Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
If a noble man becomes aware of my moral defects, he is saddened, disappointed, disillusioned perhaps. But the base man reacts differently: he is gleeful, pleased, reassured. "So he isn't better than me after all! Good!"
The noble seek those who are above them so that they can become like them. The base deny that anyone could be above them.
Must not the materialist, the mortalist hope that bodily death is the absolute end as death draws near? For he has lived as if it is. He has made no provision for anything else. He has decided that this life is all there is and has lived accordingly. He hopes he is in for no surprise. If he has lived in ways commonly regarded as evil, in the manner of a Saddam Hussein, say, surely he hopes that in the end there is no good and evil but only flimsy and fleeting human opinions.
So the mortalist too has his hope. He hopes for annihilation at death. He does not, after all, know that he is slated for annihilation. So he must hope. He has faith and hope. And love? He loves this world so much that he cannot allow even the possibility of another to distract his love.
These then are the mortalist's 'theological virtues.'
Companion post: Mortalism
Near the end of Richard Weaver's essay, "Life Without Prejudice," he quotes Milton:
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and
unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but
slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run
for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence
into the world; we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies
us is trial, and trial is by that which is contrary.
The passage bears comparison with Theodore Roosevelt's remarks about being in the arena.
I like especially the last sentence of the Milton quotation. We are born corrupt, not innocent. We are not here (mainly) to improve the world, but (mainly) to be improved by it. The world's a vale of soul-making. Since this world is a vanishing quantity, it makes little sense to expend energy trying to improve it: when your house is burning down, you don't spruce up the facade. You don't swab the decks of a sinking ship. It makes more sense to spend time and effort on what has a chance of outlasting the transitory. This world's use is to build something that outlasts it.
But this will, pace Milton, require some flight from the world into the cloister where perhaps alone the virtues can be developed that will need testing later in the world.
A while back we had to deal with a difficult person. Afterwards, wanting to praise me for my patience, my wife said, "Thank you for trying to be patient." At that I lost my patience. "I wasn't trying to be patient, I was succeeding!" Until that moment.
From the pen of E. M. Cioran:
Indolence saves us from prolixity and thereby from the shamelessness inherent in production.
The aphorism is from Drawn and Quartered.
Is all production vain and shameless? Perhaps not if one keeps one's productions to oneself. But writing books, articles and blog posts is not just production, but publishing, making public. Is publishing mere vanity and self-promotion?
In given cases it can be. And whether one of those cases is my case is not for me to decide. But surely it would be absurd to claim that all publishing by anyone is mere vanity and shameless self-promotion. Take the books of John Searle. He thinks he has solved the mind-body problem. He has done no such thing. Yet his books are enormously rich and stimulating despite some error and confusion. I am glad he has written his many books and made his contribution to our common ongoing philosophical quest. He has given me many hours of pleasure and elevated thought.
All living is self-asserting. But there is self-assertion and there is self-assertion. Personal assertion in the service of the impersonal truth is more than mere personal assertion. Thereby is vanity substantiated and shamelessness redeemed.
David Brooks makes some good points in The Vigorous Virtues, but ends on a silly and naive note:
Finally, there is the problem of the social fabric. Segmented societies do not thrive, nor do ones, like ours, with diminishing social trust. Nanny-state government may have helped undermine personal responsibility and the social fabric, but that doesn’t mean the older habits and arrangements will magically regrow simply by reducing government’s role. For example, there has been a tragic rise in single parenthood, across all ethnic groups, but family structures won’t spontaneously regenerate without some serious activism, from both religious and community groups and government agencies.
First of all, no one thinks that a reduction in the role of government "will magically regrow . . . the older habits and arrangements." So that was a silly thing to write. Such a reduction is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of a reversal of American decline. Second, only a liberal could believe that government activism could lead to a flourishing of the 'vigorous virtues' of self-reliance, personal responsibility, industriousness and a passion for freedom. Action is required, but at the level of the individual, the family, the neighbohood, the community, the church, the school.
These virtues are what make good government possible. The notion that government can inculcate them is silly. The inculcation occurs primarily in the family. But what does government do? It undermines the family.
On a positive note, David Brooks is a very entertaining and mainly sane writer and proof that the leftist rag-of-record, the NYT, hasn't completely gone to hell on its opinion pages.
