Honor Definition Essay

Honor is doing something not for yourself, but for someone else. Honor has changed quite a bit, we don’t fight to the death to prove we are honorable, now we fight for other reasons. Today honor is putting others in front of your personal comforts. American honor is being a soldier, fighting for your country. In Japan, more specifically the Kamikaze Pilots, sacrifice, doing as you're told doesnt matter the price you have to pay is honor. Honor is portrayed in many ways, good and bad depending on how you see it.

The question is “What’s honor?” According to Brett in the Art of Manliness article, “Honor = integrity is the point to which the definition of honor has evolved and what it generally means in our society today” (Art of Manliness). In fact, he is saying that there is no real meaning of honor. It has changed too much that the definition cannot stay the same.

The Art of Manliness also states that in the honor article, “the military, fire departments and criminal gangs, honor [...] barely exists in the modern” (Art of Manliness). Honor has been changed so much that the military and fire departments aren’t the only honorable ones.
Today honor can be achieved a lot easier than 200 years ago.

Claude Soffel argues that, “In order to be an honorable man in today’s society, you must be willing to stand up for what you believe in” (Soffel). Soffel is saying that for example if you wanted to boycott chinese goods, all you would need to do to be honorable to that would be to say what you think and try to achieve it. You don’t need to do that much to impress Americans. Honor today has so many meanings that it is really hard to understand what true honor is. Being honorable today is being able to go to the store when asked, doing what you’re told and being loyal.

American Honor can be described in a few different ways, but military is the biggest one. General Douglas MacArthur writes, “ In battle, and in the face of danger and death, he discloses those divine attributes which his Maker gave when He created man in His own image” (MacArthur). When you think about it military is a huge American thing. We don’t draft anymore because so many people go into the army for themselves or family. They don’t do it forcefully they do it

voluntarily.
The Kamikaze Pilots are a great example of Cultural honor. To Americans they aren’t honorable at all, suicide is never the answer, it’s frowned upon. Justin McCurry says in a news article, “Without hesitation, he agreed to fly his plane into the side of a US warship” (McCurry). They want to be faithful to their country and did what they are told. They are very honorable to Japan. They did the suicide bombings because that’s what they believed. If American’s were told to do this we wouldn’t because it isn’t what we were taught.
American’s can’t see stuff outside of our country being honorable, what we see is betrayal. Honor means doing something for others not yourself. Honor has had dramatic changes, it’s just hard to see it without bias opinion. Being honorable can be much easier nowadays than 100 years ago because we can do more things. Americans think of honor as military, anything outside of the military isn’t honorable. Kamikaze pilots are very honorable to Japan, but when Americans think of it it’s suicide. Honor is a hard thing to determine, it’s really in your eyes of what you see it as.