Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 05:12:55 -0500 From: Kafka Dream To: void Subject: honor [Warning: Message unrelated to the current national political battles] I've been thinking quite a bit about the concept of HONOR lately. Not in the "honor and obey" sense - more the personal honor headspace. It seems that despite all my flaws, I have a strong sense of what is honorable and what is not. This has been an undercurrent of thought for some time as I've been contemplating my civic duty and my sense of obligation with regard to charity as my income increases. But someone acted without honor toward me recently (no, I'm not going to talk about it so please don't ask) and it impacted me, much more than I expected. It got me thinking about it in the front of my brain. I'm not exactly sure where my honor comes from, since my parents are lovely people but not really focused on honor. And they have given me grief over doing The Right Thing when it meant that my personal reputation or liability was at stake. Still - there's a lot there that I am too close to see, but that means I can't really talk through it now (if ever). And although I have a serious military presence in my family, including a highly cleared great-auntie, I've only found out about its extent recently. (Yes, I take the idea that many people in the military consider it their duty to serve with honor seriously.) It feels pretty darn foolish, but I've been thinking more and more that it comes from books and stories. I'm generalizing here, but a few of the more prevalent concepts... Heroes have honor. People with honor don't give up. They protect the innocent and the weak. They give respect until it is proven that the object of their respect is unworthy. They try, despite moral uncertainties, to do right. These are themes in story after story, and I've been reading since I was four, taking on whole books packed with these concepts since around the age of seven or eight. That's twenty-two years of imprinting. Woven into that, lately I've also been paying attention to the constantly evolving debates about what it means to be a woman. The idea of a woman's space as interactive and supportive, emphasizing communication over competition is intriguing, but I haven't experienced it (that I've noticed) on a large scale. I see it sometimes, with individual women or small sets of women. I see myself bringing these strengths to my job and my life when I can. These ideas are not a dominating influence in my life, but the discussions are providing me with a language that I did not have before to talk about how my personal honor manifests in the context of being a woman. I don't have a spectacular conclusion here, except that it's hard. Maintaining honor in the face of dishonor, keeping communication open when confronted with a lack of reciprocity, doing the right thing despite the fact that it genuinely hurts (e.g. to admit that I was wrong, or to take responsibility for a mistake) - it's all hard. It's gotten a little easier as I've explored my own boundaries, tried to find applicable rule-sets. But I don't want to calcify, frozen in an inflexible batch of personal laws that ultimately alienate me from others. Nor do I want to set myself above anyone else, look down upon someone who does not follow my little laws. Religions interest me deeply, because they've practiced some of their rules for millenia, but surrendering to a particular set is not an option for me. And yet, struggling to define my own set is so hard that the concept of a pre-defined set is tempting. But in that fantasy I fool myself that by having established rules I won't have to struggle any longer and that's not reality. Application of any rule-set, adopted or created, to specific situations will still have to be weighed and considered. I may be mixing morality, honor and duty here. They are all evolving concepts. The difficult thing in discussing them is that they continue to change after we have marked them and worked on them, just as time will continue to pass after I have noted its passage. I guess I just wish it all (the decisions, the disappointments, the dishonor) didn't hurt so much. Kelly J.