Virtue Quest

This is not a natural love

I don’t like to talk much about sex, partly because I’m ashamed of my own weaknesses in this area, and partly because any restriction on sexual “expression” or activity is seen as “backward” (and I’m vain enough to want to be seen as progressive), and partly because sex is just plain everywhere already and I don’t particularly want to add to the mess.

But what with the foolish hooplah over Pope Benedict’s out-of-context statement on condoms, and in light of some personal questions from a few different friends, and considering a fascinating conversation over at Just Thomism, I thought I’d toss my tuppence into the ring.

Human nature

The human person is made for love.

That sentence has many meanings, because “love” has many meanings. Love could mean, broadly, (more…)

The covers won't protect me from reality

Some days I just have trouble rolling out of bed in the morning. It’s not just laziness – though that’s one chunk of the problem; it’s wondering what in the world is worth getting out of bed for. It’s a deep-seated pessimism about life, the universe, and even God that has earned me the nickname “Mr. Cranky.”

In more classical terms, it’s the deadly sin of sloth, or tristitia.

What it really is, the foundation, the root of it all, is a lie: the lie that bad things are real and good things are not.

Shutting my eyes to reality

The fact is, the only real things in the world are good. Food is good; friends are good; work is good. It’s only when something is missing, or damaged, or twisted that we call anything bad. Bad, or evil, is just the fact that something good isn’t where it ought to be.

It takes a certain blindness, or at least a distorting squint, to see only the bad – the thing that isn’t really there at all – and to overlook the good thing that is there.

For example, I’m currently writing a book about my grandmother. Every time I sit down to work on it, I keep thinking about how stupid my words are, how clumsy the phrasing, how inadequate they are to capture her personality and story.

What I’m missing are (at least) three fundamental goods:

1. I have a fascinating grandmother to write a book about
2. I put words on the page, that really convey some meaning
3. I have an idea of what this book could be, of the good story that it could convey

And maybe there are more goods than these that I’m overlooking.

The point is, I’m in the rotten habit of ignoring what’s good and focusing on what’s missing; then I take what’s missing and call that reality. That’s a lie, and a sin, and a vice.

Prying my eyes open

I find, for myself, the best antidote is a good slap in the face, or a kick in the butt. (As a friend pointed out, God gave us butts so he’d have somewhere to kick us.) I need a sharp encounter with reality.

Even a real evil will do: hunger is a great motivator to get out of bed. It’s a great motivator to put inadequate words on a page, or to hand in that imperfect resume, or to produce that good-enough widget. And it’s the least of all the possible motivators in the world.

A real good is an even better reason to live and to act. My book may not be a Pulitzer winner, but it will tell something of Grandma’s story, it will convey something of her goodness to people who wouldn’t otherwise know anything about her. And that’s better than nothing. Something is always better than nothing.

The mistake of sloth

Sloth, on the other hand, thinks that nothing is better than something. It’s the illusion that nothing is something easy and comfortable, like sleep. But sleep is a positive good; it’s a real act that restores and refreshes.

Nothing is like hunger: it’s a great void, a need without fulfillment. Nothing is a hellish wretchedness; but sloth denies this truth until it’s too late – until I’ve missed that appointment or bungled that opportunity; until the good that was there is damaged or lost.

The English journalist G.K. Chesterton quipped, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” In other words, something is always – always! – better than nothing. That’s partly why I write this blog; because even if it’s bad, it’s at least words written. And I’m no kind of writer if I’m not writing words, even bad words. Even bad words are better than no words at all.

Eat, drink, and be merry!

Among the pungent foods, garlic stands out as my favorite. But onions hold a close second – especially sauteed or, still better, caramelized onions. This simple bulb hides an almost overwhelming variety of flavors that march forth in orderly fashion as it basks in low, slow heat: from bright and acrid to mild and savory to utterly buttery and ultimately to sweet in a way so different than every other sweet I’ve tasted that it’s almost a misnomer to call it sweet.

So when I was looking for a good burger the other night, I found the local restaurant Blazing Onion irresistible.

Let’s start with the virtues on display, right from walking in the door. They tell you where the beef comes from: Northwest raised, no hormones, just good local cows. They tell you what their proprietary “BOB” sauce contains: mayo, pepper sauce, spices. They even tell you that their “Butter Burger” is uber-high in cholesterol. So, they’ve got honesty down. I like that.

The staff joked around with each other and with me. They clearly know each other, like each other, and like working together. I like signs of humanity in a business.

And then there’s the creativity of the menu. Sure, they have the standard bacon cheeseburger, the requisite BBQ and bleu cheese burger. But they also have a Thai Peanut Burger with shredded cabbage and daikon radish; a Greek Burger with olive tapanade, pepperincini, and sun dried tomato; and burgers of buffalo and wild boar meat. In addition to the burgers, they have proper entrees such as salmon, sirloin steak, and fettuccine. Appetizers include a shrimp basket.

But all of this is before you even order. It was the quality of the food that convinced me to write a blog entry about this place.

I ordered their signature “BOB,” or Blazing Onion Burger. First thing I noticed was that they don’t skimp on the onions. Probably a 1:1 ration of onion to beef on that sandwich. And the onions had been sauteed to perfect butteriness. Most places that offer “grilled onions” seem to think it means heating the onions till they’re soft, and that’s good enough. Here, they clearly know what flavor they want from their onions, and they’re willing to take the time to prepare them correctly. Thank you!

Then the beef itself. One bite and I knew that they had chosen their meat with the same care with which they’d prepared their onions. There was no pink in the burger, yet the rich beef flavor emerged unscathed, which speaks of a good cow to start with and of cooks who know how not to burn it on the grill.

