"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. As far as I can tell, the problem with usury is that the “interest” being charged is not connected to reality. As Thomas Aquinas puts it: “To take usury for money lent is unjust in itself, because this is to sell what does not exist.”

It is not a sin to ask for money to cover expenses that are real, or even to cover profits from lost opportunities. But to charge interest without any connection to some actual cost or loss is simply to demand that new money come out of nowhere. This is wrong because it is, ultimately, false and impossible.

Zippy, who sadly no longer blogs, had a series of excellent posts on why this is the case, and how it applies to our current economy. You can read his analysis, starting here, then part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5. He eventually explores the territory of what a creditor has a right to reclaim from a debtor, and a bit on what kinds of “financial instruments” are licit, and why.

Greed is not good!

The other theme that jumped out at me was what today we call “profit motive” and what the medievals called “greed”.

The problem is not that production or trade turns a profit; as many have pointed out, there would be no business or trade without profit. As no less an authority than St. Paul says, “[T]he plowman should plow in hope and the thresher thresh in hope of a share in the crop.”

The problem is, rather, that profit is not good in itself. Profit is only a means to an end. It is both foolish and unjust to try to collect profit for its own sake, whether in the form of money or in the form of houses or artworks or anything else. Profit is meant to be used, not to make more profit, but to give benefit to people.

Now, those people can include oneself. It is good to make money in order to put food on the table. It is good to feed one’s family, too. It is good to feed one’s employees, and one’s stockholders, and their families. All this is putting profits to good use.

Likewise, it is good to use profits to upgrade one’s equipment, or to do research into better ways of making widgets or better ways to bring those widgets to market.

But it is not good to pursue or hold on to profits as if they were themselves the goal, the end of economic activity. In other words, using profit itself as a motive for work or business is greed, avarice, a deadly sin and a mortal vice.

The universal destination of goods

Why is this the case? After all, didn’t I work for that money? Didn’t I earn it? What does it hurt to try to add more to it, or to hold on to it? Am I saying everybody should be poor, or that it’s wrong to be rich?

To answer the last question first: No. Ideally, nobody would be poor, and it’s perfectly okay to be rich.

But there are two things going on here: first, as I hope is clear from what I wrote above, money is not a good in itself. It is a medium for exchange, and a measure of value. But it has no value in itself; it’s entire worth is that it makes buying and selling easier. If money doesn’t buy and sell, then it loses its entire purpose and value.

Second, and more importantly, my right to own things is not absolute or unlimited. The things I own are derived from nature and labor, from the world and the work we do on it. So yes, I have a right to the products of my labor, and to what I can buy and sell with that. But my right is rooted in the nature of the world, which cannot belong absolutely to anyone. I did not make the earth, and I have no claim to it above anyone else. Nature is a gift to all of us, and each of us has an equal claim to what we need from it.

So, although I can claim the good things I have got by working, my claim stops when someone is excluded or restricted from access to the good things they need to get by. The goods of nature are universal: they belong to everybody.

If my pursuit of profit, or my hoarding of money or products or whatever, prevents someone from working, or eating, or living a humane life, then that is wrong. Profit is meant to support the life and growth of human persons, both individually and as a society. I do not have a right to keep good things away from others, no matter how hard I’ve worked for them.

It is not wrong to be rich; but it is wrong to keep riches all to oneself.

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. It doesn’t matter how much people tell me about their struggles. All I see are their actions; and their actions, for the most part, are displays of awesome ability that put me to shame.

I mean, these are people who accomplish superhuman feats like following up on emails, preparing properly for meetings, actually finishing projects they begin, and so on.

As for me? Well, sure, sometimes I do those things too. Sometimes. But I fail a lot. And even when I succeed, I’m full of fear and anxiety. For example, it’s been a while since I posted on this blog. Part of that is because, when I start to write a post, I worry about whether it will be as good as other blogs. I want it to be a masterpiece. I want it to impress everybody in the whole entire world as much as I was impressed by Plato, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Jane Austen combined.

But it’s a BLOG, for goodness sake!

