The Life and Death of Honor

Obituary of one of the oldest human values –

I was recently reading the book version of Disney’s Mulan to my four-year-old son when he asked me what “honor” was. Although I usually pride myself on concocting kid-friendly analogies and simplifications, I truly struggled with his question and muttered something like “people thinking you’re a good person” before moving on. The question stuck in the back of my mind, however,  and I have been continuously mulling how to mentally model “honor” in a concise way. After days of struggle, I began to read, research, and think critically about the idea, and what follows is the digest of that process.

The concept of honor was a staple of human society since the dawn of recorded history, and yet somehow in the past 300 years it has gone the way of steamboats and horsedrawn carriages. Honor, today, is a quaint vestige at best and pathologized at worst, coming up most often in the context of “honor killings” or the “honor culture” of the American South. Outside the limited scope of military service, “honor” is nearly synonymous with “machismo” or “bravado”, a puerile attachment to one’s own ego and reputation (or that of one’s kith and kin).

A comparison of a random selection of some other broad but unrelated terms demonstrated that the fall of honor is not just absolute but relative – freedom, for example, was a minor concern in the 16^th century but has since dwarfed honor.

Interestingly honor was more prevalent than even “love” in the 16^th century but the opposite holds true since then.

Wikipedia implies that honor is a proxy for morality prior to the rise of individuality and inner consciousness: in our earlier, tribal and clannish stages of moral development, the perceptions of actions by others and how they reflected on our kith and kin were much more important than any inherent deontological moral value, hence honor.

And yet there is a part of us that knows that this idea is missing something critical. When we read or watch stories about “honorable” characters like Ned Stark or Aragorn talking about honor, we don’t think of them as being quaint, macho, and motivated by superficial public perceptions of their clans and relatives. We know that when they are talking about their honor, they are talking about being morally upstanding figures who do the right thing regardless of the material and reputational cost (to quote Aragorn, “I do not fear death nor pain, Éomer. Only dishonor.” -JRR Tolkien, Return of the King). When we read this, we know that that is not socially-minded showmanship but rather bravery and altruism, and a reader is supposed to like Aragorn for it.

Upon contemplating this and reading further, it became obvious that “honor” was a catch-all term for many different qualities. It refers to personal moral righteousness and familial reputation, but it also refers to one’s conduct in warfare, or one’s fealty to one’s liege, and to one’s formal recognition by society. Given the ubiquitous and multifarious uses of the term, and the fact that pre-modern peoples seem to have absolutely obsessed over it (prior to 1630 it was as important as love and vastly more important than freedom), it stands to reason that it was useful and good. So how exactly can we explain the benefits of honor and what it meant?

The Benefits of Honor

I came to the following categorizations of how honor worked and why it was useful in pre-modern society, from shortest to longest:

1. A solution to the game-theory of pre-modern warfare

In the modern world there are the International Criminal Court to enforce international law and prevent war crimes, and an international press to publicize the violation of treaties and ceasefires. In the premodern world, these institutions did not exist. What prevented pre-modern peoples from regularly engaging in these acts? To some extent the answer is “nothing”, and indeed rape, pillage, and general atrocities were a constant feature of premodern warfare: the ancient Roman statesman Cato the Elder (234-149 BC) coined the phrase “The war feeds itself” (bellum ipsum se alet) to explain that armies would sustain themselves by pillaging and starving occupied territories, and it is telling of the longevity of that mode of warfare that the phrase is most heavily associated with a war nearly two millennia after Cato, the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648 AD.  One institution that may have held these atrocities in check was the papacy and later state churches, though it stands to reason that a commander willing to commit such venal acts might not be dissuaded simply by threats of additional eschatological penalties. But one additional force holding back the worst of human nature during premodern war may indeed have been the concept of honor. A society that places a high value on honor means that individuals will pay a high reputational cost for such actions as attacking civilians, violating treaties, or encouraging mass atrocities. This societal expectation discourages individuals from engaging in such behavior because they would lose honor – and as honor was transmitted familially, their families would be marked for generations. In a society where legacy is important, staining that legacy in perpetuity for a one-time military benefit may have made some commanders think twice.

