"The Protestant influence on modern ideas about religion has made sincerity and good intentions defining features of good religiosity"

That's from this article on religion in the movies of the Coen brothers.

It's an issue that has interested me ever since my first girlfriend criticized members of her church who had memorized the creed and recited it by rote. She thought it meant nothing unless they read it and thought about the meaning of each phrase as they said it. She was an Anglican girl of a low, or Protestant, bent. She'd been a very pious girl who taught Sunday school but had already begun to drift away when I met her. She had a copy of Foxe's Book of Martyrs on her bedside table.

The fact that I know what was on her bedside table is not as incriminating as it might seem. She had very little in the way of parental supervision, her mother had died and she and her father had become somewhat estranged in the aftermath following a very difficult death. But even left alone to socialize in any room of her house, with no one else under the roof, we were shockingly innocent.

We were, however, headed in different directions. She was ion her way to losing her faith and I, a cradle Catholic but not terribly convinced, was on my way to finding mine.

That experience is not, in itself, enough to cast doubt on the value of sincerity in religion. It takes a lot more. That said, I think the evidence is there to do it.

Philosophical "complexity"

I'm not making this up, the subtitle of the article really is"Is the philosopher’s complexity enough to excuse his overt anti-Semitism?". Because it's oh so much nicer when the person who hates you is complex?

Heidegger strikes me as a pretty simple proposition. His writing is dark and needlessly elaborate but  that is the mark of the simple-minded thug doing philosophy. The complexity lies in his defenders who endlessly tie themselves in knots trying to dress this nasty piece of work such that no one will notice what a crass little whore he was.

Notice, for example, this move from the article under the subtitle noted above:

But with Heidegger, sweetness and light were never part of the package, and that was the key to his power. Being and Time was the first book of philosophy I had read that seemed to understand the human condition in the same way that literature did—less through abstract intellectual concepts than through the lived experience of mood. For Heidegger, existence—in German, Dasein—is grasped first and foremost not by the rational mind, but by the emotions that determine the very shape and texture of the world in which we live. The affects he dwells on are primarily “negative” ones—fear, alienation, anxiety, rather than love or joy—but he argues that these dark and disorienting moods are precisely what disclose the world to us most primally.

Do babies feel fear, alienation and anxiety? We might concede fear, although even that would be a stretch in a newborn. Anxiety and alienation, on the other hand, are not possible for the simple reason that you need a whole lot of language skills and some abstract intellectual concepts that develop along with language skills before you can experience alienation and anxiety. All by yourself in your "throwness" you experience no such thing. Only a language-using, social being can understand such emotions. Heideggerians are stealing several bases when they make this move.

And this initial trick, made so quickly that we barely notice it, has serious long-term consequences.

Being and Time is not an overtly ethical book—it has nothing to say in the traditional vocabulary of Western philosophical moralism, no use for ideas like Plato’s “the Good” or Kant’s categorical imperative. That is largely because Heidegger is not very interested in the central problem of ethics (and of politics), which is how to live with other people. For him, the key experiences and challenges of existence are individual: Alone we suffer, alone we die, and alone we must make meaning out of our fate. The highest value, then, is not goodness but authenticity; above all, authenticity in the face of death. To accept one’s actual condition of mortality and thrownness, not to flee from these difficult facts into consoling illusions and abstractions, is for Heidegger the ultimate moral achievement. As he writes, “Authentic Being-towards-death can not evade its ownmost non-relational possibility, or cover up this possibility by fleeing from it, or give a new explanation for it to accord with the common sense of ‘the they.’ ”

Well, yes, once you've cheated by smuggling in concepts like alienation and anxiety without acknowledging that these can only be learned and understood by social beings, then you can pretend that we face all this alone. And what part of not fleeing "from these difficult facts into consoling illusions and abstractions" was Heidegger's decision to become a Nazi. (There is, by the way, no evidence that he ever regretted or repented that choice.)

To the very limited extent that it does matter, it is not in the face of death but among the living that authenticity matters.

Bonus Mad Men tie in

"'She won''t get married because she has never been in love'. I think I wrote that; it was used to sell nylons." 

"For a lot of people love isn't just a slogan." 

"Oh, you mean love, you mean big lightning bolt to the heart where you can't eat and you can't work  and you just run off and get married and make babies. The reason you haven't felt it is because it doesn't exist. What you call 'love' was invented by guys like me to sell nylons." 

"Is that right?" 

 "I'm pretty sure about it. You're born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget."

That's Don Draper and Rachel Mencken from the first season. We read this dialogue and we know this guy because we've met his type before. Draper isn't telling us something about "being" when he speaks of being born alone and dying alone. It's just a clever excuse for not caring. We see that right away. Why don't we see it in Heidegger? Because of all the complexity!

Mary Magdalene

I've been away a while on retreat, just returning last weekend, which is why there hasn't been a lot of posting here. One of the things that happened while I was away was the first full feast of Mary Magdalene, which had only been a memorial until now. This created a dilemma for a lot of Catholics. On the one hand, Mary Magdalene is a saint and much beloved one. She plays a significant role in the gospels, much more significant than many apostles whose only role in the gospels is to be name-checked. On the other hand, it causes considerable uneasiness in that the move to raise her day to a full feast raises her status in a way that challenges the way people think about women and their role in the Church.

