Honor is not the highest thing; it is not even really a complete thing in itself. Nevertheless, it is in the final balance necessary for the stable achievement of any degree of virtue or morality in life.
What We Want
Philosophically speaking, there is no question about what we want. What Aristotle knew is also what Augustine knew, what Aquinas knew, what even Descartes knew: that our very nature as rational embodied beings has inscribed in our flesh and in our hearts and every feature of our selves a desire that can be diverted and opposed, but never effaced.
Put philosophically, our moment-by-moment existence as individuals is constituted by our rational and embodied receiving of and participation in being as form: therefore, we cannot help but want to completely fulfill that being by receiving and participating in form and being in their objective fullness. Put simply, as beings who know and enjoy, we cannot help wanting to know and enjoy everything.
More immediately, since our existence at every moment and in its totality is entirely defined by our reception of being as form, we cannot help wanting our reception of being to be true. Truth and intellect are properly the same relation. We exist by knowing the truth; and it is self-contradictory to want to know the truth and at the same time reject it.
Hence, our nature contains within itself the constant, pressing imperative to know each thing it receives truly, objectively, according to what that thing is in itself and not merely as it appears to our senses or preferences or lesser desires, and to relate to it truly, which is to say to relate to it by the relation of truth, which is to say, to act in regards to it according to what it is and what it is for.
For both of these reasons, as Plato long ago pointed out, it is incomprehensible nonsense to say that it can ever be beneficial to us, can ever even be rationally thinkable and not a self-contradiction in terms, to deliberately believe what is false or do what is evil.
Yet as Plato knew also, there is another part of us that is not constituted simply and totally by intellect and truth--another part that has desires that are not solely objective workings-out of the desire to know and enjoy everything. For Plato, this other part of us--which we might call the body, though there are better names for it--was the problem, and the solution was to permanently shed it.
Aristotle, though, rejected this position, and proposed a middle course that also corresponds to more or less the common sense of the human race and the normative Christian position of the last two thousand years. This other part of us, Aristotle acknowledged, was not simply and totally constituted by the relation of truth in the same way as the intellect; it was, however, ordered to that relation, its nature constituted totally by a telos and receptivity towards receiving truth from the intellect and embodying that truth in objective and embodied and temporal actions. Or, put more simply, our human bodies are not intellects, but things that exist to be taught by the intellect the truth and to follow and live that truth out.
Hence, whatever the ultimate fate of the body or soul might be in the afterlife, the entire task of morality in this life is for the intellect to teach truth to the body in such a way and to such a degree that it comes to continually and stably share in and embody and carry out the relation of truth in respect to every thing it encounters.
Or, put more incisively, the whole goal of human morality is to establish a permanent and unbreakable bond between body and soul, such that every truth grasped by the intellect is infallibly lived out by the body. This stable bond Aristotle called a "habit" or "excellence," but it is better known today by the Latin term "virtue."
If all this is correct, then there is simply no question what you want, what I want, what you and I cannot help but wanting. We want to always and everywhere infallibly do what is objectively true and good, which is to say, what in fact corresponds to the natures and telos and happiness of every thing and every person we encounter.
Here, though, is the whole trouble: that if we want this, we do not always or even often know what we want. Different reasons for this gap have been given in human history. For Plato, the problem was merely ignorance; for Aristotle, it was habitual vice, a poor use of the body and the embodied mind; for many Christian philosophers, it was both of the above and also the perverse will of a prideful intellect seeking its own self and lesser finalities above the terrifying transcendence of a God who is both the proper end of the intellect and infinitely beyond its capacity to grasp or choose by its powers alone.
All, though, would agree that virtue and truth and the good are the objective ends of our bodies and minds and whole selves, and that therefore we in some sense want them even when we oppose them, even when we in fact choose their opposites.
Interiority and Politics
This is what the Apostles called a hard saying; that is, a saying that does not appear at first glance to give much aid or comfort to our actual pitiful lives and selves. To tell a child who very much wants to hit his sister that he in fact wants to love her is, I think, true; but also not much of a comfort to the child's delicate feelings of offended dignity at not being allowed to do what he wants.
