Delphic Maxim 65: Honour good men (and women)
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
65. Honour good men
Years ago I, along with thousands of other Australians, packed into the square outside Sydney’s Town Hall to attend the state funeral of Gough Whitlam. Whitlam is one of Australia’s best known Prime Ministers. He marked a turning point in the history of the nation, what Paul Keating described as a shaking off of our ‘Menzian torpor’. His political program was deeply progressive, profoundly ambitious, and grounded in care for people who needed it most. Whitlam was a scholarly man, which is obvious in his speech and rhetoric.
One thing has always stuck with me from that service. Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson got up to eulogise Whitlam, and that eulogy is one of the greatest speeches I’ve ever listened to. At one point, Pearson reminds the thousands of people assembled: “Whitlam didn’t have a racist bone in his body”.
Why should that remark, among all the other incredible things Pearson reminded us about Gough, be the one that sticks with me the most? My feeling is that it’s because I am so awed by a person who projects such goodness, such purity of spirit into the world — despite being on many accounts a pragmatic political player. How fundamentally good must a person be, that someone can say that they are absolutely free of malign prejudice? That’s a person truly deserving of honour.
In previous posts, I’ve unpicked what the idea of honour means, and how we might deploy it in our contemporary world. Honour, as the ancients understood it, was both embedded in the context of the community, and attached to your role within it. Whatever it is you do, you are able to do it with honour, to accrue honour. In a sense, that’s why the Australian Honours system awards Order of Australia medals each year to people who have contributed to their community. I don’t think the physical medal or recognition of the state is necessary to ‘honour’ someone, but the recognition of a person’s goodness is part of the process of ‘honouring’ them.
This is why honour, at least in my view, goes beyond simply observing a person’s actions. Whether or not a person is ‘good’ doesn’t purely revolve around whether they do good things, though that’s certainly a part of it. ‘Goodness’ is an aspect of a person’s character — it goes much deeper than actions, and involves consideration of motives and desires. Often for those of us around good people, actions are the easiest way to assess a person’s character, but words are indicators of thought as well. And there’s also something less tangible — the way people carry themselves in the world.
In a way, what we are measuring — perhaps subconsciously — is our perception of a person’s virtue. We have a subtle radar for magnanimity, we have sensors for liberality, we have seismometers of temperance. People project a thousand little signals into the world, in the way we treat the people around us (or treat those who are ‘serving’ us), or how we think about those who aren’t in the same position of privilege as us, or how we recognise injustice or unfairness in the world. It always comes down to these virtues that defines the people we most frequently choose to honour.
For me, this maxim is a reminder that it isn’t enough to respect somebody who speaks their mind — which is something a lot of people claim to want from public figures these days. The real question is what a person chooses to speak their mind for. People deserve honour when they speak and act in aid of goodness, peace, virtue and justice. It shines out of them, a scarifying light that blazes away darkness, and makes us collectively better. That’s the sort of person I can honour.