Some critics raise concerns about what this having taken so long says about the Church's treatment of women, and they are entirely right to do so. That it has taken this long to recognize her special importance is a scandal. It is still a scandal that Saint Martha day is not a feast and that her sister Saint Mary of Bethany has, who also merits a feast, for all intents and purposes, no place in the calendar.

Others resist this, fearing that elevation of Mary Magdalene and other holy women who served Jesus will open the way for female priesthood. The problem with this fear (it hardly deserves to be called an argument) is that it inadvertently undermines their side. For a male priesthood, founded on a notion of separate but equal roles, is undermined if we treat these women as second-class, and therefore not equal. To repeat, remember that all we know about for certain about saints Matthias, Bartholomew, Simon and Jude is their names and they all rate a full feast.

I think, however, there is another fear on the part of those who resist the full recognition of these holy women of the gospels and that is that it could change the way doctrine about Mary, the Mother of God is received. It does not change what is taught and believed about Mary but it could change the way it is received in the prayer and devotion of Catholics.

I'll come clean about this and admit that I think (and I very much emphasize that "I think") this would be a good thing. Mary, as was made clear by the Second Vatican Council, is a member of the church. She does not stand over and above it. Look at the calendar, however, and she has been, until this year, the only woman to rate a feast. All others receive only a memorial. When we think about feminine virtue, Mary is such a large presence as to overwhelm all others. This needs to be corrected.

I could say more and perhaps will some day.

Does Christianity have a nice guy problem?

The good folks at the Art of Manliness have begun a series on a subject near to my heart, Christianity's manhood problem. Christian churches attract more women than men and the men they do attract often seem less that manly. It's not necessarily a new issue and some might argue that it's not even a problem. Since at least the 19th century there have been churches that attracted more women than men and some of these churches were at the forefront of the movement to abolish slavery in the US and the movement to allow women to vote everywhere in the west. You could easily turn the problem around and ask not what is wrong with churches but what is wrong with the men who go to them?

I think the question should be, "Why don't men see anything in Christianity for them?" That's a question that could go either way. We might conclude that something is wrong with men that they cannot accept the message. Alternatively, we might conclude that there is something wrong with the message.

In line with the latter possibility, I wonder if the message of Christianity hasn't become what Dr. Robert A Glover calls a covert contract with life. A covert contract is an imagined deal. It's not a contract at all in that only one party knows about it. Give-to-get is a good example of a covert contract. I do something nice for someone and expect that they will return the favour. I don't actually mention this to them. You can see how that might not work out. A covert contract with life would be to generalize this and to believe that the world is set up such that things will ultimately work out well for nice guys.

A bit of interesting background, Dr. Glover used to be the pastor to a Baptist congregation. He became aware of the nice-guy syndrome when he saw it in himself. Ultimately he left the ministry and practices no faith today. He has occasionally expressed admiration for the new age, sex-and-God views of David Deida. He probably doesn't sound like a good example for any Christian man to follow.

I'd argue, however, that his book No More Mr. Nice Guy is one of the best books about manhood currently available. And much of Christian moral teaching does seem to offer exactly the sort of covert contract that Glover rightly describes as crazy. "Join our community and follow the rules and you'll be happy." For a lot of people this works out pretty well. I've seen people who had chaotic lives benefit from joining a church. On the other hand, I've seen a lot of lonely, miserable young men in Christian churches unable to connect with women. And I've heard a lot of women complain about the mopey weak men who pursue them. Is there something fundamentally wrong with modern Christianity? I think there is.

The big challenge, and something I'll explore in coming posts, is Saint Paul. He often says things that sound like nice-guy thinking: "be all things to all people" and "put others needs before your own".  The way to redeem St. Paul is, in a sense, straightforward: to argue that this isn't a covert contract but a very overt covenant with God.

I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

And that is right but it's something that is easy to forget. It's particularly easy to forget in the face of the challenges of the community. The community necessarily needs to make rules to accommodate all its members and to help everyone get along when there isn't complete agreement on what is acceptable praxis. It's easy to mix up these rules with the will of God; it's God's will that the community live in love but not necessarily his will that a certain rule about what happens when one person's ox gets gored be applied for all time in all situations.

More to come ...

At the Codfish Ball

The random number generator has given me two of the better shows from Mad Men back to back. Last weeks choice, Shut the Door, Have a Seat, was one of the very best episodes they did, possibly the best and certainly in the top three. With this week's choice it's hard to tell whether it was really as good as all that or whether it just stood out in the midst of the desert that was the last four seasons. The show lost its bearings after the third season and, while there were some good episodes like this one, it never regained its sense of purpose.

I looked up what I wrote on my other blog when the show was first broadcast and my reaction was positive. It's different to see it now with the benefit of hindsight. We know that Sally will grow up well. We know that Don will overcome the seemingly crushing barrier he is told of. We know that Pete will triumph. On the other hand, we know that Megan's choice to follow her passion will end with her being a mediocre actress and will destroy her marriage. We know that Peggy and Abe will not make a good couple. We know that Émile and Marie Calvet's marriage will fail. And, I suppose, we know that Roger and Marie will end up together. (I say, "I suppose", because, while they are a compelling couple in the long run, I find their actions in this episode unrealistic.

