On one of my author discussion groups, someone has asked whether honour is a lost virtue for today’s readers. Her general thesis was something to the effect: In today’s society, every one is out for themselves, without thinking of the impact on others. This makes for selfish heroes in romance, who pursue their own wants and needs without thinking of others.
Honour doesn’t have quite the same ring to it for me. It all depends what it drives people to do. Do we agree with Richard Lovelace, poet of the English Civil War, who wrote, in To Lucasta, Going to the Wars, “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more”? To our ears, formed by the culture of our times, it sounds like he’s using honour as a convenient excuse to do what he wanted to do.
What about the touchy aristocrats of the eighteenth century, duelling — even killing — because of a perceived insult?
Or, in our own times, look at honour killings. A loved sister or daughter, murdered to restore the reputation of the family.
I’ve been thinking about this in the light of the hero I spent the last couple of days creating for a newsletter subscriber short story. I wanted someone almost ethereally beautiful and brimming over with charm and seeming confidence. He lives a life of hedonism, and appears to care for nothing and no-one, himself included. That isn’t the whole story, of course — he is a Jude Knight hero, and a fundamental decency is a given. But it got me thinking. He is not so much selfish as self-centred — an issue that afflicts some of my other heroes, and that they need to overcome for their lives to take a turn for the better.
I’ve long seen human behaviour in terms of care circles. People behave differently to those they regard as human (and for human, read ‘like them’). People will make tremendous sacrifices and do incredible tasks for those within their closest care circle. For most people, this is their partner, parents, and children. For others, it might be comrades-at-arms, or best friends. In the next circle out might be casual friends, and then (perhaps) work colleagues, or neighbours. Beyond that, depending on the person, are those of the same ethnicity, or belief system, or gender, or some other classification. Or, it might be, animals, or the amorphous network of life people most commonly mean when they say ‘the planet’. (The actual planet is not at risk from human activity, short of some as yet unknown technology for blowing it to smithereens — otherwise it will survive, even as a vaguely spherical inanimate object, with a crust of lichen covered rock and dead seas.)
Some poor unfortunates have a single care circle, and it comprises one person: them. But even those with an every increasing number of circles encompassing the universe still rank some circles closer than others.
In many historical novels, we leave the poor, people of colour, those with a different religion, even servants, outside of the care circles of our hero and heroine. Or, we include a single representative of those groups, or political action on behalf of those groups, as signs that the protagonist is morally responsible.
My protagonists do their best for others, but only because I have to make them that way. I don’t see it as a virtue, but as a part of being human ourselves. Virtue is stepping outside our care circles to look after those we don’t love. Those who ignore the problems of others just because they are not me or mine are a step closer to the other end of a continuum that leads to terrorism and genocide.
Thinking about honour has led to me to envisage another circle entirely. The brother who kills a sister for action that brings the family into dishonour (or the Regency father who claims to have thrown his daughter into the street for the same purpose) believes they are doing it out of care — care for other members of the family that overrides care for the ousted sister. Lovelace and the motor cycle gangs give me a different perspective. When we talk about honour, whether in the current day or the stories we love to read (and write), we see an ethic that transcends the care group.
I call it an ethic, but I’m not entirely sure it is ethical. At its base, honour is about being true to one’s sense of self — “I am the sort of person who…” the hero or heroine says, when they are impelled take a certain action, even if it hurts those close to them. Their honour circle includes those who agree with the value of being that sort of person, and who therefore support the actions.
So no, I don’t think honour is a lost virtue, because whether or not it is a virtue depends entirely on what it causes us to do.
What do you think?
I believe the abstract honor, where you do something against your own self interests, your profits, etc, to satisfy some abstract moral ideal has become much much rarer in the last fifty years or so. People have always been greedy, violent cheats, but that self-centeredness used to be concealed more.
It’s very clear if you watch old dramas like Perry Mason, old movies and old books. Looking greedy and self-centered would make you a laughing stock, and doing the ethical and moral things on TV was an ‘of course.’ Now the have shows named like ‘how to get away with murder’ and a tv show about a violent drug lord teacher gets all the awards, attention, and money. Even reboots can’t help but show corrupt LEOs, while the originals were too honorable to steal, frame, extort, and pressure the holdout with honor and a family to help. Resisting corruption or redemption arcs I find so much more satisfying than the new commonality where the corrupt are the supposed ‘heroes’ of the shows.
Genre writing, Romance, SF and fantasy, and mysteries are the last great holdout of the traditional hero, an archetype that has lasted for thousads of years. But sometime after the mid-century, ‘hero’ became a four letter word, and flaws in historical people or dark sides in fictional ones became more important and aspiring to be like a hero became childish. This attention and following and admiring villains has reached the point where a recent Darth Vader comic book had him swiftly kill a stalker (creepy woman who fed her delusions of riding along with his power by making a shrine of medical waste. People went ape-shit because a villain who killed thousands- millions killed a stalker in his hospital pod/bedroom. A villain killing should not be some kind of psychic shock. Hero is becoming such a meaningless word to too many, they think protagonists are all heroes. Another obnoxious creation by a now more famous creator had someone’s mega-duper-save-the-world superpower was boosted if they physically abused their dates, er corpses. But that abuse was okay, and he was still called hero. (I’d prefer to give him to vader to dispose of)
All people and all characters have flaws, but heroes struggle with theirs and manage to do great things despite the flaws instead of wallowing in the flaws.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
I had never given “honor’ per se much thought. Ethics are not a lost virtue, but honor? I’m not sure. You make a good case. I think I’ve tended to see it as a masculine ego thing rather than a virtue.
Yes, that’s pretty much my thought.