Tonic Discussions – Ep004 – Honour
This week the panel decided to talk about honour.
Well actually it was Mark Bisone’s idea, although he tries to wiggle out of responsibility. What tipped it over the edge, though, was Mary Harrington’s recent essay Incredible Shrinking Men, which you should really read if you haven’t. It is short and insightful. From her conclusion:
I don’t know where we go from here, but my hunch is that simply demanding that men try harder to embrace the domestic sphere may not go very far. My hunch is that somewhere near the heart of the problem is the fact that the pursuit of honour is really, really important to a great many men - more important, in many cases, than keeping your partner happy - and that this remains true even when the only emotionally satisfying place to pursue honour is within a simulacrum. ... What would it look like to try and restore the pursuit of honour, for men?
What indeed? I think that’s an important question to ask. Postmodernity offers us nothing but creature comforts and professional drudgery. Deep down we know we were made for more than that. Deprived of the pursuit of honour, our spirits wither.
But what is honour, anyhow? What does honour have to do with honesty (hint: look at the etymology)? What does it mean to be honourable? Why is honour important to men in the first place? Does honour require a code, or does a code get in the way? What happens to a society in which honour has disappeared completely?
Join Mark, Grant Smith, Harrison Koehli, Daniel D, and yours truly as we debate these questions and more, on Youtube:
Rumble, or Spotify:
(The Bitchute link doesn’t seem to be up yet).
It used to be recognized as honorable that a man went to work and earned the means of taking care of his family.
Then all those miserable writers of the '50s came along and won prizes for novels and short stories and plays about how miserable a thing it was to be trapped in the dreadful daily routine of going to work and earning the means of taking care of a family. The wife and children became enemies of a man's inherent dignity. They were the parasites who destroyed his any hope of finding his true unencumbered self.
It's quite revealing, John Updike's review of Jarrell's The Animal Family. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/01/specials/jarrell-fly.html?scp=8&sq=Fly%2520by%2520Night&st=cse
And John Cheever with the short story "The Enormous Radio"--and them Angry Young Men who dominated postwar British playwriting and the grim films made from their work--
--honor is certainly to be found in getting up early every day and taking the subway to one's shitty office job downtown because the baby needs diapers and milk and you love the baby and the woman who bore him to you. Perhaps time to mock out of existence the voices saying otherwise.
Great episode gents.
I've been writing a book on Bushido for the past year and I took a deep dive into Honor, among many other virtues. There's a section in there about "Honor over Money" which looks at how feudal warrior cultures structured society - and where the merchant sat in the that structure. I battled with the libertarian / Austrian econ part of myself as I worked through this.
I might put an excerpt of this chapter on the blog at some stage.
Anyway - just dropped by to say that these podcasts are a great idea. Very high signal.
Keep them going!