I think if there is one message to take from the episode it's, "Don't follow your passion". Find your direction in the challenges and opportunities that life deals you and not in silly fantasies. Probably the best part of the episode is that the impractical dreams come from the mouth of a Marxist.

It's an interesting example of hiding the truth in plain sight for most critics didn't see it coming. They only saw that lovely shot of Émile, Marie, Megan, Don and Sally all looking miserable at the end. As I was saying last week, however, Don has an amazing ability to restart that is the basis of his heroism. The important truth that shot really tells us is that Megan is a child, a woman who has never matured, and that Sally is in danger of failing in the same way.

Is the freedom to think what you want "in your head" a freedom worth having

At first glance I would think not. Freedom of thought would appear to be of little value if you cannot actually express those thoughts in words and action. And yet, here we have someone insisting on the value of being free to think what you want "in your head".




"The freedom to think or believe what you want in your head. That's the first amendment to the US constitution."

Actually, no. Here is the first amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That's very much about stuff outside your head.

It would seem that I can believe whatever I want inside my head and no one need know. I can be polite to someone while thinking they are an idiot for whom I have no respect. For a while, anyway.

And therein lies the problem with this sort of freedom. Keeping it "inside my head" would require constant vigilance. At any moment a gesture or word could give away my real beliefs.

All this talk of freedom of thought is based on a philosophical mistake that takes it that our thoughts are private. I have a complete world of meaning inside my head and I share it with you by analogy. You've experienced pain so you can imagine my pain. In fact, no such thing goes on. Nothing is naturally hidden. We have to make an effort to hide our thoughts. Normally, it's quite easy to read our thoughts from our facial expressions and posture.

We put very little effort into reading people. One of the lessons I've learned in the last decade is that you can read someone else's thoughts quite easily. All you have to do is start trying.

It's quite frightening once you start. And here we can get some idea of the terror that comes when people try to control others' thinking; when simply doing what is hoped of you is no longer enough. But this is a terror we live with all the time. Anyone who has ever worked under someone who is determined to "change the corporate culture" will know how awful it can be.

As can anyone who has been a child. Parents, with the best of intentions, try to shape their children's thinking. And they'll keep doing it well into adulthood if you don't stop them.

That said, freedom is never inside your head.

Femme noir

Here are two quotes that feature the same moral analysis of a woman's behaviour. The two quotes are from separate shows several years apart. In both a man is accusing a woman of mistaking her need to see herself as a good person with what it takes to actually be a good person.

"Because you're good and everyone else in the world is bad. You're so hurt. So brave. With your little white nose in the air and all the time you've been building a life raft." 

"Alicia, here's the thing, you like to think you're a good person, and maybe at one time you were, but we both know, you'll do whatever it takes*."

The first of those quotes is Don Draper to Betty in the last show of the third season of Mad Men. She has been saying she wants to leave him because she is unhappy with him. And she is. But she has also been preparing her exit for a long time. It's not entirely clear to us or to Betty Draper which is the real motivator. The second quote is from the second-last episode of the first season of The Good Wife. Cary is angry at Alicia because she has used her contacts in the spectacularly corrupt Chicago political machine to win a competition between the two of them for a job. Cary is bitter and speaks as a bitter man might but Alicia is also more than a little uncertain that what she did is right.

In both situations the man is in a morally ambiguous position. Don Draper's actions are far from defensible. Cary is letting his bitterness get a hold of him. Both men have also incorrectly assumed that the woman they are accusing has been using sex to get what she wants**. And yet, they both have a point. Both Betty and Alicia have a lot invested in being able to think of themselves as good and neither really is as good as the image she desperately needs to hold of herself. There is a very deep truth about female moral psychology at work here.

I've written elsewhere about film noir and how a lot of the noir classics turn on a particular twist of male moral psychology. We men tend to allow ourselves to get bewitched such that our desires become entitlements. This applies to everything we desire but the place where it is most evident is in sexual desire and neo noir films have exploited this to maximum dramatic effect. The typical male noir hero has made, a Robert Glover puts it, a covert contract with the world that if he follows the rules he should get a trouble free life and that he should get "sex". I put the scare quotes up here because sex symbolizes much else: it symbolizes a certain level of financial success and social status. Even in the unlikely event that he gets a trouble-free life he seeks, it won't be enough. He needs the recognition of being a person of status in the larger world and good lover in the privacy of his own bedroom. He can't supply those, so he needs the world to give it to him. And this desire becomes an entitlement. And that becomes his justification for now breaking the rules. He sees the denial of his entitled status as proof that the system is crooked and concludes that he is no longer morally bound by the rules.

At some point in our lives (and maybe at several points) every man does that trick to himself. And not just to himself, he causes pain to others. I think a majority of affairs are justified by the man on the grounds that, "Okay, this is wrong and I made a commitment but I'm entitled to this once in my life." Take that basic scenario and complicate it with some serious crime and you've got any one of a dozen classic film noir.

But what about women? The same scenario doesn't work. The male who does what I have described above is wrong but can remain a sympathetic character. You could not do the same thing with a female character. There are women who occasionally decide, "Okay, this is wrong and I made a commitment but I'm entitled to this once in my life." But they don't garner sympathy. It's unfair, I know, but we judge women by a different standard.

