I believe there is a time and a place for it. For example, if a man insults you or defames you unjustly, it takes more courage and strength to simply diffuse the situation and walk away.
On the contrary, violence is justified when your livelihood or those you care about are threatened. I’ll use an example from my life when I was roughly 12 years old. By this time I was a Jr. Black belt in TaeKwonDo. My younger brother (9 at the time) and I were playing in the field with other boys from the neighborhood. Some of the boys conspired to tackle my brother and beat him up for no reason at all – other than that he was younger and smaller than us. One the first boy moved to grab my brother I landed the strongest back kick I could land square into his chest. He ran home crying and the other boys didn’t even dare lay a finger on my brother.
This is just a simple example, but the principle applies to every aspect of life. If a robber were to enter my home and threaten my children, I would unleash as much feral violence as possible and end his life without hesitation. A coward would allow his home to be defiled by an outsider, a raider.

Now I believe there are less extreme, healthy outlets for violence. The first is sports. Football, Wrestling, Martial Arts, etc. These all give outlets to engage in physical conflict, to struggle with an equal or greater opponent. In high school I wrestled. Several times other guys tried to pick fights with me and I never once felt the need to involve myself in such petty trifles. I knew I was tougher, braver, and lived with more honor. In the wrestling team we toiled, sweated, and bled together. There was a sacred trust among each young man on the team that he was accepted regardless of how many wins he had in competition, because he braved the trials of practice. Here I was able to vent all urges of violence. Sometimes simple practice drills would turn violent where the two wrestlers went from working on technique to straight fighting. Punches weren’t thrown, but each wrestler was giving 110% effort to physically dominate the other man.

Outside of wrestling, my brother and I would beat up on each other regularly. My brother and I are and have been for a very long time the very best of friends. It wasn’t always out of anger and dispute, we just felt the need to fight. We would exchange blows, drawing blood and bruising each other. After the fight we would continue on as if nothing had happened. Our mother couldn’t understand, but we understood each other. We had a code of honor between us that we could punch, kick, and tackle each other and not lose ourselves to emotion.

Society represses this now. There is no outlet for men to be violent. There is healthy violence through the mediums of physical competition.

In regards to the survival of honor in the absence of violence:

My simple answer is no. Currently I am deployed to Afghanistan in the US Army. I am a member of a small team of 15 men whom I have only known since August 2012. On this team I know and feel a deeper sense of honor than I have ever known. One of the guys on this team is now one of my closest friends in my entire life. We push each other to excellence, hold each other accountable, and support each other with life’s troubles. There is an unspoken bond between the two of us that is deeper than any other between friends or even brothers. I believe that this is driven deeply by the threat of constant attack from the enemy. The uncertainty of our security and safety forges this bond stronger and faster than any other aspect of life. I know without hesitation the men of this team would risk life and limb for me and I for them. I cannot say that about my closest friends from college or from other walks of life. Violence or the threat of violence is the catalyst that forces men to trust each other deeper and forces men to depend on each other. It may be possible to have close bonds without violence, but it will never reach the level that it can be with the threat of violence.

I’ll conclude my comments with those words. Thank you for this great article which raises some excellent points. I fear my generation will be the generation in which manhood is completely obliterated through the lies of egalitarianism. I hope this article is read by many to help curb the insidious decay of what it means to be a man of virtue, strength, and honor.

Respectfully,
George

The problem with objectivism is that
it conflicts with reality. Proof, would one have the same passion to display their ideals if they did not think someone else would listen or share those merits? In other words, have another subjugate themselves to share another individual’s values.

Also, there is no logical way to regulate or enforce said morals of self-interest. Who decided that ‘the pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.”? Are you not subjugating yourself to that collective belief of other objectivists? What makes one happy or one person’s set of morals differs from person to person thus no justice, rewards, punishments, or standards can exist.

