Virtue Quest

The original effect

Tim Burton appears to have lost his imagination.

He’s come a long way since the joy of “Beetlejuice” and the genius of “Edward Scissorhands.” Even his adaptation of “Batman” brought an originality to the superhero movie that had been sorely lacking.

But at least since “Sleepy Hollow” his films have followed a steady trend away from character and plot and toward a desperate attempt to recreate the curlicue atmosphere of the classic “The Nightmare Before Christmas”. He hasn’t bothered coming up with interesting stories, relying instead on twisting other people’s tales to suit his vertiginous vision. He’s put Johnny Depp in all sorts of white makeup (none of which matches the beauty of Edward) and he’s papier-mached or CGI-ed trees imitating the Mandelbrot set or the Golden Ratio (depending on his mood). And he’s sacrificed some truly beautiful stories to these visual allusions to his own better work.

“Alice in Wonderland” is no exception. Naturally, he had to start by making Alice older – nineteen – in order to add a touch of sex appeal and to develop a loose and unconvincing coming-of-age story in an attempt to add depth. (As if a story about a girl falling down a mile-deep rabbit hole needed to go any deeper!) He then gives Depp some erratic antics, and his muse Helena Bonham Carter (does anyone else cast her anymore?) her standard sneer-pout-sneer-pout, and his special effects department a blank check to put as many curlicues as they can into the set dressing.

To their credit, Depp as the Mad Hatter and Mia Wasikowska as Alice turn in solid performances, almost covering over the unwarranted shifts in character and the gaping plot holes. Anne Hathaway, on the other hand, was unable to transcend the absurd role of the White Queen with humanity or believability. Or maybe it was just frustration with Burton’s demand that she keep her hands constantly in the air.

Ultimately, the film fails on the level of imagination. (And yes, this is where I make the virtue connection.) Imagination requires a freedom of mind, as well as a solid grounding in reality – neither of which Burton seems able to muster any more. The closest to reality he comes is the idea that international trade is a way to get rich. But his grasp of courtship, of the tension between social expectation and personal expression, and of the nature of authority all fail to consider the human person anything other than a plot-point to be manipulated into a special-effects sequence.

Ultimately, he has no notion of the difference between good and evil. The Red Queen is arbitrary and unpleasant. The White Queen is arbitrary and (so we’re told) pleasant. But the White Queen also brews a witch’s potion without moral qualm – though she’s made some vague vow against taking life; and she shows no virtue or reason she should merit Alice’s loyalty any more than the Red Queen. Well, except that she is albino and her body is not distended by CGI.

Mr. Burton would have done much better had he taken the time to meditate on Lewis Carroll’s works, rather than mutilating them.

"But I shot a man in Reno..." or did I?

Have I mentioned how much I love the book I’m reading? The Sources of Christian Ethics by Servais Pinckaers. And it’s not just because the author’s last name sounds just like “pink hairs,” either!

A history lesson

The middle section of the book gives a quick history of major ideas in morality from Plato to the present. The very short version is that in the fourteenth century (that’s AD 1301-1400) an English Franciscan named William of Ockham (famous for “Ockham’s razor”) began pushing the theory that the will was more important than the intellect, and that freedom was the greatest of all goods – greater even than truth.

Ockham’s ideas caught on, and in the next couple hundred years transformed the way people thought about ethics and morality.

Instead of being about the pursuit of goodness, happiness, and excellence, morality became a struggle between freedom and law, between choice and obligation.

Don’t impose your morality on me!

There’s a lot packed into that history, but something that struck me very personally was that law is something imposed on me from outside, whereas virtue is something I develop from within myself.

Now, being a basically lazy man, I’ve spent vast portions of my life waiting for somebody else to make me do things. I’d put off homework till the teacher sat me down and watched me do it. At work, I would only get things done if the boss was around to make me look busy. Heck, even at home, I only bother to pick the place up if there’s company coming over.

In other words, I’ve been defining my freedom as avoiding the imposition of law – and I associated doing anything at all with the obligation of law. Even things I know are good for me, I need someone to “make” me do them.

The approach of virtue is altogether different. It recognizes that freedom is at the service of a person’s ability to act, to do stuff. And it is a person’s mind that figures out what’s good to do. The will follows the mind and moves us into action.

Right, totally abstract. Let me see if I can give an example.

An example

So I’m sitting on my bed looking at the mess that is my bedroom. Papers piling up on the desk. Clothes strewn all over the chairs and the corner of the bed – not yet on the floor, but that’ll come soon if I don’t do anything about it. A bowl and a glass from when I ate lunch in my room a week and a half ago.

