Welcome to JamesBowman.net

Sunday
February 5, 2012

Home

Now Playing

Now Playing

A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin)
(Reviewed January 24, 2012)
A brilliant and heart-breaking Iranian film that is also a superbly plotted detective story Full Review

The Artist
(Reviewed January 23, 2012)
A delightful return to the — amusingly tweaked — conventions of silent film for an unexpectedly moving if familiar love story Full Review

The Iron Lady
(Reviewed January 20, 2012)
A patronizing movie about Britain’s greatest post-war prime minister which is only interested in her mental and physical decay and not at all in her achievements Full Review

War Horse
(Reviewed January 12, 2012)
A children’s movie for those of any age who are content to dwell forever in the complacency of immaturity Full Review

Teach English with a Degree in Elementary Education.

Diary
ENTRY from January 21, 2012

In my book, Honor, A History, I wrote of Lord Herbert of Cherbury who, shipwrecked at Dover in 1609, commandeered the only rescue boat and, with his drawn sword, kept anyone else off of it and on the sinking ship except Sir Thomas Lucy. He later mentioned the incident in his autobiography without any apparent sense of shame. The point was to show that the Victorian notion of chivalry was not, as is often thought, medieval in origin but an invention of the late modern era. When a hundred years ago this April the gentlemen on board the Titanic made way with remarkable unanimity for "women and children first" on the doomed vessel’s lifeboats, they must have had a strong sense not only that they were behaving honorably and chivalrously but that such notions of honor and chivalry were the most up-to-date and progressive ones available and not some throwback to a more primitive era.

The reaction to the apparent abandonment of his ship by the captain of the Costa Concordia, Francesco Schettino, shows that these notions are still, after almost a century of honor’s disgrace and desuetude in the general culture, remarkably current. We may laugh at the idea for the formation of the character of young men put forward by Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, that they should be "acceptable at a dance, and invaluable in a shipwreck," but let a Captain Schettino prove the opposite of invaluable in a shipwreck and people will notice. And condemn.

In an interesting essay in the London Daily Telegraph, Theodore Dalrymple argues that we might excuse the Captain on the grounds that he was the product of a culture which had neglected to supply him with "an unthinking allegiance to a standard of conduct that in some circumstances might be, or might appear, ridiculous or counterproductive but in others is essential to the performance of difficult duty." In short, with a sense of honor. He goes on to distinguish between wickedness and weakness, concluding that "on the scale of human monstrosity, the Captain does not climb very high. His place on the scale of human weakness is another matter." Full Entry

My new book Media Madness, is now published and available for order from Encounter Books. Less a polemic than an attempt to understand the origins of the mass media’s folie de grandeur, the book is a warning even to those who are deserting the big networks, newsweeklies and large-circulation dailies not to carry with them into the more attractive world of niche media the undisciplined habits of thought that the old media culture has given rise to. To order this book, click here.

Also available, now in paperback, is Honor, A History, which was first published in 2006. A study of Western cultural artifacts, from the epics of Homer to the movies and TV shows of today, it is focused on explaining why Western ideas of honor developed so differently from those elsewhere — and especially from the savage honor cultures of the Islamic world. The book then goes on to trace the collapse and ultimate rejection of the old Western honor culture from World War I until the present day and to suggest the conditions that would have to prevail for its revival.