Something is broken. Something shifted over the last 100 years causing a dramatic change to the average man. As a young boy, the only reason I ever heard about Audie Murphy, one of the most decorated war heroes of our time, is that he is a distant relative. My father told me stories about him. Audie Murphy was an icon of male history, a true hero.
But something happened to our culture. Men with the character of Audie Murphy disappeared, and the average male metamorphasized over a generation. The men of today often lack the basic skills of daily living. They are increasingly immature, anxious, and depressed. They increasingly experience fatigue and malaise and are often bereft of motivation.
I’ve been practicing medicine for over 20 years. Each year, more and more men show up in my office feeling depressed, anxious, lethargic, and fatigued. With the backdrop of a pandemic disease like COVID-19, these men are more frequently suicidal than ever before. And, the majority of them respond poorly to medication and counseling. Why is there an increasing manifestation of malignant male malaise and depression?
It’s not their lousy childhood, crappy job, lack of desire, or failure to grow up that cause’s these symptoms. It’s not a lack of serotonin, dopamine or norepinephrine. And, it’s not even low testosterone levels. Although these are signs, symptoms and secondary effects of the primary problem. The problem is lack of honor. Honor has been lost by both men and women. But, this lack of honor has a uniquely deleterious effect upon the man. Honor can be learned by women, however, it is not part of their true nature. Honor is an instinctual subconscious characteristic found in the men of our species.
The feminization and emasculation of men, the emancipation and objectification of women, and the sexual liberation both sexes in our society has played a huge role in suppressing and repressing the need for honor. Though many claim we are “better off,” changes to our view of the sexes has removed our desire to hold and retain honor, especially among the younger generations of men.
What changed in the picture above? Honor is gone.
Honor is Directly Tied to Manhood
Across every culture, and across all of known time, honor and manhood are instinctively tied together. Honor has been and always will be central to a man’s masculine identity. Men would go to great lengths to win honor and to prevent the loss of their honor.
In all of classical literature, honor is the central theme because it is central in the life of a man. It is part of his subconscious identity. The poems of Homer, the plays of Shakespeare, the writings of the Stoics, the chivalry of the knights and the gallantry of the Victorian Gentleman are all based upon the “fields of honor” where men defend their manhood.
I find it enlightening that penned upon the greatest document of governance ever written, the Declaration of Independence, our founding fathers “mutually pledged to each other [their] lives, [their] fortunes and [their] sacred honor.”
Honor is foundational. It resonates throughout Christian doctrine as well. It is part of the Ten Commandments, “Honor thy father and thy mother…” (Exodus 20:12). Men have been commanded to “give honor to their wives.” (1 Peter 3:7) And, even God himself told the ancient prophets Isaiah and Moses that the fall of Lucifer was because he sought God’s honor, which is His power. (Isaiah 14:12-14; Moses 4:1)
What is Honor?
We throw the word “honor” around a great deal. But, if you actually ask the question, “What is Honor?” most people scratch their head and struggle to answer. If you press a person long enough, you’ll probably get an answer like, “being true to a set of personal ideals,” “doing the right thing when no one is looking,” or “being a person of integrity.”
Honor is instinctual in men. Men define their character around honor, duty and obligation. This is an inborn trait of the male protector and provider. A man will do something for his mother out of duty and obligation. Not because she nagged or pressured him, but because taking care of her is part of his definition of himself as a man. He may hate it or despise the activity, and he may complain about it, but not doing it is not even an option. Not because he is afraid of upsetting his mother. It’s because honor, duty and obligation define who he is on an instinctual level.
The Medieval period added “integrity” to its code of chivalry to temper “reflexive” honor (we will discuss this later). In our society, honor has been watered down and emasculated to the point that it is now defined almost identically to integrity. However, honor does not equal integrity. They are two different characteristics.
