The true victim of the 20th century

What is it about an honor group that makes it necessarily exclusive? 

That exclusivity seems to be a necessary ingredient of the attributes of leadership an honor elite seems to possess. Honor codes promote mutual regard and a way of cultivating the positive aspects of possibility within the broader more negative aspects of honor as defined by the general society. 

Perhaps the exclusivity is exactly about the difference between the positive versus the negative side of the spiritual realm. Before someone can engage with another in creative activity, they need to satisfy some pre-requisites. The satisfaction of those pre-requisites is the basis of exclusivity in the ability to join in creative endeavor. The military, the clergy, the nobility – these were groups that required some pre-requisite satisfaction of qualities before someone could join the group. 

Identity is about satisfying some minimum set of requirements to exclude the riff-raff. A truly progressive ideology must define how to turn riff-raff into leaders. If the meaning of WWII was the criminal character of fascism, the meaning of WWI was the incompetence of the ancien regime. The history of the two great wars of the 20th century is the history of the end of glory, whether it be in the namelessness of heroic collective action before the mechanical death meted out by machine guns in WWI or in the destruction of the possibility of heroic individual action in the utter grinding down of the human spirit in the evil of Auschwitz. 

Honor, as the precursor to glory, was the true victim of the 20th century. And so it goes on into the 21st century where suicide bombers have taken the notion of glory into the very precincts of evil.