Honor and Honorarium

I’ve never earned a penny for making a public speech—but presumably they weren’t altogether free. I spoke as a representative of institutions that thought they benefited from any kind of positive “exposure” to the public; I was merely the instrument of delivering that exposure. There was also the personal “honorarium” consisting of basking in the attention of mostly strangers for twenty minutes or so; and there was, of course, the intangible value of that sometimes rather perfunctory applause.

We live in a world of intangible concepts. What is “exposure,” for instance. It isn’t something one can deposit. How does one “profit” from “publicity”? The profit isn’t measurable; it’s in the same category as the weight of my soul. And what exactly does “honor” mean? Since honor also belongs to an immaterial category, the “honorarium” should be in the same class; it should be praise, never a check. Too rudely physical that. Praise is just words—not deeds. And when crass words turn into crass deeds, or when honor turns into fungible honoraria, we’ve crossed some kind of invisible barrier between order and disorder—whatever those intangible concepts mean.

Translating Honor

Honor is a word now in temporary decline. The word belongs to the cultural periods of history not to civilization. It suggests the appropriate fusion of body and of soul, thus bravery and courage, proper to the body under stress, and a transcendental stance, proper to the soul, which, in practice, is willing to sacrifice itself for the community. In its highest expression it suggests intelligence; in its low forms in manifests as duels, honor killings, vendettas and other pointless mayhem. Honesty derives from honor; its current form, telling the truth, is actually a later development dating to around 1400 (Online Etymology Dictionary); the older sense, of honorable, is preserved in the phrase of “making an honest woman of her.” Honor and truth-telling are intimately linked in German: Ehre, ehrlich—and in Hungarian, to leave the Latin or Germanic languages: Becsület, becsületes. The same is true in Greek: Timē, timioz.

The decline of a word very much at home in ages of kings, dukes, and nobles—and the bloated and contradictory meanings it developed by abuse—is understandable. But surely the qualities that it once represented, at best, have not disappeared and are still valued. I got to thinking. How would we translate honor into modern. My nominee is “integrity.” Applied to a person, it has precisely the same meaning that honor once had. It is rooted in the Latin for wholeness, completeness—which in a human means the same fusion of powers honor represents. Integrity is a kind of humble form of honor fitting for a democratic time. Which is appropriate. Proverbs (15:33) tells us: “The fear of the Lord is the instruction of wisdom; and before honor is humility.”

Honor, Capitalism

Asked to provide an antonym to the word capitalism, most web dictionaries return communism. Some instead suggest socialism; they don’t mention communism, probably because their editors think that communism is now dead as the Dodo. The word’s origins go back to (where else) late Latin, capitale, meaning property, from which we get such interesting secondary meanings as chattel and cattle. That capitale goes back to Latin caput, head. Do I infer correctly that it was the head man who had property, possessions…hence the word’s extensions? Caput is good. Reminds me of the German kaputt, meaning worn out, dead, and the phrase that goes with it: Alles ist kaputt! But (too bad) that word derives from a French card game, capot, meaning a bonnet.

Now with a word having deep roots like that, the tendency is to say that capitalism goes way back. But in the sense in which we use the word, it really harks back to Marx’s Das Kapital, thus the nineteenth century—and indeed Marx’s success in seeding communism, hence the antonym. The fervent embrace of capitalism by a subset of Americans must have its roots in this modern ideological form of it, arising from the blessed Now, Today—thus signifying a kind of loss of tradition, historical sense, a lack of depth, indeed a lack of thought.

Cartoonists retain the distinctions. Capitalists are always pictured as extraordinarily fat, oppressive, and wearing tall hats. The blessed chattel-cattle are drawn as emaciated, thin, threadbare and groaning under enormous burdens.

George Orwell, to whom we owe so many things, failed us in one regard. He gave us Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery, War is Peace—but he failed to mention Capitalism is Honor. It was in the post-1984 period that we’ve had to invent the phrase and introduce it, and try to teach it to the chattel in popular cable talk intended to suggest that if you work for capital, subject to release at any time, you are a capitalist.

