Honor and dignity seem to be lost words in today’s vocabulary, and pity us moderns for losing sight of their value. Cicero used to speak of dignitas and auctoritas as the sum total of a man’s virtues — his reputation, honor, dignity, gravitas, moral standing, and so forth.
Interestingly enough, the Romans had another term that might be seen as the passive display of honor, that being otium or leisure, a quality that helps grow ones sense of dignitas. The application of honor acquired two forms: passive (gravitas) in the sense of one’s potential energy and it’s active form (auctoritas) representing a more kinetic application of honor. If one is given an image of a cross, dignity and leisure would occupy the vertical plane; gravity and authority the horizontal with honor encompassing the totality of all four.
If one were to give this concept of honor a sense of depth, one would include the Roman idea of pietas — piety, loyalty, duty and devotion specific to one’s family. This is perhaps a remote idea as inheritors of the Western tradition where piety is inextricably bound up in ideas of religious devotion or worship. Yet to the Romans where family members haunted the great clans who preserved their memories, the honor of the past translated into the dignitas of the moment.
G.K. Chesterton famously remarked tradition was the democracy of the dead, and if postmodern iconoclasts seem deaf to its voice then it is little wonder why pietas seems to have lacked a presence in today’s society.
Earlier this Feburary, I had the pleasure of listening to a presentation by Mr. James Bowman of The New Criterion and American Spectator in Richmond. His thoughts on honor and morality in the postmodern world struck me in particular with his reflections on our post-Kantian understanding of the term, and whether dignitas could be reignited with a few bare embers that remain scattered by the horrors of the 20th century:
It’s true that I would be especially delighted in such a de-moralization of our political culture if it led to a re-establishment of the standard of honor in public life, though I regard that eventuality as being almost as utopian as the progressive dream of perfect equality. But I also believe that a recognition of the very limited role that morality has to play, or ever can have to play, in our public life would be of value in itself, since it would allow us to take up residency once again in the real world instead of the rhetorical dream-world of progressive mythology, also known by the British as the world of “virtue-signaling.” You must have noticed it yourself over the last year or so as people on both sides of the political spectrum seem to have started from the assumption that choosing a president, or even a senator or a representative, is a matter not of finding someone who can best do the job but someone whose high moral standards may be supposed (just about) to match their own.
Bowman presents an interesting argument, one that decouples morality from public life in favor of dignitas per se. Rather than a race for utopian perfection, concepts of honor lean more heavily upon a sort of realism as a golden mean; a more reliable standard than the shifting sands of ethics and moralism imposed by both the secular and sacred religions of history.
There is a link to pietas that is perhaps missing in the application of honor as Bowman understands the term that is important to consider. Though perhaps slightly critical of Judeo-Christian views on the topic as “honor skepticism” in his book Honor: A History one is compelled to reflect that honor can only be achieved with a sense of pietas for it to have the depth of meaning and force of character that would lend itself to Chesterton’s plea for the democracy of the dead. How else does the past speak to the present without such an anchoring? How deadly does auctoritas become without such an anchoring to restrain its passion?
If Giorgio Agamben is correct in his State of Exception, that “auctoritas can assert itself only in the validation or suspension of potestas” when what restricts authority from the maximum use of power if not pietas? As Agamben reflects towards the end of this exceptional book:
Politics has suffered a lasting eclipse because it has been contaminated by law, seeing itself, at best, as constituent power (that is, violence makes law), when it is not reduce to merely the power to negotiate with the law. The only truly political action, however, is that which severs the nexus between violence and law.
Because authority has been severed from duty to things past, we see a retreat to “living law” in contrast to the more reliable and realist middle position of “written law” — it is because of the disconnect between auctoritas and pietas that we see honor flattened in the postmodern world — but not extinguished. Moralism bent to the will of of those who abuse auctoritas in pursuit of utopia do so at the expense of pietas — yet this moralism or “virtue signalling” is not a cause, but merely a predication and symptom of the gravitas behind the impulse to power, which ultimately requires the shorthand of violence in order to achieve the speed of change. The illegitimacy of the act guarantees such artificial remedies will not last.
If honor is to reclaim a position in public life, it will first have to take root in the otium of private life. It is in this condition where the great Roman thinkers such as Cicero and Seneca developed and refined Roman dignitas in the shade of their careers and gave it true form, and for those of us who see in such men contemporaries rather than distant figures of history, their call to pietas remains an enduring one.