Even Mr. Webster himself watered down the definition of honor when he defined it as “adherence to what is right or to a conventional standard of conduct.” That closely resembles his definition of integrity, “the quality of being honest (doing what is right) and having strong moral principles (following a conventional standard of conduct).” These two definitions are almost identical. Yet, honor is not integrity. Webster’s definition above is not what Homer, or Shakespeare wrote about. And, that definition is NOT what our Founding Fathers pledged upon the Declaration of Independence.
The Anthropologist Frank Henderson Stewart makes the case that honor comes in two types: Horizontal Honor & Vertical Honor.
Horizontal Honor
Horizontal honor implies mutual respect of two equal men. But this isn’t the watered-down feminized version of respect that pervades our culture today. This is not the I’m a human being and you’re a human being and we should respect each other because of “social equality” type of respect. No, this is honor that is contingent upon an unyielding adherence to a standard maintained within a group.
Horizontal Honor hinges upon three essential elements. The first is a code of honor. This is a standard that must be reached by any member of the group to receive respect within the group. There are rules that outline achievements of the standard and rules that delineate how that honor is lost. Any definition of honor that cannot be lost, is not actually honor.
An honor group is the second element. This is a group of individuals who understand the honor code and have committed to live by it. Anyone and everyone within the group understands the code and lives by it. The members of group must therefore be equals and hold respect for others in the group, being both their equal and living and maintaining the standard of the honor code. Honor is then rendered based on the judgment of others in the group, and therefore the opinion of those members must matter to you. This respect is rendered in a two-way street.
These honor groups must be exclusive. If anyone and everyone can be a part of the group, regardless of their adherence to the code, then honor becomes absolutely meaningless. Egalitarianism (equality of social, political and economic status) and honor cannot coexist. Social justice destroys honor and the honor code.
Lastly, the honor group must be a tight-knit, intimate group. In a society of people that is governed by respect, a member’s knowledge of every other member and face-to-face interaction is essential. Honor cannot exist in a society where anonymity dominates. The rise of social media, and the increased anonymity that comes with it, chips away at the maintenance of honor.
Honor is all or nothing. You either have it, or you don’t. A person who fails to live up to the group’s code loses his honor. He loses his right to the respect the other members of the group provide. This creates shame. The recognition that one failed to live up to the code is shameful. For honor to exist, a healthy feeling of shame compels one to check one’s behavior. When one cares not for the respect of others in the group, honor loses its power to compel living according to the standard.
You either have the respect of your peers within this group or you don’t. Bringing dishonor upon yourself by failing to meet the minimum standards of the group (or showing disdain or indifference for those standards) results in exclusion or excommunication from the group, including the accompanying shame. Failure to conform results in your membership card being revoked.
The last semblances of honor can be heard among men in our culture today when they talk about taking away each other’s “man cards.” Men actually understand this at an instinctual level. Horizontal honor is essentially the need to actually hold the man card. It is recognition that you are a man among other men. Losing one’s man card is an echo of the punishment for violating the original code of men – the honor code.
Vertical Honor
Vertical Honor isn’t about mutual respect between two men of equal stature. It is about giving praise and esteem to those “who are superior, whether by virtual of their abilities, their rank, their services to the community, their sex, their kinship, their office, or anything else.” (Honor, Frank Henderson Stewart, p.59).
Vertical honor is hierarchical and competitive. Vertical honor goes to the man who not only lives the code, but excels at the code. Vertical honor cannot exist without horizontal honor. First, you must hold the man card. Excelling at protecting or providing then defines the vertical honor.
The feminization of our society, along with an insistence of social justice for all, makes horizontal honor in-existent, and vertical honor thereby becomes despicable, loathsome and to some, even “toxic.”
There is this feminist notion that masculinity is a basket of “good” and “bad” characteristics that men can pick and choose from. The pleasant qualities are things like provision of food, provision of funds, providing a home, duty, honor and procreation. The “bad” or distasteful characteristics are things like intense strength, lust, violence and furious indignation.
