Virtue Quest

In a comment on a previous post, Paul writes:

I looked up a contemporary definition to establish a framework as to what is virtue. Then I had to wonder “is virtue, in the ‘doing good easily and often’ practicable and important?”. Morality yes but virtue, I’m undecided. Can one use virtue to navigate the world as it exists? There are a lot of instances in business, social interactions, maintaining or improving ones place within a civilization in which a virtuous person would be vulnerable to all kinds of abuse, deception and repression. Is virtue a weakness?

This is a great question. But in order to answer it well, I’ll have to ask Paul a question right back.

What, in your mind, is the difference between morality and virtue?

I ask this because you seem to place them in very different categories. In the tradition I’m writing from, Thomist Catholicism, that difference doesn’t make much sense. Morality is the theory, and virtue is the practice. “Morality” is the word for how we recognize good (and evil) and “virtue” is the word for how we do what is good (and avoid what is evil). So, when you say, Morality yes but virtue, I’m undecided, I’m not sure I follow your meaning.

Virtue and vulnerability

That said, I think I can speak to the question of whether virtue (or moral behavior) makes a person weak or vulnerable. The short answer is: Yes.

But yes only in a sort of tunnel-visioned way. Virtue opens someone to attack or harm from one small and specific direction: injustice.

In chess or poker, in love or war, if you play fair and others cheat you will suffer harm. You will probably lose the game. But you will save your dignity.

One of the oldest sayings of philosophers is that it is better to suffer evil than to commit evil. And that’s what’s really going on here: if you refuse to commit evil, if you cling to what is good, then odds are that someone will try to commit some evil against you. It might be as small as a white lie or as big as theft, adultery, or murder. And it’s possible they’ll succeed.

Strength to endure whatever may come

However, from the broader perspective of a whole human life, virtue is exactly what gives a person the strength to endure injustice rather than to be broken by it. After all, one of the first lessons of virtue is that life ain’t fair. We’re confronted by all the same “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that tempted Hamlet to suicide and that tempt me to sloth, but that motivate the truly virtuous to rise to the challenge and stand fast in their humanity.

Whether those challenges come from a natural disaster or from the unjust acts of another person, virtue enables a person to prudently sort out the real dangers and the genuine options; to respond in a just and even loving manner; to take those actions courageously despite the hardship or danger; and to temperately refrain from the easy escapes that tempt us (well, me, at least) to avoid facing the sea of troubles in our lives.

Those easy escapes are the sorts of thing that work well for a moment, but have lasting consequences: the quarter-by-quarter greed of Wall Street, the comfort of vegging with a bowl of ice cream or a TV show, the awkward dodge of a white lie. As far as I can see, it’s only virtue, which endures suffering and injustice in the short term, that enables a person to remain true to him-/herself and to avoid the even worse consequences of vice.

In a Church as big as the Catholic one, there are thousands of little corners of spirituality. A friend invited me to check one of them out, a group called Communion and Liberation, and basically they spent about an hour discussing the reflections of one of the group’s leaders.

The passage they read that evening concludes with the reflection that, we sometimes flee from reality because it is too overwhelming. It describes this as “loneliness, which is nothing but inability to face reality.”

Are we really supposed to face reality?

Now, there’s lots to argue with here, especially for a contrarian like myself. I mean, is this really the best definition of loneliness? But I have to admit that loneliness strikes me most when I’m feeling overwhelmed, like I just can’t face life anymore – at least, I can’t face it alone.

And it occurred to me that maybe, if human nature is inherently social, if I am really not fully human unless I’m engaged in relationship with other people, I’m not supposed to face reality alone. Maybe it’s just the way things are, maybe even the way things are supposed to be, that life is too big and too difficult and too confusing for me to deal with.

In other words, maybe my frustration, anger, fear, sadness, and loneliness come from a false assumption: that I’m supposed to be somehow entirely self-sufficient, that I’m somehow big enough to face reality on my own.