Your recent posts on temptation got me thinking (again) about a problem I've wrestled with a long time. I'm a Christian minister and I've long thought about a tension between Jesus Christ's focus on intentions and sin in the internal life of man and the Christian conviction summed up in Hebrews 4:15 that Jesus was tempted in all the ways that we are but did not sin. I accept Jesus' injunction against (for instance) lusting after a person in one's heart and being angry at a person as sinful mental states or attitudes. I know from many of your past posts that you, too, are sympathetic with such a view. I believe that attitudes and intentions can be sinful as well as actions, and no doubt I get that from my Christianity.But it seems to me that to be tempted is at least in part to (for instance) 'lust after a woman in your heart'. To be angry at someone is to be tempted to act against them. To be attracted to a woman and think about (say) cheating on my wife is to be tempted to cheat. But isn't that lusting after her in my heart? This creates a problem with the view that Jesus was sinless and indeed has often made me question that particular doctrine. How could Jesus be tempted 'in all ways' that we are and yet not sin, since it seems that to be tempted is to adopt, if only for a moment, the attitudes he labels as sinful? I've never come up with a satisfactory answer to this question, so I was wondering what you might think of it.
Is it built into the very concept of temptation that if one is tempted to do something or leave something undone that the act or ommission is morally wrong? I should think so. This is not to say that in ordinary English 'temptation' is not used in looser ways. For example, 'I am tempted to answer my opening question in the affirmative.' Or, 'I am tempted to take some of my cash and buy precious metals.' These are loose uses of 'tempt' and cognates. I am here concerned with the strict use, the moral use. Accordingly, it is by my lights a conceptual truth, and thus a necessary truth, that if one is tempted to do X or forego doing Y, then the act or the omission is morally wrong.
So, strictly speaking, to be tempted to do something is to be tempted to do something wrong. One cannot be tempted to do the right thing, or the good thing, or what one ought to do. This is nonsense: 'The floozy at the Kitty Kat lounge shook her comely ass in my face thereby tempting me to go home to my wife.' If there is temptation in this situation, it is the temptation to dally with the floozy. There is no temptation in the desire to be faithful to one's spouse or in the even stronger desire to engage in sexual intercourse with her.
Nor can one be tempted to do something morally insignificant, i.e., morally neutral. 'Home fries or hash browns' in normal circumstances is not a morally significant choice. I cannot be temped either way.
I am inclined, though not tempted, to say that the worst form of temptation is the temptation to think that it doesn't matter morally what one does or leaves undone, that the moral point of view is illusory, that morality is buncombe, conventional at best, not grounded in rerum natura. Lacking a better name for this I will call it 'meta-temptation in order distinguish it from such first-order temptations as the temptation to commit adultery or to shoot my neighbor's barking dog.
Meta-temptation is the worst form of temptation because one who succumbs to the temptation to reject the objective validity of the moral point view has removed the context in which dalliance with floozies, paying one's debts, not murdering one's rivals, etc. are morally evaluable. Such a person 'beyond morality' may have prudential reasons for doing this and refraining from that, but not strictly moral reasons.
But if meta-temptation is a form of temptation, strictly speaking, then rejecting the moral point of view is itself immoral. Rejecting it is immoral, however, only if the moral POV is objectively valid and binding. If it is without validity, then it cannot be immoral to reject it. And if it is invalid, then what appears to be temptation cannot really be temptation, and the bite of conscience that accompanies the meta-temptation to reject the moral POV is illusory and not revelatory of any moral truth.
Nothing I have said resolves the question of the objective validitiy/invalidity of the moral point of view. I myself find it impossible to shake off the thought of its objective validity. Its objective validity is subjectively certain to me. That inability of mine is, however, arguably consistent with the illusoriness of the moral POV. And so my subjective certainty is not objective certainty — even to me!
I suspect that here as elsewhere one must in the end simply decide what one will believe and how one will live. You are fooling yourself if you think you will come up with a knock-down argument proof against every objection and acceptable to all able and sincere investigators. Examine the question throughly and then decide. Once you have decided, don't let your decision be overturned lightly. What you have resolved upon in your best hours should not be put in jeopardy by passing fears and doubts.
Talk-show host Dennis Prager is a fount of wisdom. I recommend his Happiness Hour to you, and the rest of his show as well. But I just heard him say on the Happiness Hour segment of his show, "jealousy slash envy." I beg to differ. I see a distinction between the two. See my Envy, Jealousy, and <i>Schadenfreude</i>.