But there is a different sense of entitlement that I think women are prone to and that we tend to understand and thus sympathize with the woman who has it and that is the sense of being entitled to think of herself as a good person no matter what happens. Part of the motivation for this is fear of shame.

I'll return to the male case first to show how shame works there. The man who gets cheated on or cheated out of something worries that this makes him a loser. He knows that life isn't fair and that success in this world depends to a large degree on lucky and that some people succeed by cheating. In reality, he hasn't done anything to earn the things he wants and then the insult-added-to-injury when someone else hurts him helps him believe that he is somehow entitled to, Robert Glover's phrase, "a happy, trouble-free life". When he doesn't get that, he feels personally shamed. People are sneering at me and I've always been a good guy who follows the rules. (Think of the opening scenes of Breaking Bad in which Walter White has been working hard at two jobs to support his wife and son, who hs a disability, and no one respects him.)

With women, the problem is a bit more complex because there is an unfair double standard to begin with: women are held to a ridiculously high but not actually impossible standard of sexual purity that no one expects from men. If it were actually impossible, the problem would disappear but every woman knows that there is a very small number of women who actually achieve what is nearly impossible and a much larger number who fake it successfully. She too knows that life is unfair and that being perceived as good according to the unfair standards that women are judged by is mostly a matter of luck and that lots of people cheat. In reality, she hasn't done anything to earn the good-woman status she wants and then the insult-added-to-injury when someone else hurts her helps her believe that she is somehow entitled to think of herself as a good person no matter how ruthlessly she pursues her selfish needs. And, just as we start off on Walter White's side, we also start off on Alicia Florrick's side. We don't necessarily think that what she subsequently does is right but we understand (tricky word that) her desires and her having been wronged by her husband, whuch she clearly was, seems to give her the moral high ground as the "good wife".

I think that the solution to both is the same: to develop a conscience. That is a much bigger challenge than it might seem forever for there is deadly trap and that is that we might simply internalize shame. If our conscience is just the nagging little voice inside that tells us that we've done wrong then we don't actually have a conscience. All we have is our mothers inside our head tearing us down. We will resent that such that, no matter how hard we try, we will quietly sabotage our attempts to "be good".

Again, both positions are about being rather than doing. The man wants to feel like a winner and the woman wants to feel like a good person. Yes, the goal is ultimately to be a better human being but we become better people by doing good things. Doing good things focuses me on something outside myself, something that can be evaluated in a cool, objective way. It also makes progress possible for each bad thing is a bump in the road instead of a terrifying shame that I meet be no good after all.

*In my all-time favourite movie, Body Heat, Ned Racine makes a similar judgment on Matty Walker; that she could, "Do what is necessary, whatever is necessary." Before we join in condemning this, however, we should remember that Jesus tells us to do what ie necessary, whatever is necessary. This appears to make it look like any means will justify the end but if our character is our destiny, and it is, then actions will make us what we are. We might gain something we want by stealing it but what we will become is a thief. Do do whatever is necessary but do it for the right end. Meanwhile, as the Book of Ruth tells us, sometimes using sex to get what she wants is exactly what a woman should do.

**The only reason that these fictional women haven't been using sex to get what they want  is because the audience would lose all sympathy for them if they did. Because women are held to an unfair standard, we never see fictional women having affairs. In real life, women in these situations would have most likely had affairs. Even at that, the prime motivation for not dong so in fiction is the desire to continue thinking of herself as a good person. It's not that they don't want the or that they give even a moment's though to the issue of betrayal—they don't have the affair so they can maintain a sense that they have the moral high ground.

When and why should we care for other people's feelings? Or, for that matter, our own feelings?

Elinor and Marianne Dashwood both have cultivated feelings. That is to say, they have put a lot of effort into their feelings. They both believe their feelings should be taken seriously and the proof is that both have taken their own feelings seriously, albeit it in different ways. We see this most clearly in an odd section well into the novel when Marianne becomes very ill and Willoughby shows up to see her. He does not speak to her but he does meet with Elinor. It's very important to Elinor that Willoughby actually loves Marianne. Later, when she has recovered physically, it will be terribly important to Marianne that John Willoughby really loved her, that he, in fact, still loves her even though he has married another. And Elinor, sensing this, makes certain that she does know.

This novel, to a degree we never see again in Austen, takes the view that the validation of feelings is terribly important. People have behaved badly but all is okay if, in the end, feelings can be validated. John Willoughby really loved Marianne even though he tossed her over in order to get financial security. He ended up having to do that because he's been a first class shit in seducing, impregnating and abandoning Colonel Brandon's ward Eliza.

Here's a thought: another way for the novel to end would have been for Willoughby to go to his aunt, admit that he behaved abominably towards Eliza and say that he is willing to make all right now by marrying Eliza. That doesn't happen for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that Willoughby is a shit and he'd never do anything so honourable. And he gets away with being a  shit because he's highly attractive to women. Marianne's vindication, to the very limited degree she has one, is that Willoughby, while married to wealth, isn't in love with his wife.

Which sounds rather like the mirror image of her own situation doesn't it?

