The lawless frontier

Honor-by-merit was the manner by which the classless, democratic society of the New World shaped the rules of authority. 

Work and the success that comes of that trial by fire bestows the rights of the gentle classes to shape law and lead armies and governments. Sir Walter Scott's notions of honor as mediated less by reputation and more by sincerity, authenticity and conscience allowed for the lower classes to pretend to codes of honor as a way of imagining their lives. The archaic honor codes of the Old World produce leaders 

"who are seen as misguided fomentors of unnecessary wars and civil violence." (Honor: A History, James Bowman, 2006; page 77). 

By moving the aristocracy from nobles by birth to landed gentlemen, the Old World honor code was inadvertently associating political privilege to the extractive industries, which was different from the honor-by-merit that evolved in the American North where hard work and industry and success in the trial-by-fire of competition in the marketplace bestowed political credentials of authority and a need to be subject to an honor code. 

Honor as virtue became the new mode where 

"true honor consists in keeping one's word exactly, in being grateful to benefactors, courageous in unavoidable dangers, in being a kind husband, a dutiful son, a careful father, a faithful friend, an obliging neighbor, an affable companion, a useful citizen, a loyal subject." (as quoted in Honor: A History, James Bowman, 2006; page 78). 

Still the honor code required a gentleman never to refuse a duel. The bedrock of the honor code was self-defense. 9/11/2001 was a challenge to a duel the little George Bush could not decline. The War on Terror is an elaborate excuse for invoking this old fashioned honor code that favors the extractives and that privileges those ambitious men who demand the prerogatives of authority without the judicious exercise of power that virtue commands. 

Honor codes flourish where law is weak. When the American Western depicts a showdown between two duellists, they are evoking the Old World's honor code as transplanted to the lawless frontier of the New World.