Category: Virtues and Vices
-
The Strength of a Weak Will
A will too weak to resist temptation is yet strong enough to suborn the intellect's rationalization of the misdeed.
-
The Importance of Self-Control
There is so much to learn from the Trayvon Martin affair. One 'take-away' is the importance of self-control. If Martin had been taught, or rather had learned, to control himself he would most likely be alive today. But he didn't. He blew his cool when questioned about his trespassing in a gated community on a rainy…
-
The Theological Virtues and the Scientistic Virtues
The theological virtues are three: faith, hope, and charity. The scientistic virtues are two: faith and hope. The scientistic types, pinning their hopes on future science, are full of faith in things unseen, things that are incomprehensible now but will, they hope, become comprehensible in the fullness of time. They thirst less for justice and…
-
Courage and Content
There are courageous souls who will say publically what others think but are afraid to say. True. But the courageousness of the saying does not underwrite the truth of what is said. Courage does not validate content. Muhammad Atta and the 9/11 terrorists had the courage of their false and murderous convictions. As a corollary,…
-
Conservatives and Prudence
The fourth of Russell Kirk's Ten Conservative Principles reads: Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative…
-
Vices Vitiated
It can happen that as a man becomes weaker, he is better able to weaken the grip of his weaknesses. Having less energy for their implementation, he now masters what mastered him. Vices vitiate until the body they have vitiated vitiates them in turn.
-
Intellectual Maturity
A mark of intellectual maturity is the ability to tolerate uncertainty without fleeing to dogmas that make false certainties of objective uncertainties, but also without falling into a self-vitiating relativism. The ideal is a love of truth that does not flag but also accepts no substitutes.
-
Measurement by Regrets
We are measurable by the nature of our regrets. What do you regret? Not having drunk enough good wine? Not having amassed more wealth? Not having given in to the temptation to commit adultery with willing women or men in faraway places? Or is it rather your intellectual mistakes and moral failures that you regret?…
-
Courage and Fearlessness
Courage is not fearlessness. The courageous feel fear, but master it, unlike the cowardly who are mastered by it. To feel no fear in any of life's situations is to fail to perceive real dangers. The fearless are foolish. It is therefore inept to praise the courageous as fearless: their virtue, which one presumably intends…
-
A School of Humility?
Perhaps we are here to be taught humility. Some indications that this could be so: 1. War is endless and ubiquitous at every level and there is nothing much we can do about it. A 'war to end all wars" in Woodrow Wilson's claptrap phrase would be a war that put an end to humanity. …
-
Why are People So Easy to Swindle?
People are so easy to swindle because the swindler has as accomplices the victim's own moral defects. When good judgment and moral sense are suborned by lust or greed or sloth or vanity or anger, the one swindled participates willingly in his own undoing. In the end he swindles himself. How is it, for example, that…
-
False Modesty
To appear modest, some of us preface our remarks with, "Correct me if I'm wrong." But we say it only when we know we are not.
-
Negativity Breeds Negativity
Negative people elicit negative responses from others. So they suffer twice: from their own negativity and from the negativity they cause.
-
A Use of Old Age
Old age is a good time for the continence whose practice was too difficult in younger days. But wait too long, and your vices will abandon you before you abandon them. Scant is the merit of continence born of incapacity.
-
Preach What You Practice!
Liberals who have amounted to something in life through advanced study, hard work, deferral of gratification, self-control, accepting responsibility for their actions and the rest of the old-fashioned virtues are often strangely hesitant to preach these conservative virtues to those most in need of them. These liberals live Right and garner the benefits, but think…