In the meantime, Marianne has been rather worthless as a sister. She has been rebuking Elinor for what she perceives as Elinor's lack of feeling. When she finds out that Elinor was actually suffering terribly because of her own frustrations in love, frustrations that Marianne was utterly oblivious about, she apologizes. We need to note that all Marianne's fine feelings did not make her any more perceptive.

We think of feelings as a kind of sensitivity. Someone sees something, hears something or touches something and they are moved. Feelings are supposed to be connected to something on this model. But Marianne's feelings are remarkably disconnected. Her feelings for Willoughby come even though she has no understanding of his character. Her feelings for her sister are absolutely useless in helping her figure out what Elinor is going through. Her feelings have nothing to do with her judgment. Or, as Austen would put it, her sensibilities have nothing to do with her sense.

That's puzzling for us because the word "sense" seems to be related to the senses. It seems like a purely mental thing. For that matter, so could judgment.  We think of these things as being "in our heads". We believe that you have to have sense or good judgment and then you act on it. On this model, it's possible to conceive of someone who has sense, who makes very good judgments, and yet never acts on them. And that's kind of odd for how could anyone know that this person has good sense if the only place that sense existed was in her head.

A thought experiment

Let's imagine that Elinor is actually a sneaky little bitch who is only out for her own happiness. She has very little real power. Her mother is a ditz, the family has no money or influence and her sister is younger and hotter than she is. She is, for all intents, a helpless mouse who can only achieve happiness if others go along with her plans. Any one of a number of people could crush her dreams simply by not playing along.

Worse, her only chance for happiness is a longshot. She and Edward have connected. She senses that and she is probably correct. Why do we know this? Well, we do. This is not science requiring specialized knowledge and skills. Everyone has had the experience of meeting someone and feeling that a real connection has been made. We don't know this with 100 percent certainty, so we wait until there have been a number of conversations. Elinor has done this. There have been a series of conversations and she now knows that Edward feels something for her and she for him.

Unfortunately, this is not science requiring specialized knowledge and skills. Other people have noticed too. (And this ought to be a reminder for us that whatever sense, sensibility, feeling and judgment are, they aren't things that happen inside our heads but things that show up in our behaviour for anyone to see provided they are willing to pay attention.) One of the people who has noticed is her ditzy mother and the other is the evil Fanny Dashwood. Elinor has no power in her relations with these people. She is a helpless mouse.

We might also note that one person who has not noticed is her sister Marianne who only finds out by being told  by her mother. It's interesting that Marianne, who supposedly loves Elinor, cannot even be bothered to pay enough attention to notice what this sister she loves is feeling. She's more aware of her own (negative) feelings towards Edward than of Elinor's.

And Edward has not declared his love. He keeps showing interest in her but he never comes out and says it. There is no actual promise, no commitment. She hopes him to be a good man but she doesn't know. Her sense/judgments manifests itself in her reticence. She holds back. She will not risk the same sort of disaster that Marianne courts and finds.

And then she finds out that Edward, like Willoughby, has a prior attachment. Unlike Willoughby, he's not a complete shit about it. He has a real sense of responsibility towards Lucy Steele. He doesn't love her anymore but he made a promise and he's not going to break it. He doesn't know that Lucy is after him only for the money he will come into. No one could know and it's entirely possible that Lucy herself is unaware and her feelings or sensibilities towards him aren't going to help if she doesn't understand own motivations.

Elinor sees a shot at happiness but it's an outside chance. All she can do at this point is to limit the damage that others with more power—Marianne, her ditzy mother, Fanny Dashwood and Lucy Steele—can do to her hopes and the only tool she has available to her is her ability to manipulate these people through her understanding of THEIR feelings. It's not her ability to feel anything herself that works for her but rather her ability to sense what others are feeling and to direct, assuage and soothe these feelings.

We might get distracted by her behaviour towards Colonel Brandon here. He seems a genuinely nice guy who acts for the benefit of others and Elinor really seems to care about his feelings. On the other hand, he turns out to be incredibly useful to her. He sets Edward up with the living that makes her happiness with him possible. He also takes Marianne off her hands by marrying her and thereby freeing Elinor to concentrate on her own happiness.

And so too we might say of her being surprisingly understanding towards Willoughby when he shows up during her sister's illness. For it is essential that she can tell Marianne that her feelings for Willoughby were valid because he really did love her. Otherwise, Marianne might have crumbled completely and Elinor would have been stuck with a helpless basket case on her hands instead of w woman willing to make a (probably loveless) match with Colonel Brandon so that Elinor could stop worrying about her.

Okay, maybe the sneaky little bitch in this scenario is actually Jane Austen plotting her novel to achieve the desired end and not Elinor who is simply hoping for the best and merely has to wait until her creator gets all her ducks lined up for her. In the end, though, I think the moral conclusion we should draw is the same: we shouldn't care about other people's feelings. We might notice them and respect them because not this person will be more likely to cooperate with us but the feelings themselves have no moral significance for us. If someone loves me, I will see that in their actions and not their feelings. If someone consistently fails to deliver, they don't love me no matter how intense their feelings for me may seem. Those feelings don't, on their own, mean anything at all.

They can have tremendous consequences and that is why we have to be very careful about how we cultivate them. We should not just let them grow. And we should not trample on the feelings of others, even when those others have shown that they don't particularly care for our own feelings. But the moral significance of feelings is zero. They are just something we need to manage in life.

