Grant McCracken: Why We Need to Bring Back Honor

“I studied Elizabethan England as a graduate student. It was a society governed by ideas of honor, and I thought, ‘Wow. Maybe some of those ideas could be returned to usefulness.'”

On December 2nd, Olivia Malloy was joined by Grant McCracken, the Canadian anthropologist and author, to discuss his latest book, The New Honor Code: A Simple Plan for Raising Our Standards and Restoring Our Good, which will be released later this month. Dr. McCracken holds a PhD from the University of Chicago in cultural anthropology and is well-known for having served in prominent roles at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. In his discussion with Ms. Malloy, Dr. McCracken explains why he sees restoring honor as a prime objective for these times, how building consensus on the importance of honor can transcend political divides, and the origins of his interest in the topic.

What, exactly, are you proposing as the new honor code?

I’m suggesting that there is a light, portable moral code that we can add to our existing moral understandings of the world. There is great moral confusion and lots of skepticism about our ability to assert moral conditions or to insist on certain kinds of behavior. In that snow globe confusion of the moment, there is a residual moral code that comes from the rules that influence our roles. So, all of us have been assigned social roles in the world—we’re parents; we’re children; we’re spouses; whatever we are. Contained in those roles is a residue of rules that specify how you are supposed to act, with regard to your child, your parent, your spouse, your community. Those are a simple, clarifying set of instructions that can improve the likelihood that we will do the right thing. At this point—I guess I don’t need to say it—we look like a nation that contains people who are incapable of making even the simplest moral determinations. You look at people like Jeffrey Epstein, Larry Nassar, Lori Loughlin, or Charlie Rose, and you just think, “These people can’t have had any idea of how to conduct themselves in a moral manner.”

How did you come to identify honor as the missing piece, as opposed to, say, respect or accountability, for example? Why honor?

I studied Elizabethan England as a graduate student. It was a society governed by ideas of honor, and I thought, “Wow. Maybe some of those ideas could be returned to usefulness.” And so, one of the chapters looks at honor in the Elizabethan period, and I tried to say how honor worked in that society to create good behavior. Some parts of that honor code are completely wrong for us. It was viciously hierarchical. For certain purposes, it was a bad moral instruction set. But, for other purposes, it serves us quite well. I think there are two faces to honor. There is that personal honor—the honorable thing you should do because that’s what you need to do to protect and define your self-respect. Without that self-respect, we are diminished creatures. But there is also the external honor. That is the honor that people in our community believe us to possess. That second kind of honor is something that we—to use a stock market metaphor—trade as an open exchange. We do things that bring us honor. I’ve got a guy who lives down the street who volunteers—I was astonished to discover—for a handful of things and has performed heroic acts of generosity and goodwill. He never gets any credit for this, but, in a more perfect world, that would be the open exchange. People would know about that; they would give him credit for that. That would be his external honor.