Honor is a topic on which a great deal has been written, but it remains very poorly understood. A typical failing is to ghettoize the phenomenon – as limited only to some forms of interaction (found in some contexts and not in others), as a concern only of one social stratum among many, as a male-gendered phenomenon, as a characteristic only of certain forms of social organisation. This can extend even to the claim that there are ‘honour societies’ that differ fundamentally from ‘dignity societies’ (echoing the older and now widely discredited antithesis between ‘shame cultures’ and ‘guilt cultures’). Such antitheses entail a distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic values that is useful for analysing individual tendencies and historical and cultural differences. But there is no group and no historical society (and perhaps, except in extreme pathological cases, no individual either) in which some combination of both tendencies is not found. Despite strong reasons for believing that contemporary Western societies – and especially their elites – are subject to an ever stronger pull in the direction of extrinsic values, educated elites within those societies have used and continue to use labels such as ‘shame-culture’ and ‘honor society’ to denigrate and patronize internal and external others – inner-city gangs, citizens of the US South (and their Scots ancestors), immigrants (e.g. the Irish and the Italians in the US), native Americans, the Japanese, southern Europeans, north Africans – and the ancient Greeks (to name but a few). Ancient Greek evidence on the nature of honor, by contrast, supports contemporary thought in a range of disciplines (such as developmental psychology, sociology, and political philosophy) on the interplay of esteem and self-esteem, recognition and dignity, as fundamental to social interaction in any society worthy of the name.
Douglas Cairns is Professor of Classics in the University of Edinburgh and author of Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (1993), Bacchylides: Five Epinician Odes (2010), and Sophocles: Antigone (2016). His most recent edited volumes include Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity (with Miranda Anderson and Mark Sprevak, 2018), A Cultural History of the Emotions in Antiquity (2019), Emotions through Time: From Antiquity to Byzantium (with Martin Hinterberger, Aglae Pizzone, and Matteo Zaccarini, 2022), Contempt, Ancient and Modern (2023), and In the Mind, in the Body, in the World: Emotions in Early China and Ancient Greece (with Curie Virág, 2024). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the British Academy, and a Member of Academia Europaea.