So there’s lie #1: I think I have to be extraordinary because I compare myself to people whom I consider to be extraordinary.

But there’s another lie, and it’s even more insidious because it’s hard to show just how it’s untrue.

After all, I am extraordinary. I am absolutely unique. There is no other me in the whole universe. And people have told me that I’ve had really helpful insights, and that they’re amazed at things I’ve done, and that they even really value my friendship. I am irreplaceable. In a very literal sense, no one in the world can do the things I do – because no one else is exactly me.

Here’s where the lie comes in: I think that I need to justify the fact of my uniqueness, and my value. I feel like I have to prove, constantly and repeatedly, that I really am as unique and special as I am.

But this is crazy. I’m not unique because I did something incredible; I’m unique because of the miracle of recombinant DNA. I’m not special because of my amazing accomplishments; I’m special because I happen to be a member of the human race, which gives me super powers like rational thought and free choice.

My dignity, my worth, does not rely on me or anything I have done. It relies on the mere fact of my existence. And my existence is not an accomplishment; it’s a gift.

Confidence in the world – not in myself

I was raised on a culture of self-confidence and self-esteem. I was constantly cajoled to feel good about myself, and to not rely on others for my worth.

But the fact is, the foundation of my value as a person is not me; the foundation is the inherent dignity of being human. It is the truth that I am made in the image and likeness of God.

The confidence I have in myself is actually an obstacle to accepting the gift of my life. I have confidence that I should be able to solve every problem and overcome every obstacle with ease. But this is a misplaced confidence. I am limited. I need help.

This is normal.

Every one of us is limited. We all need help. This is the right order of things. It is natural and good.

The confidence I need is other-confidence. I need to trust in the world around me to provide the help I need, when I need it. I have to trust other people. I have to trust God. I have to be willing to risk failure, because my actions are not supposed to succeed on their own. My actions only ever succeed when they combine with other people’s actions, when our individual attempts come together and create something than no one of us can do on his or her own.

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. The prof was describing the ancient and medieval notion that has come to be called “the great chain of being,” essentially that everything in the universe has a fixed place on a strict linear hierarchy, like rungs on a ladder, with “prime matter” at the bottom and God at the top.

It seemed obvious to me that, while a linear hierarchy is one way of organizing and relating the various things in the universe, it’s probably not the most useful. There are different kinds of order, and different kinds of relationship between things. Therefore, it didn’t surprise me when, years later, I discovered that great thinkers in ancient and medieval times held a much more subtle and nuanced view than that simplified and dumbed-down notion.

What did surprise me was how long it took me to apply my insight to my own life and behavior.

Clean your room, young man!

I’ve been living in my current apartment for about six months now, and I’m still not entirely unpacked. I have boxes and crates stacked against the wall, waiting for me to decide where to put their contents. Some of these boxes have remained unopened for the past couple moves I’ve made. This is because there’s a part of me that’s still afraid to put something in the wrong spot.

This fear is, I know, entirely unrealistic. It is stuck in a misunderstanding, or maybe a misapprehension, about freedom and order.

Order is nothing other than the relationship of things to each other. How I decide to order something, whether it’s the files in a cabinet or the furniture in a room or the tasks on my to-do list, depends on the relationships I’m looking at. With files, my goal is quick and easy access to information; the relationships I’m looking for are based on the use of the information I’m filing away. For example, bills and receipts go together, and letters from friends go together, and owners manuals and warranties go together.

Relationships between furniture, on the other hand, is based on the relationships I hope to develop between the people using the furniture. I like open rooms, where everyone can see and communicate with everybody else. There’s a part of me that wants to maximize open floor space, but a friend pointed out that putting some furniture pieces at an angle – even though it cut off a square foot-and-a-half in the corner, provided better sight lines for people sitting in chairs and on the sofa.

My to-do list actually benefits from a strictly linear ordering: first this, next that, third something else, and think twice before re-ordering the list. That’s because many activities, in reality, require something else to come first. It’s linear because the relationships are based in the uncompromising march of time.

