appiah emphasizes that the influence of honor is a social concept, in that honor is based on the opinion of one’s peers.  It can’t exist in a vacuum.  But he doesn’t consider how honor might function differently in our hyperindividualized society.  Are people still so influenced by their neighbors’ respect in a world where people don’t even know their neighbors?  Appiah discussed what he calls “honor worlds,” which is the “particular social group” whose respect someone cares about.  That might be the biggest difference between our situation and those discussed in the book.  19th century English gentlemen knew that they were unquestionably a part of the clearly defined “particular social group” of English gentlemen.  If a rural Pakistani family loses the respect of their village, they have few other options for social groups.  But in modern America, social groups are often weak, ill-defined and in constant flux.  If we’re going to use Appiah’s lessons to target certain behaviors for change, our challenge is to understand the honor world for those we target.
     If anyone is reading this book, I would love to hear some thoughts about how applicable it is to our movement.  How does our moral revolution happen?
– Tim DeChristopher