We all are much more like that child than we would like to think; and much more of our emotional lives consist of delicate feelings of offended dignity over not being allowed to do and say the manifestly stupid and harmful things we happen to want in the moment. And it is in respect to this reality that it is often more truthful merely to say that the heart of man is desperately wicked above all things, who can fathom it--and then to punish the child and/or ourselves.
There is, however, a practicality in the belief that what we really want is always and everywhere the objective good--though it is rarely put in a practical form.
From this comes the basic conflict between modern and pre-modern accounts of desire. For the ancients and Medievals, desire was conceived of objectively, as beginning with the objective good eliciting desire in the subject, conforming that subject's appetite to itself, and terminating in the subject's enjoyment of the object by way of proper relation. For moderns since the 16th century, however, desire has been conceived as beginning with the subject, as an inchoate and irrational and limitless impulse outwards that only subjectively takes its objects as good and in so doing forces those objects to conform to itself, and hence which terminates in the violent subjection or subjugation of object to appetite.
Yet if one thinks of desire as essentially limitless and subjective, then one necessarily thinks of both morality and politics as primarily about reconciling the essentially opposed and limitless desires and (in the technical sense) interests of individual people and groups, and thus making it possible for people to live together in some form of society. And the only way to do this, for all the cleverness of Enlightenment thinkers, is via some form of discipline and extrinsic imposition of hostile ends onto the subjective desires of individual people. If this is true, then morality will be conceived of most essentially as a form of violence. And we can see this quite well in all contemporary approaches to law and morality.
If it does nothing else, the belief in the objectivity of the good and of people's desire for it has a profound effect on the character and actions of the person tasked with training others to choose the good--placing love at the heart of punishment, and desire at the heart of education. If it is really true, as more or less every philosopher and Christian theologian from Aristotle until the Reformation thought it was, that the goal of governance and parenting and education alike is to create a permanent, habitual inner bond between truth and self and body and soul and cause people to reliably and freely choose the good, we would frame both laws and curricula rather differently than we presently do.
Of course, the belief that what people really and truly want is the good does not necessarily dictate a gentle or indulgent method of training or moral education--far from it! We tend as a matter of course to be much less indulgent and much more consistently demanding in seeking what we genuinely believe that we want than in what we think others want for us; and the same applies, mutatis mutandis, to helping other people seek what they want. The belief in a purely extrinsic imposition of the good tends to lead to an odd fluctuation between total indulgence and indeed indifference to conduct on the one hand, and extraordinarily coercive and violent attempts to punish and compel conduct on the other. The reason for this is simple: if people's character and choice only matter, not to themselves, but to society and/or the government and/or some private interest, then the reality is that the vast majority of people's conduct and moral character and virtue and vice simply does not matter. Where it does matter, though, the only method of proceeding is to use whatever means necessary to force them to do what those with power want or need them to do; and in this, their moral character and choices and even free will is mostly beside the point.
On the other hand, belief in the objectivity of the good and our own constitutional desire for it imposes on each person and on society collectivity an imperative that is constant and totalizing--but which is limited, not extrinsically, but intrinsically by the thing aimed at (the interior, stable, habitual choice of each individual person of the objective truth of their relations with all other persons and things) and the means necessary to achieve those ends (habit-forming interior human desire and action).
The implications of all this are limitless, moment by moment and day by day; and until one has actually tried to live out this way of doing and being, there is little that can be comprehensibly said to the outsider.
I really do believe that if we could untangle all our manifold and petty and perverse desires and wishes and habits, it is true that we would ultimately discover that at the root of them all lies the infinite receptivity of the intellect for the fullness of truthful being and objective goodness. I have, to a reasonable extent, succeeded in untangling my own moment-by-moment desires and choices and emotions and discovering their ultimate roots in the objective good; and in discovering this, I have succeeded to a certain degree in altering those moment-by-moment desires and choices and emotions so as to better conform them with their ends.
In doing this, though, I have also and inevitably come to notice the degree to which my moment-by-moment daily desires and wishes and enjoyments were and still to an extent are irrational and perverse and self-contradictory, not relative to some violently imposed external standard, but relative to their own aims and in themselves. And all of this is not easy.