But something in me says, I don’t have to clean my room. Nobody’s going to make me. You’re not the mom of me!

So, instead of cleaning my room, I read a book. Yep, The Sources of Christian Ethics. And it occured to me that I could choose to clean my room – not because someone was forcing me to, but because it was good to. I could clean my room simply because I enjoy having a clean room.

So I stood up and started clearing off my desk.

Those who cling to freedom will lose it

It’s ironic that, by clinging to a false freedom – refusing to let anybody “make” me clean my room – I actually lost a true freedom: the ability to clean my room and to enjoy it. But that’s what happens when a good thing gets put in the wrong place.

Freedom is not the highest good, and is not something to be grasped with both hands. If we hold it lightly, and use it to grow in virtue, then it blossoms itself and makes everything we do truly free.

Here I come to save the day!

I’m reading Servais Pinckaers’ The Sources of Christian Ethics, and, well, it’s full of rich material. Very thought provoking.

Something that struck me last night was the following:

The action of the Holy Spirit goes still further. Not limited to forming within us personal capacities for action, or virtues, it also engenders dispositions for receiving the spiritual inspirations and impulses needed for producing perfect works.

Obviously, he’s in the middle of relating natural morality, and the cardinal virtues that go with it, to the supernatural morality that comes with Christian grace. But almost as an aside, a throwaway, he gives a definition of virtue that I haven’t seen before:

personal capacities for action, or virtues

Now, as soon as I read it, I thought, of course! It just seems so obvious that a virtue is a person’s ability to do something well. And the only thing I would add, in order to make it a complete definition, is that a virtue properly is about living a human life well.

Now, the reason I’m so excited about this is that I’ve been struggling to articulate virtue in a positive or intriguing manner, and all the definitions that spoke of “habits” and “dispositions” and “forming character” and so on just fed into the idea that virtue is somehow dreary.

But looking at virtue as an ability, a capacity for action – that’s like Napoleon Dynamite’s bo-staff skilz. It’s like Luke Skywalker’s Jedi powers. It is, to use a word from my youth, AWESOME!

That said, I’m now off to my secret lair to defend the world against the forces of evil. Excelsior! (which is olde-tyme speak for “up, up, and away!”)

I, the party of the first part....

I was listening to the radio on the way into work this morning and heard a story about how some scientists are afraid they’ll have to throw out the past eight years’ worth of research on human embryonic stem cells.

The reason? It seems that proper consent was not obtained for some of the stem cell lines that President Bush approved back in 2001. I can only assume they were talking about these objections from a UCSF team.

I had to laugh. They can’t do the research because they don’t have a signed permission slip?

Yet these same people pooh-pooh those who object on the grounds that the embryos are human lives being destroyed. Because that’s just not an important question.

Consent: the sole criterion of the good?

My friend Mark likes to point out that our culture seems to have rejected every virtue except tolerance, and every standard of goodness or value except informed consent. He notes that neither of these are sufficient to base a human society on; in fact, they both ultimately lead to a society that collapses upon itself.

I think the problem is that we have, by and large, accepted unquestioningly the myth that we are first and foremost individuals. A nation, a community, even a family, is presumed to be something that we enter into by choice. We have a “social contract,” and all our relationships suddenly have the nature of a contract. They are negotiated, agreed to, and disputes are adjudicated based on the terms of the contract as understood by the parties.

No wonder we have so many lawsuits. No wonder politics has become the common religion practiced by Americans. No wonder the only solutions we can come up with to any problems are legal ones.

No wonder we pay more attention to a medical form than to a human life.

Why human nature is important

On the other hand, all the ancient and medieval thinkers knew that the human person is a social animal. “No man is an island,” as John Donne put it. We cannot be born without other people. We cannot survive without a family. We cannot accomplish any tasks without relying on others to provide what we cannot provide for ourselves.

And we cannot be fully human without other people to converse with, to laugh with, to play with, to work with. We actually are least human when we are isolated as individuals.

When we forget this, when we base our entire sense of goodness on my own individual consent – as if I were utterly independent of the rest of the world – then we lose sight of what is truly good for the human person: love, friendship, collaboration, joy and peace. All these are gifts; they cannot be legislated and are not subject to a contract. We have no right to them. The only consent required is the consent to receive them from those who love us.

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.

Just get it done

One of my friends describes her life as “the daily grind.” She’s worried that she doesn’t have the joy or enthusiasm for things that she used to. She feels tied down, restricted by the work of just maintaining stuff in her life: job, home, relationships, and so on.