Facing reality with a friend

Now, I’ve been blessed with some of the finest friends in all of history. Not only do they put up with my endless noodling through abstract ideas and my needless nitpickiness about the exact etymological meaning of words, not only do they agree to see the tedious movies I want to watch and play the tedious games I want to play, not only do they eat my cooking with no greater objection than adding a bit of salt, but they constantly teach me new things about the world and how to live in it.

In fact, every time I’ve found myself really able to face some piece of reality that’s getting in my face, whether it’s a burnt piece of toast or the loss of a job or the prosecution of an unjust war, it’s only been because of a friend. Left to myself, I curl up into a ball in the darkest corner I can find. But with a friend by my side – or even on the long end of a phone line – I find a strength and a resilience that is greater than I possess in myself.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

I actually dreamed about “Lost” last night. Scary. I should definitely talk to my therapist about that.

Anyway, here’s something approaching a thoughtful response to the “Lost” series finale, and actually to “Lost” as a whole. Needless to say, there will be SPOILERS in this post, so if you haven’t yet seen the finale, you can watch it on Hulu. And if you haven’t seen the rest of the series, well, most of what I say won’t make sense anyway.

What “Lost” found

Let me start with what I loved about “Lost.”

First and foremost, Hugo “Hurley” Reyes. Easily the heart of the show, Hurley has been the only character I have never lost hope for, and my hope was not disappointed. As soon as Jacob’s “candidates” were mentioned, I declared that I wanted Hurley to end up as the new Jacob. He was the only one whom I would trust with The Island, and I’m pleased to see that the writers agreed with me.

I loved that it ended with “nobody dies alone”. A major theme of the whole show was the forming and challenging of relationship and of community. As a Catholic, I see shadows of the idea of the communion of saints here, and the idea that none of us ever is utterly alone or disconnected from the rest of humanity.

I was super-pleased to see Sayid and Ben find a kind of redemption. I was particularly worried about Sayid after he lost his emotions, but it’s clear that his growth in virtue over the years was not lost – not entirely, anyway.

I could go on for hours listing all the details and small beauties of the show, but I’ll simply say that I loved the fact that the writers took each and every character (with the possible exception of Kate, who at times seemed little more than the prize that Jack and Sawyer were competing for,) seriously, and gave each one room to grow and develop. I loved that they took the mystery of The Island seriously, and left even Jacob a bit in the dark (so to speak) about the Light. I loved that they took morality seriously, and showed how each character’s choices formed and changed his or her personality. Despite the bizarre and sometimes inexplicable turns of events, the writers basically kept the characters real, and that invited me (and the rest of the viewing public, I hope,) to give the show what Tolkien called “secondary belief”: an honor due only to a really creative (or sub-creative) world.

My problems with “Lost”

That said, “Lost” was far from perfect. And the finale in particular brought out a number of the most serious problems with the show. Being a hyper-critical kind of guy, I just can’t let those imperfections pass without comment.

To start with, the “LA story” of this final season ultimately didn’t hold together for me. I get that it’s a kind of purgatory, but I don’t quite get Eloise Hawking’s warnings to Desmond – does she really know what kind of reality she’s in? And I don’t entirely understand the presence of Jack’s son. Is this a “younger Jack” (like the “younger Jacob” that appeared on the Island)? And what does Ben still have to work through in this “place”? Maybe his relationship with his father? Not really clear.

Most of all, the whole, “This is a place you created together, so that you could find each other again,” just doesn’t make the connection that I think they’re trying to make to their life on The Island. It makes it all feel like a gimmick to get the whole cast back together for a sentimental ending. I think I would have bought, “This is a gift from the Island for the service each of you provided,” or something along those lines, but the way it was is just metaphysically muddy to say the least.

Which actually brings me back to The Island. From the first season, The Island was developed as a kind of living being, with a will and a character of its own. I think the “Across the Sea” episode was intended to draw together the threads of The Island’s own story. But come on … a Light at the Heart of The Island – oooh! I want something a little more.