2. A heuristic to encourage the efficacy of pre-modern society and administration

It is difficult for us moderns to understand the extent to which the pre-modern world was personal. Max Weber, one of the founders of modern sociology, viewed modernity as a process of transitioning from a Gemeinschaft (community) into a Gesellschaft (society). In the former, looking out for one’s friends and family, using influence for their benefit and helping them get into positions of power is considered good and dutiful; in the latter, being dutiful means impersonally discharging the role of one’s office without regard to personal relationships; doing too much favoritism is considered corruption or nepotism. Indonesia’s former president Suharto once neatly encapsulated the difference (and revealed that Indonesia was still a Gemeinschaft) with the quote “what you call corruption, we call family values”.

Most pre-modern societies, particularly feudal ones, had almost non-existent states, the governing apparatus being almost completely dissolved and reconstituted upon a monarchical succession. 14^th century England had only a few hundred people in direct employ of the crown, most of them being tax collectors, royal estate and forest managers, and keepers of the peace. A monarchical succession meant that a new person with his or her own network of dependents, friends and trustees would need to pick and choose his or her own councilors and appointees to go out and do things.  How was a monarch to choose people for all of these roles? What all this meant was that the work of state administration was built on personal reputation. If a monarch needed something done well, they needed a quick metric to be able to assess the efficacy of an appointee. To that end, they could simply use someone’s reputation for honor.

Thus, to the extent that honor encompasses such qualities as honesty and forthrightness, it would encourage the enforcement of contracts and upholding of laws. If it encodes diligence, willingness to abide by oaths and be overt in one’s declarations of allegiances, then it would help to encourage stable politics and relations amongst peers of the realm (an above-board network of alliances allows a rational calculus of when and whether to initiate a conflict; a clandestine alliance system gets us the tangle of World War One). If honor encompasses honesty and charity, it would entail dependability in collective and remitting taxes and making necessary investments to prevent or curtail social unrest by the lower classes. And most importantly, honor was a stand-in for loyalty to one’s liege and the crown. If you’re assigning a general to lead an army or a governor to lead a wealthy province, you want to be sure that they’re not going to betray you. Honor serves as both a metric for that likelihood and, failing that, a reputational deterrent on future generations of a traitor.

3. A general shorthand for morality that is responsive to changing moral frameworks

Western civilization has spoken of “honor” over thousands of years, and what that means in terms of personal virtues has changed radically over that time. One of the most important ideas of Friederich Nietzsche is the conceptualization of Slave Morality versus Master Morality. In Nietzsche’s conception, the Master Morality of the societies that used to be slave masters (Mesopotamians, Greeks, Romans) was later overcome by an inverted Slave Morality of those who used to be their slaves, i.e. the Judeo-Christian moral values.

Let us first examine how honor worked in the Master Morality of the ancient world. In this conception, what was morally good was to be judiciously utilize the benefits of being at the top of the social pyramid, to become the most powerful and beautiful version of oneself, to surpass one’s rivals, to fully self-actualize. We see this fully laid out in epics such as the Iliad, wherein what is exalted is martial, mental, and interpersonal prowess. As Hector explains in the Iliad (Book VI), “I have long understood, deep in my heart, to defend the Trojans under Hector’s spear, and to win noble glory for myself and my forebears”.  We see this carried over into Roman society as exemplified by the pursuit of glory and the acquisition of familial “honors” which is how the word (honor) is used when it first enters the Western lexicon. Ancient Romans, particularly in the late Republican period, were absolutely obsessed with acquiring honors, in the plural. In this sense, honors often means public recognitions of honors via titles, offices, and displays such as the all-important triumph in which the celebrated man would have to be reminded that he was mortal lest he follow the path of Bellerophon and think he had acquired divinity. By the late Republic the quest for honors had become an obsession, and their pursuit was fuel for the civil wars and lust for power that ended the Roman Republic. To wit, Cicero comments in his De Officiis (On Duties), “honor is the reward of virtue, and the pursuit of honor is the very aim of every great man. It is the highest obligation to seek the recognition of those who are worthy, not for personal gain, but for the service of the state.” And as later Roman commenters (Livy) observed in looking back on that period, “No man is truly great unless he has acquired honor through the strength of his own actions. It is the pursuit of honor that drives men to greatness” (History of Rome book 2). In other words, honor in the Master Morality framework was exogenous, not endogenous. It was about getting others to recognize your greatness.

