Worth fighting for.

Honor: A History, by James Bowman (Encounter, 265 pp., $25.95)

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AS Robert E. Lee agonized over whether to remain loyal to the government of the United States on the eve of Virginia's secession early in 1861, Virginia's favorite son confided in his wife the solemn standard he would use to make up his mind. "There is no sacrifice I am not ready to make for the preservation of the Union," he wrote her in a letter, "save that of honor." Today we can still feel the oppressive liberation of that sentence. Those were living words. Every one of them was cautiously weighed, and all people with the ability to read at that time would have understood their precise import--to wit, that not all was up for debate; the cosmos wasn't infinitely pliable; the civilized man had to have a spine. Overriding Lee's ardent desire to remain faithful to the country and the army that had commissioned him to serve was something greater and irreducible, which was, of course, his honor.

When James Bowman, one of our most perceptive thinkers and discerning critics of the media, had his draft number come up in 1970 for service in the Vietnam War--a war he then opposed--he felt immense relief when the medical officer washed him out for a physical debility. Yet Bowman noted the officer's manly sympathy for him as he did so. The doctor might have believed that he had contributed to handicapping the young man, denying him that ultimate test of manhood that Bowman would naturally have wished to pass; he might have been compromising, in a word, the young man's honor. Bowman walked away with a feeling of blessed reprieve 36 years ago, but he never forgot the sense that he and the medical officer, both men living at the same historical moment, nonetheless inhabited different worlds, different spiritual atmospheres. The doctor didn't belong to Lee's world, but he didn't belong entirely to Bowman's either.

James Bowman now presents his Honor: A History as a highly readable and impressively bold attempt not only to define what this elusive idea called honor really means in its many colors through time but to account for its passing out of the popular vocabulary over the last 90 years or so--thereby examining the consequences with which we are left to live and, sometimes, suffer. Bowman makes a modest claim when he draws us to his subtitle to say that this is a, not the, history of honor, but this claim is a bit of preemptory modesty. Although few other books on this less than foot-tapping topic in a populist time exist, surely he has written the one by which others will be judged in the future, assuming that there will be sensible--and honorable--people left in the future to do the judging. Their loss would be, of course, inestimable. For honor is, Bowman writes, "the standard by which we judge our public men and women--a form of judgment which, even in a non-'judgmental' age such as ours, it is scarcely possible to imagine being without."

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An aura still hangs about the word, if not always the idea. (Some people actively despise both.) Regardless of the promulgation of written honor codes here and there, honor's strictures have rarely gotten themselves recorded on paper. Honor isn't like statutory law; it belongs more to the realm of the felt and assumed than to that of the thought and legislated. At its most elemental, Bowman writes, honor is simply "the good opinion of the people who matter to us," and without it the society of others, from neighborhoods to nation-states, isn't possible. Whatever action earns that regard sows the seeds of honor; whatever offends that regard calls down scorn. Honor embraces the idea of saving face; it's not just about what we are but about what we show the world. A hermit may be able to achieve sanctity, but that he might wish to gain honor is, to say the least, absurd. He hasn't a need for it. Honor requires approval. It needs an audience.

A defense of the concept of honor makes for a tougher, less obvious, case than may be apparent to most of us. Honor's merit we would think unassailable. Think of the formidable, almost nostalgic comforts we find in such phrases as on my honor, Scout's honor, and you're on your honor--not to mention the major chord sounded in the pledge from the Declaration of Independence of "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." They feel like breezes from a freer land. Yet honor is not always an unalloyed good everywhere and for everyone; its desirability at any one time hinges on the peculiarity of its social setting or, as we say now, its context. Gentleman-soldiers can live by honor, but so can thieves, thugs, and Islamic radicals who engage in suicide bombings and "honor killings."

In this way honor differs from morality, the claims of which are universal, whether or not universally applied. All that matters is who's being honored and who's doing the honoring. And people have to sign on to an honor code; they must agree about what it means. Revealingly, the formula to honor and obey has long since been dropped by many moderns from the wedding ceremony; feminists may object to obey, but few, feminist or not, can claim with confidence to know what honor means anymore. It no longer signifies. Honor must stand in time's weather like everything else.

It is here that Bowman shows himself in this meticulous study a keen and detached reader of history, for while he doesn't hide his own qualified views on honor (he's for it), he doesn't play the advocate only. He is most committed to showing how the idea has evolved from out of the bogs of prehistory through ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern times--from the Homeric hero through to the flower of high-spirited, comic chivalry in Don Quixote to the muddy horrors and waste of World War I--until today, in the backwash of The Catcher in the Rye and Vietnam, in what Bowman calls a "Post-Honor culture," the most conspicuous residual forms of honor we see are, on the happy end, that of the military and, on the low end, that of street gangs. Bowman takes a sharp, exhaustive look at most of them, and his critical sense for describing and evaluating never gets overrun by his eagerness to resuscitate the idea of honor as an ideal. Lavish, well-chosen references to aristocrats, politics and politicians, warfare, literature, and the popular culture of movies, TV (The Sopranos), and music fill this history--which, amazingly, for all its close analysis, still manages to read less like a study and more like a story.

Bowman makes for the journey a useful distinction between what he calls reflexive and cultural forms of honor. The first one we all understand instinctively: A child hits back when hit, a nation fights back when attacked. It's glandular honor. But cultural honor "comprises the traditions, stories, and habits of thought of a particular society about ... the proper and improper uses of violence." We might call it reflective honor. It largely defines a culture's values and, when this form of honor is threatened, the very foundations of a society can shake and even shatter. Much of the book is a meditation on the hardy survival of one and the steady erosion or transformation of the other.

A few points will surprise some readers, particularly Bowman's nicely accurate account of the historical bias of Christianity against secular notions of honor in the West. Talk about clashing codes: Turning the other cheek or loving others as oneself has little to do with slyly saving face or violently getting back at an enemy for the sake of one's honor. But as the centuries passed, the rough edges of those sensibilities were worn down until the 18th and 19th centuries, when both were fused so beautifully that the cultural ideal of the honorable Christian gentleman--the Victorian accommodation--emerged and has not been surpassed for sweetness and strength to this day.

Perhaps it couldn't last. Too many forces have conspired against it and one morning the sun had to rise on us and our contemporary moment. The new enemies of honor are, predictably, manifold. The spirit of democracy is one; if all people are to be considered the same in worth, the premium placed on distinction of any kind becomes less attractive and more expensive. Another is the multicultural attitude, which posits conflicting ideas about what constitutes honor; codes of honor within a community are strained without consensus. The therapeutic elevation of victimhood corrodes external standards and excuses dereliction. Then we have those odorous, overlapping forms of idealism and pacifism--abetted relentlessly by the media and miseducation in the schools--that usually assume vastly different views of human nature itself. These enemies Bowman profiles with subtlety and acuity while also suggesting a few ways to combat them.

Wherever the larger culture goes, though, personal honor, a term dear to Evelyn Waugh, remains open to us. The struggle to be honorable, which means nothing less than the effort to become better than one really is, pays off. As Browning once wrote, "When the fight begins within himself, a man's worth something."

Mr. Simmons is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College, and author of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin.