Matters of Honor

Is there such a thing as "Honor", or "Honour" as our British cousins would have it, in these disturbing times?  There are honors, of course, and people are honored in one way or another with some frequency.  They receive awards or their merits are recognized by others.  People are held in esteem, they're respected.  But here I refer to Honor as a characteristic or virtue which is expressed in a code of conduct.

Honor in that sense isn't easily defined.  It's not the same as the law, it's not the same as morality or ethics.  It may manifest itself in conduct, it may be said to require certain conduct in certain circumstances as morality or ethics may indicate certain conduct is moral or ethical.  But it isn't itself moral or ethical.  So, I think H.L. Mencken was incorrect when he wrote (taking his phraseology from Nietzsche, with whom he was infatuated) that honor is simply the morality of superior men

I'd maintain it is a sense of oneself.  That doesn't say much, though, does it?  Perhaps it's better to define it as a self-judgment of one's worth or quality.  Because someone is a person of honor, conduct of a particular kind cannot be countenanced.  There are things an honorable person wouldn't think of doing, not because (or at least not merely because) it would be wrong to do them, but because doing them would be contrary to the nature of a person of honor.  Honor may, therefore, be related to the Stoic injunction that we should act according to (our) nature.

Acting dishonorably would diminish a person of honor.  It would render the person less worthy in that person's eyes, and should in that of others as well, if they're also persons of honor.  It would do so regardless of the consequences of the act or whether the act conforms to law or rules of a particular ethics.

Honor in this sense usually is thought to encompass the possession of certain virtues, most notably honesty, courage, chivalry, justice and nobility.  This may be due to the fact that it appears honor in this sense seems to  have its basis in cultures of aristocracy and rank.   It has been associated with status.  Gentlemen have honor, or nobles do, not merchants or tradesman or peasants.  Honor has been associated with violence as a result, I think.  When one's status is questioned or put in jeopardy, than extreme action may be taken.  If one's honor is impugned, revenge may be called for, or the person being dishonored may have grounds to challenge those questioning their honor, to a duel or seeking some other kind of recompense.  Honor has also been referred to in the military, or at least was in the past, and appears to arise in warrior cultures.

If Honor as commonly defined isn't appropriate except in aristocracies or the military or is an antiquated concept, I think it may survive provided it is seen as a sense of personal worth or merit or status which requires a code of conduct.  A person of honor would act in a particular way without regard to others or circumstances, simply because that is the nature of the person.  The nature of a person of honor would be such that the person's worth, merit or status would be lessened by acting dishonorably, which is to say dishonestly, unjustly, without virtue.  Again, I think the concept of honor so defined would have similarities to what it is that would make a person a Stoic Sage.  I don't know whether Honor as a code of conduct would be a basis for an ethics or morality, but conceiving of it as a part of one's nature seems consistent with the idea that our nature and that of the universe is essentially infused with and devoted to reason, and the belief in an immanent divinity of which we're a part.

Is Honor of any significance, now?  I would say it is not.  Clearly, those who purport to be our leaders have none.  What is significant to them, and to others, is entirely determined by factors unrelated to personal qualities and worthiness.  Generally, those factors are wealth, power, and advantage.  A glance at the headlines is all that's required to establish this is the case.  Politicians are notoriously dishonest, but no person of honor would be able to abide the spectacular, unrepentant dishonesty of the new member of the House from New York without being sickened and ashamed.  Such a person would be shunned by the honorable.  Nonetheless, nothing is being done to  discourage him by the leaders of his party simply because his vote is needed and the potential that there will be one less Republican in Congress outweighs any thoughts of honesty or decency.  A person of honor cannot accept the claim that the end justifies the means, because neither the means nor the end are of importance.  They are, as it were, indifferents.

There is something compelling in the thought that some conduct is unworthy of human beings, something which is more compelling even than the belief that some conduct is wrong, or immoral, or contrary to imagined commands of paternal and paternalistic gods.  Contempt and shame are powerful emotions, particularly when we direct them at ourselves.  Perhaps a sense of honor is something which we should cultivate.

 

Homage to Looney Tunes

 

As the leaders of our Great Republic come more and more to resemble caricatures of greedy, stupid, ignorant, craven, self-righteous, venal and in some way pathetic figures, it seems appropriate that homage be paid to those cartoons of yore in which all those characteristics were on display, and mocked.  Those were happier times, in that cartoon characters with the same foibles appeared on screens small and large.  Now, cartoonish people are shown on them.  Sadly, these living cartoons hold power over us and are inclined to wield it in cartoonish ways.

 If you're like me, Foghorn Leghorn comes to mind whenever a politician is foisted on us in person or via media (relatively few have his charming accent, though).  Daffy Duck comes to mind as well, but primarily in the case of one figure only.  If only they could be treated as cartoons, perhaps all would be well, or at least better.  But to the homage.

For me, Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies produced the truly great examples of cartoons during that golden age between 1930 and 1960 or thereabouts.  The Disney cartoons were, as they remain, stupid, ponderous, sickly-sweet and sanctimonious.  Hanna-Barbera creations, or at least those made during that period, seemed filled with oafish and disturbingly similar characters as drawn and in their personalities (e.g. the characters in The Flintstones and Yogi Bear).

I should clarify that I refer to the Looney Tunes of the past.  I know that the characters of the golden age have returned in animation that seems pallid in comparison.  Perhaps that's due to the unfortunate absence of Mel Blanc, but I suspect it's more the result of our age's tendency to discourage the silly, particularly where children are concerned.  

What distinguished the Looney Tunes characters from other cartoons was the fact that they had personalities which, though exaggerated for effect, were in an odd way endearing.  They were preposterous and appeared in preposterous situations, but you accepted them because it was made clear that all was done with a kind of knowing wink.  Bugs himself provided that wink in many episodes. The characters were clever and crafty when not insane, like Daffy. Sometimes they were hopelessly, uselessly clever and crafty, all cunning doomed to fail, like in the case of Wile E. Coyote.

In a sense watching Looney Tunes was like watching the Marx Brothers or the Monty Python crew in some of their sillier and more fantastic moments.  Watching Disney or Hanna-Barbera was like watching some of the worst sitcoms ever made, or mere slapstick.

Bugs Bunny was sly, insouciant, and mocking.  Mickey Mouse was something of a benevolent idiot, a rube, a country bumpkin.  Bugs would have made a fool of Mickey even more successfully than he made a fool of Elmer Fudd.  Daffy Duck was a joyous and enjoyable lunatic.  Donald Duck was a bitter and ornery, and did nothing witty or even funny.

Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies even managed to bring high culture to the cartoon world, but with a sardonic twist.  To see Bugs and Elmer Fudd playing Siegfried and Brunhilde and singing to the sound of Wagner's inflated scores was a moment of hilarity in my life I cannot forget.  The same with their version of The Barber of Seville.  It's true that Disney merged some of its characters with classical music in Fantasia, but that was a pretentious effort; it was largely intended seriously.  To my knowledge, Looney Tunes never struck a serious note.  It was always gloriously silly.

To focus on the silly, and old cartoons, in this sad time may seem frivolous.  But I find it curiously satisfying and even redemptive.  Such things act to save us from the thuggish and humorless evil that surrounds us.  Arguably at least, what I call a golden age for cartoons encompassed the Great Depression, World War II and the Cold War, and times even more frightening than these times.  The capacity to laugh is one of our distinctive features.  Too often now our humor is cruel and boorish.  Perhaps that's always been the case, but I doubt it.  We are a crueler and more boorish people than we were.

Never There In the First Place

 

If you give it some thought, Christmas is a holiday which invites skepticism regarding Christianity.  It may in that sense almost be called "Anti-Christian."   This isn't merely because it's become almost entirely about making and spending money, about marketing, about sanctimony and relentless religious posturing.  Rather, it's because there's nothing about it that has anything to do with a historical Jesus, and everything about it is either manufactured or based in pagan myth and tradition.  It's a great Christian holiday which isn't in the least bit Christian in nature or origin, but Christians have chosen it and describe it as Christian, and insist that it be treated as peculiarly Christian. 

The Christian story of Christmas, to the extent that it purports to be accurate, clearly isn't accurate.  The trappings of Christmas--the tree, the Yule Log, the exchange of gifts, mistletoe, etc.--don't have their origins in Christianity.  Why, then, do Christians insist on it, and make it their greatest holy day?

We begin with what should be known by all, but perhaps is not.  That is, that there is no evidence, no report, and indeed nothing, indicating or even suggesting Jesus was born on what we now call December 25th.  The Roman Church began celebrating it as the day of the birth of Christ in 336 C.E., more than 300 years after the event is said to have taken place.   There is considerable evidence, however, that it was the date on which the birth of pagan gods such as Sol Invictus and Mithras was celebrated, and was within the season during which the great pagan celebration of Saturnalia took place, which involved gift-giving and parties, and featured roleplay in which slaves and servants become masters and their masters slaves and servants.

