(De)Constructing Honor. Who Has It? How do you Get It?

St. Olaf College, its friends and supporters, its donors and philanthropists, do well, in this hour, to honor our
students for their academic achievements.
And in this brief, truncated honor ritual, we are reaching far back into the ancient world and its cultural
values. We are taking up, with the conferral of honor, a value system that, in the modern West, lies for the
most part dormant, partly hidden from our consciousness, and only partially understood. The ancient honor
code placed honor and its opposite, shame, at the very center of its value system. Aristotle preferred to
speak of praise and blame rather than honor and shame. But the meaning was the same. So, in Aristotles
terms we are here to praise worthy, hard-working, deserving students. We are also here to praise
generous, kind-hearted people who support our college and students with scholarships and other moneys,
sometimes by way of self-denial and personal sacrifice. So today, only honor and praise; no one gets
blamed, for anything!
Today, then, we recall, indeed, we resurrect, the ancient and venerable notion of honor. And what we are
doing is neither new nor foreign to the academy, the university. For schools and academies have long had an
honor roll, or a Deans list. And who knows for how many centuries University diplomas have contained
the Latin words, cum laude, or even summa cum laude?
But, I mean very briefly to argue that, beyond the conferral of honors in an academic setting, and beyond
the occasional conversational reference to honor perhaps in connection with military loss or victory or a
sporting event in modern western societies, we dont know much about honor any more. True, honor is a
positive cultural value, but its power as a value that governs human activity on a day-to-day basis, is gladly,
perhaps intentionally, and already long ago in western culture, dismissed as an archaic and indeed a very
dangerous concept.
If anyone today is paying much attention to the ancient values of honor and shame, it is the cultural
anthropologists, especially those who study Eastern Mediterranean and ancient Near Eastern Societies.
Some biblical scholars claim, borrowing from the cultural anthropologists, that the pivotal values of honor
and shame govern the world-view of biblical times. And they attempt to read, say, the David narratives in
the Old Testament, or the gospels in the New Testament, in the light of these pivotal values. Honor and
shame language fills the biblical narratives and its poetry as well. Above all, of course, the Bible speaks of
the honor due to God; and our parents are to be honored, says the 10 commandments. And the New
Testament surprised no one when it writes of the shame heaped on one who dies on a cross.
What, really, is the ancient honor culture? What are its constituent elements? How did it function? And why
did it work in ancient eastern traditional cultures? There is time to touch on such issues only briefly.
Let me quote a few sentences from a well-known authority on honor, admittedly verbose and so typically
academic in its dispassionate tone. These words concerning honor are from Pierre Bourdieu, the recently
deceased French anthropologist/sociologist:
The ethos of honour is fundamentally opposed to a universal and formal morality which affirms the equality
in dignity of all men and consequently the equality of their rights and duties. Not only do the rules imposed
upon men differ from those imposed upon women, and the duties toward men differ from those toward
women, but also the dictates of honour, directly applied to the individual case and varying according to the
situation, are in no way capable of being made universal.
This very generalized statement, though it does not say everything, is really very chilling to the modern,
western heart. No equality of rights and duties for human beings? Men and women have different rights and
duties? Different situations and contexts allow different honorable actions, which cannot be applied
universally?