Yet if one has never even attempted this struggle, has never even conceived of one's desires and choices in these terms however inchoately, I struggle to understand how one could be expected to understand the good--or, really, meaningfully desire or enjoy it. The whole task is in the doing.
The Honor of Individuals and States
Honor is the habitual attitude by which one sees the relation of the self to the objective good as a matter both of interior desire and essence, and of external, social, and political identity.
That is a definition; and a definition that is, again, difficult to explain to those who have never attempted the struggle it embodies.
At any given moment, an individual person may be subjectively hungry, thirsty, tired, horny, lonely, annoyed, blind, deaf, cold, hot, in pain, nauseous, or grumpy. At any given moment, our subjective and moment-by-moment desires may be confused, irrational, perverse, nonsensical, based on lies, or, in short, insufficiently directed and conformed to their objects.
Honor is the quality that leads us, in such circumstances, to not merely be able to set aside our subjective desires and emotions and choose the objective good--that would be the virtue of fortitude--but to personally see this choice as, and more than this to want others to see it as, our own good and our own desire and, in short, what we ourselves want and who we ourselves are.
The basic relationality of the human person is the source of many difficulties and complexities for human life and morality. It has also been the source of much confusion for philosophers. Given that a human person is an embodied intellectual being ordered towards receiving being in truth, it is not immediately clear how one ought to relate to another embodied intellectual being also ordered towards receiving the same thing.
As discussed above, clearly human beings and human societies play some role in communicating truth to and training the individual in virtue--but clearly also there is an immediacy and interiority to how one person relates to another that goes beyond the mere communication of objective reality.
Or, put another way, what human beings want to communicate to each other is not merely the truth about the world, or the goodness of the world, but the truth about themselves--themselves as truth and goodness. There is, in other words, a personal content to the intellect, a personality that exists in relation, not only to the world-as-object, but to the person-as-subject.
At the same time, the objectivity of the good, and its immateriality considered as form, means that intellectual beings are capable of being united in a much more profound way than any irrational beings--united precisely by sharing in a common good, or common form, present in and desired and enjoyed by both of their intellects. Likewise, to the extent there is personal content to the intellect, they are capable of receiving and knowing that personal and subjective content also, knowing and enjoying it in truth and being in proper relation to it, or in other words to each other and to the personality of each considered as a common good. This is the essential idea both of Plato's Republic on the virtue of justice, and of Aristotle's discussion of friendship.
For all the theoretical difficulties of personhood, however, the main difficulty human social and political life poses to the life of virtue is a practical one. Plato and Aristotle lived in an intensely gregarious society governed by an immensely politicized aristocracy to which they themselves belonged. As such, they grew up among people whose thoughts and desires and actions seemed most often to be governed by neither selfish disordered individual desire or considerations of truth and abstract morality, but rather by ideas of honor and shame seen in external and social terms.
As a young aristocratic male, one entered military service and learned rhetoric and prepared for political office neither in order to gratify one's lust for women and boys, nor in order to know and live the truth and objective good, but rather in order to gain honor for oneself and one's family and avoid shame and disgrace. And these considerations are extremely difficult to boil down or reduce to either desire or objective rationality.
It is certainly true that in an urbanized society what people think of you has some effect on whether or not you achieve your individual desires--and also true that one can justify education, rhetorical education, and service to the state in abstract moral terms. It is equally clear, though, that neither was the direct motivation for action for 5th century Athenian oligarchs--particularly when people's sense of honor led them to endure incredible hardships and even suffer and die for the state, or on the other hand commit incredible crimes and do unimaginable evils for it.
Plato dealt with this in part by proposing a somewhat confusing tripartite model of the human soul where the basic social concerns of honor and shame were mediated by something called the thumos--a consideration that Aristotle dismissed as unnecessary given his own more straightforward treatment of the universal and particular. It is really only, however, a properly Christian idea of the person that allows the full integration of the human concern for external social honor and shame with both individual desires and the objective good.
