Honor and Honesty

I once taught in the South at an old fashioned, southern gentleman’s prep school located just below the Mason-Dixon Line. The culture of the school was fiercely southern, I imagine, because it was located so close to “Yankeedom.” It was a long time ago, but as I watch the Republican remnants and their fellow travelers like Joe Liebermann rant and rave about the need to preserve free market capitalism in all its purity, I am reminded of some of my students from the southern landed gentry stock who challenged me whenever I confronted them about looking over on Beauregard’s or Hampton’s paper for an answer to a quiz question. Their response was inevitably, “Are you questioning my honor, sir?”
I would answer with, “I don’t know exactly what you mean by honor, but I am certainly questioning your honesty.” What I saw was a complete disconnect between honesty and honor. The latter was some abstract notion of reputation that must be defended at all costs, while the whole concept of actual honesty seemed lost on these young men. Fortunately I was never challenged to a duel during my three years of exile in that disturbing land, and finally I escaped back to New England.
I see the same disconnect in the southern Republican defense of free enterprise. They insist it should be defended at all costs no matter what. There is in them the same false chivalry I witnessed as a young teacher. Their notion of integrity is to defend principles no matter what, even if they have proven themselves to be worthy of questioning, as evidenced by the latest bubble and bust scenario acted out on Wall Street. Their sense of absolute integrity in defense of pure market economies as the only way to conduct business falls right in line with the history of the South as a whole: they were adamant about maintaining the institution of slavery in the face of its obvious immorality and growing economic disadvantages for the region; they were adamant about preserving Jim Crow; they were adamant about the idealization and paradoxical subservience of their white women; and now they are adamant about maintaining the deregulation of free markets at any cost. Everything becomes a last stand against the undermining of principle by Yankee liberalism and pragmatism.
Even The Economist, probably the best weekly news magazine in the world and a defender of market economies, sees the need for some kind of regulation by governments in the wake of the unregulated market debacle, but the southern Republicans will stick to principle and frame issues in terms of Thomas Paine-like absolutes, although they would not cite Paine because he was a nominal Yankee.*
The southern Republican is not the last vestige of a culture that simply will not die. NASCAR is another. Born of whiskey-running, revenuer escaping outlaws, Today’s NASCAR is the epitome of the institutionalization of red-neck southern values, and it has grown to the point that it has become mainstream American entertainment. The vast majority of its contestants are white as are most of its viewers. It celebrates a modern version of the single combat warrior of old who lives outside the law, risks his life, and maneuvers through obstacles (other drivers) to attain victory. Although there are rules and regulations governing among other aspects the size of engines and the horsepower, the spirit of single combat in that individual contestants duel it out for huge cash prizes is preserved. Fatalities do occur from time to time, so the liberties they take can result in death. The illusion, at least, of unregulated, all-out-aggression and individually heroic life-risk is preserved.
The reality, however, is that NASCAR is regulated. It is not a place where anyone can bring any kind of car to the track and do anything he wants. There are rules, restrictions, and constant revisions as technology and safety issues evolve. If the quintessential modern southern sport has rules, why can’t Wall Street? Is it just another disconnect that sport should have rules but real life should not? Maybe it’s just confusion between freedom and license that the South never sorted out except in NASCAR. Real freedom is not doing whatever you want until you get caught and then retreating into self-righteous indignation when confronted or blowing blue smoke out your exhaust pipe to escape the revenuers.
One of the definitions of integrity, in fact the first, is honesty. But then again, the southern mind has always been able to compartmentalize in ways that astound, such as the disconnect I witnessed long ago, between honor and honesty. It appears that the modern southern Republican mind’s focus on principle is so strong that it is blinded from honesty in any real sense.
*Actually, he lived in Philadelphia for a rather short period of time and then New Rochelle, New York, although he spent a good deal of his life abroad and was born in England.