When a man instinctively acts upon his role as provider and protector, gender roles that are repressed in today’s culture, he naturally bases his actions around those things that bring honor. Being an honorable provider and protector requires the man to excel at those things that are perceived by the feminist as “messy,” “bad” or “toxic.” Honor is an action word and can only be demonstrated through action. When that man begins to be true to horizontal and vertical honor, today’s society sees him a “toxic male.”
Men thrive on admiration of their honor, especially vertical honor. It literally recharges a man’s batteries. These are the trophies, awards, points and accolades that come from distinguishing yourself as a provider or protector. It’s why men are drawn to messy tests of their strength, power, and manhood against other men. It’s what drives a man to run a marathon, become a prize fighter, learn martial arts, to be a hunter, build a home, design cities, write revolutionary computer code, complete medical school and residency, and on, and on, and on.
Honor as Defined by Our Forefathers
Honor as our Forefathers understood it was two-fold: respect from the group (horizontal) and praise from the group (vertical). Implicit in this definition of honor is that it depends upon the opinion of others. You may have a sense of honor, but that just does not cut it. Others must first recognize your honor before it can actually exist.
I can hear some of you say, “Wait a minute, Doc, honor is universal to men and women. What about the honor of women?”
Yes. You are correct. However, honor differs between the genders. Though codes of honor have varied across time and cultures, in its most primitive instinctual forms, honor was usually related to chastity for women and courage for men.
During the periods of history when governments did not exist, professional military’s were few and far between, and there was no one to enforce the “rule of law,” the moral force that governed the tribe and maintained survival was “honor.” Men were expected to act as the tribe’s protectors, a role in which strength, courage and vitality were essential. If the man was not physically strong, then he was expected to contribute through mastery of a skill (shaman, medicine man, scout, black-smith, weapons maker, shepherd, etc.) that provided benefit to the tribe. Honor is the driving force that motivated men to fulfill these expectations.
Demonstration of courage and mastery provided horizontal honor as men. That honor provided privileges of being a full member of the tribe. As they excelled at the code, the were granted even greater status and more privilege within the tribe (vertical honor). However, cowardice, laziness, and weakness were shamed as unmanly causing loss of access to privilege within the tribe.
Defending Your Honor
Defending your honor or reputation was a matter of life or death for many of our ancestors and forefathers. It is literally instinctual in the male. Even into the late 19th century, one could not get a good job as a lawyer or politician without maintaining one’s honor. Thus, to maintain privileges, men were highly motivated and tremendously vigilant about maintaining their honor.
Insult to one’s reputation or honor, or the honor (chastity) of a female member of your family, required immediate remedy. If you were hit, you hit back. Saving face was supreme. Retaliation was necessary to prove you still had the courage that made one worthy of honorable status. The chasity of a female member of your household could be remedied by the courageous act of the protector. Dueling was a common and acceptable means of defending that honor.
Defending honor can lead to what anthropologists call reflexive honor. This was inspiring and, also, problematic. When taken to the extreme, reflexive honor becomes an “irrational pissing contest” between men, clans or even communities. This could destroy a community. So, as societies became more civilized, they attempted to temper the male instinct to retaliate when honor has been maligned. This tempering is what brought about the honor code of chivalry with the Medieval knights and the gentleman’s code of the Victorian era.
A Man’s Honor vs The Group’s Honor
Concern for one’s honor is both selfish and selfless. On one hand, men want to be respected as men, respected in the tribe and desire the privileges of membership (horizontal honor). Membership in the tribe entitled the person to gain vertical honor and status through worthy deeds. One’s reputation for strength and honor also kept other members of the tribe from picking on them or casting them out.
A man’s honor benefited the tribe as a whole. Each individual’s reputation for courage and strength added to the group’s courage and strength. The more formidable a tribe’s reputation, the less likely other tribes would try to bother them. This is why men who do not care about the tribe’s honor are shamed by the group. Disloyalty of an individual puts the whole group at risk.