The rise of the former slave populations with their Slave Morality truly inverted things.  In the Gospels Jesus intones repeatedly against the pursuit of public recognition: “When you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others” (Matthew 6:2); “you know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave” (Matthew 20:25-26) and further “for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God” (John 12:43). The message of humility naturally was taken up by those who were materially already humbled by the existing socioeconomic order (the slaves and urban poor) and resisted by those who had the most to lose – the practitioners of the Master Morality of public honor and glory. Over the following three hundred years Christianity came to be the dominant religion of the Mediterranean world. What followed in the West was literal moral revolution, the overthrow of the Masters by the Slaves, and the creation of a new order in which honor was still a goal, but the means of its attainment shifted radically. Thus by the 5^th century St. Augustine echoed the same message “Let us then approach with reverence, and seek our honor in humility, not in pride” (City of God, published 426). Through the Middle Ages we hear from Dante Alighieri that “The greatest honor is not that which comes from men, but from God. And the greatest humility is knowing that, without His grace, we are nothing” (Divine Comedy, 1321). And at the end of the Medieval period, Sir Thomas Mallory repeats the same message, that “He who is humble in heart, his honour shall be pure and his glory eternal; but pride is the enemy of honor and virtue” (Le Mort d’Arthur, 1470).

The Death of Honor

As we saw from the n-grams above, Honor died around 1700 in Western Europe, as “the old aristocratic code of honor was gradually replaced by a new middle-class ethic of self-discipline, hard work, and social respectability” (Lawrence Stone, “The Crisis of the Aristocracy” (1965)). But following the trend line, its subsequent exhumation in the 19^th century was as a pastiche to reminisce about or poke fun at, not as a genuine revival of the cultural value. For example, in Sir Walter Scott’s magnum opus Rob Roy, the word “honour” appears 152 times in just a little over 500 pages. Jane Austen used the term quite often, 256 times in her collected works, but anyone who has read Austen will know that she came to bury honor, not praise it. 

The exact reasons for the decline in honor are difficult to pinpoint as there were myriad processes unfolding at the time. The Enlightenment subjected many cultural values to rational scrutiny and Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire had no mercy for the concept that they wished to be rid of with great urgency: “The idea of honor has caused more bloodshed than any other human folly.” Voltaire Candide 1759. If one looks back on the typology for the benefits of honor above, we can see that many of the reasons for honor’s existence began to be moot by the 18^th and 19^th  centuries. For example, the growth of centralized bureaucratic states allowed expanded recordkeeping and objective evaluations of merit, eliminating the need for reputational heuristics. Increased law, order, communication and infrastructure meant greater movement and atomization of the individual as the Gemeinschaft gave way to the Gesellschaft; familial reputation gave way to licenses, certifications, degrees, and more affected signals of social status. And as “honor” used to be a vacuous stand-in for any number of human virtues and moral qualities, it was with little difficulty that it could simply be replaced by more precise terms for those qualities, e.g. “honesty” or “bravery”. Thus “honor” came to be a term of critique for those areas of the world most resistant to modernizing and enlightenment influences, where “honor culture” and “honor killings” persist as remnants of what once was the dominant mode of human thought and moral reasoning.

Epilogue: Another Resurrection?

Looking back at the n-grams, we can see one last fillip on the trend line beginning in the late 20^th century. While no clear explanation has been put forth for this, one obvious suspect would be the rise in historical fantasy. With Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, Game of Thrones, and countless other fantasy worlds attracting millions of fans on screens, pages and tabletops, it is little wonder that concomitant historical concepts such as “honor” should rise in popularity as well. This clear growth in this direction can be evidenced by the fact that historical fantasy tropes such as dragons, empires, knights and castles have seen large growth in popularity from the 1990s, but historical terms with less resonance in historical fantasy such as “crusade”, “dowry”, “abbot” and “chastity” demonstrate no such gains.

Nevertheless, the usage in the English lexicon of “honor” remains a small fraction of what it once was. Honor continues to interest us academically and fictionally, but there is little chance of it returning to guide our choices and moral values in the here-and-now.