This is particularly true in love. There are feelings that go with love but to love someone is to deliver and to keep delivering. If you don't do that, then you don't really love.

To cultivate absurd dreams

I have the impression that fascism and adolescence continue to be . . . permanent historical seasons of our lives . . . remaining children for eternity, leaving responsibilities for others, living with the comforting sensation that there is someone who thinks for you . . . and in the meanwhile, you have this limited, time-wasting freedom which permits you only to cultivate absurd dreams. 

Frederico Fellini

The modern world is prone to fascism. As Fellini notes, it grows out of an adolescent worldview and adolescence is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. It ought to worry us especially now as we live in a world where adolescence has run wild; the generation that currently obsesses about microaggressions and trigger warnings and that has already embraced a cult of personality in Obama is ripe for fascism.

At the same time, we too easily look outside ourselves for someone or something to blame. Fellini looked to the Catholic Church. He wasn't crazy to do so. There was a lot about the Catholic church, especially in the period of high Mariology that culminated with Pius XII, that lent itself to an adolescent worldview and the sort of immature fantasies that fascism grows out of. But it didn't have to be that way; the people aren't responsible for the culture that they inherit but they are responsible for how they respond to it. You are responsible for the sort of soil you provide for the seed that is sown.

Today, we might just as easily blame the universities and there is no doubt that a lot of appalling nonsense seemingly designed to churn out adolescents who forever put off growing up, who comfort themselves by letting others think for them and wallow in empty freedom where they cultivate absurd dreams. Ultimately, however, they still have the power to embrace responsibility.

Shame that manifests as anger

This is a pretty commonplace phenomenon but, as sometimes is the case, is really quite strange if you think about it. I saw an example of it a while ago in someone who momentarily seemed intensely angry but, I later realized, was actually feeling intense shame. I suspect everyone has done this at some time; I know I have.

But ... why?

I think it's a habit more than something specific to the situation. Googling around, I see that puts me at odds with professional opinion which tends to the view that deep analysis is the way to figure it out. My guess is that it starts in childhood when adults, especially our parents, shame us into doing things. We start to respond to feelings of shame with resentment. It's resentment and not anger because we can't act on our resentment.

But one day we lash out in anger and, to our surprise, it works. The adult is fully aware that they are manipulating might shame and they cave when we explode.

The problem is that we never learn how to process shame and guilt properly. We have to teach ourselves this skill as adults. We do things we feel badly about but know no way to achieve reconciliation. As a consequence, the feeling of shame is always there below the surface. When something happens to remind us, it feels like a rude invasion of our privacy and the anger flashes up because that is way we have trained ourselves to feel and to act. We have no notion. All we think we're feeling is shame but our face shows repressed rage to everyone else in the room.

Nothing good can come of this but, as I say, we have no idea how to fix it. We think we are faced with a series of individual problems that we cannot fix. But it's not really those things but our general habit of responding to bad feelings about things we have done.

I think that's it.

Virtue signalling (2)

I do not know whether the term virtue signalling will catch on or not. I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it describes something human beings actually do. On the other hand, it was quickly appropriated by the perpetual outrage community as a cheap and easy put down.

The key fact is this: virtue signalling is a normal and unavoidable thing that all human beings do. It's not evil. You, me and everybody else we know will, under most circumstances, express the values the we believe the people we are with want to hear. It's a normal, and even productive, thing to do.

A friend of mine is pregnant with her second child. She noticed that her first child has started to grunt when he bends over. He does this because mummy, heavy with child, grunts when she bends over. That's virtue signalling. He's expressing a value, bending over is hard, because his mother expresses that value. In her case, it's actually true. In his case, it's not. He does it because he, like all human beings, is hardwired to learn by imitating others and because his very life depends on his mother.

That is true of us too. Our very life depends on the community around us. If you find yourself stuck with people you don't know well for an extended period of time, you will begin to mirror their behaviours and attitudes.

There are two lessons to be drawn from this. The most commonplace one is the that it takes courage to speak up for your values. Most of us have had the experience of finding ourselves in the presence of someone who brashly says things we deeply oppose but found ourselves unable to respond. We just sat there while things we found hateful were said. But there is a deeper and more important lesson here and that is that our expressed values are often at odds with our real values.

Think of the example I give above in a slightly different light. Imagine you are in a group and someone says things you deeply oppose and you do not object at first but soon notice that the others in the group do. And now you join in. Or maybe you wait a little longer to see if a few others also join and then you join in. Perhaps you wait until it's obvious that the person is rejected and reviled by the rest of the group and then you join in (perhaps "pile on" would be a better term by that point).

We've all done these things. What this tells us is that fitting in is a value we treasure deeply.

To return to the previous example, let's consider a further hypothetical: if the group started to be angry with the person who had expressed offensive opinions, at what point would we pull back? We hope that it would be sometime before someone got a rope to lynch them with but who knows what we are capable of.

We live in a deontological culture. That is to say, we live in a world where morality is largely defined in terms of duty defined by rules. Be tolerant. Don't use violence. Recycle. Don't have sex with teenagers. Be faithful to your spouse. Don't text while driving. And many more. Each of these rules comes accompanied with a justification in terms of duty. "There is a garbage crisis and it is your duty to reduce landfill waste by recycling."

