The meaning of honor

The Humanities and the drift to extreme relativization argue there are no firm values, not even truth or the meaning of a story. It is all subject to the deconstruction of the individual against the foolish pretenses of collective conviction and the way we construct reality. This vogue is the logical extension of the decay of honor in Western civilization. When people speak of the decadence of Western civilization, they are pointing to the decay of Western civilization's code of honor. 

The battle between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in the first decade of the 21^st century was thus about the meaning of honor in today's world of a struggle between secular versus fundamentalist values. The Republican Party understands this struggle whereas the Democratic Party seems not to. The question is not what is the Democratic Party's position on the War in Iraq; the question is how does the Democratic Party's position on the War in Iraq illuminate our understanding of Western honor codes.