As might be expected of a day celebrating the birth of sun gods such as the Roman ones I referred to, it occurs very near to the winter solstice.  The winter solstice was celebrated by pagans of all kinds long before Jesus is said to have been born, as the time at which the sun ceases "dying" and is in effect "born" and the days slowly become longer and brighter.

Then there is the story of Christmas described in the Gospels.  According to that of Luke, Jesus was born during the reign of Augustus, in Bethlehem, because of the requirements of a census taken while Quirinius (Publius Sulpicius Quirinius) was governor of the Roman Province of Syria, which included Palestine.  The census supposedly required all to travel to the town of their birth, to be counted.  According to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great.

The early Christians seemingly kept poor records, but the Romans were great record-keepers.  The census of Quirinius was taken several years after the death of Herod.  No Roman census required everyone to travel to their ancestral home--a requirement which would likely have caused chaos in travel and administration, and would have been a dramatically large burden to all concerned.  Why, then, does Christianity claim that Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem?  Because it was the City of David, and Jesus through his father Joseph was claimed to be a descendent of David and the messiah was supposed to be born there.  

Then there is the manger problem.  The nativity scene or setting we're familiar with involves a stable, a manger, various animals and shepherds.  Early Christians maintained Jesus was born in a cave, though.  That would seem to be the case according to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where the place at which Jesus was born is depicted by the star in the photograph at the head of this post, and is referred to as a "grotto."  That place along with other locations and objects important to Christianity was discovered by Helena, the very busy and industrious mother of the Emperor Constantine, who roamed the Holy Land in search of such things, and is considered a saint according to the Catholic Church.

We have heard, and still hear, many urge that we should "keep Christ in Christmas."  But it can fairly be maintained that he was never there in the first place, and isn't there much now.  Instead, he's been inserted, in a rather shameless, brazen fashion, into an ancient time of celebration made significant for reasons having nothing to do with him or Christianity.

It's harmless enough, of course, to create a holiday and designate it as a time for special celebration of a particular person or event.  This is done with some frequency, in fact.  If that is what Christians have done in creating Christmas, who could complain?  But a religion such as Christianity cannot be doubted, and that is especially the case where holy books are concerned. 

If we give it some more thought, perhaps in fact Christmas isn't Anti-Christian, but peculiarly Christian in the sense that it is contrived, a pretence, much like being a Christian is, today, and likely has been forever, sadly.  If to be Christian is to follow the teachings of Jesus, Christians are mostly frauds.

We should by all means celebrate the Christmas season.  It's great fun, and always has been, since long before Christ and Christianity.  The winter solstice has always been significant as well.  But one with think the pious and self-righteous should have some decency, and restrain themselves from insisting we stop treating the Christmas season as being solely something which it clearly is not. 

Living in Cloud Cuckoo Land

The Cloud Cuckoo Land I refer to in this post is that of Aristophanes, as depicted in his play The Birds.

It's not the one referred to in the recent novel bearing that title, nor is it the one referred to by assorted German philosophers.  The Germans once thought themselves the successors to the ancient Greeks, for reasons I don't understand, and perhaps still do, but I do not. 

Cloud Cuckoo Land as it has been referred to in more modern times is a place where absurdity reigns, or a fantasy land.  As pictured in Aristophanes' play, it is a kind of kingdom of birds, made by birds who are thought to be the real or original gods.  It's built by birds on the recommendation of a couple of men, who tell them (the birds) of their divinity.  

As might be expected, the play has been interpreted as intended to communicate this or that profound insight, and may well have been intended to do so.  The most obvious interpretation--that it is a comedy written by a great writer of comedies, intended to make people laugh--is thought too vulgar.  But Aristophanes could be quite vulgar when he wanted to be, and the ancients were, in fact, quite vulgar in various respects according to modern sensibilities.  

But Cloud Cuckoo Land may be an appropriate description of the world in which we live, at least as a synonym for absurdity.  The mid-term elections didn't pan out as it was supposed to according to  our ubiquitous media, pundits and politicians, and that may be because of a rejection of the lunatic rantings of Stercus Magnus (as I'll call him for purposes of this post) and his cohort of brown-nosing (if not yet brown-shirted) imbeciles.  That of course would not in itself be absurd, and may even be encouraging.  But, the world in which we live remains one in which people who have no business governing anything run for and even obtain public office; one in which money is deemed speech; one in which it's easier to obtain a deadly weapon than it is to obtain accurate information.  So the dismal failure to predict the outcome of the elections may merely be the result of stupidity instead of a sign of sensibility.  