I don’t want to run on too long, so suffice it to say that the fries, the sauces, the French onion soup, and the couple other burger options I sampled from my friends plates (the Thai and the Greek) confirmed that Blazing Onion is more than a single trick pony.

I have only one critique: with burgers so bodacious, a toothpick or a paper wrap to hold it all together would have been helpful. But then again, I did enjoy licking my fingers when I was done, so maybe they planned that as well.

For those of you not blessed with a residence in the Puget Sound area, fear not: they’re planning to expand nationwide over the coming decade. When it does come to your area, do check it out, and see just how good virtue can be!

The view from the top makes it look so easy!

More goodness from Pinckaers’ The Sources of Christian Ethics!

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

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

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

Beginning in virtue

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

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

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

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

Progress in virtue

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

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

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

Perfect virtue

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

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

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

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

And that’s a goal worth striving for!

Just one little bite ...

I was reading an article called “The Difference between Needs and Wants” which to me seemed useful, but not quite on target.

The author cites Aristotle as equating “needs” with “real goods,” i.e., “the things that every human requires for the pursuit of happiness,” and equating “wants” with “apparent goods,” which sometimes are actually bad for people. He goes on to describe how focusing on needs rather than wants will lead to a fuller, happier life.

What’s good and what’s bad?

Don’t get me wrong: I think the article gives basically good advice. But I think he over-simplifies the whole nature of human desire and the objects of our desires. And that can give the wrong idea that “wants” are somehow not “real goods” for us.

One of the fundamentals of Aristotle’s view of nature is that everything that exists is good because existence itself is good. So, if anything exists at all, then it is at least in that minimal way good.

More than that, the idea of “bad” or “evil” is not equal to the idea of “good.” What I mean is that goodness is a real, positive thing that exists. “Badness” or “evil” is not something that is real in itself; it is the absence or the distortion of some real thing – some good thing.

A good example is blindness. Blindness is not a thing in itself; it is only the distortion or destruction of sight. Sight is real, and good. Blindness is nothing except the absence of sight.

Virtue and human desire

Now, desire (and its partner, aversion) is the means by which we sense good and the lack of good. Your eyes see a square of a dark-brown color, and your nose smells a unique combination of sweet and bitter, and your fingers feel a hard smooth texture. In your mind, you combine all these senses into an understanding of the thing itself: a chocolate bar.

But it is desire which judges that chocolate bar to be good or bad. Or rather, it is desire that identifies what is good in the chocolate bar, and what is lacking.

So, you may find yourself with conflicting desires: you know it tastes good, but you also know it will give you a sugar high and subsequent crash, or that it is fattening. In other words, you desire both the flavor of chocolate and the benefits of health.

Thankfully, desire is not the end of the story: our ability to reason enables us to sort out the various good things that we desire, and to make a decision. The trick is to let ourselves be informed by, but not driven by, our desires.

Needs and wants, real and apparent goods

So, everything that we desire is a “real” good, insofar as it exists and has some kind of goodness that we recognize. And everything we desire is an “apparent” good, because it is a good that appears to us. There are goods that we don’t easily recognize (e.g., the value of doing your taxes,) and there are goods whose limitations we overlook (e.g., having another drink with that cute somebody); but desire is always seeking something good.

Prudence means that we let reason sort through all those good things we desire, and search them to figure out if we’re overlooking some limitation or even falsehood about the good we desire. Prudence also applies labels like “need” to goods that we literally cannot live without. Prudence weighs the goods we’d have to give up (time, money, a good night’s sleep) against the good thing we want.

Then, through the virtue of prudence, we can make decisions that we can honestly say are good.

Aristotle’s idea of virtue is that it is the means to an end; virtue is the way to achieve a goal. In Greek-speak, this is called teleology, since telos is the Greek word for “end” or “goal”. Here’s how he puts it:

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. (N. Ethics I.1)

If, then, there is some end [i.e., goal] of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this) … clearly this must be the good and the chief good. (N. Ethics I.2)

Now, the “chief good” of people is usually called “happiness” (which, in Greek, is eudaimonea, literalistically good-spiritedness, good-life). He points out that, while everyone seems to agree on the word, many different ideas of what the word means are floating around, ranging from physical pleasure to social honors to philosophical contemplation. It’s important to know what happiness is so that we can know how to use virtue to attain it, just as it’s important for a plumber to know how the pipes are supposed to work so that he knows what tools he needs to install or repair them.

Don't worry

Happiness: more than a feeling

Now, I usually think of happiness as a word to describe how I’m feeling at the moment, as in, “I’m happy to see my friends” or “I’m unhappy that my car has broken down.” But Aristotle is talking about something more permanent. Essentially, he says that happiness is being fully human, of fulfilling one’s nature as a person.

That means, of course, that we need to know what human nature is. It’s certainly a part of human nature to have emotions, and to have physical senses that can receive pleasure or pain, and even (going to the most basic level) just to be alive. But these are things that we share with other creatures in the world, such as plants or animals.

What sets human beings apart, for Aristotle, is that we can reason. More than just thinking logically, this includes the ability to make decisions. That is, it means we have free will. And that means that our happiness depends on our freely chosen actions.

Virtue and happiness for all

So it’s obvious that virtue is all about making good decisions, or, in other words, about choosing to act according to our nature rather than against it. This is why, for example, so many moralists have warned people against acting like animals: if we follow our emotions and ignore our intellect, we’re acting against our own nature, and won’t find happiness.

But there’s one other aspect of human nature that comes into play: our social nature. As John Donne put it, “No man is an island, entire of itself.” None of my actions, no matter how private, can be confined only to myself without affecting others. My simplest thoughts change my choice of words, my body language, my emotional reactions.

This means that the happiness I seek is not merely my own, but is the fulfillment of the human community as a whole. If anyone weeps, I must weep with him, and if any rejoices I share that joy.