Clearly, it matters to all of us, on an immediate, visceral level, what others think of us--and what they think most of all about whether we are good or not. In this, there is an essentially moral nature to how others view us, which is at the end of the day also a personal and intellectual dimension. The question is not just whether we are good in the objective and abstract terms applicable to, say, an apple or an explosive or a rake or a right triangle, but in the subjective terms applicable only to an embodied intellectual being.
When we consider each other, we always to some extent ask the question: is this person a good person? Are they truthful? Are they virtuous? Are they trustworthy? And all these questions are in the end the same thing: are they stably oriented towards receiving the objective good, do they relate properly to it, do they choose and possess and enjoy it as they should?
Of course, in practice, many other considerations rational and irrational, good and bad, ordered and disordered, important and less important, social and political and communal and personal, always intrude themselves to some extent into our practical social evaluations of honor and shame. It is for this reason that transcendent philosophy and religion alike have so often tended to go against the grain of society; the reason, among other things, why both Socrates and Christ were killed.
Still, the reality is that as personal beings most of us most of the time are more motivated by what other people think of us than by either abstract goodness or individual desire; and this makes the social, external sense of identity and honor extremely powerful when directed either for good or evil. In the normal course of things, it is primarily and first honor and shame that teaches us, as small children, to choose the good we do not know and reject the evil we cannot understand. It is primarily and first honor and shame that teaches us, as young men or women, to choose the good that is more difficult and reject the evil that gives immediate pleasure. And it is primarily and first honor and shame that teaches us as mature adults with power to use that power responsibly for the good of our families and communities and not merely for self-indulgence.
In the simplest sense, "honor" refers merely to the Greek "time," a social reward granted because others think well of us. Considered as a personal virtue, however, as Christian societies have generally considered it since the Middle Ages, it is best understood as the kind of habitus that, in a mature and virtuous person, regulates and bonds the personal concern for external approbation with the subjective demands of desire and the objective demands of morality.
An honorable person, therefore, is a person whose externally and socially presented and affirmed sense of self is in fundamental harmony with both the objective good, and with his own internal identity and subjective desires. As with most virtues, the end of this virtue is a person in harmony with themselves who stably and easily chooses the good and does the right thing in every circumstance, and moreover enjoys doing so. The means of this virtue, though, is a constant struggle to choose the good and do the right thing even when these three aspects of the person are in profound and seemingly irreconcilable conflict with each other.
The basic test of whether one is an honorable person or not is really quite simple. When asked to do something that is clearly the right thing to do but that clashes with your immediate subjective desires, do you perceive this action internally as an affirmation of or as a threat to to your identity and sense of self? As something you internally want to do or as something you do not want to do but are being externally coerced into doing? As a fulfillment, or as a violation? And when you carry out such an action, do you want those around you to affirm what you have done, or apologize for it? Do you want them to treat it as something that you wanted to do, and be happy,nor as something you were forced to do, and be sad?
More immediately, do you want the people around you to expect you to do the right thing, to see it as something in keeping with your identity and sense of self and desires, something you reliably do as a matter of character and may be counted on to do by others without special thought, or do you want them to view it as a surprise, an extraordinary act of heroism, an extraordinary sacrifice, indeed as an extraordinary violation of who you are and what you want and perhaps even of what is right or good that others are obliged to not only never affirm but rather mourn and deprecate and apologize for and make up for by indulging you in other ways? It is natural and normal to desire to be praised for doing the right thing: but do you want to be praised, or to be condoled? Doing the right thing often comes at the cost of genuine sacrifices, the giving up of genuine goods, which it is legitimate to mourn and for which it is good to seek consolation; but do you want to be consoled for losing the good, or only for choosing it?
In all this, note well, honor is what regulates between the external sense of self and the internal relation to the objective good, works to bring them into alignment. An honorable choice is one that affirms externally and socially that one internally and constitutionally wants the objective good; a dishonorable choice is one that defines our external sense of self by something opposed to genuinely wanting the objective good.
