Over lunch recently a fellow writer uttered a word that rather took me by surprise. My companion described the trend of people making private digital communications public — such as Kanye West’s recent leaking of text messages from his personal trainer, or a Vox journalist’s decision to publish Twitter messages from the former crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried — as plain “dishonourable”.
The idea that our behaviour should be guided not solely by respect for the law, nor even by a certain moral code, but by a sense of honour is an unfashionable one. Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks the frequency with which words and phrases are used in books from 1800 onwards, shows a sharp decline in the use of the words “honour”, “honourable” and “dishonourable” from the early 19th century to the present day. Usage of all three words has fallen by about 90 per cent over the period.
When members of the British parliament sling insults at the “honourable” members sitting across the chamber from them — or indeed at their own side — we are not, one assumes, expected to take this descriptor seriously.
Yet while it might be an antiquated notion, if these members of parliament did have a sense that they should behave with honour, we would have much better politicians, who were more concerned with telling the truth and doing the right thing even when they thought they could get away with the opposite.