The assassination of Charlie Kirk was not just evil, it was cowardly—and above all, dishonorable.
That an action might be dishonorable used to bother men, dissuading them from perpetrating such an act. When Themistocles was on the run from both the Spartan authorities and his own Athenian countrymen, he fled to the royal court of Molossia. Though Themistocles and King Admetus were mortal enemies, he supplicated his host. Themistocles said that if the king wished to take vengeance on him, honor demanded he should pick another time, when the two were on equal footing. With thoughts of honor swirling in his mind, the Molossian king protected his guest from his pursuers.
Honor codes are the most powerful restraint—much more powerful than state law—on those who are able and willing to use violent force. No wonder we see honor so highly prized among warrior castes and the political classes of healthy nations—knights, Spartiates, the admiralty, military aristocracies, and so on. A sense of honor not only curbs chaotic violence among the energetic, but it also channels that aggression toward productive ends, even toward excellence.
However, left-wing activists have spent at least the last generation demolishing the edifice of honor in the hearts of young men. We are now reaping the whirlwind.
Losing the Telos
As James Bowman notes in his illuminating, if overly pessimistic, Honor: A History (2006), honor is gender-specific across societies, from the primitive to the advanced: “The basic honor of the savage—bravery for men, chastity for women—is still recognizable beneath the surfaces of the popular culture that has done so much to efface it. If you doubt it, try calling a man a wimp or a woman a slut.” This hypothesis was clearly easier to prove some two decades ago when the book was published.
Honor is most salient for, and characteristic of, men. Its breeding ground is what one historian called the “honor group.” As Bowman explains, “[Such] honor groups form naturally around any corporate enterprise, but especially those—like the armed services, police forces, fire brigades and sports teams—that are male-dominated.”
However, in the 20th century, elite service academies in America forgot that crucial lesson.
The Ford Administration passed a law in 1975 requiring West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs to accept women. Virginia Military Institute (VMI) managed to hold out until 1996, when it too fell to the onslaught of second-wave feminism in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion in United States v. Virginia. Scott Yenor gives the full, sad story in the latest Provocation from the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. As Justice Scalia noted at the time, the principles articulated by the majority effectively declared single-sex public education unconstitutional.
These developments are bad for men and women alike. They indiscriminately abolish female excellence by setting a male standard for women. And they abolish single-gender institutions and projects that are necessary for developing a lifelong taste for honor in young men. This robs men, who are charged with the responsible use of violence, of the tools of honor that can help them channel their power in good ways.
In the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a legal framework that gradually crystallized like a massive kidney stone, ensuring equal outcomes for “protected groups,” became the goal for which everything else was sacrificed. This inorganic growth now crowds out honest discussion, based on an accurate understanding of human nature, from our courtrooms.
While the racial dimensions of this legal paradigm shift dominate our public debates, the rigorous denial of a teleological difference between the sexes is far more pernicious. For this difference cuts deep to the heart of what it means to be human.
Historically, honor-based war bands were often mixed-race, transcending real and meaningful natural divides, as in the motley comitatus Romulus assembled to found the Eternal City. From the pharaohs to the Macedonians and the Roman legions of late antiquity, coalition armies gradually drew a barbarous diversity into a unity, even sparking ethnogenesis—but the war band was never mixed gender.
Nature Always Comes Back
As Yenor points out, the defense in US v. Virginia felt forced to make their case on the basis of bland ideals such as preserving a diversity of educational options in the State of Virginia, or sexless policies like “better educational outcomes for both men and women.” You know, like test scores and job placement. Even the clairvoyant Scalia had little room to maneuver against Justice Ginsburg’s well-precedented presumption that gender-specific goals for education were ipso facto baseless and inadmissible in a serious courtroom.
The gradual denaturing of VMI’s renowned “Code of a Gentleman” is an unsettling illustration of the collapse of honor. The organic, common code of honorable action upheld by peers (a gentleman “does not slap strangers on the back” nor “hail a lady from a club window”) was shoved aside by the bureaucratic “Code of a Cadet,” which the school administration now requires students to memorize. Predictably, the code is mostly managerial boilerplate, much of which is redolent of an “In This House” type of morality: “A cadet stands against intolerance, prejudice, discrimination, hate, and oppression.”
Real honor works, however, when a man shrinks from the shame of disappointing not his overlords, but his peers. If it feels like homework, it’s not honor.
After the rapid cultural developments of the last decade, from the popularity of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life to the forceful public rejection of trans men in women’s sports, RBG’s premise that all social construction of gender difference is arbitrary and unjust now seems not just quaint and laughable, but thoroughly unscientific. Even moderate liberals like Richard Reeves are now arguing for male-only institutions to solve men-specific social problems (skyrocketing rates of suicide, unemployment, drug use, and inceldom, to name just some). Even if such calls from the likes of Reeves are piled high with qualifications about the unquestionable goodness of women’s social progress, such a shift is momentous, and we should be grateful for it.
Second-wave feminism perverts the equal dignity between the sexes into mandating an equality of potentials, ends, and outcomes, denying the harmonious biological and anthropological differences which underpin that very dignity. In the Odyssey, good women are usually found standing next to the pillars of a magnificent household—for they are themselves the true pillars.
Instead, in our day, bereft of the natural protectors who honor their virtues, women are often exploited by the government, corporate employers, pollsters, and pickup artists. Men often lack good friends who can hold them to a standard of honor, instead dissipating their energies on frivolity and destruction. Thankfully, feminism is mortally wounded and on its way out as a political force. But a dying she-bear can still kill you.
As of now, our legal institutions lag substantially behind popular culture. The kidney stone sticks; men and women will continue to cramp and suffer until we pulverize it. Legal activists and institution builders now have a popular mandate to do exactly that.
The Road to Restoration
Overturning United States v. Virginia offers a promising practical route to begin this project. The work is urgent, because educational institutions built upon a corrupt anthropology will continue to subconsciously distort minds and characters—even if we compel their denizens to affirm conservative platitudes about the family and patriotism.
From all appearances, Charlie Kirk’s assassin was raised in the type of family that in former times might have been adequate to ensure his stability (that is, married parents who were conservative and present in the home). What he lacked was a healthy male youth social structure. Indeed, most young men now lack this—and if they have it, they only managed to cobble it together despite the suspicion or even hostility of the institutions entrusted with their formation.
As Charlie’s wife Erika pointed out in the wake of his murder, her husband’s work was especially focused on giving a meaningful, hopeful purpose to the kind of young man who killed him. Building on Charlie’s work means not only calling our youth to the higher purposes of family and duty, but also restoring to them the institutional and social struts that uphold strength of character.
Reviving—or refounding—institutions, groups, and activities that recognize the unique and differing teleology of male and female excellence can begin with the service academies and the military, where the fate of honor has the most obvious consequences for national security. But it should not stop there. Reviving sex-specific education as a widely accessible option should be the number one priority for anyone in the conservative movement who cares about America’s long-term health and viability. While we’re at it, we can get to work tossing out all those other outdated statutes that are regularly used to ram gender mixing and gender quotas where they clearly do not belong.