HONOUR

Law often allows
what honour forbids.
Seneca

Honour is external conscience
and conscience is internal honour.
Arthur Schopenhauer

In a corrupted spirit
there is no place for honour.
Tacitus

I realize that to talk nowadays about honour sounds almost like an anachronism. Certainly, honour is not the latest trend. It is a value we have almost entirely forgotten. The word “honour” is barely even pronounced these days. However, we can often see how a lot of people give ostentatious speeches about “human dignity”. Leaving now aside the fact that most people understand such dignity as they best please – usually just to make some demand – the point is that no one takes the trouble to explain what exactly that dignity consist of, and upon which foundations it rests.

Essentially, the concept of honour is based on respect. Simply put, the honour of a person means for someone to be what he is and to be acknowledged and respected for what he is. My honour rests upon me being what I am, and upon the respect and acknowledgment my peers show for what I am. The bottom line is that people should behave in a way that allows them to respect themselves and, at the same time, respect those who respect themselves.

However, it would be a mistake not to distinguish between honour and reputation, fame or notoriety. For a person of true integrity, reputation is nothing but the consequence of an intrinsic honorability acknowledged by his peers. People of spotless reputation are honoured; people who are distinguished by exceptional honorability are paid homage. And this applies to opponents and even to declared enemies. During World War I, when the British managed to shoot down Manfred von Richthofen – the legendary German flying ace known as “The Red Baron” for the colour of the plane he flew – they gave him a full military funeral. Australian airmen served as pallbearers, and an honour guard fired a salute. Allied squadrons stationed nearby presented memorial wreaths.

It happens to be that not only is honour based on respect, it also inspires respect; and for men of honour this respect goes beyond all borders and barriers. There are no barriers for the acknowledgment of honour even among people who believe in different sets of values. The Teutonic Knight or the Spanish gentleman would have paid homage to the Japanese Samurai even if they do not necessarily share his code of honour that imposed upon him ritual suicide upon the death of his Lord. The poor will respect the rich if the rich are honest, and the rich will respect the poor if the poor are honest. Among people of honour, the weak and the powerful will respect each other because honour surpasses established hierarchies and social or economic status. Honour and respect are values that cannot be constrained within conventional structures. They go beyond all social, economic or political structures because they are embedded in the noblest part of our human predicament.   And this nobleness imposes recognition, even among people of different cultures or civilizations.

The only true International is that of Men of Honour.

And this does not mean that the members of this fellowship are “equal” in the sense of today’s egalitarianism. In bygone times, people would have said that they are “peers”. Honour does not make us equal. It makes us equally respectable.

The difficulty of explaining and defining honour rests mainly on the fact that it is a highly self-referential value. At the end of the day, it is either explained by itself, or it becomes very hard to describe. Trying to explain honour to a corrupt or greedy and self-centered person is very much like trying to explain colours to the blind, or music to the deaf. That is why everything that implies honour quickly becomes circular: we are worthy of respect if we behave with honour, and we become honourable by respecting our own dignity and acting respectably.

One essential thing that needs to be understood is that dignity is not an attribute that can be automatically assigned to anyone, as many claim, or at least pretend to argue. It is a sad and bitter truth, but there are unworthy people. Because dignity has to be exercised; respect is first to be deserved and then to be earned. Respecting others and respecting the dignity of others is, of course, a highly recommendable practice. But, what are we to do with those who do not respect even themselves? What dignity are we to respect in those who have no dignity at all? Is it possible to pay homage to someone who has no honour whatsoever?

Another vital quality of honour, just like many of the other values we will see, is that it establishes a two-way road. It is a value that dwells within us, and that is recognized in others. However, although the road has two ways this does not mean that you can expect the traffic to flow automatically. The value will be there within you, only if it is nourished and exercised. And it will be recognized in others only if their behaviour is such as to allow for a similar value to be inferred or deduced. Honour without its corresponding behaviour is mere bragging. If I say the proverbial “my son, do what I say and not what I do” perhaps I might be giving a good advice, but that will not turn what I do into honourable behaviour.

Whether we all have – or do not have – the same capacity of being honourable is something open to debate and discussion. As for me, and I admit that this may sound quite odious, I must confess that I do not believe that all human beings have the same capacity for honour. Throughout my life I have met people so unworthy and so deprived of even the most elemental notion of honour, that not even with the greatest good will on Earth can I manage to imagine how they could have possibly followed a different path. There are people who say that honour and dignity come from education and environment. I do not believe that.  I really cannot believe that.  In any case, either our whole education is one enormous failure, or there is very little it can do about honour and dignity. Choose whichever option you like, but the pervasive corruption and dishonesty of our present civilization – and this is something that raises bitter complaints everywhere – clearly proves that, in terms of decency, we have not achieved a great deal with our educational system.

I believe that the practice and exercise of honour would be much more encouraged by a good system of rewards and punishments, rather than by sophisticated educational theories. And please do not get me wrong: I am not thinking about brutal punishment, public floggings, death penalties, nor any brutality of the sort. What I have in mind is a system that promotes honorability and that sets almost insurmountable barriers to dishonesty. As long as we continue rewarding speculators, swindlers and gross opportunists with the highest positions in society, and as long as we continue to punish simple honest professionals and workers with the lowest degrees of social status, there is little hope that we will ever be able to build a society based on honour and respect for true dignity. It may be just a personal opinion, but I really do believe much more in a good selection criteria, rather than in the alleged unlimited educability of human beings.