20th Century Honor is Depressing
In the 20th Century, urbanization and anonymity dissolved the intimate face-to-face relationships that honor requires. People have grown uncomfortable with violence and shame. Individuals feelings and desire have been elevated above the common good of the tribe or society. People began forming their own personal honor codes and refused judgement of those codes by anyone but themselves. This transformed honor into a concept synonymous with personal integrity.
Yet, the instinctual male defines his character around honor, and true honor has been whitewashed into personal integrity, the man experiences depression. Honor is the moral imperative of men. Obedience is the moral imperative of boys.
As a child, you did the right thing out of obedience to authority and out of fear of punishment from that authority. As we mature, we begin to recognize that our behavior affects others and the needs of groups to which we belong.
Honor is a moral imperative. As we age, we begin to operate and act out of honor instead of out of obedience to authority. Men begin to recognize that they have a role to play in helping the group to survive or thrive. Men recognize that their individual actions add to the strength or weakness of a group.
Honor in a Man Begets Love
The mindset of honor is different. When men function from a mindset of rules and laws, they do the bare minimum they can without being punished. Or they push the law to see how far it bends. When men function from the mindset of honor, they seek to pull their own weight, and then add further to strengthen the group.
Honor moves a man’s motivations to act from the base, childlike fear of authority, to a higher, nobler respect that becomes love. The love of family, love of church, and love of country are all borne of honor. A man will NEVER let those he loves (or himself) down by slacking off. Love, from the perspective of a man, is born of his honor and strengthens his honor.
If a man leaves his church, or is disinterested in and organization, it is likely because he’s lost the sense of mutual respect in the horizontal honor of that group or congregation. He has lost faith in that congregation’s ability to provide the innate horizontal honor he seeks.
Not only is honor a more mature moral imperative than obedience, it is often a much more powerful motivator. Social pressure, the very thing that drives honor, is more powerful than rules and laws in getting people to do things. Studies show that people are more likely to change their behavior when they think their respected peers are watching them. The key driver is respect of peers considered to be equal in group or standing. We are still social animals at heart – we still feel motivated by shame, loneliness and/or desertion.
Lack of Honor Breeds Ineptitude
Without honor mediocrity, corruption and incompetence rule. Honor is based in reputation and when people stop caring about their reputation, shame disappears. When there is no shame, people devolve into creatures with little inertia that do the very least they can without getting into trouble, getting fined or getting fired. This breeds a culture of mediocrity, corruption, and blatant incompetence. You can see this in any business or customer service network today. People no longer have any fear of their history following them and have no incentive to perform with excellence. Instead, we have a culture of employees with mind blowing ineptitude.
This lack of honor has resulted in a society that now relies upon obedience to rules, regulations and restrictions to govern behavior. The minutia of rules in your office, town, city, community, and state seem innumerable is because they are. We must now be policed by external authority to constantly check behavior in the absence of honor.
Honor Creates Meaning
The reason people tend to like old movies and books better than the modern variety is honor. It’s not nostalgia, or talent or lack of topics. The drama of old literature captures our attention because the characters had to operate in a culture of honor.
Honor provides structure to navigate and push up against. The struggle of moving up through a group by following a code, avoiding shame and earning honor.
The reason reality shows have become popular is that these shows create temporary groups of people experimenting with unique situations forcing the creation of and adherence to the groups temporary honor codes. Otherwise life is mundane and boring.
Without honor life feels like a great charade with our own self-constructed realities that lack comparison, competition and esteem of others. Life seems empty and insubstantial. Evil runs unchecked. Good goes unrewarded. True merit goes un-honored and everyone gets a participation trophy that holds absolutely no meaning. Everyone gets a piece of the egalitarian pie that does not nourish or satiate our hunger.
Every Man Needs a Platoon
We are all part of large groups that provide us identity and belonging. You might be associated with a political party, a company, a church, a company, a town, a state or a nation. Yet these groups are usually too large to provide the intimacy necessary for honor to thrive. In these groups, no one really cares if you are living honorably or not. We must give up the notion that honor can be revived at the macroscopic level.