If a mass murderer were to come into someone’s home and kill the family and said it was in their own rational self interest and happiness (rational does not mean ‘true’ or ‘correct’) thus he was trying to complete the highest moral purpose of his life. Someone can sabotage another ones project because it was in conflict with their ‘morals’. There is no objective means for justice to be enforced thus the victims cannot logically have reason or right to be angry or retaliate to the perpetrators.

People are social by nature, Proof, you are communicating and responding to others from a keyboard for social interaction. Do you not rely on others for their services and products of efforts and labor like, groceries, vehicle, livelihood, education, knowledge, entertainment; don’t lie, you’re on the internet. You weren’t satisfied living under a rock, twiddling your thumbs. You obviously wanted/needed something that you couldn’t produce on your own, thus making other men the means to your end, if you are on the internet to begin with.

Thus, no man is an island. Objectivism is, at best, an ivory tower philosophy that cannot exist in a real harmonious world.

Thank you, but no. I’ll stick with Objectivism, which holds that “Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.”

Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.

Your pieces on honor have all been organic, though provoking, and meditative. As a young man growing up in todays day and age I find it reassuring that the actions of myself and my peers so well mimics that of our forefathers. My personal ideas of honor may slightly differ but the concepts seem to relate.

It is my view that one determines what is good and honorable by a simple exercise of the Kant’s universal law. If an action cannot be replicated without causing the destruction of it’s premise or the culture that the premise resides it is wrong. Do not lie because then there is no truth, do not steal because then ownership is nonexistent, etc…. I have found this creates a valid code of conduct to determine when it is appropriate to action or not., for it also addresses the issue of cowardice. If we were to all stand aside while a murder took place then everyone would be murdered. To not support a friend or family member would constitute the destruction of the support networks that we rely on so heavily.

To address some of your questions, I do not think that violence is an honorable reaction in most situations. The only exceptions are when you are given intent, ability, and opportunity by an attacker that wishes you or another harm. What do you solve in that situation? Who is the better shot?Boxer?Fighter?etc… So unless the above criteria are met then I do not believe violent action is warranted. This opinion continues into my idea of shaming your peers into better behavior. My personal opinion is that foul language simply makes you sound less intelligent and that if you cannot sufficiently convey your displeasure silence yourself, grab a dictionary, and educate yourself. As your VMI reference indicates shaming does not need to involve foul language but instead place that person in a state of humiliation.

I believe that the key point in your article is that to have honor one must support ones peer group. I find that this idea keeps pulling me back into politics and the actions of our soldiers and politicians while under oath. I personally can understand why the rest of the world thinks we’re all corrupt, for if all I saw on the news was the actions of our government then I would not hold America in great esteem either.

What are your views on the subject? Do you think that the US as a country conducts themselves in an honorable manner? What are the expectations that we should ask of our governing bodies?

-Joshua Simkins

“As society has become more complex and anonymous, and the bonds of honor have dissolved, we’ve had to rely more and more on obedience – rules and regulations — to govern people’s behavior. Because we no longer trust people to do things because they swore an oath to do so, and because concern for their honorable reputation compels them, we’ve created ever more elaborate rules and regulations to enforce ethics. Instead of feeling safe in the knowledge that a man has internalized an honor code to the extent that he may be trusted to do the right thing, even when no one is watching, now he must be constantly checked up on and videotaped. The reason the minutia of rules at your office feel infantilizing…is because they are. We must be policed by an external authority to check our behavior in the absence of honor.”

It’s truly interesting that you alluded to the fact that people follow rules and regulations rather than honor when determining how they should act. I think this is a major problem we are having in the military today. I have seen people carry out their duties in a marginal fashion if it doesn’t promote their chance to advance or achieve their next rank, while pushing themselves when it benefits them directly. There is indeed no shame anymore, and now when you try to hold someone’s feet to the fire, you are often instructed to “lighten up”.

For example, the Navy core values of honor, courage and commitment are often recited, but are only truly lived because people are scared of the legal repercussions of getting into trouble, not because of the shame of failing to live up to something greater than themselves.

Thank you for writing this. Reading it truly made my day!