Virtue Quest

"Your lovin' gives me a thrill, but your lovin' don't pay my bills..."

I’m giving a talk at my parish tomorrow night (7:00 in the parish hall, if you’re in the neighborhood!) on usury and the morality of economics.

Usury has become a popular word, at least in some circles, for what’s wrong with our current economy. Too many people getting too greedy, and getting bailed out when their greed comes home to roost.

I think usury is one part of the problem, but it’s bigger than that. The other problem is straight up greed, which is not exactly the same as usury. Now, I’m not an economist, and I don’t understand the ins and outs of the whole system. My approach has been to take hold of the basic moral issues involved in economic life. And in my reading and thinking, these two themes have jumped out to center stage.

Reality

It’s no surprise to you who read this blog that I’m a big fan of reality. I think 99% of our problems come from a mismatch between what I think or what I want and what is actually the case.

Usury is an excellent example of this. (more…)

What do you mean, you don't have a secret identity?

I am my own arch-enemy.

I have this outrageous expectation that I should be super-awesome at everything I attempt, as if I’d been born on Krypton or some such thing. And if I can’t excel – or even if I could excel, but it would take, you know, effort – well, it’s easier to give up. It’s easier to fail in a way that I control, an intentional and deliberate failure, than to strive for success and risk falling short.

Stupid. I know. Or I know it in my head, anyway. Somehow my gut remains convinced of that little piece of insanity.

In other words, I know intellectually that I’m just an ordinary guy, a mere mortal, just like everyone else. But there are a couple obstacles to acting on that knowledge.

Lies I tell myself

First, there’s a part of me that’s convinced that everybody else around me really is entirely competent, brilliant, strong, and has X-ray vision. (more…)

Where to begin...?

As a sophomore in college, I had a single dorm room. No roommate. A space entirely my own. And I remember that, after the first ten minutes, it terrified me. I don’t think I ever finished entirely unpacking.

I had no one to tell me where my things were supposed to go.

I know that most normal people – you do realize I’m rather abnormal, I hope – would feel the thrill of freedom and the drive to creativity in deciding for themselves where their own things should go. But I was very caught up in a way of thinking limited to “right” and “wrong,” that had no room for “good” and its chums “better” and “best”.

It was actually the required class on Western Civilization that woke me up, or started to. (more…)

How much of the world's weight should I carry?

I consider tolerance to be a kind of stop-gap, a second-best, a hand-me-down virtue at most. For example, if I said to my beloved, “Darling, I tolerate you,” I would deserve the slap I would receive. Tolerance is the virtue of bearing with some necessary but undesirable thing. It is not the ideal toward which I strive.

That said, tolerance is a real virtue, even if a secondary one: I would place it as a sub-virtue of Fortitude or Courage, as a form of patience and perseverance. But it is only virtuous when directed to something that is both undesirable and necessary.

It’s clear to me that other people don’t fall into the category of “undesirable.” A human being is, by his or her very existence, good. This particular person may be inconvenient or uncomfortable – or even dangerous – to me at this particular time. But what is undesirable is not that person’s humanity; the inconvenience or danger is what is bad.

What isn’t so clear to me, sometimes, is whether I myself fall into that “undesirable” category. (more…)

First off, I apologize for the sparse posting this week. Many turkeys in the oven, so to speak.

Fiction as a “virtual reality”

We're in trouble now!

This is a little off topic for the blog, but what the heck: it’s only a blog after all. In addition to this blog, I’m a fiction writer as well. Being both neurotic and an introvert, I spend way too much time interrogating myself about whether it’s good or realistic or productive or whatever to write stories.

This is how I justify it to myself. I hope that my justification has some basis in reality. (more…)

For me? Aw, you shouldn't have!

I had one of those “a-ha” moments over the weekend. I was thinking about words, as I often do, and I was trying to find a way to articulate the difference between recognizing life (or a friend or a privilege or whatever) as a gift and taking life for granted. And I realized, the phrases look roughly identical.

A grant, after all, is a kind of gift. It is something given to me by someone else.

So I started exploring whether there are any words we use for that sense of entitlement we call “taking something for granted” that don’t in fact refer to receiving something from someone else. (more…)

I've been expecting your call!

The other day, I was talking with a friend from a writer’s group I work with. She was describing how inspiration strikes her, and it resonated with my own experience: it genuinely feels as if someone else is telling or directing the story.

It’s not split-personality – at least, not for myself or any of the other writers I know. But it’s a strong sense that A) I’m not sufficient in myself to write this piece, and B) I’m not alone in writing it. This experience is common enough that the ancient Greeks named goddesses who inspire the various arts and occupations: the Muses. Even the word “inspire” means “breathe into;” that is, the ideas are breathed into the artist or the worker, the words whispered into the ear of the poet.

The collaborative feeling of following a muse can be exhilarating. (The Greeks called it “ecstasy,” literally, standing outside yourself.) I’ve talked to people from all walks of life, ranging from manufacturing to scholarship to service, and many talk about this kind of feeling: a kind of connection, through the work, with something or someone greater than themselves. Some call it “being in the zone” or “going on autopilot” or some other phrase that conveys how the work becomes energizing and exciting and easy.

But that feeling is, like all feelings, a passing thing. Nobody feels it all the time, and some people feel it rarely, if ever. It’s tempting to chase after the feeling or to grow despondent when it’s absent; and it’s also tempting, for cynics like me, to dismiss the feeling altogether.

The truth is, (more…)

Just keep walking, just keep walking...

I get overwhelmed pretty easily. Sometimes, just looking at the pile of dishes in my sink exhausts me. Other times I’m more ambitious: I figure I can conquer the world but I worry if I’ll make it outside the little pond of our solar system. But the fact is, whenever I face a new task – or a new start on an ongoing task – there’s a part of me that asks, “Can I really do that?”

For example, I’ve mentioned that I’m working on a book about my grandmother’s life. Until the last couple weeks, I’ve been stuck on the magnitude of the project. I talked to one of my uncles about my problems, and he suggested a couple ways to break the project down into smaller pieces, each of which is do-able in an hour or two.

Well, duh! says I. I know how to do that. I just don’t want to.

Why not? (more…)

Wish you were here...

Right now I live alone. It’s a pleasant one-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood that reminds a reservist friend of Baghdad. I invite people over, one at a time or in a party, and sometimes they come and sometimes they don’t. Occasionally, I go out to meet with other people at their homes, or at a restaurant or cafe. It’s pretty normal, I guess, for a guy who works from home.

So, needless to say, I get lonely from time to time. That’s no surprise. But it’s sometimes surprising when loneliness strikes. It happens when I’m with friends almost as often as when I’m alone. It could strike when I’m eating, when I’m working, when I’m reading … almost any time. There may very well be causes, but I’m not aware of them. It often strikes me out of the blue.

Dealing with loneliness

I’m not sure I’d deal with it any better if I had warning. (more…)

Not actually all that logical

My good friend Amy said:

The problem here is that you can’t teach people how to think. Not, at least, without heading straight long into [indoctrination] schools (Communist, Nazi, etc). Not a soul on the planet will tell you they don’t know how to think, even if their life is a long string of screw ups. And who gets to judge whose thinking is “right”? (After all everyone must think to act, even if poorly.) Other than practical matters of social order and universal natural law, I think humans might be best to leave that judgment to God.

There’s a lot going on it that. (more…)