This is a very compelling morality. It's clearly expressed and relatively easy to understand. Compared to utilitarianism, Do what will give the greatest happiness to the largest number," or virtue ethics, "Act in a  way to train yourself to be a better human being, " there is clarity and ease of application to be found in, "There is a garbage crisis and it is your duty to reduce landfill waste by recycling." You know what to do and you can easily figure out if you've done it. It's also liberating in one sense—once you've done what the rules tell you to be your duty, you can stop. "I've recycled, I can get a beer and watch television." That's nothing to sneer at, although we all do sneer at it.

But, at the same time that we accept deontology, we also reject it because we cannot and do not fully internalize these values. My real attitude toward recycling is something like: "I will do this up to a point but if I just have to get the place cleaned up because guests are arriving or because I've been getting depressed at the kitchen being so messy and I know I'll feel better if I can clean it up quickly then those plastic containers are going straight into the garbage and I don't think that will do any real harm so long as I don't do it too often but, at the same time, I don't want everyone thinking this is okay so I will continue to hold the hard line when expressing my attitudes towards people who don't recycle."

It's not that we have some alternative set of values that we really follow. It's more that we are willing to make a whole lot of exceptions that we aren't honest with ourselves or others about. And that is why we fear and love the expression "virtue signalling". We fear it because we know it can be justly applied to what we do. We love it because it can be justly applied to what other people do and that makes it a useful tool for making others talk and behave in a predictable fashion.

What do we do about this? I'll try and come back to it.

Praxis and theory

Melzer and, I assume, Leo Strauss, argue that esoteric writing arises from a perceived conflict between theory and praxis. The ancients believed that there was always such a conflict because "the many" would never be able to appreciate philosophy. The moderns, beginning with the Enlightenment leaders, believed that there was a temporary gap between theory and praxis but, once praxis had been reformed according to theory, it would disappear. On this modern account, esoteric writing is only a temporary thing until social practices had been reformed.

If that Enlightenment notion puts the stink of Auschwitz in your nose, go to the head of the class.

The ancient view also has its problems. Commenting on the Seventh Letter attributed to Plato, Melzer writes,

The passage begins, for example, with the classic Platonic view that philosophic knowledge is the supreme good of life and that helping others to acquire it, where possible, an act of highest beneficence.

There is something about this reading of Plato that has more in common with religious mysticism than with the kind of philosophy I like to do. I, like Wittgenstein, see philosophy as something we do on a temporary basis in response to puzzles that arise and we do it not as an end in itself but in order to be able to go back to leading our lives. That is not to say, as some have misread Wittgenstein, that all philosophical puzzles can be made to go away but rather that we should not be bewitched by the language. The central mysteries of life will always be there and one of the best things about doing philosophy in a Wittgensteinian manner is that we can face these mysteries as mysteries much as a good Catholic doesn't claim to comprehend the Trinity. We will recognize mysteries through ritualistic behaviour rather than try to dissolve them through analysis.

This approach puts praxis ahead of theory. To put it in ordinary language, it's more important to live well than to be able to say what living well is. And that reverses the order of esoteric thinking: we will now be esoteric in order to protect our praxis from theory, our own theory as well as that of others.

Encountering another as a person definitely does not mean "dissolving" that person, taking him or her apart psychologically and thus seizing power over the other, but seeing the other in his or her difference, even strangeness. Whoever wants to truly recognize another as a person must expect to encounter the unexpected and be led into a new world of which one previously had no idea—a world whose strangeness fascinates but also frightens.

That's Gerhard Lohfink and the primary example he has in mind is Jesus who needs to be protected from our ego which would reduce him to a concept. But the same is true of us in our encounter with social groups beginning with our own families. Others will always want to reduce us to their idea of what we should be. And this would lead to something like the reverse of what Arthur Melzer and Leo Strauss have in mind when they speak of esoteric writing: it would be a way of appearing to go along with theory so as to be able to protect a praxis that is at odds with that theory.

This will be more than what is implied by the common expression "lip service" for we will want not only to provide lip service but also to communicate with others who share our values not as expressed in some theory but as actually lived.

Fatherly advice

This one comes from someone else's father but it remains the best piece of fatherly advice I ever got:

There will be days when it feels like you have to deal with one idiot after another. When that happens, the problem is you.

Another gem, this one courtesy of Wayne Levine, is that once you have defined your core values, don't tell anyone about them. Just live them. Write them on a card and place this card in your wallet so you can pull it out when you want to remind yourself. (I've got mine in Evernote.)

Levine calls these values non-negotiable, unalterable terms (which produces the too-cute acronym NUTs). It applies to many other things as well. I'd say it applies to your personal mythology. The second you tell people what your most important values are, they can use them against you. They can mock your values directly. They can also tear you down for failing to live up to them. Finally, and most damaging, they can (and will) use this knowledge to manipulate you" "Well, if you want to live up to [insert stated value] then you should [insert thing they want to manipulate you into doing]."

