October, 2008:

You may be familiar with NPR’s resurrection of the program “This I Believe.” I have been meaning to write an essay on this topic and this week I finally found some time to do that during my trip. I still need to trim this down below 500 words (it is at 729) but I will go ahead and share it here. Feel free to comment.

I believe in honor

I think I have always tried to live my life in a way that might be considered “honorable.” I can remember quite vividly a moment in the 5th grade when a classmate hit me, trying to start a fight, and hearing my father’s voice in my head saying, “It takes a stronger man to take a punch and that give one.” “I’m not going to fight you,” was all I said. I believe that my Christian faith, confirmed at a young age, was vital in developing my sense of honor but it wasn’t until I became an academic and the dean of an honors college that I really thought about what “honor” means.

Honor is a word that we hear so often and in so many contexts that it is easy to forget its meaning. What complicates matters further is that honor is a very complex concept. My academic field is in ancient Hebrew and Jewish literature but more specifically in exegesis, the process by which meaning is drawn out from a text. Most of my research has focused upon the ancient rabbis’ interpretation of Scripture, however the concepts can be readily applied to any text, whether written, spoken, or in any other media. It is common place in interpreting texts to find that any given word of phrase can have different meanings in different contexts.

Honor is one such word that often carries not only different meanings in different contexts, but it can have multiple meanings in any given context. We are perhaps most familiar with the notion of honor as doing that which is viewed by the culture or community as noble or right. In today’s political climate it is hard not to think of those who speak of serving our country with honor or the politicians who accuse the other of behaving dishonorably. In these cases the use of honor implies a pattern of moral behavior, a “right” way of doing things. When one is acting honorably or with honor they are upholding certain moral standards of conduct. I saw this first hand while living in Louisiana when people from around the country came to the aid of those whose lives had been devastated by hurricane Katrina. We see it in the person who stops a robbery in progress or those students who help tutor local children after school, all of these are people acting in honorable ways.

In academia we speak of honors in a different way. Every year students graduate “with honors” in their chosen field. Their diplomas indicate the academic honors that they have just received; Schreyer Honors College Scholars receive a medal that symbolizes their academic achievements. These honors are accolades, praise for the distinctive and exceptional work that they have done. So honor can be something that a culture or community considers worthy of esteem, it may be doing something that benefits others more than self, or it may be accolades or awards given to someone for work that is considered outstanding. In the 17th century the French writer François de La Rochefoucauld brought together the notion of honor as both accolades and character when he said that a person’s “honor ought always to be measured by the methods they made use of in attaining it.”

I believe in honor, in all of these senses because at the core of all of these definitions is the notion that we are to strive for excellence and in so doing we become better people, those in our community will benefit, and our world will become a better place. It is true, as the sociologist might warn us, that different cultures in other times and places held as honorable practices that we may find objectionable. But when we as a society become jaded and dismiss honor as a relic and something to be sniffed at as a trite token of a bygone age, we diminish ourselves.

I believe that what we need to do as a society is to reassert what we believe to be honorable and right. We must establish for ourselves, our students, our leaders, and our community the notion of doing what is right, placing the well being of others before ourselves, and rewarding and rejoicing in such actions. I believe that our nation must not simply be a place of excellence but of honor.

 

I am currently at the convention of the National Collegiate Honors Council. As you can imagine, when a group of educators get together we tend to talk about educational and therefore social concerns. Last night was our annual dinner with our CIC colleagues and I again shared my thoughts on what I think could be positively transformative for our society: compulsory service.

Proposal

Every person, male and female, would serve 12-24 months in government or community service after graduating from high school or reaching 18 years of age. This service would be either in military service or community service and would meet a number of needs.

• Military – For the forseeable future, whether we like it or not, we need a strong military presence around the world. We also need more people, plain and simple, since we have a relative few doing so much the burden upon them is becoming unbearable and the consequences catastrophic. Furthermore, we are in danger of creating a “warrior class” where only those who are either trying to move out of poverty or who are children of military parents go into the service. The result is a distancing for most Americans from the cost of protecting our country and our freedoms.
• Disaster Relief – We currently depend upon our military, particularly our National Guard, to bring aid within the US such as after Katrina. While some security is needed in those circumstances most of the services provided would be best served by relief workers, specifically trained for such duties. (Our military is too often asked to provide relief and peace keeping work for which they are not in fact trained.) These workers could also be deployed abroad. Currently existing programs such as the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps would be appropriate collaborators.
• Community Service – There are various needs in our society that could be well served by those opting out of military service. For example, teaching English to non-native speakers, park service, construction work, childcare, and so on.

Benefits

• Maturity and skills development – Regardless of whether one entered military service or community service at the end of their duty these young folks, now 20 years or so, would have acquired important skills including discipline and training in a vocation. For those who would then enter college, a “GI Bill” would be in place, would be at a much greater level of maturity and better able to appreciate and use their education.
• Talented Workforce – Many young people today don’t go to college and do not have access to training or opportunities for jobs because of their lack of training. Having completed their duty these individuals would have appropriate skills so that those who do not go on for higher education they would be better prepared to enter the work force.
• Labor – Our country is in great need of good labor, whether it is in the military, rebuilding our infrastructure, or in community service.

This would be a dramatic change for the US and not one that expect would be terribly well received. Some would say it smacks of socialism but so far there is no serious attempt to deal with these various issues. This single (yet complex, I admit) solution would address a wide variety of needs and would benefit all parties. Other countries have done something very similar (I first learned of it studying German language in Germany, taught by someone who was doing their community service)¹ and we would be able to learn from their mistakes and strengths. It is a grand plan whose time has come.

Now, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain would either of you like to take this up?

 

1. I believe it is still in place. The only article I could find is from 2004 when they were considering stopping the draft and one of the concerns was that the community service would have to end as well. [↩]