57. Why human honors can’t make you happy
57. WHY HUMAN HONORS CAN’T MAKE YOU HAPPY
Honor, love, and respect—everyone wants it. Isn’t that the secret of happiness? Doesn’t being loved and honored and respected make you happier than anything else, even more than loving and honoring and respecting someone else?
Happiness is in the happy. But honor is not in the honored, but rather in him who honors and who offers deference to the person honored, as the Philosopher says. Therefore happiness does not consist in honor.
It is impossible for happiness to consist in honor. For honor is given to a man on account of some excellence in him, and consequently it is a sign and attestation of the excellence that is in the person honored. . .
As the Philosopher says, honor is not the reward of virtue for which the virtuous work; but they receive honor from men by way of reward, as from those who have nothing greater to offer. But virtue’s true reward is happiness itself. . . . [I]f they worked for honor, it would no longer be a virtue, but (the vice of worldly) ambition (I-II,2,3).
Many sociologists and psychologists (e.g., David Riesman and Nathan Glaser in the classic The Lonely Crowd) tell us that we moderns typically live outside ourselves; we have little or no inner life. We follow fads and fashions. We tell the truth with a clock. We worry about other people’s opinions about us and about everything else. We are conformists. Even nonconformists conform to the fads and fashions of their nonconformity. “Rebellious” teenagers talk the same, dress the same. They voluntarily don the same uniforms—to express their nonconformity! They demand to be honored by their peers above all things.
Honor is prized in every society. But the premodern version of honor was excellence: being better than anyone else at something. This is still prized, but only in the worlds of entertainment and sports, the theaters that we erect to distract ourselves from ourselves. What we prize in our real lives is honor for not being different, for being the same, for being one of the lonely crowd. We prize “consensus” over truth.
But the new modern version of honor is just as subject to St. Thomas’ two arguments against it as the ancient version is, and probably much more so.
The first point is incredibly simple: honor is not in you, it’s in someone else’s mind. Your happiness, in contrast, is yours. Happiness is inside you, honor is outside you and inside someone else.
And the second point is just as simple: What is it that you want to be honored for? For nothing? Do you want to be a fake? For something, then. For what? For something truly good? Or for something not truly good? That would again be a fake. Then it is not honor itself but the truly good thing that you are honored for, that is your true good and happiness and last end.
But what is that? You still have not found it, no matter how much you are honored, because it must be something more than honor itself.