My main question about The Island throughout the series has been, what is the connection between The Island and the rest of the world? And despite Alison Janney’s explanation that “if the light goes out there, it goes out everywhere,” I just don’t buy it. I need to see that there’s a real connection between the state of the Light on The Island and the state of … hope? humanity? something in the rest of the world. And when the Light is “uncorked” in the finale, well, it turns red, and dimmer, and Smokey becomes mortal, and the Island shakes, and… it doesn’t seem to affect the persons the way it should if the light within them is threatened. Wouldn’t they all have become like Sayid, or like the Smoke Monster? or something?

So, ultimately, I’m left wondering what the whole point of The Island is in the first place. I wonder what really would have been so bad about the Light going out and The Island sinking into the sea. What difference would it make?

So that’s a rather disappointing place to be.

And, in the end…

As with the things I loved, I have tons of nit-picks that aren’t worth going into. Overall, “Lost” was an ambitious and often inspiring show, and I don’t regret a moment I spent watching it. Maybe it failed in its ultimate aim, but the effort was a worthy one on every count, and I have learned a great deal about myself and about telling stories from the show.

And that’s quite a lot for one show to accomplish.

Pardon me while I get all philosophical for a bit.

Those who have known me a while know that I suffer from clinical depression. The meds and some good therapy have that pretty well under control; but it’s linked to something that is beyond the scope of medical science. I have a bad habit of asking, “What’s the meaning of life?” or, “What’s the point of it all?” or, closer to home, “What’s the point of my life?”

Yes, I’m a Catholic; and I do buy the whole “know, love, and serve God in this life so that I may be happy with him forever in the next” idea. But it’s an idea: it’s words that I assent to in my mind, but that don’t always reach to my heart, or my gut – which is where those questions of meaning come from. In other words, I still ask, “What’s it mean to be happy with God?” or even, “Why did God make me in the first place?”

The questions “Why?” and “What does it mean?”

A good friend once suggested to me that most people – me included – put much more stock in what something means than what something is, and that this is a backwards way of living life. A person, or an experience, or even an object is only “significant” because it first exists in reality. A relationship has to be lived before it can “mean” anything.

He has an excellent point. I tend to over-think just about everything in my life, and on a cultural level it’s much easier to find “analysis” than it is to find “news.” There’s a certain cart-preceding-horse-ness about this whole approach.

At the same time, the question of meaning is one that just doesn’t go away. And, in terms of “what my life means,” anyway, I’m looking for something deeper than explanation or analysis. But it’s hard to say exactly what it is I am looking for. What am I asking when I ask “why?” or “what’s the point?”

What’s behind these questions, at least for me, is a sort of “what’s worthwhile about it?” or “is it any good?” And I think that’s what “a meaningful life” or an answer to “why?” would entail: I want to see and recognize what’s good about the world, and about my being in the world. I want to know that my life is good.

Not just a moral good

Now, this isn’t quite the same thing as, “I want to make the world a better place.” Of course, I want to be a morally good person: I want to be the kind of person who does kind and loving things, who makes living better for those around me, and so on.

But there’s something that comes first: there’s the very fact that I’m alive, that I exist in the world at all.

Or, in more philosophical terms, is goodness convertible with being? Is existence itself good?

Now, for some people, that’s an absurd question. It’s obvious to them that it’s good to exist. But that’s not universally true. Besides quirky people like me, there’s the whole tradition of Buddhism. If I understand it correctly, Buddhism teaches that existence is an illusion, and that we can escape from the illusion – not into a greater reality, but into nothingness, into not-being. The way to save oneself from suffering is to escape from existing.

And yet, I have real experiences of the goodness of being. For me, being something of a nerd, the paradigmatic moment was sitting in high school chemistry when I suddenly understood the structure of the periodic table. It was beautiful. It was profound. It opened up the world to me. I just wanted to stare at the chart on the wall for hours on end.

I’ve heard normal people describe similar experiences in watching a sunrise, or hearing music. Sometimes, it takes the form of awe at another person. Sometimes it’s falling in love.

