Honour

"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honour is what you know about yourself. "
Lois McMaster Bujold, "A Civil Campaign", 1999, US science fiction author



Back after a long break. It was quite an eventful weekend with one of the main events being my reintroducing myself to the Japanese martial art of Tai Jitsu (the unarmed combat style of the Ninja). I had not trained for 5 months so the effect on my body was devastating, but I lasted the full two and a half hours without injury - that was a result! I also reflected on the ancient Japanese warriors and their codes of honour. The Samurai had a code of honour but so did the Ninja...

Honour is one of those elusive concepts that we feel but find difficult to express precisely. Pride is a clumsy attempt at it and somewhat misses the point. It probably boils down to some form of self-validation, in the absence of any external judgement, not quite a form of conscience but yet providing a compass by which we may navigate our lives.

However, the very nature of self-validation suggests that honour can be flawed as it is derived from the values that the individual holds. These values may be universal or they may be cultural - they might even be individual. And so, much has been done in the name of honour, noble and brutal, so that the concept itself now has a mixed connotation unlike hundreds of years ago.

I suspect that we need to redicover the concept of honour, base our honour on sound universal principles and show the integrity to live by it. The world has numerous challenges and one step in the right direction for us all would be to become more honourable.


"Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody's going to know whether you did it or not. "
Oprah Winfrey, in Good Housekeeping, US actress & television talk show host (1954 - )

"Honour does not have to be defended. "
Robert J. Sawyer, "Calculating God", 2000, Canadian science fiction writer (1960 - )