What is Honour?
My blog on honourable relationship brought up the issue of, what is honour anyway? The term honour, along with honourable behaviour and honourable relationship gets bandied around a fair bit, but with little definition.
Honour is personal. It cannot be pinned down into a specific set of values and behaviours. Unlike a system of laws, honour is a nuanced thing that responds to the moment, the situation, the complexities. There can be no ‘one size fits all’ approach here. We make it on our own terms. That said, there are some generalities I think we can pin down around this one.
Honour has to have integrity. What you say and what you do need to align. You need consistency. At the same time, all beliefs are evolving works in progress so there has to be permission to grow, develop and change. That calls for a balance between sticking to your beliefs, and letting them grow into something else, when necessary.
Honour is based on other things, it does not exist as a free floating, distinct and separate entity. Honour is rooted in your ethics and beliefs. It is how your ideas about what is good, right and necessary translate into actual speech, behaviour and thinking. So to be able to act honourably on your own terms, you have to have figured out what your value system is and how that works. You have to know what you believe. You can behave well in an improvised way but honour is a system, and it is deliberate, not accidental. Conscious engagement is a big part of what defines honour.
Everything we do is influenced by how we understand the world, what we think is happening, what we think it means and so forth. Our choices about what could be honourable are rooted in these understandings. Thus if our core beliefs are dysfunctional, we may have trouble acting honourably even to our own satisfaction. We also have priorities, and those shape our idea of honour. Is caring for our family more, or less important than protesting against war? There is no right answer to this, only the personal answer.
I think honour is always an attempt, an experiment and a work in progress. It’s an aspiration and an ideal as well. It isn’t a fixed and solid thing. What matters most, as I see it, is the conscious and deliberate attempt to create a set of values and then manifest them through the details of your daily life. The process of seeking to live honourably is far easier to talk about than the details because we can assume some common ground there. The process is perhaps the most important bit, too. In the questing after honourable ways of being, we learn about ourselves and the world. We make mistakes, experience confusion, find situations that lack tidy solutions, and we grow.