Of course, as even this summary should indicate, there are real dangers that come from a personal or cultural sense of honor, particularly when not properly grounded in, not just the good considered as objective and transcendent, but the actual humble and subjective reality of our lives and selves and desires.
When not grounded in truth in this sense, honor can easily morph into dishonesty--a state where we refuse to ever acknowledge to others or ourselves the reality of our true, subjective, moment-by-moment desires and emotions, compartmentalize them out of existence, make ourselves out to be virtuous to others when we are in fact deeply vicious, and in short lie constantly and continually to others and ourselves.
Most fundamentally, a sense of honor unleavened by humility makes it impossible to actually grow in virtue, since we are unable to accept the distance between ourselves and the objective good and take any steps to bring the two into closer conformity. Much easier to merely pretend to be good than to actually do the work of making oneself good. Much easier, as Christ said, to clean the outside of the cup and dish than to actually thoroughly wash the interior. Much easier to be a hypocrite than a virtuous person.
Humility is the virtue that teaches us to be truthful, not just in an ultimate, but in an immediate sense, and not just in an honorable, but also in a relatively dishonorable sense. Honor tells us to connect our external sense of self to the objective good; humility tells us to acknowledge the gap between our internal self and the objective good, and in so doing allows us to actually begin to make up that gap.
The ultimate goal of virtue, it must be again and again affirmed, is not to appear to others to be virtuous, but to reliably have subjective and internal and moment-by-moment desires and emotions and choices ordered towards the objective good. And in this, humility is far more important than honor: as Christ's parable of the Pharisee and the publican teaches well. A fully virtuous person is always honorable, but one can advance very far on the path of virtue without a particularly developed social sense of honor, and very far on the path of honor without being particularly virtuous.
Still, in the world of historical human life, honor has generally been the easiest and most widespread shortcut to virtue, and very often and for many people an absolutely indispensable means to it. The number of people who can internally and of themselves find the comprehensive and objective good and then internally and of themselves teach themselves to love it and reliably and habitually choose it has in most societies not been particularly high. Having an external and social sense of self, and external and social feelings of affirmation and disgrace, tied to some kind of objective good or some kind of virtue has been the main thing actually leading most people most of the time to choose the good and reject the evil. And the lack of a sense of honor has been the main thing leading most people to do extraordinary evils and to tolerate them.
The Dishonor of America
Still, in America in 2024, hypocrites are a dying breed, and for all the wrong reasons. We are no longer a particularly social people, let alone a gregarious one. We are, rather, pervasively and increasingly anti-social, people who live our lives not externally and objectively, but subjectively and by the faux-internalities of the Internet.
The crisis of honor in American society, though, does not come principally from a lack of concern for what other people think of us. Rather, in the Internet age the creation and management of self-image in a purely external sense has become an overriding preoccupation of nearly everyone nearly all the time, to a degree otherwise seen only in the most extreme and artificial historical aristocracies.
Still, the anti-sociability of Americans and our obsession with external image are not in fact opposed trends, but manifestations of the same mania. The extraordinarily artificial and objectifying (in the proper sense) images people make of themselves for the Internet are so strange precisely because, to a degree unknown in human history, they lack any fundamental connection with either the subjective, internal reality of the self, or any sense of the good or true in an objective sense.
Hence, one can see on the Internet truly deranged attempts to reduce moral goodness or sexual attractiveness to purely abstract and universal and mathematical principles, eliminating entirely any subjective or personal element whatsoever, and at the same time attempts to reduce the most basic principles of truth and morality to purely subjective and social preferences.
The idea that there might be a gap between appearance and reality, between social self and internal self, between the subjective good and the objective good, to be overcome via a habitual virtue of honor, is fundamentally alien to modern and American culture. As Baudrillard long ago pointed out, American culture is defined first and foremost by a belief in appearances as reality, or alternately of reality as constituted by appearances; of reality as a single universal plane with no depth and no transcendence on any level. For Americans, Baudrillard says, nothing deceives, nothing is ambiguous; there is simply the image on the screen, which is always both true and good. The simulation of a thing is always more real than the thing itself; rebaptism is always more efficacious than the first baptism; the third marriage is always more genuine than the first marriage; one's avatar is always a truer expression of one's self than one's body.