Other anthropologists are more specific in defining honor and emphasize different things, some a bit more
user-friendly. For example, honor is about the esteem in which others hold you, that is, public recognition. It
is also the value of a person in his own eyes . . . ones claim to pride, and public recognition of it. You can
earn honor by your own merits so-called achieved honor; but you also possess a kind of ascribed
honor by birth, due to the ranking of your family, its nobility, wealth, and so on. The salient point for us here
is that claims to both kinds of honor seek public validation and recognition competitively or agonistically.
Ancient societies were patriarchal, and so males had to be brave and courageous, but also defend against
any contesting of the honor they claimed for themselves or their families. An insult to their honor provoked
revenge. And only a wimp did not revenge an insult. Aristotle said that it is honorable when one takes just
vengeance on his enemies and refuses to be reconciled.3 To show mercy and forego vengeance that
would therefore be a shameful thing in an ancient honor culture.
Today, of course, we will have none of this. The notion that one must avenge an insult to ones honor is
publicly at least a source of moral indignation to us. An instructive example lies in Shakespeares comedy
currently playing at the Guthrie theatre The Merchant of Venice. Shylock has been dishonored. In one
of the moving speeches in the play, Shylock says of the Merchant, Antonio:
He hath disgraced me and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned
my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies.
Shylock the cultural Middle Easterner must live and be justified by the ancient honor culture. Hence he
continues, If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? REVENGE. If a Christian wrong a Jew? Then
REVENGE. In short, when honor is denied, its force becomes practically unmanageable. Shame impels a man
to justify himself and re-establish his honor-rating. In modern democratic, western civilization, however, we
have long felt uncomfortable, even offended, by outright sentiments of vengeance, and hence the need to
tame or domesticate honor and shame values by toning down the vengeful aspects.
But the impulse toward domestication of honor began long before modern western values as we know them.
Such an impulse is certainly rooted in the New Testament, which had a built-in bias against honor. Nay
more, there was likely already in Greek and Roman honor culture, though subtle, a skepticism toward
ancient honor culture. It was, according to James Bowman, a troubled awareness of the discrepancy
between inward and outward realties, and therefore the potential for the honor-skepticism that grew
throughout the Christian centuries.4 Aristotle and others already had introduced a crucial innovation by
linking honor with other moral virtues such as liberality and truthfulness; thus nobility of actions had to be
matched with nobility of mind.
Much later Shakespeare himself was part of a large but slow movement away from traditional honor culture.
Was he not in part speaking through Falstaff when Sir John Falstaff said,
What is honor? A word. What is in that word honor? What is that honor? Air. A trim reckoning. Who hath
it? He that died o Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. Tis insensible then? Yea to the
dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore Ill none of it. Honor
is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.5
This movement away from traditional honor gathers momentum from many quarters and over as many
centuries. Edmund Burke pronounced the age of chivalry [to be] gone, while Schopenhauer dismissed
knightly honor and the cult of dueling. Negative views of ancient honor culture culminated in the 20th
century with what writer James Bowman (in his book Honor: A History) calls an anti-honor feeling. We
Americans are, he states, enemies of the Honor Culture. For Mr. Bowman, Mark Twain, Hemingway and
Faulkner are preeminent American writers who had always known that honor was a feudal relic and that the
world would be better off without it.6 For the 20th century, perhaps these words from Hemingways A
Farewell to Arms, concerning honor and war, say it all:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and the expression in vain. . . . Abstract words
such as glory, honor, [or] courage were obscene beside the concrete names of [destroyed] villages, the
names of roads and rivers.7
And so here were are, now in the 21st century, in a western modern society, having presumably freed
ourselves over many centuries from those undesirable elements of ancient honor culture: patriarchal
contests for public honor, vengeance for indignities and insults, keeping women in their place in the domestic
sphere. On the other hand, we have retained and polished the best of the old honor code: a ritual of honor
and praise of students for academic achievement, earned by virtue of their hard work and excellence of
character, not by old family ties, old-boy or old-girl networks, male-female distinction, ethnic backgrounds,
and the like.
So, whats all the fuss? Whats not to like? Merely this: a very large part of todays world still operates,
culturally and politically and religiously, within the ancient, traditional value system called honor and shame.
And we, at least in America, do not really understand them. And it is clear for all to see what this lack of
understanding has brought us. My final, simple point: in all good faith and sincere respect, we need to
return to the ancient honor culture no, of course not for a re-appropriation of its non-western values, but
to know it and understand it: for world peace will depend on any bridges of understanding we can build.

Pierre Bourdieu, The Sentiments of Honour in Kabyle Society. Trans. Philip Sherrard, in Honour and
Shame: the Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. J. G. Peristiany (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1966),
pp. 191-241.
Julian Pitt-Rivers, The Fate of Shechem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 1.
Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.9.20. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon (New York, The Modern
Library, 2001).
4

James Bowman, Honor: A History (New York: Encounter Books, 2006) , p. 45.

Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, V.i. 133-41 in G. Blakemore Evans et al., eds. The Riverside Shakespeare,
2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
5

Bowman, p. 134

Quoted in Bowman, p. 134.