Back to School By David Hein
[The Living Church] Church schools support both Christianity and honor systems. They perceive no conflict. They see honor as harmonious with Christian theology and Christian ethical principles. Certainly no chaplain or school head ever arises in chapel and proclaims: I now know that we have been deceived into accepting this honor system all these years; shame on us! And yet conscientious Christians might want to raise some questions about their compatibility, and then go on to see if they can sort out any tangles that appear.
In church schools, honor is routinely experienced as a leading way of representing, embodying, enforcing, and growing this commitment to character. It’s almost right up there with chapel as a leading identifier of what the school is all about in relation to moral development. A school’s honor system is — dare I say it? — a familiar marketing tool.
Today’s students grow up in a world in which the lack of honor (although it would not be put that way) is almost taken for granted. Who, when accused of anything, ever says “Yes, I’m guilty, and I’m sorry”? Who does not first deny? Then, if left no room for escape: blame others, or the environment, or mental stress — anything but Yes, I was responsible, I did wrong, I am willing to face the consequences. That last bit gets said in court only as part of the plea deal. That’s what children grow up exposed to. Or they have parents who, rather than supporting the teacher who reprimanded or punished their child, blame the school, thinking they are defending their child.
The famous sociologist Peter Berger raises some thought-provoking questions in his 1970 essay “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor.” He begins with this arresting statement: “Honor occupies about the same place in contemporary usage as chastity. An individual asserting it hardly invites admiration, and one who claims to have lost it is an object of amusement rather than sympathy.” Apparently outdated — and perhaps thankfully so — “at best, honor and chastity are seen as ideological leftovers in the consciousness of obsolete classes, such as military officers or ethnic grandmothers.”
Berger points to a moral reason for honor’s social ostracism: it was class-bound, the norms of an elite. It was appropriate for medieval knights, but it was not seen as desirable or even possible for democratic men and women. Honor was, Berger observes, an aristocratic concept, bound up with a hierarchical view of society. The age of chivalry operated on the basis of a moral code that gave different weight to and had varying expectations of different parties: “To each his due” was the moral imperative of the feudal order. This morality was traditional, then, but it was not absolute. Instead, it was relative to different groups in society. (This medieval mind-set shows up in Anselm’s great work on the Atonement, Cur Deus Homo.)
What citizens the world over seek today is not honor but dignity, which confers status not according to rank but according to personhood. Dignity adheres to the solitary self; it asserts a humanity behind the roles and norms of society. A naked, abandoned baby in a trashcan has as much status, dignity, and worth as the robed king in his castle on the hill. This view is enshrined in such famous modern documents as the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
Read more at: The Living Church