Being Honorable

For Me, That Meant Resigning From the State Department and Now Resisting Our New President’s Vision of America.

- Brady Kiesling

My life was not short enough for me to not do the things I wanted not to do,” is the lament playwright Tom Stoppard puts in the mouth of the hero, British poet A. E. Housman, in The Invention of Love. That bleakness resonates for me. The storybooks of my childhood were infused with the idea that people should be honorable. But that honor was always deeply tinged in self-denial. Its cloud of meaning, which includes pride, dignity, legitimacy, satisfaction, and happiness, is inseparable from the self-loathing that wracks me when I yield to impulse and violate rules of behavior I impose on myself. Desire to protect my fragile honor, not fear of punishment, drives me to conduct myself as a good citizen and not grab at every pussy within reach.

Honor is thus a very fine thing, if a humane philosophy is the basis of our self-restraint. Without it, squeamishness, vanity, or the prevailing fashion gets exalted into a code of ethics. The ancient Greeks and Israelites were more concerned with rules of ritual purity than with rules of good conduct. It was okay to rape your slave, for example, but not during her menstrual period. Proof of personal honor in many traditional societies even today is the brutal control exercised over the reproductive behavior of members of the household.

Darker still, often, are the class implications of many of our rules of honor. For 19th-century Christian gentlemen, an alleged lack of self-restraint among the “dark races” and the “lower orders” justified ruthless economic exploitation and the imposition of a strict, punitive religion. Fear of an angry god (crafted in the image of angry human masters) would control subordinates who supposedly lacked the internal code to control themselves.