Distinctions are good so long as they cut the bird of reality at the joints. The more the better.
It is useful to suppose oneself composed of a lower and a higher self. Much good comes from denying the former, good that accrues to the latter.
Companion post: William James on Self-Denial.
The better people are hard on themselves. The exemplify the anti-Bukowski property: they try. They set themselves difficult tasks and strive to complete them. They make intellectual, moral, spiritual, and physical demands of themselves. They are alive to the discrepancy between what they are and what they ought to be.
But they also know how to relax and enjoy life. Be hard on yourself, but honor yourself and permit yourself a bit of self-congratulation at obstacles overcome and goals attained. The true conservative knows how to appreciate and enjoy — and that includes appreciating and enjoying dear old self.
Money, power, sex, and recognition form the Mighty Tetrad of human motivators, the chief goads to action here below. But none of the four is evil or the root of all evil. People thoughtlessly and falsely repeat, time and again, that money is the root of all evil. Why not say that about power, sex, and recognition? The sober truth is that no member of the Mighty Tetrad is evil or the root of all evil. Each is ambiguous: a good liable to perversion.
One might wonder about recognition especially as it shades off into fame, and beyond that, into empty celebrity. Is it really good? Surely a modicum of recognition by certain of one's fellows is necessary for human happiness. To that extent, recognition is good. But a little suffices, and more is not better. To be famous would be horrible, after the initial rush wore off. And it might even get you killed by some crazy, as witness the case of John Lennon.
1. Money is the root of all evil.
2. Love of money is the root of all evil.
3. Inordinate love of money is the root of all evil.
4. Inordinate love of money is the root of some evil.
It is easy to see that each of (1)-(3) is false, and that (4) alone is true. Money is an abstract form of wealth and wealth is obviously good. How can something good be the root of all evil? It is not even the root of some evil. It makes more sense to say that the love of money is the root of all evil. But this too is plainly mistaken. Since money is good, a certain ‘love’ or desire of it is both wise and morally legitimate. It is the inordinate love of money that bears some connection to evil. But to all evil? Surely some of the evil in the world derives from such other sources as the inordinate love of power, sex, and fame. Therefore, the most we can say with a show of plausibility is that the inordinate love of money is at the root of some evil.
An inordinate love is an excessive love, a love unhinged and unbalanced. One form of excess consists in taking for an end in itself what can only be viewed as a means. Thus the miser’s mistake is in taking money to be an end in itself when it can only be a means.
Generalizing the opening quartet yields:
A. X is the root of all evil.
B. Love of X is the root of all evil.
C. Inordinate love of X is the root of all evil.
D. Inordinate love of X is the root of some evil.
I claim that whatever one plugs in for ‘X’ — whether it be money, property, progeny, power, influence, sex, fame, knowledge, alcohol, tobacco, firearms — results in a pattern of three falsehoods and one truth. You may verify this for yourself. Or else present me with a counterexample.
One conclusion I draw is that evil has no one root. So one should not speak of the root of evil. Evil has many roots corresponding to our many inordinate loves. Since there is no one root of all evil, the eradication of evil is no simple matter. Or if there is a single root, it lies not in things desired, but in the disordered human heart. Only metanoia, a change of heart/mind, could eradicate evil, assuming evil can be uprooted.
Wait too long to develop self-control and you may find that your vices have abandoned you before you have had a chance to abandon them. In divorces of all kinds it is better to be the one who sends packing rather than the one sent packing.
The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude. Can it be said in plain Anglo-Saxon? Grateful thoughts lead one to happiness. However you say it, it is true. The miserable make themselves miserable by their bad thinking; the happy happy by their correct mental hygiene.
Broad generalizations, these. They admit of exceptions, as goes without saying. He who is afflicted with Weilian malheur cannot think his way out of his misery. Don't get hung up on the exceptions. Meditate on the broad practical truth. On Thanksgiving, and every day.
Liberals will complain that I am 'preaching.' But that only reinforces my point: they complain and they think, strangely, that any form of exhortation just has to be hypocritical. Besides not knowing what hypocrisy is, they don't know how to appreciate what actually exists and provably works. Appreciation is conservative. Scratch a liberal and likely as not you'll find a nihilist, a denier of the value of what is, a hankerer after what is not, and in too many cases, what is impossible.