Interesting contrast there. Honor and Capitalism. I suggest it to the thoughtful as a subject of meditation on those long, boring commutes. The modern mind (my impression) feels a kind of mild but sad nostalgia when contemplating Honor—as something that harks back to childhood, the olden days, the days that (really) never actually held sway. Capitalism (my impression once again) has a not quite pleasant taste but signals power, smarts, sophistication, and a kind of realistic indifference to anything but self—but, Facebook Friend, it has a kind of scientific magic, doesn’t it? That very sophistication, that realism, that hard-nosed drive, baby, that’s what magically transmutes—doesn’t it?—into the American Dream?

The truth is (my conviction) that in a genuinely healthy society, one that must confront reality—and the time for that is now approaching—honor will turn out to be the actual antonym to capitalism. It means, at minimum, returning to comprehensive human values: cultivating character, loving our neighbors not keeping up with them, doing unto others as we would be done by, honoring our parents rather than fawning before the powerful, the celebrated, honest dealings, defense of our shores not of “interests,” firm handshakes, straight talk, aiding the weak, visiting the sick, and building foundations before raising structures—never mind Towers of Babel.

Straws

In ordinary life people make distinctions between the practical and the philosophical. I hear people say: “Well, let’s not get too philosophical about that.” This stance puts philosophy into an airy-fairy region of reality and suggests that it has no practical bearing, thus that it isn’t real. I note here that one does not encounter this attitude uniformly across the globe. It is the product of a culture. For a while, about fifteen years ago, I had frequent dealings with a number of Russian immigrants. These were ordinary people, not intellectuals. They tended to come alive precisely when “things got philosophical”; they valued that mode of thought; it stimulated them; they could and did participate.

Philosophy is one straw in the wind. The notion of honor is another. In our culture honor is largely associated with backwardness and tribalism. Its high forms—and the high development of self that these represent—have become incomprehensible. Honor survives in diluted form only as sportsmanship, but the ingestion of steroids by some of our leading athletes indicates that honor is fading even in sports.

Manners? What manners? you might ask. Courtesy to women as I was taught it as a boy has become the negative of sexist behavior. Elderly women accept such minor gallantry as opening doors for them—if, sometimes, with a look of surprise or anxious suspicion. Men were supposed to honor women once (that word again) and, by courtesy, to communicate that attitude. The elderly were also supposed to have been honored, but today, curiously defying reality, we are supposed to pretend that aging doesn’t happen. The young therefore don’t invariably and spontaneously yield a seat to the aged. It still happens. Virtue flowers naturally in the human soul. But the new training seems to reach most.

Worst of all—and here is the confessional part—the culture is such that I find myself behaving in the modern mode time and time again. And it’s always only afterwards, on the way out to the car or on the way home, that I realize with a start what a slob I have become. When the whole culture acts in a certain way, it helps the individual. I still keenly remember how careful I became, years ago, during a trip to Japan—realizing there that a much higher standard prevailed. And I hastened to conform.

What all this signifies is that comprehensive understanding of reality, coherence between vast structures, and complexity are being lost. Philosophy is practical. Honor is superior to mere mutual advantage. Women really are different from men—and vive la différence. Recognizing that difference—and where it applies and where it does not—testifies to a power of differentiation. The elderly deserve special courtesies because they are weaker, because knowledge and experience are valuable and should be honored (and in courtesy acknowledged even if not present in every instance). Honor and courtesy arise from a well-developed understanding of values—and a recognition that values by their very nature are hierarchically arranged.

Another straw in the wind and I will go indoors. Our highest leaders leave office and then convert their fame into vast sums of money. Whatever happened to towering figures like Robert E. Lee who never used the word “enemy” but contented himself with saying “those people,” and who, after he retired, with barely any assets at all, resolutely avoided any hint of cashing in? It also troubles me to think—having learned that lots of people have never heard of the Battle of Gettysburg—that there are masses of people out there who may not recognize Lee's name, never mind his splendid example.