In Defense of Honor

About this time last year, I presented this essay at the 2010 Senior Colloquium at Wake Forest University, which was held at the Graylyn Conference Center. I delivered an earlier version to an incoming freshman class at the 2008 Honor Assembly, the text of which was published in The Old Guard newspaper. In the intervening years I studied honor as it relates to political theory and eventually wrote a thesis on it entitled, A Consideration of Honor: To Lockeland and Back. 


In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Falstaff, summoned to acts of courage on the battlefield, justifies his cowardice with a comic discourse on "Honor":

What need I be so forward with Him that calls not on me? Well, ‘tis no matter. Honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to a leg?  No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honor? A word. What is in that word “honor”? What is that “honor”? Air. A trim reckoning.

When asked to count the cost, Falstaff finds that he does not have much use for honor.  He along with thousands of others are about to risk their lives for the sake of honor, and the rewards are not readily apparent.  Shakespeare was careful to couch this assault on a pillar of his society in the voice of a fool, but I think the question is worth considering.  Every student is forced to reckon the cost of honor.  At some point, he will be asked to choose between the honorable course and a shortcut.  When faced with the impossible, he will have to decide whether honor is worth the prick of failure.

Honor is not quite the pillar of society that it was in Henry’s or even Shakespeare’s time.  Thus, Falstaff is a bit of a prophet for the modern day.  He believes the physical world is all there is and that self-interest is the motivation for all human action.  In this world, the rewards of shortcuts must be weighed against the costs of society’s disapproval. The most serious decisions should be decided by shrewd calculations of costs and benefits. It is as Machiavelli said, seeming is better than being.  I think it is safe to say that many of us are tempted to think this way.  Downloaders settle out of court.  Students are suspended.  Executives go to jail.  Most, however, walk away unscathed, and on Falstaff’s view, we should not blame them for it. They correctly calculated it to be in their interest.

When we see man as simply matter in motion, we begin to undermine those attributes that give humans their humanity.  We attempt to quantify the value of human life and end up wondering if it has any value at all.  We try to describe freedom in scientific terms and enslave ourselves to biology and physical circumstance.  By limiting ourselves to the material world, we blur the line between what is and what ought to be.  Honor though, as any child will tell you, is a question of oughts.  The knight ought to risk his life for the princess. Lancelot ought to be faithful to his king.  So how are we to recover our sense of ought?

Thanks to durability of human nature, our moral imagination is far from lost.  We see mass genocide and cannot help but declare it an atrocity.  We find forced child prostitution, and our hearts break.  We hear stories of soldiers diving on grenades to save their comrades and hope we would do the same.  In each of these cases, we find ourselves acting on principles that reach beyond the world described by modern natural science.  Suppose we fail to act in one of these situations, or worse, take the wrong action.  Well, then we feel shame, for shame is what teaches us when we’ve been dishonorable.  Professor Harvey Mansfield shed some light on this unique human capacity in his Jefferson Lecture.  You see; despite what science tells us about our similarities with chimpanzees, only humans have a capacity for shame, and it seems that shame is not always in our interest.  Sometimes it means failing a class.  Sometimes it means losing one’s life.  Yet something within us pricks us on.  The Ancients called it thumos.  When a soldier charges into battle against overwhelming odds, it is thumos that makes him “insist on his own importance” and drives him on, despite his instinct for self-preservation (Mansfield).  Thumos forces him to think past his own good and act for what the ancients called the good.  I think the war imagery is right, for honor is only won through conflict.  Honor is gained when a soldier risks his life on the battlefield.  Honor is gained when a student faces the impossible exam with integrity.  It involves taking risks that defy simple calculation.  What the honorable student and soldier teach us is that honor is part of what it means to be human.

In its original conception, the aim of the liberal arts education was to educate in what it means to be human, since this was thought to free humans from bodily appetites and cultivate the life of the mind.  As W.E.B. Du Bois put it, the goal of the true college is “not earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.”  Thus, liberal education as it was originally conceived was at least in part an education in how to live.  To some extent this aim has been lost in the present day.  The Liberal Arts College has given way to the Research University and the Research University to what Clark Kerr calls the “Multiversity.”  Core curriculums are on the wane as professors demand specialization, society demands “useful” knowledge, and undergraduates demand choice. 

Even so, elements of liberal education live on at Wake Forest.  A student may still read Shakespeare and be compelled by King Henry’s honorable break from Falstaff’s shameless world.  He may take a philosophy course and find Machiavelli’s claim a weak challenge to Cicero’s argument that being rather than seeming leads to the fulfilled life.  He may read the Bible and find that treasures in heaven are far better than treasures on earth.  As an institution, Wake Forest still aims to be “pro humanitate.”  Though its place in the curriculum is uncertain, Wake Forest continues to encourage students to think beyond their own good and toward the common good.  The Honor Code echoes this goal.  It helps us recover our sense of ought by reminding us of what it means to be dishonorable. 

As I retire from the Honor and Ethics Council, my thoughts turn to continuing the tradition of honor at Wake Forest.  My hopes for Wake Forest are threefold.  First, I hope that she will return to liberal education as it was originally understood, so that students might again be encouraged to take seriously the best that has been thought and said regarding the good for human life.  Second, I hope that she will remain “pro humanitate” and do so by stitching her motto into the very fabric of her curriculum.  Third, I hope that she will remain committed to honor, not out of a desire for success, but out of a recognition that humans ought to live honorably.  George Bernard Shaw once said that “the most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.”  The bright students of Wake Forest have far more to lose than the drunken Falstaff.  But with a truly liberal education that incorporates a concern for humanity and a commitment to honor, they may find that chivalry is not dead and that honor is weightier than ever.