Order provides the structure for free action. If my files are organized, I’m more free to find the information I want; if my furniture (and my to-do list) is well ordered, it’s easier to have fun with my friends.

Fear of punishment and fear of chaos

So order is both something that I create from and for myself, because it depends on the relationships I’m choosing to look at, and something that is independent of me, because those relationships are based in something real and objective.

This is normal and reasonable and helpful to me. Why, then, do I have such a fear of both aspects of order? Why am I afraid both that I’ll have to decide what to do, and that someone else will impose a decision on me?

I’m sure there are plenty of psychological reasons and childhood traumas that might explain the origin of my fears. But those don’t matter very much. What matters is, replacing my false view of order with a true one. And that is done one act at a time.

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.

Tolerating imperfection

My friends know that I’m the annoying sort of perfectionist who lets his fears of failure stop him from attempting good things. It’s a very bad habit, a genuine vice. But on the occasions I overcome it, I tend to swing to the opposite vice of sloppiness or even self-sabotage.

This makes it look like I’m very hard on myself, and so most people usually advise me to cut myself some slack, to be more tolerant of my failures. To me, this always looks like “lowering my standards” or giving in to vice.

But I was talking with my spiritual director the other day, and he reminded me that I should not tolerate evil. He pointed out that, while I was very intolerant of imperfection, I was very tolerant of temptation and of my own acts of vice and sin. This is exactly the opposite of what I should be striving for.

Imperfection is a normal and necessary part of human life: we are all finite, limited, and incomplete in and of ourselves. We depend on one another for everything from the basic necessities of survival to our highest personal fulfillment. Somehow I’ve got it in my skull that I need to be absolutely 100% self-sufficient, that I have to know everything and do everything without accepting any help from anybody, or else I’m a failure. That is a lie. It is utterly false, because it is contrary to human nature. My limitations and needs may be inconvenient or difficult, but they are not bad or wrong.

In other words, they are necessary, even if they are sometimes undesirable. I should tolerate them.

Not tolerating evil

Those imperfections are what a philosopher might call a “natural evil” or an “ontological evil,” that is, something lacking in some natural good of being. If I were blind, that would be an “evil” in the nature of my eyes; it’s an imperfection and a limitation. But it’s not a moral evil; it’s not an evil action, and it doesn’t make me an evil person.

Moral evil is what my spiritual director advised me not to tolerate. This returns to the ancient wisdom of Plato, that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit a crime or sin.

Why is this so? The answer I’m discovering is that, while natural evil is unavoidable, moral evil is unnecessary. There is no absolute reason I should do anything bad. I might make a mistake, or I might act out of ignorance, but there is nothing that binds me to do something I know is wrong. Nothing in the entire universe can compel me to choose to harm a fly, much less to harm my neighbor.

In other words, moral evil is intolerable – and most intolerable of all in myself.

So I need to turn completely around: I’ve been tolerating my neglect of friends and of duties, tolerating my “need” for hours of mind-numbing entertainment from TV or computer games; meanwhile, I’ve been intolerant of my ignorance and my lack of control over the impact of my work. I’ve got it backward.

I can’t be sure my efforts will succeed, but I can be sure that I will fail – and be a failure – if I don’t make any efforts. I need to learn to tolerate my imperfections, and become absolutely intolerant of my faults.

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.

The reason I am so obsessed with stories – both reading or watching them and writing them myself – is that my whole perspective on the world is profoundly shaped by the stories I believe in. So, for most of my youth, my paradigm for reality was Star Wars. I saw everything through the lens of The Force. Later, I discovered Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which I have found to be a far superior guide to reality than Lucas’ mess. Still later, a friend introduced me to the romances of Jane Austen, which provide a profound counterpoint to Tolkien’s vision.

Light fare, perhaps? Yes, perhaps. But, for good or ill, these are the stories that have largely shaped my understanding of the world.

And I’m convinced that it cannot be any other way. It seems to me that stories are a necessary part of human life, and of learning how to be human.

