Honor

If you are looking for opportunities to earn honor, there has never been a time when it is in such high need, and there is so little societal capacity for it.

Jeffery Bay, Unsplash.

Until a few weeks ago, I had never given honor much thought. Then Mary Harrington wrote an article about it. She observes that many modern men seem adrift. They are unengaged, and not participating in family or community life even when they have chosen to get married and have kids. Simply, they are slackers. Harrington suggests that modern men feel left out of real life as the capacity to earn honor has shrunk. Men are turning to video games to engage in resource gathering, focus, competition, and collaboration as a form of status seeking, or cultivating honor, in virtual environments. 

I don’t agree with all Harrington writes here, but it’s certainly interesting. The problem at the heart of the article is something I’ve observed and mused on over the years. Before I met and married my partner in middle age, I unsuccessfully dated for, like, 5 million years. Jokes and jibes aside, this was not something I wanted. There was never a time I put off finding a serious partner to pursue my career or any other goal. It just didn’t happen. One of the reasons was that I met many men who seemed very checked out.  

I did a lot of soul searching to understand whether I was expecting too much of potential partners. There are quite a few snarky memes about (and some very real examples of) successful ladies that will only date 6 ft tall men with excellent stock portfolios. All I can tell you is that I met a lot of dudes that, if faced with serious financial, medical or personal challenges while having a family, didn’t seem like they would be up to figuring out the hard, boring stuff. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing the really hard stuff alone.  

There are a lot of so-called feminists that could go on and on about this sort of thing, but it’s not my point to bemoan the lack of quality dating opportunities from a hetero female perspective. For one, I am not sure that this is a problem strictly among men. Many women are checked out too. After all, doomerism, slacktivism, quiet quitting, and the YA-ification of mainstream culture all reflect a certain cultural malaise, and appeal to both men and women. I do agree with Harrington that something is going on. The idea that honor is displaced within modern life and could contribute to current issues of isolation, disengagement, or antisocial behavior (however mild), is compelling. 

I didn’t grow up with a concept of honor. That got me thinking about how I didn’t grow up with a concept of integrity either. When I learned in my 20s that it was good to be consistent in your intentions, communicate thoughts and intentions accurately and proactively to people, tell one consistent truth about a situation to all individuals, and not gossip, it was a revelation to me. You may think that’s very silly and that I was a bad person. Maybe I was a bad person! But many people engage in these behaviors and it was normal, and neither my parents nor friends ever mentioned integrity as a value. People do talk about lying, but integrity is much larger than telling full untruths. I didn’t even learn about integrity by hurting people and getting hurt by them in turn. A lot of my 20s were full of stupid drama and we were all mired in it. However, one day I read a random blog where the author called out someone for having low integrity. And my brain stopped: Integrity, what is this? And I started reading about it.

Yes, I was really that stupid. And also, adopting integrity as a principle greatly improved my life, even as I am a flawed human who cannot always live up to my own expectations. Living a principled life has always appealed to me, even before I had the tools to know which principles mattered and how to live them. Is there a similar opportunity for a more principled life in cultivating the concept of honor?

There are a couple aspects to the definition of honor as a life principle, 1) great respect, and 2) adherence to what is right or to a conventional standard of conduct. When I think of an honorable person, I imagine a great knight meeting an enemy on a battlefield, and adhering to fair conduct even if that causes the knight to lose the fight. I imagine that even if the honorable knight loses some storied fights, their overall brave adherence to fairness, honesty, and the right outcomes has served them well throughout life, and adherence brings longer-term wins that are beyond the current battle. I think that sounds like a desirable ideal to cultivate. 

Our culture tends to use honor as a verb, rather than a noun. We mention honor in formal speeches when bestowing an award for achievements, in death when bestowing a monument, or in traditional wedding vows. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t touch on what it means to act honorably.  

I cannot recall a single instance when family or friends have discussed acting with honor seriously. And I can only think of a handful of contexts in which honor is mentioned or discussed in wider culture, outside of period films. Honor Culture is a topic that pops up from time to time, usually to write-off American Southerners as ego-driven fools. The military is another context that comes to mind, where honor may (or may not) be a central concept; I admit I know almost nothing about it. In all, this isn’t a lot about honor, and it feels negatively-coded.  

Google tells me the words “honor” and “honour” have seen decreased use over time.

If you’re into Star Trek, I guess there is also Worf from The Next Generation, who is the butt of many jokes.  

This poor dude cannot get a break.

