In all times and places, “Death before dishonor!” has been the motto of those who have cared more for honor than for life itself, and who have performed daring exploits in honor’s name. Until now.

In today’s Western culture, writes James Bowman in Honor: A History (Encounter Books, 2006), we hardly know what the word “honor” means. It is this ignorance of honor, Bowman argues, that helped bring on the tragedy of September 11 and has been responsible for our somewhat muddled response to it. The jihadists who fight us today belong to a primitive honor culture and hold us in contempt, partly because we have abandoned our own.

In Honor: A History, Bowman describes how the culture of honor in the West developed over millennia and changed from its more primitive forms by its response to the challenges posed to it by Christianity and the Enlightenment. Western honor culture reached its apogee with the idea of the Christian gentleman, Bowman explains, then broke up and fell apart between the end of World War I and the end of the Vietnam War. Bowman will conclude with a discussion of the possibility of reviving honor.