Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. But where
is here and how much does it weigh?
That's the supposed to be me, huh? Imitation is a form of flattery.
An honor. But what is the greatest honor
possible?
Let's begin our journey by looking at challenges and achievements
worthy of honour. First, the physical ones.
Being the fastest person to run a marathon
26.2 miles is great but why stop there?
The Iron Man triathlon involves
swimming - 2.4 miles, racing on a bicycle 112 miles
and then running an entire marathon.
Record holder Craig Alexander did it all in
8 hours, 3 minutes and 56 seconds.
Beyond that things begin to get mental.
The self transcendence race held every summer in New York
is the longest certified foot race
on the planet. It's not 26 miles long,
it's 3100.
And instead of running thousands of miles across the varied
landscape of the US, competitors merely run
around the same city block in Queens
5 649 times.
You have 52 days to complete the race and doing so can
wear out as many as 12 pairs of shoes.
The fastest time for completing the race goes to Wolfgang Schwerk
who finished in just 41 days,
averaging 75 miles of running
every day. In the realm of entertainment
there are very clear physical rewards, statuettes like
the Emmy, the Grammy, the Oscar and the Tony.
Winning at least one of each is called an
EGOT. So far 11 humans have won all four awards in competitive categories.
Marvin Hamlisch and Richard Rodgers also each won a Pulitzer Prize.
Lynn Redgrave is the only person to have ever been nominated
for all four awards without winning
a single one. Some people have won surprising combinations of awards.
Steve Tisch, as chairman and executive vice president of the New York Giants
and producer of films like Forrest Gump, American History X
and Snatch is the only person in history to have won both
a Super Bowl ring and an Oscar.
And throughout all of human history only one person
has won an Oscar and a Nobel Prize.
George Bernard Shaw. Those are neat facts
but let's define honour. There are two guys we should go to. The first is Noah
Webster
whose American Dictionary is the reason Americans
spell it honor. The second guy is Samuel Johnson whose English Dictionary is the
reason people
across the Atlantic, where I usually am, spell it
honour. Johnson differentiated two types of honored that are relevant to the
question
in this video's title. The first is what he calls
nobility of soul, magnanimity and the scorn
of meanness. This is honour derived not from achievement at something competitive
but rather from perceived virtuous conduct
and personal integrity. But what counts
as a virtue? One of my favorite attempts to catalog human virtues was done by
Christopher Peterson
and Martin Seligman. Frustrated by a persistent
focus on mental illness, they devised a guide
to mental wellness. Their catalog contains 24
virtues and strengths shared across nearly every
human culture. They attached historical figures
believed to personify each trait and their list of 24
included fairness, humility,
hope, humor, appreciation,
of beauty and the love of learning. Using
their list as a scorecard for virtue points to determine
the most honorable person is impossible
but that hasn't stopped people from discussing the greatest
honor in terms of virtue. Richard Nixon did some things that people might
consider
dishonorable, but his perspective is illuminating.
In his first inaugural address he said "the greatest
honor history can bestow is the title
of peacemaker." Peacemaker.
But who has the authority to judge virtue?
Hopefully not individuals. Richard Wiseman's brilliant
"Quirkology" discusses a survey conducted in 1997 by US News & World Report,
which asked people who they thought was
somewhat likely to go to heaven
as a marker of perceived virtuous conduct and personal integrity
it's really illuminating. 52 percent
thought that Bill Clinton would, 60 percent but Princess Diana would
and a full 79 percent said that they thought Mother Teresa
would go to heaven but she was only second-place.
87 percent of respondents agreed that someone else
was likely to go to heaven. Who do they think that was?
Themselves. The greatest honor a country bestows upon those
who have defended, fought for it, often carries the most
awe-inspiring stories. The greatest military honor in the United Kingdom
is the Victoria Cross. In the United States
it's the Medal of Honor, given for conspicuous gallantry
and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond
the call of duty. Many of its recipients are honored
posthumously. They are people who acted instantly
and without regard for their own safety
they've walked into enemy fire, loosing their lives
to communicate life-saving messages. They have fallen on grenades
to absorb the impact with their bodies,
so that others around them wouldn't have to.
Samuel Johnson's second definition of honor
focuses not so much on honor that comes from being
ethically excellent, but instead on honor that comes
from power, from being royal
or famous. Global surveys have shown that many corporate logos,
like the golden arches, are more famous than any celebrity
or other symbols. So, technically speaking, the greatest
honor as far as becoming famous and globally known
might simply be to become a fast food mascot.
Not all honorable people get honored.
How does a grand, recognized public act
made possible by being in the right place at the right time with the right
opportunities compare to the honor of merely being
the best person you can be? A good citizen,
a mother, a father, an otherwise
unrecognized person who is nonetheless
an amazing hero to a few.
Your family, your friends, that one person
who really needed you. Is recognition merely
an accident of luck? A snowball effect,
an accumulation of advantage. People who stand out when they are young
are often given access to more opportunities,
which then leads to and entitles them to more opportunities later on,
accumulating overtime like snow on a snowball that eventually becomes an
entire boulder of snow
only the original snowball of which was the original person.
Historians have pointed this phenomenon out, the accumulation of advantage,
when criticizing the great man theory
of history. The idea that human history can be talked
or understood as a time line of few
important honored individuals.
Philip Zimbardo, the researcher behind the infamous
Stanford Prison, study has shown that the wrong situation can bring out
evil in almost anybody. He stressed in his recent TED talk
that not all of us will encounter just the right opportunities to become the
next
Gandhi or Neil Armstrong. But what we can do
is live our lives with what Zimbardo calls
a heroic imagination. As a hero and waiting,
who thinks sociocentrically, not egocentrically.
He says most heroes are everyday people,
who emerge as heroes in particular situations.
So, a fair argument can be made that simply
knowing you did the right thing when presented with the situation involving
Peterson
and Seligman's virtues and strengths
is the greatest honour
possible, the most honorable life.
Now, whether or not that honorable behavior is recognized
Well, Cato the Elder questioned the value imparted by
physical awards by simply saying, "after I'm dead
I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument
than why I have one." It's an honor to talk to you guys
every week. So, as always,
thanks for watching.