There is sense to this if one's concept of the self is of an essentially free-floating and arbitrary will merely causing facts to be, and hence with the degree of control of that will over the world constituting the only test of truthfulness. It is true that one can modify one's picture on Facebook, adjust it according to one's aesthetic preferences and goals and desires, more than one can modify one's actual body; and far more than one can modify one's actual moral character. Yet for all that one's body and one's character are real; and one's modified and filtered and Photoshopped picture on the Internet is not.
"Hypocrite" is the Greek word for actor; and if a hypocrite is someone who plays an external role that has nothing fundamentally to do with their internal selves at all, then Americans are nearly all hypocrites. Hypocrites in the moral sense, though, have generally been seen as people who are fundamentally concerned with other people seeing them as objectively good and righteous; whereas Americans are increasingly concerned not so much with appearing good as at controlling their image and conforming it to a totally arbitrary standard ultimately set by themselves or others like them.
This is in one sense conformity and in another sense freedom; but neither gets to the heart of the matter. We pretend to be what we are not, not so much because we desire the good, but because we fear it. We take the most internal and subjective and moment-by-moment and incoherent and disordered desires of our interior selves, and treat them as objectively good, and turn them into standards to which we ruthlessly conform ourselves and force others to ruthlessly conform themselves--at least in external image.
Hence the utter strangeness of contemporary American society, on the Internet and to an ever-increasing degree in real life and in the halls of government. When we look around, we emphatically do not see people pretending to be good in an external and objective sense that does not correspond completely to their internal and subjective selves. Rather, what we see is something much stranger: people engaged in asserting that the semi-random and constantly changing jumble of their internal selves is in fact the objective good itself. What I want is always and by definition both the objective good and my true and real self; even when what I want is different today from what it was yesterday, even when what I want is obviously self-contradictory, even when what I want contradicts morality and reason, even even when what I want contradicts what others want, even when what I want contradicts my body and soul and self, even when what I want is taken entirely from things I have seen on the Internet, even when what I want has nothing at all to do with either me as a real person or the world as a real world.
This kind of person may be many things, including accidentally kind and to an extent virtuous. The one thing this kind of person can never under any circumstances be is honorable.
Without Honor, the American Empire Cannot Endure
Salvation depends on virtue; and most essentially of all virtues on humility. Before we can be saved, we must be in a position to receive what God wants to give us: beginning with ourselves and others and the world around us.
Politics, too, is aimed at salvation; and depends on virtue. For politics to be successful, states must be led by virtuous people; virtuous not merely externally, but internally also. This is a controversial position today, but is historically the merest common sense.
Still, political societies can function, if not achieve their ends, under many profound disabilities. One of the most common historically has been a state of affairs where the leaders of states and peoples have been people who were internally and subjectively vicious, but externally directed by a sense of honor that tied them to at least an external and socially-accepted, if not properly moral and transcendent, idea of the good. And this state of affairs is not only not ideal, but in practice not really workable or capable of anything but continual dissolution, as the many wars and conflicts and abominations of history testify.
Nevertheless, if a society led by vicious people with a sense of honor cannot be truly stable or truly successful, it can, at least, endure for a very long time; or at least take a very long time to fall apart. The Roman Empire endured for two hundred years or so in a state of continual collapse and civil war, simply because there was no immediate alternative for people to choose that could do what the Roman Empire did for them, which was still by and large and despite the madness of the Emperor and his army to promote agricultural prosperity and prevent war. And I have, in this space, again and again compared the current state of the American Empire to Rome in this respect, and pointed out that discussion of the fall of the American Empire was as yet very premature, that America was still unimaginably powerful, that the settled peoples of the world still by and large benefited from its rule and by and large wanted it to rule.