The point is, it almost doesn’t matter that I’m there to see it; what matters is that this beautiful, wonderful thing exists. And if the periodic table is good – indeed, if anything at all is good – then that goodness is a part of the real world. In other words, the world has a “meaning,” a “point,” it’s “worthwhile,” at least as far as the periodic table goes.

And if I can recognize it, that recognition is also good. That means that, as far as my ability to recognize something good goes, I am good, worthwhile, and my life has some kind of meaning.

Ditto for everybody else in the world.

Now, this isn’t an air-tight proof that any- and everything that exists is good by its very existence (though I think it’s a step toward that), but it does remind me that the burden of proof lies with pessimism. I have the ability to recognize good in all sorts of things, including myself.

And that’s not bad.

Today, Ash Wednesday, begins the season of Lent in the Catholic Church. It’s a season of prayer and fasting and almsgiving, imitating Christ’s forty days in the desert, and preparing to celebrate his passion and resurrection at Easter.

Some Christian traditions, such as the Orthodox, have a very strict discipline for Lent. We Catholics have it fairly light in terms of required discipline: two days of actual fasting – Ash Wednesday and Good Friday – and no meat on any Fridays. But we’re encouraged to take on other penances ourselves.

So, here’s how I’m going about the whole Lenten thing.

Prayer, Fasting, Almsgiving

Prayer is the foundation and the heart of Lent. But not just any prayer. It’s a prayer of testing. Jesus went into the desert to be tested, so this prayer is for strength and endurance in the face of testing, in the face of temptation. It’s also a prayer of abandonment to God. It’s giving him permission to test me, and to challenge me in ways I haven’t necessarily planned for.

So, I’m taking up an old form of prayer: the Liturgy of the Hours. I’ve prayed this way before, and I’ve taken a break from it for a little while. But it’s very appropriate for Lent because it constantly recalls me to the very basics of my dependence on God.

As for fasting, I’m going to give up salty snacks (like chips and peanuts and such) as well as desserts at home. These are things that I really do long for, that I’ll notice are gone from my diet, and that will remind me that “man does not live on bread alone.” And that’s the main point of fasting: to rely on God’s care at a fundamental level. I don’t make my own food. God, ultimately, is the one who feeds me.

Also, on the not-so-foodlike-stuff level, I’m giving up computer games. I enjoy the heck out of them, but they too easily distract me from what’s truly important in life.

I’ll be honest: I don’t quite know what to do about almsgiving. I do make regular charitable donations from my income. I probably could devote a bit more money to it, but I don’t have all that much to give. So I’ve been thinking about doing some kind of volunteer work. I know there’s plenty that needs doing. Just not quite sure where to focus.

If you have any ideas, I’m open to them. I figure I’ll talk it through with my spiritual director when I next see him.

In any case, giving alms is like the other two Lenten disciplines: it forces me to put my trust in God. Not only that I can make do with less, but that God can give great things to others through me.

I don’t know how many of my readers celebrate Lent, but if you want to share what you’re doing, I think it would make great conversation in the comments box!

Siobhan asked me if I was ever going to write about anything besides prudence. My short answer is, yes-and-no.

The long answer is that, the way I see it, writing about any one of the virtues really entails writing about them all. Every virtue implies every other, ultimately. The names are simply a matter of focus.

… from a certain point of view…

As far as I know, this approach to virtue is something I made up on my own, so I welcome anybody to correct or refine what I’m saying here.

It seems to me that the virtues are not exactly separate things from each other, but distinct aspects of a virtuous action.

So, any given action – for example, eating a bowl of ice cream (one of my favorite actions!) – can be seen from the perspective of prudence, or justice, or fortitude, or temperance. For that matter, you can look at it from the point of view of faith, or hope, or love.

My thinking is still a bit muddy, but I find the cardinal virtue / theological virtue distinction to be valuable here, showing two major lenses to use in looking at actions.

Cardinal virtues

So, in deciding about eating a bowl of ice cream, one can ask whether it is prudent. That is, is eating ice cream really a good thing for me in my current situation?

One can also ask, is it temperate? That is, are my desires within me in harmony with the truth and facts I’ve prudently discovered? Or, is it courageous? That is, must I overcome obstacles in order to achieve the good that I have prudently discovered?

