Virtue Quest

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.

Now, if only they were topped with bacon....

One of my friends is a young priest at my parish, Fr. Raphael Mary. He preached the homily this morning on the Beatitudes – Luke’s version, with the “woes” as well as the “blesseds”.

He started with Krispy Kreme donuts. (No, I won’t link to their site!) He described an occasion on which he thought such a donut too good to pass up. Repeatedly. At least seven times. And as he lay on a sofa with a stomach-ache, seven donuts congealing into a blob of greasy sugar in his belly, a friend asked him, “Why did you do that?”

Temporary and permanet goods

Fr. Raphael Mary’s answer was, basically, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” In other words, he chased after the immediate pleasure rather than the long-term good.

He then used TV as another example. While you’re actively watching a show, he said, it gives you pleasure. But when the show is over, that pleasure doesn’t last. In fact, it leaves you feeling rather empty.

Now, this is where I have to disagree with my friend.

No, I don’t disagree that television is all-too-often a superficial pleasure – if it’s a pleasure at all. Actually, I disagree that it’s something that disappears as soon as it’s over, or as soon as one leaves it behind.

Those images, those thoughts, those repetative themes from the soundtrack all stay with me long after the show is gone. They sit in my mind like the remnants of those donuts sat in Fr. Raphael Mary’s gut.

And, to some extent or other, so does everything else. At a bare minimum, the time spent on an activity – whether skiing or feeding the poor or napping in front of a “Gilmore Girls” marathon – has fixed itself permanently in one’s past. It has become part of one’s history, and no one can undo what has been done.

There may be other effects that last beyond the event as well: one can never not cheat on that one test, or take back those words to one’s mother, or not eat those seven donuts. We can’t change the past, and we have to deal with the ramifications of the past in the present and the future.

Real and apparent goods

Our actions and choices don’t just change the world around us; they change our very selves. They form habits. I become accustomed to eating lots of donuts, or to watching telly for three straight hours, or to lying to my friends, or to ….

This is why the real question is not, How long will the pleasure last? The question is, Is this pleasure really good?

Maybe more accurately, the question is, What kind of good is this thing that I desire? Is it an important good? Is it something that will help me be more myself? Or is it only good for a part of me – my tongue, or my eyes, or my self-image? Is it good for a part, but bad for the whole of me?

These are the questions that lead to virtue.

Open me!

I had a great conversation with a friend this morning. She pointed out to me that none of us choose to be here – either in the sense of being born in the first place, or where we happen to be in a job or family or what not. My situation in life is not something I have much control over, and most of it I have absolutely no control over.

And I realized that, till recently anyway, I have been harboring resentment about that. It made me feel powerless and frustrated. I wanted more control. I wanted to be where I chose to be, rather than where I was.

But there’s another way of looking at it: my life, and my situation in life is a gift. It’s both a gift to me, in that there is a great deal of good – comfort, love, friendship, and so on – in my life; and it’s a gift to others, in that I have good things to give to the people I encounter every day.

Yep, I’m God’s gift to the world.

But then again, so is everyone else. You’re God’s gift to me, for example. So it’s not that big a deal.

Anyway, I just realize that I need to shift my attitude from resentment, which is focused on what I don’t have, to gratitude, which is focused on what I do have. And that’s more realistic anyway: what I do have is real, but what I don’t have is a product of my imagination.

Well, are you?

Matthew Archibold, whom I only know from his blogging, wrote a post entitled “Atheists love you. They just don’t know why.” Therein he describes the impossibility of deriving a transcendent ethic from a materialist worldview. Here’s a snippet:

I have to wonder from what philosophical grounding does Dawkins’ altruism emanate? Why is other human life worth anything if there is no God? From what philosophical groundwork is he basing his good works on? Dawkins, it would seem to me, hasn’t defined his terms and is only borrowing our definition of “good.” Because without our definitions he’d have to ask the question, “What is good without God?” And that’s something I haven’t seen answered yet.

Atheists and agnostics and skeptics – oh my!

Let me say up front that I (partly) agree with Archibold’s conclusion. But I think his reasoning is too muddy to pass muster, and therefore is not very useful.

Aristotle defines good as “that at which all things aim” or, essentially, the object of desire. This is not the hedonist manifesto it first appears to be; rather, it is saying that our desire is like a sense calibrated to detect goodness in the way that our eyes are calibrated to detect light.

In other words, according to Aristotle, goodness is a real thing out in the world that we can experience directly and point to.

Now, Aristotle certainly thought that gods, and a Prime Mover above the gods, existed. So he was no atheist in that respect. But his notion of God (with a capital G) was so distant as to be unrecognizable as the Christian Trinity. One could perhaps argue that it was closer to the Muslim Allah, but the Muslims never really took to Aristotle’s notions of God, so that’s debatable. And the Hindu Brahman is even more transcendent – and impersonal, to boot – than Aristotle’s ideas.

And yet, all these traditions have a notion of “good” that is pretty much the same thing. Aristotle’s definition makes sense, even if people would tweak it in one way or another.

So I would say that Dawkins isn’t borrowing the concept of “good” from religion generally or from Christianity specifically. Nor the concept of giving aid, nor the notion of virtue. After all, it’s not hard to find examples of altruistic atheists from various points in history.

What is good without God?

But I said above that I basically agreed with his conclusion, that morality and virtue is impossible without God. Here’s why.

As soon as we encounter something, say, a bowl of oatmeal, one of the things that happens is desire (or the flip side of the coin, aversion). It’s an instantaneous judgment once we recognize it as oatmeal: we want it or we don’t. Can’t help it. It’s part of being human.

We also desire abstract things, immaterial things, like justice or wisdom. As soon as we form the concept in our minds, we label it as “good” or “bad”.

Now, at this point, a strictly materialist universe is out the window as far as I see. Where, in a strictly materialist universe, does the experience of anything “immaterial” come from? How can there be abstraction if there is nothing abstract in reality?

But beyond that, I’m also strongly of the school that nothing comes from nothing. So, wherever this world came from, however it was formed, it had to come from some principle at least as capable of abstraction and desire as we are. Which, more or less, is what Aristotle meant by God (with a capital G).

Note that I’m not saying anyone has to believe in God to be virtuous. Nor am I saying that any one religion is wrong (though I’m happy to discuss Christianity privately with anyone). Just saying that desire indicates to me that goodness is real, and that it has to come from somewhere, just like everything else.