My experience is totally different: I’ve been bouncing all over the place so much in the past few years that I’m soaking up stability and regularity wherever I can find it. It’s comforting to me to punch the clock at work, to have a morning routine, to do things like fill the car with gas or hit the grocery store on the way home.

But I have some distance from the chaos of the last couple years, well, I’ll probably get tired of the daily grind myself. And maybe my friend will find some new inspiration in her life.

The only constant is change

The trick is to find some way to happiness, some way to excellence, regardless of mood or life circumstances or whatever. And this is where virtue comes in.

Virtue is constancy in the midst of change.

Virtue holds up the goal, the ideal, the good, and shows the path to strive for it. The good, happiness, never changes; even though the way to pursue it often does.

Sometimes it takes courage; sometimes it takes self-restraint. Sometimes it means stepping back to a more objective distance; and sometimes it means jumping into immediate action.

Sometimes virtue is sticking with a person through thick and thin, even when you don’t feel like it. And other times, virtue is making a change, even when you’re overwhelmed by fear.

How to know the right thing to do

It’s easiest to see right and wrong in the rear-view mirror: hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. But there are a few things we can do in the moment to make better decisions – even if they’re not always the best:

1. Know the goal: take some time regularly to sort through your priorities. Check your list with someone you trust. Give yourself a clear, concrete image of what you’re aiming for
2. Take inventory: before making a difficult decision, look around and double-check the facts of the situation. Ask if there’s anything you’re missing. Ask if you’re assuming something that isn’t really there.
3. Listen to your heart: if something feels very right, or very wrong, there’s got to be a reason for it. Look for that reason. Don’t dismiss it.
4. Follow your head: your heart can give you good information, but it makes lousy decisions. Leave the actual decision to your reason. Ask yourself how you can move toward your goal, toward happiness, toward excellence, in this situation here and now. And, if you’ve gathered all the facts, trust your reasoning. Do what you have concluded is good, no matter how you feel about it.

For me, it’s the last two that always are the hardest. My feelings cloud my thinking; or my thinking pushes down my feelings. But I keep trying to learn from my mistakes, to go back and try to do better next time. Even small progress is better than no progress at all.

Distinct, though not divorced

Aristotle says that the point of his book on ethics is to lay the groundwork for politics. He, like most of the Greeks from what I can tell, had a very State-centered view of the world.

But I think there are a couple important points here.

First, personal ethics really does have public implications. How I act in private cannot be separated from how I act in public and how the rest of society acts.

Second, Aristotle’s insight isn’t quite so anti-individual as it seems; after all, he sees that the human person is a social creature, that no man is an island, that it is not good to be alone. So, looking for the good life, he necessarily has to look at the life of the community.

Government and society

The poster I’m using to illustrate this post comes from a Conservative Party campaign in Great Britain. It’s a kind of retraction of a saying of Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative Prime Minister in the 1980’s. She once said, “There is no such thing as society.”

This poster turns that statement on its head by pointing out a distinction that we tend to blur in the 21st century – at least, in the English-speaking world. I can’t count the number of times when, in conversation, I’ve mentioned that “society” or “the whole community” has responsibility for some aspect of life – health care, to take a current example.

My interlocutors often would jump in with either, “No! The government should stay out of health care!” or “Yes! That’s exactly why we need a single-payer program!”

But government is not the same thing as the community.

Instead, it seems to me that people assume government will take responsibility for the problems and duties of the community. I’m not convinced that’s the case.

Neither right nor left

Here’s the thing: the so-called political right has a point in saying that a big government or “nanny state” tends to encourage irresponsible behavior by citizens by absolving them of personal responsibility for themselves and for one another.

And the so-called political left has a point in saying that government is the only entity which really comprehends the entire populace, and so can serve those who fall through the gaps in other social structures.

But while both of these “sides” see a real problem, neither seems to know where the solution lies. The right tends to want government to serve the “private sector”, meaning business; and the left tends to want the private sector to become a branch of government. But neither focus on the truly personal.

Personal virtue

It seems to me that any system, whether in government or business or anything else, is doomed to failure if it bases itself on a fantasy rather than on a reality. And one fantasy is that a system, in and of itself, will make the world better – no matter what quality of people are in the system.

But the fact is, human nature tends to find loopholes and gaps and ways to “work” any and every system it encounters. The answer is not a new system. The answer is to encourage each and every person to strive for excellence, for goodness, for virtue. The answer is to focus on the person.

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.

Pure concentrated goodness?

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!

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.