Honour Essential to Psycho-social Integrity

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In a society that is critically challenged by "truth" in every field, it is possible that "honour" transcends truth in its significance for social coherence. It may have a superordinate role. This may have always been the case, which would explain the extent to which its trappings have become a focus of attention. It could be argued that, in a period of increasing social turbulence marked by crises of law and order, that the role of honour will come to be seen as even more vital and fundamental. Whereas its role at the highest levels of society may be increasingly called into question, the recognition of its role in some form amongst the most disadvantaged, and even amongst street gangs, is of striking significance.

The challenge for society is that strategic decisions, if made by any leadership, are now made without honour -- or are quite incapable of being proved to have been made honourably. This is the case despite the honourable trappings that may accompany such decisions: ceremonies, treaty signatures, etc. Those at the highest level may even be subject to indictment, impeachment or be justifiably accused of lying to, or deliberately misleading, those they represent.

Maybe honour is of greater significance in providing coherence to social initiatives than rationality. This is the case in heroic action to save life (such as by emergency services), in terrorist suicide missions. In contrast to many qualities, honour is readily recognized across cultures and languages. The unusual lack of confusion or ambiguity in this regard suggests that it may be associated with a more fundamental and universal understanding.

There is now far greater capacity to present and declare anything to be honourable -- as an act of public relations -- than to recognize something that is. Curiously dictatorships are strongly focused on the trappings of honour as a means of shoring up legitimacy for their regimes. In this sense the perceptions triggered by the rituals of honouring provide a form of keystone.

Honour might be considered to be inherently dissociated from the preoccupations of most disciplines and from their practice. By extension, honour might therefore be considered as distant from any form of interdisciplinarity. This assumption is challenged in what follows. It is argued here that, on the contrary, honour is central to effective interdisciplinarity, if only because of its cognitive implications. A sense of honour and acting honourably conditions practice of a discipline -- as is often most explicitly articulated in relation to the martial arts -- but notably in the light of widespread preoccupation with "academic integrity". Failure to imbue the practice of any discipline with honour can then be understood as putting the effectiveness of that practice at significant risk. The question is whether what is understood as honour does indeed have some form of superordinate cognitive role in interdisciplinary practice.

It would of course be an exaggeration to assert that all leadership today is in some ways dishonourable. It is however fair to assert that those leaders who remain honourable are, through their undeclared knowledge of the behavior of their less honourable colleagues, tainted in some measure by their complicity in that dishonour.

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