Delphic Maxim 118: Do not abandon honour

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.

118. Do not abandon honour

Have you ever noticed how frequently the notion of honour comes up, not only in these maxims, but in movies about the ancients? Films like Gladiator, or Troy, or period pieces set in the time all inevitably have a speech about honour and how exciting it is. I’ve discussed the concept at length in previous maxims: honour is basically about how you carry yourself in the social role you occupy. Fair enough.

This maxim inflects the idea of honour a little differently: it suggests that we are already being honourable, but that we shouldn’t abandon this idea. There are two ways in which I think this is relevant: how we operate as individuals, but also how the idea of honour is interpreted by us as a community today.

As individuals, a sense of honourable conduct helps us to keep our moral compasses in day to day life. It’s not just about being polite — that’s a part of it, but I suppose you can still be rude and honourable at the same time (there are plenty of prickly heroes in film that work as examples here — Hopper from Stranger Things is one who springs to mind at the moment). The point here isn’t about just ‘defending your honour’, which reads like some kind of incel-ready faux-macho problem. Honour is about maintaining your ethical obligations as a person in a social milieu — losing honour is almost always a failure of character.

But let’s read this maxim a different way, because we’ve talked about how it works for individuals quite a lot previously. What if the idea of ‘not abandoning honour’ is actually a demand placed on our society, rather than the individual. This actually makes a lot of sense, because for many of the ancients — Plato and Aristotle in particular — the society often preceded and defined the content of our individual characters.

We seem to live in an age where our social understanding of honour has been thinned out. We only really use the word when people are being ‘awarded honours’ on a national day (which I’ve discussed in an earlier maxim), or when we’re quoting characters from warrior races in science fiction, like the Klingons. Honour doesn’t really seem to operate in our daily lives in a meaningful way anymore.

That’s in part because it’s a pretty clunky old concept — it’s out of fashion, a stodgy relic of a time before television, consumerism, and social media. It sounds pretty conservative of me, but I’d love to see the way a progressive, cosmopolitan, left-leaning liberal like myself could rehabilitate some of these concepts that come from traditional social values. I wonder if ‘not abandoning honour’ is a way to bridge a political divide that exists — a partisanship that goes to the heart of how we live in the world today.

Rehabilitating — unabandoning — honour doesn’t necessarily mean we need to live and die by this word, day in day out. It simply serves, like so many of the ideas in these maxims, as a reminder that we had social obligations and mores in a past life that are still relevant today. How we relate to the people around us, our social ethic, is probably more important than ever as we become fragmented and atomised by technology and economic changes. Maybe a more ‘conservative’ social value like honour offers a way to get back to something that we increasingly lack: an understanding of our place — and its importance — in a bigger social net.