Reputation as Food

"Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful — be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency." - William S. Burroughs

I think reputation may be one of the least understood realities of the modern world.

Not that reputation is unique to the modern world.

Reputation, this way we constantly reconsider the meaning of other people's lives and our understanding of who they are, may be one of the most important functions of human culture. In fact, without it, culture, in any achieved sense, might not be possible.

In the modern world, there are two approaches to reputation.

The first seems to be a mad lunge towards a narcissistic sort of fame and notoriety.

The second is an aversion of 'being known' that plays as a kind of modesty, "I don't care about that stuff. I don't need to be well known. Whatever. I do what I want. People can think of me what they will."

Perhaps both of these responses to this old, and deeply human culture-maker are not opposites, but opposames. Seemingly opposing answers that both, in the end, testify to the same thing: our modern obsession with and deep poverty of individualism and the sense that the only purpose reputation might have is to aggrandize ourselves; to fill some deep empty hole inside of ourselves.

But, what might reputation look like in a culture more rooted in some collectively held understanding of the world and their place in it?

I believe that, in a more tribal or clan based culture, it would be understood that, wherever you travelled, like it or not, aware of it or not, you were representing your people. If you behaved well, it reflected well on your people. If you behaved poorly, it did not.

And so, reputation might be better understood not as a way we feed ourselves but as a way we feed our people.

Perhaps a good reputation is a way we feed the past, the present and the future.

Perhaps a good reputation is a way that we feed our ancestors; that they look up and swell with pride and say, "They're one of mine!"

Perhaps a good reputation is a way that we feed our people in the present. It's a way that we make their lives easier, inspire the generosity and kinship of neighbouring peoples and warm up the hearth fires of good reception they might get the next time they follow your footsteps to the neighbouring county.

Perhaps a good reputation is a way we feed those to come by giving them ancestors worthy of claiming; worthy of being from. That they could swell with pride and say, "I come from those ones."

I recall a storyteller from England speaking of the legendary Irish hero Fionn MacCumhaill as, "My man Fionn." An ancestor he was proud to claim and be from.

In a world rife with self-loathing and all of the consequences to our physical, emotional and social health, developing a good and honourable reputation and allowing ourselves to be claimed by others, may be one of the most potent medicines we can give.

A good name is a currency, but it's not there to be spent on yourself.

Reputation can also animate or de-animate our entire community; it can feed or starve those connected to us.

If you look at the word 'indigenous', you will see that root word gen that also appears in genitals, genealogy, generic, genetics, genre, genus and more. Gen seems to relate to a certain kind of belonging to a group, to a people. It seems to speak of lineage but also of shared understanding and deeply fashioned kinship. 

Gen also appears in the word 'generous'. And, perhaps this whispers that our capacity to be generous is not self-generated, but comes from our belonging to a people who have our back; and from the depth of the cultural patrimony entrusted to us.

Traditionally, the foundation of your personal self-esteem was not a self-generated enterprise at all but something of which you were on the receiving end.

So, from whence did it come?

From your pride about the people from whom you come and your noble heredity.

An elder I study with spoke of how the tall-walking, swagger one develops when one belongs to a people of good repute might come across as a bit arrogant. He shared how someone who was proud of where they came from might say, "Well, you know... I'd prefer to be a nobody. I mean, if it were up to me, I'd play it small, but look at who I come from and who I am representing here. Look who's behind me!"

Most traditional people's I know have an immense pride in the lineages from which they come.

Consider these words about the Irish during the times of the Potato Famine, as described by John Kelly in The Graves Are Walking:

"Irish peasant culture, though medieval in character, was good at a few things; one was affording a deeply impoverished people with a sense of dignity and worth. Every Irish townland had its wise man, its storyteller, its keeners; every district its schoolmaster, its traveling poets, and its songsters. Under the sheltering umbrella of peasant culture, even the most humble could be esteemed. Of course the peasant knew he was very poor, but that was the result of being outmatched by life, and where was the shame in that? Many a man - many a fine man - had been outmatched by life. Besides, the peasant's language, Irish, was such a glory, the saints in heaven spoke it."