Finally, one acts. And one asks, is this action just? That is, am I pursuing good in accordance with reality, opposing my false desires and overcoming obstacles?

So, prudence discovers the good; fortitude and temperance clear the way to pursuing that good, one by overcoming external obstacles and the other by opposing internal disorders; and justice acts to pursue the good. All the virtues collaborate in the process of taking action, and any given action is virtuous to the extent that it conforms to all the cardinal virtues.

Theological virtues

I see the theological virtues as a kind of parallel. Faith discovers the good – not merely relying on my own reason, but trusting in the testimony of others. Hope clears the path to the good by putting false desires and external obstacles in proper perspective. And love acts for the good, even by laying down one’s life for one’s beloved.

So the theological virtues build upon the cardinal virtues and express them, not merely from my own individual and human perspective, but from a higher perspective, even a divine perspective.

What about the ice cream?

I understand that the greatest question here may be, “Yeah, but did you eat the ice cream?”

How could you be in any doubt? Ice cream is a form of pure concentrated goodness.

Of course I ate the ice cream!

I’ll admit it: I like my instant gratification to be both instant and gratifying.

It’s tough for me to recognize good things at much of a distance. And I’m often blind to the good in the things that are right in front of my face. Heaven and religion is a great example of my struggle with the virtue of hope.

Lacking the virtue of hope

When I was a kid, I didn’t think much about heaven. I considered it “pie in the sky” and figured I could always worry about it later. And, at the same time, I looked at religion (I was raised Roman Catholic) as a bunch of useless words and gestures that often involved men wearing dresses.

In high school, I took a turn as an atheist for a couple years. I started out by searching for “truth”, but eventually said that I was looking for “meaning” or “purpose” in life. Now that I’ve returned to the religion of my youth, I think a more proper word is hope.

The irony is that I’ve found hope in exactly the place that I could not find it as a child, in God, in Jesus and his Church.

This doesn’t mean I like everything about the Catholic Church. I find some parts of the Mass to be boring, and I find some priests to be embarrassments, and I find some devotions or aspects of spirituality to be silly.

But I’ve come to see that they all are directed toward the ultimate object of hope: union with God, aka, heaven. And I understand this clearly in my mind, even if my heart or my gut don’t like it or don’t get it.

I have two major obstacles to hope: I don’t recognize something as good, or I’m impatient and unwilling to work for something in the future. Both these obstacles show up in spades with regard to hoping for perfect union with God.

Is heaven really good?

I long ago dropped the childish notion of heaven as a kind of eternal amusement park or (worse) lounging endlessly in a toga on a cloud practicing the harp. But even the profound mystical descriptions of heaven: gazing on the face of God, intimate communion in Love, the glorification of my mortal body… all of these, well, kind of leave me cold.

I mentioned in another post that great hopes are built upon smaller hopes. It’s hard to hope for success in a career if one has no experience of success from a game or a musical instrument. And I think this is part of my problem: I tend to be hyper-critical of everything. Go ahead, ask my friends: I can find fault in a sunset or a view of the mountains.

So I’ve been practicing by reminding myself of how good things are around me: how delicious is this food, or how delightful is the time I spend with that friend, or how satisfying it is to get that bass lick down just so. I remind myself of these good things whenever I’m tempted to say that life just sucks and nothing is worth anything.

And I try connect those small feelings in my gut or my heart with the knowledge in my head that God is the ultimate source of all these undeniably good things. It’s an uphill battle, but (as with all virtue) it’s getting a little bit easier as I keep on practicing.

Why can’t I have it right now?

The dieter’s slogan, “A moment on the lips, forever on the hips!” strikes very close to home here. Ice cream and bacon are my particular weaknesses in the realm of gluttony. And overwhelming emotion – usually anger or sadness – is the fix I seek in the realm of “meaning” or “purpose.”

But the union with God that hope truly seeks, like the health of the dieter, means refusing to indulge in emotional fixes. It means overcoming my desire to feel … not so much to feel “good” as to feel intensely or “importantly.” Instead, I have to recognize that the true good, the true importance, is found in God rather than in the feelings I’m seeking.