The plotline of life

The primary way we learn anything, of course, is through direct experience. Ouch! That burner is hot! But what happens in that moment of experience?

I’ve had many friends tell me how their awareness of a particular cause or passion woke up through an experience. They suddenly realized that there are millions of poor and suffering people in the world, or that problems can be solved by engineering solutions, or that someone really does love them after all. As soon as they describe the event, they spin it into a story: this understanding of the world shapes their own character. It becomes a plot twist in their own life.

And what changes in that moment? What is realized, or learned, or discovered? It is a new way of viewing the world as a whole. It is like putting on glasses and realizing for the first time just how blurred your vision had been. Objects come into focus, and distinctions become clear.

And, seeing clearly, you are now free to act.

Virtual reality and vicarious experience

Now obviously there are limits to any one person’s experience. For example, I don’t remember ever burning my finger on the stove top. But I watched my older brother do so, and I learned from watching him. In a way, I made his experience my own.

Learning from someone’s example is a kind of second-hand experience. It may not be my exact prescription, but it helps me see much better than I could before. And it saves me from some of the worse consequences of my blindness.

Now, what’s interesting is that it doesn’t seem to matter a great deal whether that second-hand experience is factual or fictional. Many a child has been inspired to honesty by the story of George Washington’s refusal to lie about cutting down a cherry tree, despite the (at best) questionable historicity of the tale.

What matters is that I am able to make the story my own somehow, that my experience of the story becomes a genuine part of my experience of life. So, as I said, Star Wars gave me a heroic lens to view my own life that appeared to be so far from the “bright center” of the universe. It opened my eyes to powers beyond my ability to understand, and to the requirement for those powers to be used for good.

Problems arose, of course, when I discovered that The Force was not in any significant sense real. I don’t mean the fantasy elements of it; a mere child can see through that. I mean that The Force ultimately contradicts itself: it seems impersonal, yet it has a guiding quality; the difference between the “good side” and the “dark side” seems to “depend greatly upon one’s point of view,” yet it is imperative to resist the draw of darkness.

In other words, Star Wars gave me a better lens than I had, but it still left me blind in some very important parts of life.

The importance of good stories

Reality is the ultimate test of all worldviews, whether gained from personal experience or through the virtual reality of a story. I cling to the lens I found in Jane Austen’s work because she sees aspects of the world that, as a twenty-first century American male, I literally cannot see. She reveals a spot as invisible to me as the back of my head, and enables me to see that aspect of the world in my own family and friends. On the other hand, I find most romances (of page or screen) actually raise obstacles to understanding the people in my life.

I try to be discerning in what I read and watch. I try even harder to be discerning in what I write. My goal is to write stories that draw people more deeply into reality rather than distracting from its difficulty.

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. Even the word “entitlement” refers to the granting of “title” or ownership of something by whomever has the authority to give it. The only words I could think of are words like “possession” or “ownership”, which really don’t convey the kind of presumptuous attitude I’m trying to describe.

Maybe presumption is itself the word I’m looking for. It literally means “taking something before,” that is, before it is given. It is taking something as if it had been granted, even when it has not. And that’s where the problematic attitude lies: it’s a lack of recognition that something is genuinely a gift. It’s the idea that I am completely and independently capable of getting everything I want or need entirely on my own without any help from anyone else ever. Ultimately, that attitude is founded on falsehood.

Gratitude: recognition of my need for others

I’m concerned about this attitude because it’s one I struggle with all the time myself. I remember as a child needing to be told to say “thank you” at Christmas or on my birthday, and thinking that I didn’t really feel grateful. I felt like I deserved the toys, or maybe even deserved better loot than I’d got. So I went through the motions and held onto presumption in my heart.

But that led me to a bitter and lonely place. I alienated many of my friends. And then something rather odd happened: when a friend did show a kindness to me, even a tiny one, I found myself utterly overwhelmed with gratitude far out of proportion to their act. It was as if all that repressed recognition of others’ gifts to me came bursting out at once. So then I had friends saying, “Enough thank yous, already! It was really nothing!”

