Reductio ad absurdum: everything is meaningless, so why do intelligent, educated people do anything?
I find views like this pointlessly cynical. The man has been done something good for society, why on earth shouldn't he accept the acknowledgement?
I find views like this pointlessly cynical. The man has been done something good for society, why on earth shouldn't he accept the acknowledgement?
"An OBE is what you get if you clean the toilets well at King's Cross station."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_have_declin...
But seriously, these are both personal opinions, and the first one even seems to be working against your original assertion that the honour is meaningless.
All things considered, if you have an issue with the monarchy and the "aristocratic" government (not quite accurate, but there's a point there), that's completely valid. Rallying against an almost entirely unrelated honours system is way off-target, and I would imagine that abolishing it would do more harm than good.
No, it's like receiving a Nobel Prize, or a Medal of Honour (or any medal, really).
An organisation awarding a prize to someone who has done something remarkable for his fellow men.
In any modern society we have titles, and honors but they have to be earned.
President, general, senator is your equal, selected for their office based on the skills (I know that a staggering oversimplification, and a very naive point of view) not based on the birth right.
One could. But most people would disagree.
[^1]: With one thousand awardees this seems more like an Eagle Scout Badge or
Like an Eagle Scout Badge or a Medal of Honour.
Doesn't matter how many people get it, my point is that it's a reward for either doing something positive or achieving something remarkable.
Read the comment I originally responded to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United_...
[NB I'm really not defending this state of affairs - just pointing out that "Upper Class" traditionally meant "aristocracy" not "rich" in the UK].
"This started to change in Europe with the rise of the middle class. Now we think of the middle class as people who are neither rich nor poor, but originally they were a distinct group. In a feudal society, there are just two classes: a warrior aristocracy, and the serfs who work their estates. The middle class were a new, third group who lived in towns and supported themselves by manufacturing and trade.
Starting in the tenth and eleventh centuries, petty nobles and former serfs banded together in towns that gradually became powerful enough to ignore the local feudal lords. [10] Like serfs, the middle class made a living largely by creating wealth. (In port cities like Genoa and Pisa, they also engaged in piracy.) But unlike serfs they had an incentive to create a lot of it. Any wealth a serf created belonged to his master. There was not much point in making more than you could hide. Whereas the independence of the townsmen allowed them to keep whatever wealth they created.
Once it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, society as a whole started to get richer very rapidly. Nearly everything we have was created by the middle class. Indeed, the other two classes have effectively disappeared in industrial societies, and their names been given to either end of the middle class. (In the original sense of the word, Bill Gates is middle class.)
But it was not till the Industrial Revolution that wealth creation definitively replaced corruption as the best way to get rich. In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called "corruption") when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich."
You can't be born into it, and the system has traditionally honoured thousands of 'normal' people that have been nominated, usually by their peers, for doing work in their field or community.
https://www.gov.uk/honours-committees
As you can see, some of them are themselves honours recipients, and some are not.
In no sense is this a self-awarding organisation - and the only reason there are so many recipients on the committee is because honours are given out to just about everybody who has achieved anything of note.