What Is The Greatest Honor?

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. But where is here and how much does it weigh? That's 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 honor 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 that 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 and 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, losing 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 over time 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 timeline 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 in 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.