LET'S BE honest with ourselves: Honor is dying. It's happening, slowly but surely. The only question left for us is whether to own up to that fact and let it die quickly, with dignity, or whether to ignore reality until honor coughs its last gasp in our collective face.
Now, I love the concept of honor. I was thoroughly intoxicated by the mythic notion of Honor - the proper noun - as a prospective student, just as many of us were. I ate up the propaganda because I wanted to believe it. I wanted to live in a "community of trust," to live in perfect harmony with everyone around me. But we have to walk a fine line between what we want and what we can realistically wish for - between aiming high and fantasizing. Honor falls into the latter categories.
I'm not pointing out any great secret; anyone who's paying close attention can see that, for all practical purposes, honor is dead. I'm merely drawing a conclusion we desperately want not to reach - pointing out something we want to pretend isn't true.
As much as we don't want to admit it, we don't live in a community of trust. Evidence of that fact surrounds us. We lock our doors and bicycles compulsively, even if we're only leaving for a few minutes. Last week, the Law School instituted a lockdown, requiring students to swipe pre-approved ID cards to open exterior doors after hours.
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The gyms have signs on their lockers warning patrons to lock their valuables to prevent theft. Thieves - whether they be students or Charlottesville residents - will strike, they tell us, particularly during the few moments we're in the shower or toilet. Similar signs are the first thing any student or visitor sees upon entering the libraries. They shout, "Theft is common here! Don't let your valuables out of your sight!"
The part of our honor system we are most proud of - the honor pledge that governs our academic lives - is perhaps the worst. Cheating is rampant; we all know it, even if we can't prove it. We've all seen wandering eyes and overheard comments about copying papers or homework assignments. Many of us have heard teaching assistants tell stories about being pressured or even threatened by faculty when they've tried to report an honor offense.
Because we love the idea of honor so much, we ignore these things and shout "We have honor!" at the top of our lungs. We still spout off the rhetoric and propaganda to the prospective students and visitors because we want to believe it, not because it's true.
I hesitate to say these things because the individuals involved in the honor system love honor. Honor Committee Chairman Thomas Hall is more passionate about and dedicated to the idea of honor than most people will be about anything. But unfortunately, even dozens of committed, passionate people can't save the honor system. Honor can't be a top-down project. It has to come from the bottom up.
We can't become honorable just by having an honor system; we can only have an honor system if we're already honorable. Honor has to precede an honor system, not the other way around. Being honorable isn't something that happens because a few extraordinary leaders promote the ideals of honor, no matter how much they care or how hard they try. It's something that has to happen much earlier in life. And we live in a society in which that no longer happens to the same degree it used to.
The Committee is fighting a losing battle because they're not fighting against people like me who say honor is dead, they're fighting against the culture that has killed it - against absent and disinterested parents, pop culture and television, neo-Machiavellian politics, against the soulless modern world.
We're deluding ourselves if we continue to believe in a shining, romanticized notion of honor. Sure, we all want to believe in honorableness and the innate goodness of people. But at some point, optimism becomes idealism and goals become fairy tales. Clinging to the ideal of honor isn't hopeful, it's just plain foolish. Our stubborn refusal to let honor go discredits everything else we claim to be. It makes a joke of everything we stand for as students, as an institution and as members of a community.
It depresses me to call for the end of the honor system. But it depresses me even more to imagine standing idly by as our false, old-fashioned ideas of honor make a mockery of our University. It's time to abandon honor as the concept that defines this place; it's time to stop clutching at the remaining shreds of honor as our most central and holy quality. There's still plenty to bind our community together that doesn't require wishful, nostalgic yearning for days long gone. It's time to move on to defining our University in terms of reality instead of in terms of over-inflated, archaic ideals.
(Bryan Maxwell's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at bmax@virginia.edu.)
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