There are two meanings to the term “honor” as used in modern society.
One is the summation of all the traditionally male virtues. A man (or woman) of honor holds true to a very strict code of conduct that accepts no excuses. They do the right thing in every situation no matter what and accept whatever consequences fate chooses to deal out rather than violate that code.
A person of honor is courageous. They step up to the plate every single time duty calls. They define courage as the ability to do what is right no matter how you feel, and it is a definition they live out every single day of their lives.
A person of honor is honest. They mean what they say and live what they believe. Their word is sacred to them and they will not break it except in the direst of circumstances. And even then, they will regret it, and seek to make amends.
A person of honor is courteous. An honorable person strives never to hurt another unintentionally. They are polite and considerate in all public discourse, and are meticulous in their dealings with others.
A person of honor is noble. They do not allow petty personal concerns keep them from doing what is right. The greatest good is always on their minds, and part of the strictness of their code of conduct is the upright and forthright way they keep their heads above the fray, always striving to uphold the highest of ideals.
This version of honor is all about maintaining personal integrity. What motivates the honorable person is the desire to live their lives in a morally correct way. They know that there is nobody out there keeping score on what they do and do not, and they do not expect to be rewarded for their virtue.
It is the desire to be able to look oneself in the mirror and respect the person looking back at you that motivates the person of honor to live each day in as upright, noble, and honorable way as they possibly can.
Then, there is the other sense of the word honor, which is basically just an excuse for men to respond with violence when they get their feelings hurt.
I am serious about this. This is the mis-use of the word “honor” that used to lead to duels, and still does to this day, just in a far less official and regulated way. It is the perversion of the concept of honor that leads to the unthinkable madness of so-called “honor killings”, where a father will kill his own child just to keep the other men from making fun of him. It is the mutation of the word “honor” that leads to blood feuds, saber-rattling, and even war… just to keep men from getting their feelings hurt when they lose face in front of other men.
Think about it. Say a man is in a bar when some no-good sidewinder comes up to him and makes a string of highly vulgar speculations as to the breadth of our hero’s wife’s tastes in sexual partners, including various local lowlifes and the local wildlife and, of course, the sidewinder himself.
Now obviously, what our hero wants to do is attack. That’s basic caveman human nature. When someone makes us angry, we want to thump them with our club. Our hero wants to beat the sidewinder up for saying something that hurt the hero’s feelings, but he knows that civilized human beings are not actually supposed to do that. So he needs an excuse.
Enter the terrible miscasting of “honor”. The sidewinder has not actually injured anything but the hero’s feelings. It’s not like anyone is likely to take the sidewinder’s word on his wife’s broadly accessible virtues. Once you pull back the testosterone veil of pseudo-respectability from this farce of “honor”, you realize that all that is at stake is our hero’s feelings.
Under this bullshit idea of honor, a man has to beat up (or even kill) anyone who says something that hurts their feelings so that everybody will be too scared to hurt the man’s feelings in the future. This is honestly how men deal with their emotions, women and girls.
The problem is that, deep down, men want to fight. There is a drive deep within the male psyche to butt heads with other men and find (or challenge) our place in the hierarchy. We know we are not supposed to fight, and so we keep it in check or redirect it into other forms of competition. But it is always there.
The very flimsiness of this grotesque misuse of the idea of “honor” demonstrates how deep this desire goes. We will take nearly any excuse to drop civilization (symbolically enacted by taking off your jacket) and enter a primal world of brutality.
That is why action movies are structured as they are. It is all to support a male violence fantasy. The villains are a genuine threat to the safety of the innocent specifically because that makes the hero’s acts of violence justified. The girlfriend has to die or get captured so that the hero both has a personal reason to take down the bad guys and is free to do so, without any messy personal involvements holding them back. The enemies the hero fights have to get stronger as he goes, because the violence thrill has to get stronger to have the same effect.
The only righteous use of violence for any honorable person is to protect people. Anything else is just a paper thin justification for acting like any old caveman by using violence to resolve disputes instead of reason.
Remember this the next time some man (and it will be a man) said he was defending someone’s “honor”.
Bullshit. All they really did was try to beat someone up for making them angry. That is not civilized behaviour, and therefore it is the exact opposite of truly honorable behaviour.
And if anyone disagrees with me, I’ll beat the crap out of them.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