Initially, I thought each of us needed a community or congregation. That may work, but I realized the average size of a military company is 150 people. This is also “Dunbar’s number.” It is the maximum number of people in which stable social relationships can occur at any given time. It is the maximal number in a group in which honor and shame can govern effectively before rules and regulations are required to govern behavior. Interestingly, this is also the number of people to which ancient villages would grow before they would break off to form separate settlements.
Withing each military company, there are 3-5 platoons consisting of 16-44 men. Platoons are the smallest “self-contained” unit in the army. Each one has a medic, radio operator, headquarters element, and forward observer. A platoon of men usually sleeps together, eats together, fights together and, under severe conditions, dies together.
I have always been fascinated by comments made to me by soldiers when asked about their allegiance to one another. This was reinforced by journalist Sebastian Junger in his book, War. Soldiers admit they would risk their lives “without hesitation for anyone in the platoon or company.” This sense of identity, loyalty, and brotherhood drops off in groups larger than the platoon or the company.
Junger states, “For some reason there is a profound and mysterious gratification to the reciprocal agreement to protect another person with your life, and combat is virtually the only situation in which that happens regularly.”
Only a small percentage of those in the military are directly involved in regular firefights. The rest serve in support roles. Though support roles experience an honor culture in degrees lower than combat soldiers, it is of a more profound degree than civilians. Other than combat soldiers, police officers and firefighters are the only others who experience a similar degree of honor. They may not have their lives directly threatened every day, but they constantly work under the risk that they could, and they know that their comrades are willing to risk their own lives to protect them.
Where Do You Find A Platoon?
Not all of us can be a soldier, police officer or firefighter, even if they if they wanted to be. Yet, every man can, and should be part of a small, tight-knit honor group. This may be a sports team, men’s group at church, fraternity, professional group, etc.
If you can’t find one, start your own. It doesn’t have to be formal and you don’t need a lot of people. 2-3 people are enough to start.
For your physical survival and your psychological health, you need to be part of a group. Men want meaning in their lives, meaning that comes from being a part of something larger than themselves. But, if you are like me, until I understood the importance of honor groups, we are often unwilling to trade some of our individualism to get it.
Studies done decades ago showed that men who belonged to a group that was close-knit showed less fear when jumping from an airplane than groups of men who shared only weak ties. The studies demonstrated that men could also withstand greater pain from electric shocks when they were part of a highly-bound group, as opposed to one with loose associations. The military found that tightly-knit units suffer less cases of mental breakdown, depression and PTSD than units where morale and bonding is low. The reason for these findings is that men in a tightly-bonded group both know that the man on either side of him has his back. The fear of dishonoring their brothers drives them to overcome their own fears and move forward and not let others down. One of the men Junger interviewed said, “As a soldier, the thing you were most scared of was failing your brothers when they needed you, and compared to that, dying was easy. Dying was over with. Cowardice lingered forever.”
Men of Today Must Have Honor to Survive
Men around us in society break down and cave to depression and stress, just fighting their individual battles. I see it every day. They lack the strength to deal with life’s difficulties because they don’t have honor pushing them forward. They don’t have honor because they lack a platoon.
The core of honor, then, is this – to act in such a way that does not let the man on your right and the man on your left down when they need you most.
Conclusion
People talk about wanting honor. They desire the end, but do not want the means. Honor, then, will only live on in small units and platoons of men willing to accept and carry the burden and responsibility that must accompany it.
James Davidson Hunter put it this way, “We say we want a renewal of character in our day but we don’t really know what we ask for. To have a renewal of character is to have a renewal of a creedal order that constrains, limits, binds, obligates, and compels. This price is too high for us to pay. We want character but without unyielding conviction; we want strong morality but without the emotional burden of guilt or shame; we want virtue but without particular moral justifications that invariably offend; we want good without having to name evil; we want decency without the authority to insist upon it; we want moral community without any limitations to personal freedom. In short, we want what we cannot possibly have on the terms that we want it.”
Are you one of those men of honor? Or, will you settle for the pain and depression of living true to only a part of yourself?