I think honor is due for a comeback as an important American value. I don’t mean Honor Culture and reputation, as that is a child’s version of honor. In my mind, a truly honorable person will do the right thing, even if it is misinterpreted by others as the wrong thing and it hurts their reputation. Reputation is besides the point, as adherence to correct actions are the value.    

In America, today’s war isn’t a literal battlefield, it’s a dirty culture war of statistics and rhetoric. The Left and Right try to emotionally manipulate and threaten you into adherence, to capture you in their tribe. Hypocrisy is normalized, if not expected, to keep the opposition in its place. Use of rigorousness and data is selective. Debate tactics are advanced because they win arguments, not because they bring forward actionable truths. Narrative is more important than experiences or facts. Taunts and slurs are flung, and pointless fights started, to create drama and put the other side in a bad position, without serving the needs of the people one is fighting for. Conflict is started at a cool and cowardly social media distance, so that one does not have to engage with the humanity of those they’d like to dominate or capture. Respecting one’s enemies is seen as a betrayal of being a good person. 

I honestly don’t have the time to rigorously document whether all of this is true or not within our institutions and media, but many people believe this is today’s zeitgeist. I am one of them.

These culture war battles are without honor. 

I know, it sounds silly. But here we are.

An honorable person would try to influence you through integrity, effectiveness, goodness and joy. An honorable approach to solving modern dilemmas would include admitting to wrong, acknowledging the successes of your enemies, and accepting apologies. Honor would mean a commitment to uncovering the truth, and being honest and transparent about arguments and information, rather than trying to win at any cost. Honor would mean only engaging in conflict when it could serve a measurable gain, and otherwise avoiding it. Honorable people prefer to meet in person with their enemies, and see and understand enemies as human beings.  

The biggest test of your honor, and the way to most effectively show honor, is to lose honorably.  

Losing doesn’t mean you give up on an issue, and it doesn’t mean you lose the war. Losing with honor, does mean admitting that you didn’t do enough to win that particular battle and that you need to seriously reconsider your tactics and positions, and even your value to the cause. It does mean you take responsibility for the outcome, to the extent you are able, instead of externalizing the loss and blaming your enemy, as explained through conspiracy or oppression. 

Do you feel like you see a lot of leaders exhibiting these qualities?

If everyday men and women are looking for honor, but feel there are no modern opportunities to express it, let me suggest: America’s culture war provides plenty of opportunity for cultivating honor. And one can approach political and cultural issues with honor immediately. The field is wide open. There is so much dishonorable behavior in our cultural conflicts, that even small attempts at acting honorably within these conflicts would probably be noticed, for better or for worse. 

Perhaps humans don’t have an instinct to see opportunities for honor in non-physical confrontations. Yet, the stakes in these conflicts are very real. There is no shortage of stories of people losing jobs, opportunities, friendships, and families, or being publicly shamed or even threatened, over wrongthink regarding culture war topics. Bravery is needed to act differently in this landscape. 

Does a lack of honor affect personal and community life engagement? I can definitely see how that could be the case. When institutions or powerful individuals act dishonorably politically and in the media, people will dis-engage from them. These institutions, and their actors, have no honor when they interact with each other, and you’d be a fool to expect that they would have honor when interacting with you. The institution will not lose honorably if you have a conflict with them, say, over the education or healthcare of your child. And an institution will always have more power than an individual, which worsens the effects of their lack of honorability. And obviously, and can’t believe that I have to say this out loud, honorably losing is key to conflict resolution. If you never concede anything, never apologize, even when you are wrong, then you can never compromise and create a path forward for all parties. A lack of honor is endless division. And endless division leads to a lack of meaningful political and social change through group compromise, and that is disheartening and disengaging. 

Would more emphasis on honor in society change any of this? Who can say, but my imagination is sparked. I’m interested in learning more and thinking about how honor can be applied in the culture war, and improve our interpersonal and society-wide engagement and conflict resolution. I admit, promoting honor feels like shaky ground. As if only socially unskilled nerds with a love of medieval history might be interested in it. I certainly will not mention pursuing honor to my close friends, even if it’s evident in my actions. It’s definitely not cool. But the anthropologist in me tells me to lean into that, just a bit. Is there something about honor that makes us deeply uncomfortable? Sometimes, it’s the things that are never mentioned that are key to understanding the deep workings of a culture. Maybe honor is a vital piece that’s just out of view, and has been so transformed by the modern information landscape, that we haven’t been able to recognize opportunities to express it.