Lost Honor

Character, it is said, is what you do when you think you won't get caught. In light of the New England Patriots' alleged electronic spying and dirty tricks against opponents such as secretly videoing opponents' signs, jamming coach-to-quarterback frequencies, planting spies in locker rooms and stealing blackboard plays, keeping a library on each defensive coordinator's playbook actions, etc., I am reminded that honor is a concept being widely ignored today and readily sacrificed in favor of winning, bottom line success, and public perception.

In sports, winning is everything. Players are evaluated, rewarded and punished based primarily on their records, not whether they beat their wives at home, take steroids and other performance enhancers, or get arrested for barroom brawls or drug possession. Coaches' jobs are almost exclusively judged on their won-lost records, regardless of their demeanor, their player relations, or their practises.

In the business sector, profit seems to be the only measure that counts as well, and corporate dirty tricks are well documented. Nothing else matters unless you get caught and bring disgrace upon your firm. And when cheating is discovered, as in the lead-laden paint on millions of toys made in China, then the bottom line suffers and high level executives, borrowing from Japanese tradional honor perceptions, commit hari-kari--but only because the scandal is revealed, not because the practise was wrong or shameful to begin with.

I wonder how much we are willing to sell out our personal honor for the new public definition of success. Maybe it's easier to live with a less-than-honorable guilt if one has a big house and a fat bank account, easier for coaches and players to live with misdeeds they got away with if it resulted in winning. And the excuse offered widely that "everyone else does this all the time" seems really empty.

Life has rules, but there will always be those who find ways to get around them in the pursuit of some goal. The real issue, to me, isn't whether people can cheat and get away with it but whether they hold their honor dear. It seems many today, sadly, do not. And when honor is sacrificed, there's not much difference from stealing or lying or any other injury to our fellow men we choose to commit to achieve our goals.

When I began teaching college around the mid-1960's, there was a lot of talk about situational ethics and moral relativism. Whether something was right or wrong, it was thought then by many, depended on who got hurt and the situation, not any absolute measure. I fear that attitude may be returning today.

My father told me when I was a boy that right was right and wrong was wrong, that things couldn't be "a little wrong" or "a little right" but were right or wrong, period. He wouldn't have had much regard for situation ethics or moral relativism. I think some "wrong" things have fewer or worse consequences than others, or may be mitigated by circumstances, but they are all equally wrong. Otherwise it would be very hard for me to believe in a God-defined good or evil, and I could only look at social consequences to define them. I happen to believe man doesn't define right and wrong. It's too bad that he is so vain that he insists on interpreting it based on his personal preferences.

No, I agree with my dad, right is right and wrong is wrong. It doesn't "depend" on anything, not whether others do the same thing or whether you can get away with it or whether no one gets hurt or lots of people may even benefit. Avoiding an act that is wrong because you know it is wrong, regardless of whether you might get away with it, is a matter of honor.