Virtue Quest

Words do not suffice

My aunt recently passed away after a long battle with breast cancer. Needless to say, her death has affected the entire family, but my uncle and cousins most of all. Now, our whole family tends to meet difficulty with humor, so there’s been lots of laughter; but I’m sure when I’m not around to see it, there are tears as well.

Still, they put what’s called “a good face” on the matter. At the funeral, we sang songs like “Rejoice and be glad,” and at the reception the line was, “She wanted it to be a joyful occasion.” And she did. I think she wanted a celebration of life.

Being a Christian, I see a certain reason in that: there’s hope for a greater joy in heaven than there ever was on earth. Even from a purely natural perspective, there’s a certain gratitude for all the good that she brought to our lives: her sharp wit and quick smile and constant love as a wife and mother.

But the loss is real. I remember a few years ago when one of my best friends was diagnosed with cancer; she’s currently in remission and is doing well, pursuing a career and so on. But there was a stark moment for me when I realized that I couldn’t take her for granted, that at some point she might be gone from this world. And if I felt like a piece of myself was being torn away just at the possibility of losing my friend, I can’t imagine what my uncle and cousins must be enduring at the real loss of my aunt.

The problem of evil

It’s times like this that, philosophically, the so-called “problem of evil” comes to the fore. How can we understand, or explain, or just deal with the painful and grievous events that happen every day in the world around us? Whether it’s disease and death, or inhumane crime, or natural disaster … where does it come from, and what does it mean for how we live our lives?

Voltaire (to grossly oversimplify) suggested that we simply “cultivate our own gardens,” that is, do the best we can with what we’ve got, and not pretend the world is any better than it is. It’s a kind of detachment from those things that are beyond our ability to control.

Buddhism goes even further, if I understand it rightly. It advocates a radical detachment from all things, good and evil. For even good always leads to evil, when it is lost. So if we avoid attachment to all things, we will never have cause for grief. Both these approaches share the great insight that good things, good people, are ultimately limited and vulnerable. They fail to meet that unlimited longing for good that lives within our hearts.

But their solutions strike me as, well, cowardly. Grief, at least, has the courage to stand in the face of loss and acknowledge just how good this person, this relationship, is that has been lost. Grief is the act of love in the face of loss.

The “problem” of goodness

I think it goes deeper still, though. Grief demonstrates that our very awareness of evil is dependent on the existence of good. It is very possible to experience good without evil, such as on a wedding day when even clumsiness and tears are causes of joy; but it is impossible to experience evil without good. No one would attend a funeral unless the one who has died was a great good in their life.

It’s easy to answer, where does evil come from? It comes from the loss of something good. The greater question is, where does good come from?

How is it possible that wonder and beauty and joy and a profound connection between persons enters into the world? Why do I experience a painting (a mere arrangement of colored globs) or a gesture (a simple mechanical motion) or a person (just another animal, after all) as something that gives meaning to life, that organizes my priorities, that I can only describe as “good”?

This is the great mystery of life, it seems to me. And it is a mystery that is celebrated rather than solved, celebrated even in times of loss and grief.

Eileen Nearne

I ran across this eulogy of Eileen “Didi” Nearne, an agent of Britain’s Special Operations Executive charged with maintaining communications with France during World War II.

She worked cleverly and faithfully, but ultimately was captured and tortured by the Gestapo (apparently using a technique similar to waterboarding). She was interred in a concentration camp, but escaped and hid until the Allies arrived.

I tend to imagine a war as a highly dramatic situation where the moral lines stand out more clearly; but Didi’s work, for the most part, took a much more everyday aspect. She operated a wireless set. She held down a day job. She had to decide when to tell a lie and when to tell the truth. She had to make difficult choices with uncertain consequences. Her stakes were, in some ways, higher; but the nature of her choice was not very different from the kind of choices I face each morning.

She maintained her cover as long as she could, but when captured she refused to contribute her labor to the Nazi war effort suffered greatly for her stand on principle. She managed, not only to escape herself, but to help others to escape with her. This required both prudence and courage in choosing just how best to combat the evils she faced.

When she returned home, she also returned to a more “normal” life. She did not cling to either the pain or the glory of her work during the war. She lived with her sister, and made the best contribution she could to her community. She continued to suffer what we now would call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from what she endured during her captivity. But she resisted the temptation to leverage her heroism or her suffering for personal benefit.