By indulging myself now, I’m actually moving away from the source of what is good and important.

So, to practice hope, again I remind myself of how false and unnecessary these immediate pleasures are. And then, as soon as possible, I focus my attention on some good activity (like listening to my friend, or cleaning my room, or praying) that really will bring me more fully into union with God.

As I said, I’m definitely rowing upstream here. I fail far more often than I succeed. But I think I have an glimpse of what success looks like.

Kelly seems to have been reading my mind. How did you know I was going to follow up by talking about hope in the big picture?

Here’s the thing: I think we’ve had so many of our hopes dashed that we Americans have become fairly cynical about placing hope in anything. But this also means that we have had an intensifying craving for something to hope in, because hope is a natural way of relating to the world.

So, when something claims to be, well, worthy of hope, we tend either to mock it or to cling irrationally to it.

Irrational hope

All we have to do is rewind a year.

(As a disclaimer, I don’t intend to say anything about President Obama, except that he is a human being. He has done some good, and some evil, and has made some mistakes. History will judge his reputation and God will judge his soul and the only judgment I can make is whether or not I vote for him when he next runs for election.)

Then-Senator Obama ran one of the most memorable political campaigns in recent history, and one of the main features was the iconic poster of him with a single word under his upward-gazing face: “HOPE”.

This poster polarized opinions of the candidate, and most people I know took it either as A) a sign that Obama brought a new and better approach to politics, or that B) a confirmation that Obama’s ego had outstripped all sense of reality.

The fact is that, like most politicians throughout history, Obama the candidate promised all sorts of things, some of which were beyond his power to deliver – at least, without the aid of Congress.

In other words, his campaign encouraged people to place an irrational hope in him: a “hope” beyond the realm of possibility.

Rational hope

The virtue of hope, on the other hand, is grounded in reason. As I noted before, hope as a virtue pursues a future good that is difficult but possible. That is, whatever we hope for has to be a real good, and it has to be really possible.

Strictly speaking, we cannot hope for a fantasy, or for something impossible.

And that is where most big “hopes” go awry. Politicians, and salespeople, and coaches, and journalists, and … you get the picture: they all try to raise people’s hopes toward fantasies or impossibilities. And they do this because it works. Many people do raise their hopes to these things, and act accordingly – whether with their votes or their dollars or their actions.

And, when inevitably these hopes fail, these people find it more difficult to satisfy the yearning for good, for something better than all this.

True hope prevails

The solution is to hold fast to the virtue of hope: to insist on reality, on truth. This means sometimes calming the emotions – stepping back to take a more objective view of the promise – and sometimes it means overcoming resistance – especially when we discover a groundless prejudice.

It means putting the right hopes in the right places.

Kelly said:

I just find it so much more exhausting to have hope in, say politics or the state of the world, or an end to hunger.

It’s entirely rational to hope that political action will result in a more orderly or fair society. It’s irrational to hope that politics will make us all better people or make the world a better place. It’s entirely rational to hope for a better distribution of the world’s goods, so that fewer people suffer from hunger. It’s irrational to hope that no one will ever again face malnutrition or starvation.

Growing in hope

Hope for greater things builds on hope for smaller things. If I have no experience of success in learning to play the bass guitar, then I have very little to base a hope for a career (or for politics, or for global reform) on.

This doesn’t mean I don’t desire those great things; it means I’m unable to really understand the difficulty of the task, or to estimate whether it is possible. I’m liable to be suckered in by a fantasy, or to wear myself out striving for an impossibility.

Strangely enough, the best way I’ve found to grow in hope is to constantly seek a reality check. I’ve found that playing bass and political action are easier in some ways than I feared, and challenging in ways I didn’t expect. So, I revise my expectations, and take the next step forward.

I was going to confession once, and the priest pointed out to me that what my sins had in common was that they were sins against hope.