Well, it wasn’t nothing. But it also wasn’t the thing I was most grateful for: I was most grateful for the ability to acknowledge my dependence on other people.

My illusion of fierce independence had been (and still is, in parts of my life) a kind of cage that kept me from the real world as it actually is, and from connecting to the real people who live in it. So finding a way to relate – simply by acknowledging the relationship – was a tremendous good that I could never have simply acquired for myself. I am glad my mother taught me how to say “thank you” all those years ago.

Gratitude and justice

It’s interesting that Thomas Aquinas lists gratitude as part of the virtue of justice, while generosity or giving gifts is part of the virtue of charity or love. That is, even though gifts are given freely, the acknowledgment of the gift is something owed by duty.

At first, this seems odd, and a little bit like extortion. But my own experience shows me why it’s a matter of justice. To refuse to acknowledge the gift and the giver is to deny the reality that I have received something I could not have without that other person.

I could not have received life without my parents. I could not have received friendship without my friends. Even in relationships where there is a “business” aspect, there also is a gift; I could not have received my education without my teachers’ willingness to give what they also had received. Gratitude, giving thanks for what has been granted, is simply a matter of seeing reality for what it is.

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, the feeling is one sign among many of something that goes beyond mere feeling. These experiences are signs of vocation.

What’s a vocation?

“Vocation” is a word that has gone through a number of changes over the years. Originally, it literally meant “a calling” – based on the Latin vocare which means “to call”. It came to mean, the work that someone is called to, then it meant a career distinct from the “professions,” and now it seems to mean a technical job or skilled labor of some kind.

The big question this raises, of course, is: who’s doing the calling?

In a family business, it might be Mom or Dad who’s calling. In the military, it’s Uncle Sam. In the Church (where most people equate “vocation” with priests and nuns), it’s God who calls.

The feelings of inspiration or autopilot are important especially because they point toward the source of the call. It’s critical that these experiences are not just emotions that rise up within me, but are genuinely moved by another. That is to say, there really is someone outside my skull who is calling for my work.

And this is not an impersonal call; it depends intimately on who I am and the uniqueness of the gifts and strengths I have. The call is for me to do what only I can do – and therefore what will bring a unique fulfillment to my life.

It is not a call to be a cog in a machine; it is a call to be fully myself, and to take my place in the world I live in.

How do I know?

Now, some people seem born knowing what they are called to do: it’s a profound orientation of their lives, and they have a hard time thinking of what else they might do.

Others just schlep along through life, trying to make ends meet, and having fun whenever and wherever they can. They’re not looking for much else.

And lots of people, including many of my friends, have a notion that something bigger and better is waiting for them, somewhere out there. They just don’t quite know what it is or how to get there from here.

Here’s where that feeling comes in as a pointer. The kind of experience I’m talking about has several traits:

• It energizes without causing agitation or anxiety
• It motivates, showing the meaning or purpose of both life and work
• It generates more ideas, more possibilities, more work
• It radiates beyond myself: other people notice something going on

This experience is far from the last word in discernment; but it’s usually the best starting point. What am I doing when this kind of thing happens to me? What do I do about it?

Knowing what calls my name helps me to ask other questions: how can I put more time and energy into that activity? is it something I can structure my life around? are there signs of who is the origin of that call, who my work is meant to reach?

After all, when one receives a call, the thing to do is to connect with the caller. That’s what it means to answer.

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? Because there’s another part of me, call it the grandiose egotist side, that doesn’t want to do anything that isn’t instantly apparent as brilliant and perfect. Plugging along at little tasks just doesn’t have the same feel as finishing a book, or even a chapter.

Reality check

It’s at this point that I need to pull myself back down to earth. Both my despair of finishing a job and my desire for the feeling of accomplishment are unwarranted. What is true is that every task has some pleasant and some unpleasant aspects to it. That’s just the nature of reality, and it does no good to focus only on the difficult aspects while ignoring the easy or exciting aspects – or vice versa.