Or consider the Scottish Highlander as Michael Newton writes about in Warriors of the Word:

"John Mair wrote in 1521 about the pride taken by his countrymen in their pretensions to noble birth, '...they take inordinate pleasure in noble birth and (though of ignoble origin themselves) delight in hearing themselves spoken of as come of noble blood'. Visitors from other nations often remarked at the self-regard of common Highlanders, in contrast to the cringing peasants of their own societies, as when as anonymous eighteenth-century English visitor noted, "The poorest and most despicable Creature of the name of MacDonald looks upon himself as a Gentleman of far Superior Quality than a man of England of £1000 a year.' Regardless of their economic dearth or the swings of fortune, their cultural self-confidence gave them buoyancy as Edmund Burt noted in the 1720's: 'The Highlanders walk nimbly and upright, so that you will never see, among the meanest of them, in the most remote parts, the clumsy, stopping gait of the French paisans, or own own country fellows but, on the contrary, a kind of stateliness in the midst of their poverty.' The Rev. Donald MacQueen, minister in eighteenth-century Skye, stated that even the lowest classes aspired to the highest ideals of noble behaviour, as elucidated and celebrated in Gaelic song and story: '...Every one of the superior clans thought himself a gentleman, as deriving from his pedigree from an honourable stock, and proposed to do nothing unworthy of his descent or connections."

The whole thing is there in that last sentence: "...and proposed to do nothing unworthy of his descent or connections."

Our reputation has immense consequences for our people.

Our reputation is not primarily about us.

Our reputation has immense consequences for our people. As does their reputation for us. This is the reciprocal nature of it.

If we behave badly, it reflects poorly on all of them. If they behave badly, it reflects poorly on us. If this shared culture is the source, the well-spring of one's self-esteem, then if we act in such a way that poisons this well, everyone is affected. There is less to be proud of. And, of course, this isn't just for those alive now. Our reputation will also have an effect on those who follow us. Ask any MacDonald in Scotland who knows their history if they don't still hold some grudge against the Campbells for the Massacre at Glencoe that happened in 1692, over three hundred years ago.

In traditional communities, if you were the child of one with a bad reputation, you might carry that too and be starved by it but, if your parents were renowned for their kindness and generosity, that reputation would feed you.

If you are a salesperson and you behave badly towards a potential client, it reflects on all salespeople.

If you are an holistic practitioner and you behave badly towards a client, it reflects on all holistic practitioners.

If you are a life-coach and you behave badly towards a client, it reflects on all life-coaches.

If you are a man and you behave badly towards women, it reflects on all men.

If you are a white person and you behave badly towards people of colour, it reflects on all white people. And thus, the growing self-hatred amongst white people and the increase in cultural appropriation that flows from it. Of course, the challenge here is that white people tend not to see themselves as a group and so, can’t imagine why their conduct would have any consequence for other white people.

How we behave, and the honourable reputation we cultivate becomes food for all those around us and those to come and ennobles them as well.

A good reputation is food. But that food is not primarily for us. Cultivating a good reputation is our way of feeding the deep, cultural well-being of our community, it is the hard-wood we bring to the collective hearth fire that keeps us all warm, it is water flowing to the common cistern; the deep, spring-watered well of our collective self-esteem which feeds the fruiting trees of beauty-making, affection and pride that grow around it.

Our conduct can bring a good name to our people and give our community something beautiful to testify to that ennobles them in the testifying.

And so what does this mean for all of us? What does knowing this ask of us?

Perhaps it asks us to consider that our insistence on being an inconsequential nobody is starving people.

Perhaps it asks us to see that an honourable reputation is one of the ways that village-mindedness finds its way back into our world as people say, “Yes. I will claim this one as one of mine.”

Perhaps it might ask of us, that we proceed in such a way that we become an ancestor worth claiming; the we carry ourselves in the world with such beauty and style as we feed the world that has been feeding us all along that those who come after us might say, "I come from the same community as that one there. I'm one of their people. I'm proud to be in the same group as them."

Perhaps it asks of us to see reputation as being a scent we can leave on the wind, a rumour that could be spread that, in these dangerous and endangered times, there were those who strove to live differently, who tried for something finer, who worked to learn the poverty of their times and make beauty from it, who woke up to the crater into which they were borne, and, instead of trying to escape it, made something marvellous, ornate and staggeringly wonderful of it from the poverty that was entrusted to them.

No doubt, life will get the best of us, but we can leave something that lingers behind us, a rumour, a small testimony, some carefully preserved sack of seeds, the remnants of the fruiting of all our best intentions, a reason to keep breathing and going on, a life-giving wind carrying a story of those who came before them.

Reputation is not a trophy to win. It’s an obligation. It’s a responsibility.

Reputation is not our greatest way of becoming a unique individual. It’s a deep manner of tethering one’s self to those you come from and allowing others to tether themselves to you.

Reputation is not a reward. It’s a manner of feeding. It is not about self-sufficiency but about bringing your contribution to that old clay pot at the centre of the village so that others might eat.

When there is no village, humans are consistently overwhelmed and lonely and, from this place, behave badly. This has consequences for other humans, the non-human world and the unseen world.

When there are no people worthy of claiming as your kin, there is no possibility of village.

And so, perhaps, more than anything, it asks us to consider how our insistence on being an inconsequential, invisible, individual nobody might be starving something invaluable.