This is the first installment of a project I have been gestating, going all the way back to my college days at Penn State. After a couple of explorative looks at other majors, i.e. pre-law, and phychology, I landed in the Philosophy department. The reason for that was having met a remarkable professor emeritus, Ernst Hans Freund. Dr. Freund was a birthright Quaker who had fled Germany after a brief stint in Sachsenhausen, a KV, concentration camp. His family saw the handwrighting on the wall and knew it had to escape or perish. I had taken an intro level course from him, i.e. Philosphy of Ethics, and suddenly knew I wanted to explore the whole field of ethics in some depth. What I also knew was that I had zero desire to make such a study into an academic pursuit laden with 'deep thinking' and theorical clouds of complex thinking. I already knew that reading the so-called 'Dead Germans' was anathema to where I was. I could use that crowd as a sleep aid, but they did nothing for my ability to navigate daily life in the trenches.
So, I spent the better part of the next three years writing weekly essays for the good professor and we would sit in his office and discuss them. Kind by nature, Dr. Freund led me gently to a depth of understanding such things as 'selfishness vs. selflessness'. What could or should be the balance between taking care of oneself and service to others. Many years later I spent about four years as an EMT-A, on a local rescue squad here in Maine, and that balance became a very important means of being in dire circumstances and keeping myself grounded and able to do so without being damaged by what I saw. Example: 3 a.m., driving cold rain, a smashed car and two teenagers in danger of dying before we could stabilize them and get them to a trauma center. Things like that can eat away at your own sense of what is real and how to accept that life can be horrifyingly cruel. One made it.
I came away from my time with Dr. Freund knowing that life is an ongoing effort to maintain a strong and grounded connection with the challenges we all face in our lives.My intention and my hope in writing this series of essays is that I can help others to do exactly that. And, the foundation that underlies developing the ability to 'cope' is a deep sense of right and wrong. Learning how to maintain a clear sense of right and wrong is as important as a scuba-diver knowing which was is up in zero visibility water. One needs to be able to get back to safety when everything is urging you to panic....in which case, you're toast.
My hope is that I can offer you, the reader, some ideas of how to always know which way is up. Enter, the concept and the practice of HONOR. I have no intention of making things any more complex than need be. My goal is to give you some 'things' that you can use as tools for navigating the dire challenges that living in these times is foisting on each of us. So, here goes. This is my story of how Honor came to be as a part of the human condition.
When we were hunter-gathering nomadic bands of people making a living off what we could find and what we could hunt down and kill, we lived in various caves, skin-covered huts, tents and whatever could be imporvised to keep us safe, from predators and from the elements. I saw an example of one such hut in the Museum of Natural History in New York. Those early humans were tough and resilient.
At a point about 10,000 years ago humans realized that they could plant seeds and harvest food, instead of having to just find it or run it down. We became an agrarian society and this meant staying in one place, pretty much permanently, though droughts or other disasters might require moving at some point...which is still true today and we're seeing this happen as people are forced to abandon regions that are becoming unsustainable as the climate crisis deepens. There is a 'diaspora' happening in which people must flee towards regions where life is still sustainable. And, of course, the people already living in these places are becoming threatened by this surge of people who have had to migrate or die.
As agrarians, we began to realize that others could descend on our settlements and plunder, rob and kill us for the food we raised. So, the nomadic warrior class morphed into the individuals who were willing to put the communityfirst and even sacrifice their own lives to defend it. This was the very first inkling of what has now become the military. This happened all over the planet and out of it came such phenomena as the Samurai, the Knighthood, and on and on. Each of these warrior cults (and I don't mean that in a necessarily bad way} developed their own ideas of what we now call Honor. It has been very well codified and often has a system of rigid rules and laws that a warrior member must abide by, or risk becoming an untethered outcast, a "Ronin" in Samurai culture, a leaderless danger to the established order.
Over the millennia, Honor has morphed into some forms that are out of control and seem very radical by modern standards. The violation of some codes of Honor is cause for not merely being cast out, but even for commiting suicide. The concept of 'Face' and the idea that losing face is such a disgrace that one must commit sepuku, i.e. gutting oneself with a tanto (dagger) is manifest in every warrior culture in one form or another. The 'loss' of honor due to the transgressions of another has been cause to challenge that person to a duel, often to death, by sword or pistol. It is my sense that these are perversions of the original concept of Honor, which was being willing to sacrifice one's life in order to protect and even save the rest of one's society, tribe, community, or name the type of grouping.
In order to have a military style force that can be relied on to defend the rest of the group, they had to know that this was real, and not merely a show of bravado. The Congressional Medal of Honor is given posthumously to about 90% of its recipients. It is awarded most famously to solders and marines who have thrown themselves on a grenade to save the lives of their nearby comrades in arms.
What we are currently experiencing in 21st century America is the death of this concept and its replacement by the idea that greed and dishonesty, and the domination of our society by the greedy oligarchs who are not only willing to claw their way to a place of total dominance, but are unaffected by the suffering they will inflict in so doing. They want fabulous, unending affluence...but they also want to be the masters who control all the rest of us.
We are witnessing what happens to a society when the concept of Honor is tossed aside in favor of self-permission to do WHATEVER is necessary to achieve their selfish goals. For the so-called 'tech bros' there are no limits or any kind of restrictions on what they can do to the rest of us.
This is a good place to pause for now. Please come back and read the next installment when it is up.
And, on we go......to Infinity, and Beyond
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