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Aswad -> RE: I want to know what happened to honor and integrity (11/22/2008 7:45:19 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Aszhrae
certainly brings in to question what others value more than honor and integrity, does it not?
I think a more interesting question would be how others define honor and integrity.
Honor means different things to a Maori, an Inuit, a Japanese, a European and an American. And it has meant different things to each of these at different points in time. Does that mean that an honorable Samurai from the Tokugawa shogunate would be considered dishonorable by a modern American? You betcha. The former would see nothing wrong with decapitating a passerby for bumping into him, that being the origin of the whole modernization period after the British bombed a whole village to retaliate for such an act. Hardly what the average modern American would consider honorable, although the retaliatory response would seem to be in line with modern American perceptions of honor, unless Americans perceive themselves to lack honor overall.
Integrity has some pretty neat definitions, and some pretty useless ones.
Princeton Wordnet gives the neat definition of "an undivided or unbroken completeness or totality with nothing missing," which is certainly desireable in a Master, and which pertains to one's qualities as a person. It also gives the useless definition of "moral soundness," which would either mean that the person in question rejects BDSM (not morally sound in many parts of the world), or that the person conforms to your own ideas of moral soundness (well, duh, that's a compatibility issue, if I ever saw one). It would also imply that a person working against the Taliban regime, for instance, would be dishonorable, just like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ghandi were dishonorable by the very same definition. I, for one, reject that definition on the basis that it reduces to an absurdity. Wikipedia offers a middle ground, with "the basing of one's actions on an internally consistent framework of principles."
I have never been morally sound by the standards of my communities. I have had too much integrity for that. I may fit the first Princeton definition, but only in a pragmatic sense; dogmatically, I would say that it is unattainable. I have, for the bulk of my lifetime, had the sort of integrity described by the Wikipedia definition. Each of these leads to a different conclusion. And none of them are compatible with how I see the word applied in the real world, which implies that the OP needs to be more specific about what she is after in this regard. At least if she wants integrity, for integrity has its basis in a deeply held concern for truth, and truth requires a measure of precision in order to not be confused with what passes for it in this world.
Similar things hold for honor. It's one of those things where the lack of a standard gives no yardstick to measure by, which deprives the human faculty for self-evaluation of the necessary feedback to provide an accurate assessment. Kind of like being open-minded. People have generally been "taught" to be open-minded, or, rather, to think of it as a desireable trait. Few possess it, because its lack is yet another thing that there is no feedback for, and most who get it will still think that the objective quality will readily suffer pragmatic exceptions, which it does not.
Perhaps what the OP should be looking for is a man who holds himself to a high standard, has an above-average track record of succeeding at doing so, has a standard that is compatible with her own, with dependability included in that standard. Such men are rare enough, without putting ambiguous criterion in there that are bound to tell off the men who possess the desireable qualities (because they question themselves, having set unattainably high standards for themselves) and which is bound to attract those who do not possess those qualities (because their judgment is impaired, leading them to assume they're well set).
Or perhaps she should just take some responsibility for judging the character of a man for herself, rather than depending on his self-assessment. As we all (hopefully) know, as our knowledge and experience expands, we acquire a greater understanding of how far we have to go, and the converse is also true. Hence, when we are starting out in some area, the journey will seem short. Yet, after travelling the same road for years, we realize the journey will take more than a lifetime. In the end, that means that Mr. Right usually thinks he has a long way to go, while Mr. Asshole thinks he's there already. Thus it is a pretty poor choice to leave that assessment to either of them: you'll likely have better luck with tea leaves.
That wouldn't be terribly PC of me to say, though...
...oops.
Health,
al-Aswad.
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