All part of the Cloud Cuckoo Land we've built, not the birds.

We humans built our Cloud Cuckoo Land believing ourselves to be gods or to be made in God's image, or at least to be the most intelligent creature living on this woefully small and insignificant planet.  We needed nobody to tell us that's what we should do.  Perhaps that's what gods do.  Alas, our Cloud Cuckoo Land is a disaster.

But here's another interpretation of Aristophanes' play.  Perhaps the obvious was, or is, the message of the play.  Perhaps Aristophanes was quite serious. The birds' Cloud Cuckoo Land would be better than any city of humans.  Birds are worthier gods than we are.  In fact, any animal would be.  There is wisdom in the worship of animals engaged in by our ancestors.  Unlike us, animals aren't selfish, greedy, stupid or malicious.  They subsist, they merely are, and live according to nature--that's all they can do, in fact.  They have no pretensions, no dreams or nightmares to confound or confuse them.  They don't make war.  They're what we strive to be and cannot be, perfectly in mesh with the world (at least until we've remake it).

 

The Only Thing That Will Make You See Sense

The bigoted, elitist, but nonetheless incisive Sage of Baltimore comes to mind more and more as the horror of the mid-term elections looms larger and larger before us.  If I wanted merely to comment on the preposterous hypocrisy and venality of the election process, I'd be content to quote his assertion that elections are an advance auction sale of stolen goods.  But these are dark times, and dark times engender dark thoughts.  And so the quote which graces this post, above.

Was Mott the Hoople right when it sang all too long ago that Violence is the only thing that will make us see sense?  Yes, I mean Violence with a capital "V."  If it is, it's likely that it will only make us see sense in the short term, but that may suffice to resuscitate our dwindling civilization until the next time it's required to jolt us into remediative action.  Our history repeats itself in certain respects.  Think of the statement heard in movies featuring the Mafia, that a war is good for business now and then. Human society may not be significantly different from that of organized crime.  Fascists were destroyed in the Second World War but arise once more, in Europe and even here.  Read Sinclair Lewis; read George Orwell.

We've had many wars, but the war being spoken of by some now is war of a particular kind.  Political war within a political unit; that is to say, a civil war.  We've flirted with the idea of one lately, it seems. It may be that the thought of a civil war pleases some of us.  Those it pleases most are probably lovers of fantasies in which they figure heroically, brandishing weapons in defense of whatever they find important.

We had a real civil war during the 1860s, of course, but our capacity to forget is such that it's more or less a romantic memory now, even another fantasy, perhaps.  Some of us dress up and pretend to  be soldiers in that war (and other wars as well, unfortunately).  One of the memories of that war we should hold is that it was remarkably bloody; another is that we fight our best (that is to say, do the most harm) when we fight among ourselves.  And it seems clear to me, at least, that we're eager to fight among ourselves once more.

The internal war we may face is different from that civil war, though.  No great casus belli is available.  What causes there are seem mean, petty things taken in themselves--whether we think of sex the same way, or certain people the same way, or agree that certain books shouldn't be read, certain things shouldn't be said, or certain people shouldn't be here or whose love for our Great Republic is seemingly inadequate, or certain religions shouldn't be allowed or followed.  Most important, though, is the fear that others may have what we have or take what we have, especially if those others are different than we are.  

I suspect that if there is such a war it will be more similar to the internal wars of the French Revolution.  There's a kind of regime running this country, a regime born of and sustained by money.  Those who have the money despise or are at best indifferent to those who don't, and take great pains to appear as though they have the interests of those they despise or are indifferent to in mind when those of the regime act to foster their own interests.  Why it's thought that the regime seeks to benefit anyone but its own members is beyond me.  It should be obvious it does not, but suckers must indeed be born every minute.

Still, I can't help but feel that this enchantment will wear off, eventually.  And when it does, mere anarchy will be loosed upon the world in a way far more real than the aristocratic Yeats thought it had been all those years ago.  Every normal person will not only want to hoist the black flag and start cutting throats (some already do, I think) but will begin the work of slashing. If the kind of hate we see displayed in our society is any indication, many long for a new guillontine already, and there are wannabe Marats and Robespierres standing ready.

There's only so much hypocrisy, venality, sanctimony, arrogance, fraud and contempt one can take.  Some day, someone or many someones will notice that things don't change, no matter what is said or done by those with power.  They don't change because those in power won't gain, but will rather lose, if change takes place.  What will the reaction be when we realize, collectively, that we've been bamboozled?