Rather, I need to focus on what is directly in front of me: what is here and now. So, for my grandma’s book, I have some research to do and some notes to take today. If I spend my time worrying about how many interviews I still need to conduct, or on the other hand daydreaming about how high it will reach on the New York Times bestseller list, then I will create my own failure.

If instead I do a couple hours of work, and spend five minutes at the end reviewing what I’ve done, then I will see the progress I have made. It may be small progress, but it shows me where I am in the big picture of the job. Moreover, it allows me to know exactly where to pick up again tomorrow.

Life application

Now, the example of working on my grandmother’s book is an application of the virtue of prudence, with a little temperance thrown in for good measure. And even though it’s a book – a book! – it’s still a fairly small and focused task.

The life of virtue is a call to apply virtue to every aspect of my life. I need to be prudent, not just about writing a memoir, but also about cleaning my kitchen and relating to my friends and voting in the election and my attitude toward strangers and…. I need to do this for the next 50 years or however long I happen to hang out on this earth. Zoiks! I really can’t deal with a task that big!

And yet, a life is composed of days, and a day is composed of hours. Every moment is an opportunity to practice some small virtue. Every day is a chance to live life fully – meaning to fully live, though not to live an entire life.

I used to write up a daily inventory on this blog. I stopped that because I was self-censoring, leaving out the parts of my life I didn’t particularly want to publicize. So now I’m keeping the inventory in a journal. This is an old practice. The Jesuits have a form of it called the Examen. Twelve-step programs call it the Tenth Step. The reason behind keeping an inventory is to learn to recognize what is really going on in any given day. It is like reviewing my work at the end of a task: it gives a reality check and shows me where I am in the bigger picture.

Slowly but surely, I’m beginning to see my life – my desires, my relationships, my work – more clearly. Slowly but surely, I’m making progress in virtue, and part of that progress is recognizing my small steps forward as genuine progress.

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. It fills me with a deep longing for companionship, like a hunger. It also fills me with a fear that no one would want to be my companion. Since I’m a fairly timid man, that fear often keeps me from picking up the phone or getting out of the apartment, which is exactly what the longing is driving me to do.

Virtue lies in recognizing reality and acting accordingly. So what’s real in loneliness, and what’s illusion?

It’s pretty clear to me that the fear is an illusion. After all, I have a number of excellent friends who go out of their way to tell me that they like me around. I’m sure there are people who don’t enjoy my company, but I don’t think I have anyone who could be described as an enemy.

It’s also an illusion that, when I feel lonely, I need to be with someone else right that exact moment. But the feeling points to a real need, in the same way that hunger points to the eventual need for food, even though I want that steak right now! Loneliness reminds me that I’m not an island, that I’m not an absolutely independent individual; rather, I’m a social animal, and I cannot be fully myself without other people.

The need for society

In case you hadn’t guessed already, I’m an introvert; I spend much of my time alone by choice. Much of the time, I need solitude to think and to work and to rest. But there’s a point at which my thoughts need to be expressed, my work needs a larger context, and my rest becomes restless. The emotion of lonliness reminds me of that need.

There are plenty of practical reasons for needing other people. I’m currently reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and he points out how many people are involved in providing a coat for one person to wear. He considers this a distinguishing mark from the rest of the animal kingdom: that we cooperate (or compete) with one another to supply mutual needs.

However, I think the practical need, like the emotion of loneliness, is a manifestation of the root cause. Even if we can somehow provide entirely for ourselves, like Tom Hank’s character in “Cast Away,” there remains an essential incompleteness to any solitary individual. There’s a need for another human face, even if it’s painted on a volleyball.

There have been times in my life that I’ve wished it weren’t so, when I wanted to be absolutely 100% self-sufficient. Mostly, I think, I wanted to pain and fear of loneliness to go away. But the fact is that other people really have given me the greatest gift of all: the invitation and the challenge to stretch myself. I could never learn if I had no one to learn from. I could never laugh without someone to laugh with – or at. I would never have tried to write if I hadn’t first had other people’s writings to read.

In other words, I would not be myself without other people.