Her service was to God and Country, and she left it at that. She may not have been a saint, (or maybe she was); but she certainly was a model of courage and prudence, and is a good reminder to me that simply doing my work quietly can sometimes help change the world for the better.

Other information is available:

• Her biography at Wikipedia
• Obituary in the London Telegraph
• Obituary in the New York Times

40 Days for Life is an internationally coordinated, yet community based, campaign to peacefully raise awareness of the consequences of abortion for neighborhoods, for friends, and for families. There have been six coordinated campaigns since 2007. This time around, the campaign will run the 40 days between September 22 and October 31, 2010. 40 Days for Life follows a three-pronged strategy:

1. Prayer and fasting
2. Peaceful vigil
3. Community outreach

The prayer and fasting acknowledges that human action alone is insufficient to overcome the widespread assumption that abortion is a reasonable option. The peaceful vigil aims at letting a clinic’s employees and clients know that there are alternatives to abortion, and at letting the wider community know about the activity of an abortion clinic in their neighborhood. The community outreach educates people about the reality of abortion through church, media, and campus outreach.

It’s easy to get involved, and it’s a great way to grow in the virtues of justice, fortitude, and charity.

Today is Memorial Day in the U.S.A., the day on which we remember the members of our armed services who have given their lives in the defense of our nation.

Just want to add my thanks to those of all the rest of the nation, and to let any current soldiers who happen to read this that you are in my prayers.

One hand helps another

A quick and dirty definition of love, according to Thomas Aquinas, is “to will the good of another.”

This even works for loving oneself, if what you’re willing is really what is good for yourself – that is, what will make you the best person you can be, rather than what simply feels good at the moment.

The trick is, how do you know what’s really good for someone? Isn’t it just arrogant beyond belief to think that I know better than anyone else what’s best? Isn’t it horribly patronizing? Doesn’t it belittle the person I’m supposedly loving?

How to know what’s good

Well, think of the alternative for a moment. Wouldn’t it be a false “humility” to neglect to do nice things for a friend, or to refuse to warn someone of a danger, on the excuse that “I can’t really know what’s good for so-and-so”?

There is a danger of arrogance or a false “superiority,” because we can only judge based on our own perceptions. We can be deceived by apparent goods, or by the illusion of ease or safety. We can be blinded or distracted from what’s really going on.

But none of this means that we’re incapable of recognizing real good things when we meet them. It just means there are limits, and that we therefore need each other’s help.

I’ve found in my own life that the best way to know what’s really good – and therefore what’s really loving – is to double-check with someone I trust. Sometimes, I talk to my mom. Sometimes, to one of my close friends. For some situations, I ask a priest or a counselor.

In other words, when I’m not sure how to love, I ask someone with a different perspective than mine. I ask them to love me, by helping me to love someone else. I don’t always do what they advise, but their point of view gives me a better picture of what’s real, and helps me sort out the real good from apparent goods.

Knowing love and doing love

Of course, actions speak louder than words. This is where the other virtues come into play. I need temperance to work when I need to work so that I can play when my friends are available to play. I need courage to stand my ground when I’m tempted to give in. I need justice to remember and to guide me in my obligations toward others. I need prudence to figure out how to put my knowledge and my love into practical action in the first place.

So, if love is willing someone’s good, then all the other virtues are the tools that help me to accomplish that will. They enable me to actually do good, rather than just thinking or desiring it.

And that’s encouraging, because I often mess up the doing part. But if I learn, and practice, and continue to grow in virtue, then I’ll come closer to that ultimate goal of loving my family, my friends, my neighbors.

I'll just play one more level....

[A historical note: I started writing this post over a week ago... and have only now got round to finishing it. Urp!]

I think I mentioned that I’d given up computer games for Lent. I’m not much of a gamer, as gamers go. Spider solitaire and a third-party version of Risk are my favorites. Never got into the MMOGs. But I’ll be honest, those games can waste hours at a time. That’s plural hours. As in, way too many.

So, that’s a big reason I’ve been slowly growing sleep deprived since Easter Sunday. End of day comes, and I think, hey, I’m allowed my games. And next thing I know it’s 1am (or later), and I have to be up for work the next morning.

Run away! Run away!

Sure, I play games to relax. But it often becomes something more than that. It turns into an attempt to escape from my life.