In the old days people used to say that we have honour because honour is an “endowment of the soul”. However, the individual could lose it by staining it with his actions, being that God is the sole judge, donor and protector of honour. At the same time, Western culture has always made a distinction between “honour” and “honorific” considering the latter to be something acquired and even inherited, being the King its judge, donor and protector.

By the late 19th Century, Roque Barcia would say in his “Dictionary of Spanish Synonyms”: “… honour is a present, intimate, honorific; it is ours. It is the asset we will pass on to our children. Honorifics are traditional, historic, inherited honours; they are the asset we received from our forefathers. Thus honour is a virtue; honorifics are a sort of «raison d’état», almost a hierarchy. Honour is something you have. Honorifics are something you receive.” ([i])

From all we have seen, I think it becomes quite clear that honour is not a guaranteed possession. It is not something you have no matter what you do in life. It can be lost, and in fact, past generations thought it was like virginity: either you have it or you do not, and you can lose it only once. Maybe today we would not be so strict. Considering the way things are around the world, I think we should be a bit more understanding and admit that even an honorable person can have a moment of weakness, or make a serious mistake he will not feel particularly proud of for the rest of his life. But in any case, let us not exaggerate this indulgence and tolerance. Because dishonesty happens to be a ramp on which it is very hard to climb back up if you allow yourself to slide down. Take a step down the path of corruption and dishonesty, and if you manage to undo it immediately, maybe – and only maybe – you will manage to continue being an honourable person. However, if you take a second step you will probably have lost your honour forever.  Dishonour is a bottomless pit from which there is no way out. At least not without help.  And it would be good to remember what we just said about who is the donor of honour according to Western tradition.

Once honour is lost, self-respect and respect for others goes with it. Having lost all kind of respect, people lose their dignity. Among many other reasons, that is why I said before that there are unworthy people. A dishonest person is not worthy of respect, and a person not worthy of respect is an unworthy person. Essentially it is just rock-solid logic. There is no way around it. It is useless to throw speeches about a theoretical “human dignity” allegedly resident within anyone, because of  the mere fact that a being belongs to a zoological class called Homo sapiens. There are people who have thrown away their dignity, or who do not have even the slightest idea of its existence, and society does not gain anything by being tenderly consenting with them. In addition: our current experience and even 10.000 years of History prove that this criterion only triggers a decay that can become irreversible very easily.

Please understand me: it is not a question of being inhumanly cruel with unworthy people. The issue is only to block them out of the higher positions of social stratification in a decisive and definitive way, especially from those positions involving functions that concern the whole social organism, or at least a considerable amount of human beings. I do not think that the corrupt and the dishonest forcibly deserve stoning, hanging or public strangling. But I do believe they deserve the disdain they inspire, and I positively do not think they deserve to be rewarded with the highest levels of status in our civilization; especially not those levels from which they can later make decisions affecting all of us.

Finally, there is also a relationship we cannot overlook, and that is the relationship between honour and duty.

To fulfil our obligations is not equivalent to doing our duty. To fulfil an obligation is a matter or responsibility. To fulfil a duty is a matter of honour. Responsible people fulfil their obligations; people of honour do their duty.

Although, initially, it might not seem so, the difference is enormous. An obligation is something we owe to others. Duty is something we owe to ourselves. An obligation can be demanded and many times supposes reciprocity or repayment. A duty is something that is expected from us regardless of whether there is – or is not – any compensation. It is what we do “just because”. Because we are how we are, and we are what we are. Or it is what we do not do, simply because people of honour do not do such things. Duty is ruled by our conscience. Obligations are ruled by laws, common use, custom and assumed commitments.

That is why Seneca used to say “law often allows what honour forbids”. The meaning of duty is much wider and, by far, more imperative than any obligation. And not only in the restrictive sense of Seneca’s quote, but in the much more crucial way of positively demanding a given attitude or a given behaviour. In terms of duty, it is generally far more essential what duty commands than what it forbids.

A doctor’s duty is to try to cure a patient. To do it consciously to the best of his knowledge and ability, and taking all appropriate cares is his obligation. But it is also his duty to consider the patient as a suffering human being and not only as a chance to collect fees for useless consultations. However, it is his obligation to maintain confidentiality.

In any case, honour always resides in what makes us proud, or in what we believe we can be proud of. Not in order to brag about it in front of others and boast unnecessarily. It is simply what intrinsically belongs to us and satisfies us; it is what describes us and we are pleased how it describes us; it is what represents us and we find it satisfactory that it does.

Our honour is in what we truly are. It defines how we wish to see ourselves and how we wish to be perceived, acknowledged, respected and treated by others. Simultaneously, it also defines how we wish to perceive others in order to acknowledge them, respect them and treat them honourably.

Honour is what makes ladies out of women and gentlemen out o men.

And no matter what certain people may say, these categories do not depend on fashion or the latest craze.

They are conditions that will never be out-of-date.