Honour is obsolete.  The culprit, as usual, is the modern era and its devices. A better word than obsolete might be endangered.  Due to habitat loss.

It has always been a difficult value to uphold.  It’s one of duty as opposed to pleasure.  The honourable choice is very rarely the easy one.

When we think of honour, we often think of the large and historic examples. We think of Oates walking into the snow to die so that his party might live.  We think of the most extreme cases and there honour sits:

Strong and divorced from our day to day routines. A museum piece of expectational people on the outreaches of human experience.

But it’s usually a much smaller thing.  A matter of keeping appointments and doing what you say.  The Yakuza, who have a notorious fetish for honour, demand punctuality.  They know that a person who can’t even be on time, can’t ever be depended on for jail.

You won’t make the Olympics if you don’t do your push-ups.

And it’s these little exercises in decency that are vanishing. Not because people are bad but because they are unnecessary.  When they go, the big actions of honour will go with them.  As a sport, it requires a lot of training.

I’m not attempting to draw any ethical conclusion here.  I’m not saying that the world requires honour (though it once did) nor am I going on some Socratic rant against the youth and their perceived lack of ethics.

What I am saying is:  The world has changed in certain fundamental respects and certain fundamental values will change with it.  Honour is one of them.

When stripped of all Klingon, Mafia and military sentimentality, honour, like most social ethics, is a function of communication.

pic nicked from here

For many years, to meet someone, you had to set up a time and a place.  You would both travel to the destination.  Effort was expended and you both expected the other person to be present.

Plans had to be kept because they could not easily  be changed.  Not showing up, when someone travelled half a day to meet you, was a real asshole move. It was dishonourable.  All you really had was your word and breaking it was so serious a faux pas that people would show up to duels, where they had a good chance of being shot, and whole armies would show up in fields to battle each other.

Often at prearranged times.

The telephone might have been the first serious techno-blow to honour.  It allowed for quick changes to plans.  You still had to catch the person at home but, instead of sending a missive to inform them that you would fail to keep your word, you could now just pick up the phone.

You just had to do it before they left the house.  If you were really lucky, you just explained yourself to their answering machine. Phew, you thought.

pic nicked from here

With this small habit changed, it should come as little surprise that we saw less of the big acts of honour.  That the people who still took the concept seriously were criminal organizations who couldn’t use the telephones and remained dependant on appointments.  For the rest of us, the soil had been contaminated.

New technologies, such as the Web 2.0 and mobile computing devices are not just change in scale from the telephone but a complete change in type.  Unless you’re in the mob, dealing with an old person or just paying lip-service to an obsolete institution, these techs made appointments obsolete.

We live half-hooked up to the hive mind, reacting to the people near us, whose locations we now know.  There is no need to plan ahead, hold to our word about meetings or be on time.  Rather, our paths cross or they do not.

There is no need for honour.  Who can possibly hold to their word when they have tweeted so very many of them?  Who can develop bravery when they can criticize behind a fake name or no name at all?  People will take the easy path.

For better or worse, that’s generally what people do.

People’s words will become divorced from their actions, becoming noise, their actions divorced from their personality, becoming persona, and their integrity divorced from their work, becoming slavery.  A sort of sycophantic, childish cowardice will be the norm.   A bleating whine between cheek kisses.

With honour failing to be a necessary, let alone important, part of our ordinary dealings, it will not appear again in our extraordinary ones.

Is that good?  Is it bad?  You’ll get no opinion from me.  I have no idea.

But I do believe the world is fluxier than it’s ever been.  Things move faster, change quicker and make more noise.  Whoever coined the term websurfing was more accurate than s/he could have known.  Because of the internet, today’s social world is a liquid place, moved by waves, pulled by undertows and occasionally spraying you in the face.  Sometimes there’s even a shark.

Like surfing, rapid adaptation is of much more use than dogmatically holding the course you planned.  Unlike surfing, there will soon be no shore left to return to.  Even the real world seems below social media water.  Just look in any big-rich-city cafe.

We just have moving liquid.  Endless.

A new system of ethics will emerge from all this weird new tech (hopefully before it’s replaced by the next generation- just once, I would love to see morals catch up to technology) it seems that people just crave fame.

I don’t know why but I see a lot of that.  Motherfuckers really seem to think they deserve acclaim.  Guess that’s what happens when the media raises your kids.

If celebrity is the only place people want to go, the only shore they want to reach, then we’re fucking lost.  Way out at sea and about to start eating each other.

But all that is probably hopefully a temporary thing.

The death of honour is not.  It’s always been private value and the modern world is very public.  Online, we’re all turned inside out.  Honour will die and it will be replaced by a society of snitches.  The opinions of others and a lack of privacy might even be a better check on our actions than our own consciences.

I don’t know.

But I do know this — we’re going to find out.