Not that my life is all that rough. But I am, as I’ve said, a lazy man and I resist any intrusion on my comforts. It quickly becomes a matter of principle: if work takes time away from leisure, then play takes time away from sleep.

Sleep, of course, ultimately takes its time back … usually at the least convenient moment.

All of this could have been avoided if only I’d been a little more disciplined, a little more realistic. I just don’t have all the time I’d like to play and relax and make a fool of myself. None of us do. There’s lots of good in life, but some parts of life are just plain tough, and that’s normal.

Penance and parties

I think that’s one of the lessons of Lent: that part of life is hard work, is difficult, even painful. But the penance leads to a celebration: our work bears fruit, and there’s a greater joy than the mere escape of vegging out with a computer game.

So I’m trying to remind myself of the good things that arise from giving up computer games and other distractions – good things like a full night’s sleep and the ability to enjoy life the next day.

And when I restrict my game playing to times when I really have nothing better to do, I find I actually enjoy the game more. Who’d have thought it?

Eons ago, during the SuperBowl, Old Spice premiered a commercial which became an instant hit. Among the reasons, I think, is because it’s a great example of virtue. Here’s the commercial:

Virtue?

Yes, virtue. First off, it’s encouraging both men and women to strive for excellence. Men, smell like an excellent man. Here’s what the ideal is. (“Sadly, your man isn’t me. But he could smell like me…”) Strive for this. And women, hold your men accountable, accept nothing less than an excellent man.

On top of that, the humor is a humor of excellence: it’s highlighting the absurdity of its claims in the midst of claiming them: “Anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not like a lady.” Obviously not – but great things are possible when you strive for excellence, for virtue. Meanwhile, there’s a joyful exuberance in the exaggeration that I can’t help but laugh at – even after watching it a dozen times or more.

Finally, there’s the artistry of the filmmaking. The commercial is all one shot, with almost no animated effects. (The diamonds were the only part edited in.) Here’s a rather long-winded interview with some of the filmmakers. It’s almost twenty minutes, but it shows the lengths they were willing to go in order to produce a truly excellent commercial. The writers had great faith in the crew, the actor showed exceptional temperance (“He was spot on for every take”) and the director had the courage to attempt such a complex piece of work.

Beautiful. Downright inspiring. Can’t help but love it.

So: go and do likewise.

These past few days have been, well, difficult for me. It’s mostly stuff involving family and friends and colleagues that really doesn’t belong on the internet, so I won’t give details. The result is, basically, I’m stressed and emotionally wiped out.

Taking my emotional state as an excuse, I’ve let go of any number of virtuous habits I’ve been trying to build up. Some examples: keeping my room clean – out; putting work before pleasure – out; writing (both for this blog and for my novel) on a consistent and disciplined schedule – out; getting to bed at a reasonable hour – out.

I’m reminded once again of a phrase from a grade-school play based on “Alice in Wonderland”: I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it.

As I look at the wreckage of the past couple days, I’m tempted to think that I’m an absolute idiot and that I know nothing about living well or virtuously. I have no business writing about it here, putting on airs as if I were some sort of authority.

That sort of thinking leads me to: I have no business even attempting a virtuous life, since I’m doomed to failure.

At this point, I hope the lie is clear. The fact is, the only authority I’m claiming is my own experience and the fact that I’ve read some interesting books that some of you may not have read. The fact is, the theory of virtue itself acknowledges that perfection is not a reasonable goal in this life; rather, growth, and progress, and improvement are the goals.

The fact is, failure is no reason to give up. Rather, it’s a call to re-focus. So: my first priority is to get my sleep schedule back on track. When I’m tired, I’m incapable of thinking clearly. Second, start picking up my bedroom, so that my physical environment is less of an obstacle.

And third, (which, oddly, appears first,) I’m putting words on the screen. Maybe they’re stupid words, or simple words; but a writer is one who writes, so the words must come out. As Chesterton says, a thing worth doing is worth doing poorly.

The view from the top makes it look so easy!

More goodness from Pinckaers’ The Sources of Christian Ethics!

Following St. Thomas Aquinas, Pinckaers gives three basic stages of growth in virtue:

1. Beginner / childhood
2. Proficient / adolescent
3. Perfect / mature adult

Each of these stages essentially follows the growth in freedom of a person, and challenges the person to become more free in his or her life. Here’s how each stage works:

Beginning in virtue

The beginner needs to learn how the world works. This is the stage of getting to know – to know oneself, to know one’s abilities, and to know the world and the moral basis of one’s life in the world. The primary work of this stage is learning or, to use a more traditional word, discipline.