For the American Empire to exist at all, however, it is absolutely necessary that its leaders possess a sense of honor tied to an objective sense of the good at least broadly acceptable to the rest of the human race. John F. Kennedy was a very personally vicious man; but he was honorable in at least the basic sense that he publicly and externally pretended to be someone defined by an attachment to the political goods of justice and peace. The same was true by and large for his successor Lyndon B. Johnson, a personally corrupt and vicious monster who nonetheless paid frequent and cynical homage to the idea of virtue, ginning up movements for justice and to feed the poor to achieve his policy goals. And along with the pretense of personal honor came a much more substantial idea of collective and political and indeed Imperial honor, an idea that at least America as a government and people and Empire was defined by public and external relation to some objective good. A President might break his wedding vows, but America made a treaty, America would abide by it--or at least pretend to. President might desire only power, but America would stand for justice--at least pretend to.
Somewhere along the way, though, our leaders stopped having this kind of honor; stopped having any concern to define themselves and their government with reference to any objective good going beyond subjective desire. With Donald Trump, however, this crisis of honor has reached fundamental proportions--and now imperils the very existence of American Empire and even American governance.
I do not think that Donald Trump is personally the most vicious President to have served. In fact, I think in many ways the Presidents preceding him were more personally vicious; and that even they never achieved the levels of personal viciousness present in people like Woodrow Wilson or Lyndon Johnson.
Nevertheless, what may be profitably said of Donald Trump is that he is the least honorable President to have ever served; perhaps the least honorable person to have ever held political power.
Trump is the apotheosis of the American proclivity for holding up incoherent, disordered desire and personal preference as the standard of objective goodness for all. Every thing he does is the best; every thing his opponents do is the worst; every war he fights is a victory; every policy he pursues is the correct one. He is, put simply, a winner; not a hypocrite, but something much worse than a hypocrite, and much much worse even than an open and unashamed malefactor. He is a person for whom there is simply no gap between the objective good and subjective desire, and no need to conform one to the other. He is dishonor incarnate.
In nothing has this been clearer than the recent war with the Islamic Republic of Iran, a war that is notable not so much for its injustice as for its absolute and pervasive dishonor, a dishonor applied now not merely to Donald Trump as a person or politician but to America as a nation. Many previous American regimes fought unjust wars--much more unjust wars, in fact. Never before, though, has America fought a war premised entirely on the public and external and total rejection of the very idea of consistency with the objective good.
America negotiated with Iran, but only to get what it wanted; then, when it wanted to, it used those negotiations to lull the enemy into a false sense of security; then, when it wanted to, it assassinated the political leader of Iran and spiritual leader of 300 million Shi'a Muslims along with his family and women and children. It said the war was to liberate the people of Iran; then, when they did not want to be liberated, it said that it was to destroy the ballistic missiles; then, when it wanted to, it said the war was to end the nuclear program; then, when it wanted to, it said it was for something else, perhaps merely to kill the bad people, or to be able to post cool reels to the Internet.
America said the war would last three days; then that it would last four weeks; then that it would last for six months; then that it was over; then that it was still going on after all. Sober politicians acknowledged in public that the war had been launched under the cover of negotiations to maximize tactical advantages The leader of the American military boasted publicly that the war was an unfair fight, that it was punching someone when they were down. As the war has gone worse and worse, people across the American government have denied what they said before, denied every defeat or temporary setback, stated publicly that the war would end whenever they felt like it and not according to any objective benchmarks or conditions whatsoever. The American President declared victory, and then said the war would go on.
All of these pronouncements have the same significance, which is simply to say: the good is merely what we want right now. It is not objective; it is not social or communal or political; it cannot conceivably be shared with anyone else. We are winners not because we are winning, but because we want to win.
What is objective reality? What is the good? What is honor? Who knows?
Yet the reality is that any political community whatsoever, even a brutal repressive Empire, depends on some commonality and some common good between rulers and subjects. The denial of honor is at its heart the denial of the shared and common and social and political nature of the good; which is to say, the denial of the very idea of the political as such.
If the good is merely personal and individual and subjective and constantly shifting, it cannot constitute the basis for a political community or even an Empire; and if the American Empire rests finally on mere individual and subjective whims then the American Empire will cease to exist.
What applies to the American Empire applies equally to every human person. Be honorable, or you will die. Be honorable, or you will be forever alone.
This is the warning: take it.
