A Sermon for the Age of Offence

Respect: Humanity’s Dumbest Suicide Pact

Or, How Hurt Feelings Became a Weapon of the Weak and the Creed of the Cowardly

“There is no right not to be offended; only the right not to listen.”

— Christopher Hitchens

Respect is the altar upon which otherwise ordinary people immolate themselves, and—just as often—others. From duelling aristocrats to road-raging accountants, from tribal elders burying daughters to barroom drunks trading one-punch manslaughter charges, the story is depressingly the same: someone felt disrespected, and civilisation lost another skirmish against idiocy.

Let’s begin with a basic truth: no one has ever literally died of disrespect. There is no coroner’s report listing “mockery” or “side-eye” as the cause of death. And yet, the cemeteries are full of men—and they are disproportionately men—who couldn’t endure the faintest slight.

Honour cultures have known this pathology for centuries: the duel in Europe, the blood feud in the Balkans, the vendetta in Sicily, the shoot-out in the American South. Men trained…