Not to excuse myself, but more to say “it takes one to know one,” I think I see a lack of hope – or even an opposition to hope – all around us in the American culture. And I think this “sinning against hope” is at the root of many problems in the world today.

Hope … for what?

Thomas Aquinas says that the object of hope is a future good, difficult but possible to obtain. This deceptively simple definition has four parts:

• Hope seeks a good - i.e., it looks for something truly desirable and worthy
• The good that hope seeks is in the future - it is not something we can have here and now, or even immediately
• This good is difficult to achieve – it is not something that will simply come to us, that we can take for granted
• Yet, it is possible - it is not a fantasy, or a daydream, but is something real and within the grasp of those who strive for it

For myself, I find I fail on every one of these points. For example, I hope to be a good bass guitarist. But there are times I just don’t feel that playing music is very important or worthwhile. Or I grow impatient and figure if I can’t be a rock star right now then I’d rather not play at all. Or I give up in frustration, not wanting to endure the effort and pain of practice. Or, worst of all, I despair of ever improving, imagining that I am missing some vital talent or gift.

In all these cases, though, the objection is summed up easily: “Why bother?”

Why bother?

I hear variations of this objection all the time. I hear it from co-workers: “Who’s going to find out?” I hear it from friends: “Eh, whatever.” I hear it from my own heart: “I’d rather just watch TV.”

The problem here is that we lose touch with reality. Whether we wallow in a wishful fantasy or settle for a lesser or easier goal, to lose hope is to let go of the truth that good things are worth pursuing. It is to forget that music really is beautiful, and that there is a unique beauty that can only come through my own fingers.

It is to believe the lie that this – whatever situation we’re in, whether personal or political or practical – that this is as good as it’s going to get, and nothing we do can make it any better.

Despair says: “It’ll never be perfect.” But hope says, “It can always be better.”

And the virtue of hope is repeating, reminding, building the habit in myself and others of always doing things even a little bit better.

Yesterday, I answered Sarah’s question by saying that virtue is a good habit. That’s pithy and fits neatly on a bumper sticker; but it’s not nearly the whole story. I wrote a little about it being good, but today I want to write about virtue being a habit.

Rinse, and repeat!

I’ve heard various theories on how to form a habit. Some say, repeat an action for thirty consecutive days, and it will become a habit. Others say, repeat an action one hundred times, and it will become a habit. Others give variations with different numbers. But all focus on the repetition.

Now, I’ll grant that if you do something the same way enough times, you’ll develop a kind of habit: a sort of physical habit, like a proper golf swing – or so my dad tells me. But I don’t think this is quite the kind of habit that makes a virtue. Nor do I think it’s the easiest way to develop a habit.

Purposeful repetition

In my own experience, the ways I’ve developed habits most quickly and easily all have one thing in common: I had a strong sense of purpose when I repeated the action. When I was in the habit of daily exercise, there was a particular girl I wanted to impress. Now that I’m not trying to impress her, my habit of exercise has slipped away.

This cuts both ways. In fact, it helps explain why I develop habits of vice so much more quickly than habits of virtue. When I eat that extra bowl of ice cream, mmm! I get an instant affirmation of how nummy ice cream is. Meanwhile, when I’m trying to develop virtuous habits, I need to constantly remind myself why I’m doing it.

All you need is love!

I didn’t choose the example of trying to impress a girl at random. I was in love, and that love motivated me beyond myself. That is, after all, what true love will do: move me to some good beyond myself.

The trick, then, to developing virtuous habits is to fall in love with the results of virtue. Maybe it’s just to remind yourself of what it is you most love. Maybe it’s to draw out the connections between some virtuous action and the object of your love.

What I’m trying now (and I’ll let you know how this goes) is to listen carefully to the people I love most, and who love me best. I’m listening for what they think I’m doing well, and what they think I need to improve at. I’m doing this because I’m awfully good at convincing myself that I’m just fine, or that I’m utterly worthless. My friends give me a reality check.

Because that’s another thing love does: like every virtue, it puts me in touch with reality.

If you want a little help from some friends, join the quest! I know that we will grow more together than separately.