So, when I feel lonely…

So, knowing both the illusion and the reality, I’m working on a habit of keeping in touch with friends, family, and colleagues whether I’m feeling lonely or feeling solitary. The feelings come and go, but they point to an important reality: the need to balance social time and alone time.

For me, the struggle is to engage in the social time. For other people, it may be to set the boundaries needed for alone time. But it’s human nature to be fully ourselves only in the context of a community.

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. I replied that you can teach people how to be critical or rigorous in their thought, and she replied:

Of course you can teach someone the rules of logic. Notice however, they are your (or someone elses) rules of logic. … You can ask others questions, but by definition these must come from your cultural background. And the act of questioning to find “weaknesses in thought” creates a framework that suggests that you may have a superior line of thinking from the get go. … All people think spontaneously and creatively on their own. It maybe that their illogical or weak thinking is simply something that you don’t understand or agree with. Very dangerous stuff, this “logical” thinking.

Dangerous stuff!

I fully agree that thinking is dangerous stuff. It’s far too dangerous to leave children in ignorance about it.

As Amy says, we think spontaneously and creatively. We can’t help but think. We are, by nature, rational animals; Homo sapiens literally means “wise man”; thinking is what defines our species. But thinking is an ability like all our other natural abilities: walking, for example, or eating, or communicating. But all of these require, not just natural ability, but a certain learning as well. We assist children in learning how to walk, we encourage and correct them. If someone shows great ability, we train them into athletes. We refine and strengthen our natural ability through instruction and training.

Likewise, we introduce different foods to children, and teach them what is food and what is not, and continue to refine our tastes into adulthood. And, while the instinct and need to communicate is innate, it is only through learning the “artificial” structures of language that we are able to actually make ourselves known to others, or to know them ourselves.

Thinking is the same way: the rules of logic are like the rules of walking or the rules of digestion. They are discovered rather than made up. Logic is the science that shows how thought works, and is able to analyze whether a conclusion really does follow from a premise. People don’t have to know the rules of logic in order to think, but they will think more easily and avoid more pitfalls if they know where the pitfalls and obstacles are.

Beyond logic … there be dragons!

There are lots of ways of thinking that don’t fit neatly into the forms of a syllogism or the structures that logic uses to describe thought. There are lots of sentences that don’t fit neatly into a grammatical diagram, and grammatical diagrams are far from the easiest way to communicate; yet grammar is a tool to help us understand speech; and logic is a tool to help us understand thought.

Logic helps us test and understand whether the questions we ask are limited to our cultural background, or whether they speak to something universally human. Logic helps us discover whether a line of thinking has problems or contradictions, that is, weaknesses. Logic, far from being “your” rules or “someone’s” rules, are our rules. They are ways of bridging the gaps that appear when we disagree or don’t understand someone else.

When we let go of logic, then there is nothing to bridge the gaps. All we have left is, “Well, I disagree,” and there’s no possibility of further communication. That person who says something I don’t understand may be a friend or an enemy, but I have no way of knowing. We may agree or disagree, but I have a hard time figuring that out unless we can examine our thoughts and find out where they are similar, where they are different, and where either of us may be making mistakes. The person I’m arguing with may be a dragon or may be a knight in shining armor, but without logic, I have no way of finding the truth.

The truth will make you free

And this, I think reaches the foundation of Amy’s assertion. She says:

George Lucas got it dead on with the line “The Truth very much depends on your point of view”

Taken to its extreme, (which is what we have in today’s realm of “identity politics” and “advocacy journalism” and so on,) this is an utter denial of the existence of truth or of our ability to think about it.

Our perception of the truth depends on our point of view. The truth itself, reality itself, does not. We can be wrong about the truth. This is why we need tools like logic (and grammar, and physics, and economics, and so on) to keep us honest, to keep us grounded in reality. My point of view is limited, and fallible. My culture’s point of view is biased and historically conditioned. But points of view can be tested, and taught to connect to reality. Reality, truth, is the only real basis we have for speaking and working with each other.