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A sense of honor
Every man has feelings. Mine chiefly revolve around a concept of honor. This concept is incomprehensible to most Americans. They are a very moral people, but almost anaesthetic to honor.'64
The common man, he wrote in another place, ‘is extremely and even excessively moral, but the concept of what is called honor is beyond him.’65
The differences between the two, to his way of thinking, were plain enough.
- The moral man refrained from a given act because he was afraid that somebody might be looking; the man of honor refrained from the same act for the simple reason that it was beneath his ideas of what constituted human dignity.
- The moral man set great store by the opinion that others held of him, regardless of whether that opinion was right or wrong; the man of honor cared not a whit for what others might think – he was guided only by his own innate sense of what was and was not decent.
- The moral man would lie just as readily as he would tell the truth, depending on which was necessary to save his skin; the man of honor told the truth instinctively but would not hesitate to lie if a lie were necessary to save the good name and happiness of someone else.
Nor was this to say that the man of honor did not now and then slip; he did, but he usually recognized the fact honestly and made peace with himself, whereas the moral man made every effort to conceal his weakness, to deny it both to himself and to others, and to evade it by trying to pass the blame off onto someone else.
Honor, Mencken concluded in a sharp definition, is ‘simply the morality of superior men.’661
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1 Fecher, Charles A. Mencken: A Study of his Thought. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1978. Pp. 113-114. Quoting Mencken.
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