Now, it strikes us that discipline is something opposed to freedom, but when the freedom we seek is to live a fully human life, we start out in need of knowledge and in need of practice. Human beings need to be raised and trained and taught.

The goal of education is to lead the child to understand (and the educator must first understand this himself) that discipline, law, and rules are not meant to destroy his freedom, still less to crush or enslave him. Their purpose is rather to develop his ability to perform actions of real excellence by removing dangerous excesses, which can proliferate in the human person like weeds stifling good grain, and by guarding him against unhealthy errors that could turn him aside and jeopardize his interior freedom.

Moreover, this is only the initial stage of growth, just as practicing scales is the beginning and not the end of playing the piano.

Progress in virtue

The second stage involves internalizing the rules by seeing and acting on the reason the rules exist in the first place. It involves a certain testing of the rules – not to destroy them, but to understand them, just as a pianist might try out different formations of a chord or ask what happens when you add this note to it. This is the stage where virtues become, not actions that one follows because they’re imposed, but a kind of “second nature,” an ability that really is one’s own.

Virtue is not a habitual way of acting, formed by the repetition of material acts and engendering in us a psychological mechanism. It is a personal capacity for action, the fruit of a series of fine cations, a power for progress and perfection.

In other words, freedom and goodness cease to be mechanical exercises and become organic parts of us.

Perfect virtue

First off, Pinckaers warns (and I warn with him) that “perfect” here doesn’t mean the end of the road; rather, it means the fulfillment, and the completion of development. Probably a better word for today would be “mature” but St. Thomas used “perfect” so Pinckaers explains what he meant by it.

We can characterize this stage by two features: mastery of excellent actions and creative fruitfulness.

This is the ultimate goal: to be able to do whatever we do well, and to do it creatively. This is what Thomas Edison meant by saying that “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” The virtuous person has gained the freedom and the ability to bring inspiration to reality in spite of the difficulty or obstacles in the way.

This does not mean the end of learning or of growth; rather it means that learning and growth continue almost naturally, without great effort – because the virtuous person has learned how to learn, and has rooted him- or herself in good soil for growth. Virtue has become a stable foundation for the freedom to do what really leads to happiness.

And that’s a goal worth striving for!

Time to get up

I’d been having a pretty good month, till about the middle of this past week. I’ve been waking up on time, getting work done, keeping in touch with friends, praying regularly, and so on … but little things slowly began to slip. So, I haven’t really made my bed since Wednesday. I came in late to work a couple days this week – only a couple minutes late, but definitely late. And these past couple days off, I’ve spent more time watching telly and playing computer games than reading or writing, which is what I had planned to do.

The demon despair

Now, my tendency when I find myself slipping into bad habits is just to give up the fight.

That’s because I’m (first) lazy and (second) a coward and (third) prone to depression. Big whoop. I know plenty of people who can identify with those vices, and I know I’m not alone. But that doesn’t make it okay.

So, the question is, what to do about it. How can I overcome the temptation to despair?

I think the first step is to recognize that this isn’t just a minor foible. This is self-destructive behavior in a very literal sense. Despair is just a non-committal form of suicide, and I need to recognize it as a real and present attack on my life and happiness.

Doesn’t matter that the attack comes from within. I need to recognize it as a threat, or else I won’t meet it with the right attitude.

The monk’s solution

I heard a story once about a guy who walked past a monastery every day, always longing to be like the monks inside but thinking he wasn’t holy enough. One day, he met a monk who was sweeping the sidewalk. He asked the monk what he did in the monastery.

The monk said, “We fall down, then get back up. We fall down, then get back up.”

I always thought of that as a smarmy way of saying, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” But I’m starting to take it a little more literally: think of a boxing match. If you get knocked down, you stand back up. You struggle to your feet by whatever means necessary. If you don’t the fight is over. You’ve lost.

I’ve read enough works by mystics to know that “spiritual warfare” is not just a metaphor for them. I think it can’t just be a metaphor for me, either.

A declaration of war

Therefore I’m declaring war on my vices. I may not win, but my plan is, like Galadriel, to “fight the long defeat.” Or like Rocky, to “go the distance.”

After all, virtue is not about perfection. It is about excellence. It is about settling for nothing less than one’s best.