Finally, and this one is from me: focus on outward behaviours and not inward attitudes. For example, we often try to tell ourselves lies like, "I don't care what she thinks." But we do care and we have no direct control over that. The only thing we can control is outward behaviour. When we next see her obviously disapproving of what we are doing or saying, we can refuse to respond. She'll still know we have noticed and perhaps she'll even enjoy knowing that we are upset. But the thing we can control, we will control.

There was a song back in the 1970s called, "Free your mind and your ass will follow". A sanitized version of the same message appeared in a 1990s song called, "Free your mind and the rest will follow." Both songs get it backwards. Change your behaviour and you'll free your mind or "Free your ass and your mind will follow".

"We all wish we were from someplace else"

This is going to be a little abstract.

How different are these two scenarios:

1. A writer has been given your personal information—your name, where and when you were born, which schools you went to, your religious belief or lack of it and so on—and has been asked to create a personal mythology for a character with your name and experiences.
2. You decide to review your life with the intention of coming up with a personal mythology.

At first glance, the difference seems blindingly obvious. The writer can only research the sorts of things a person in your place might remember whereas you know exactly what you do remember. You have a direct and authentic access to your experience that the writer can only guess at.

There is a sense in which that is true. Maybe you went to a high school where most of the kids were fans of hard rock music and wore jeans, T-shirts and workboots but you were a member of a tiny subculture whose members wore tweed jackets, grey flannels and ties and insisted on antiquated spellings such as "grey" and "shew". The writer would almost certainly miss this detail and thereby get everything wrong.

On the other hand, even rejecting the dominant culture of your school, you would have been very much influenced by it. And you have almost certainly forgotten much of what you experienced. What you remember comes in the form of stories that you and others have told over and over again and those stories often (almost always) don't match the verifiable facts of your life. What we wanted, what we felt compelled to say, in response to the two scenarios I posted above was a special and direct access to "the real me". It would seem that the most we can really say is that the person who actually lived the life will have a much better idea where to look for clues and will know of many more such clues than the writer researching their character could ever have.

The final problem is that your experiences might be a barrier to what you want to achieve. You have psychological barriers and self deceptions that stand in the way. The writer might well be more open to possibilities you are currently cutting yourself off from for no good reason.

"Here, you're an honorary"

The quote immediately above and the one in the title of this post are from the unnamed "gentleman of the rails" who visits the Whitman homestead in the first season episode of Mad Men named "The Hobo Code". The theme is freedom. But what is freedom? When we're in captivity, we, like the bird in the cage, can only imagine that freedom is a world without bars. But freedom is not freedom from but freedom for a purpose. Freedom from is empty and unsatisfying.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.

This is one of my favourite quotes. Marx, who missed the full significance of his own point, sees that to change yourself is to learn another language. An existing language.  And learning another language is a long and arduous process.

The process begins for Dick Whitman with the flashback in "The Hobo Code" and it begins with a language. In a move that Wittgenstein would have loved, the hobo teaches young Dick only four symbols:

• A pie that symbolizes that the food is good here.
• A set of teeth indicating that a vicious dog lives here.
• A sort of sickle that means a dishonest man lives here.
• A stick woman that means tell a sad story.

As Wittgenstein would say, "Conceive of this as a complete primitive language." That means that understanding this language means knowing how to use and respond to these expressions.

As Wittgenstein would note, we are already functioning at a high level here. To get even this primitive language, we must know a whole lot. Just the literal use of the expressions requires us to know what a "dishonest man" is and why it would matter that he lives here. Young Dick only learns these things in this episode.

We might also think about the metaphorical extension of these expressions. Good food and scary dogs are concepts that a child can readily understand. They can also be extended. Likewise, we can see how an adult might see potential benefits in gaining a  woman's sympathy that a child might not immediately grasp.

A dishonest man lives here, however, is in a different class.

Rejection

The episode, interestingly, begins with Bert Cooper telling Don, "I know what kind you are." He elaborates on that by saying he believes that Don is, "Productive and reasonable and, in the end, completely self-interested" and "unsentimental". Bert is suggesting that Don's personal mythology is much like the views of Ayn Rand. Don rejects that and the rest of the episode shows us why. His personal mythology is that of the Hobo.

All rebellion begins with rejection. Don rejects his mother. He doesn't accept Adam as his brother. He tells the hobo, "Ain't you heard, I'm a whorechild." At least according to the flashbacks, his biological mother was a prostitute who died giving birth to him. There is a huge problem here, though, because no child can have a flashback to his conception and birth. Later, his adoptive mother will become an actual prostitute. His father, who dies, is replaced by "Uncle Mac" who is not his uncle but his adoptive mother's pimp. He remembers Uncle Mac as having been kind to him.

Don's whole life is about a rejection of his mother. Father figures are a bit trickier. That his father is dishonest is clear but so, in different ways, are the replacement father figures—Uncle Mac, the real Don Draper, Bert Cooper and Conrad "Connie" Hilton. The only honest father figure in Don's life is the hobo and he only has a brief brush with him.

To return to the point I make at the top of this post, that encounter need not even be "real" in the ordinary sense of the world.

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up,
knelt down before him, and asked him,
“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus answered him, “Why do you call me good?
No one is good but God alone.
You know the commandments: You shall not kill;
you shall not commit adultery;
you shall not steal;
you shall not bear false witness;
you shall not defraud;
honor your father and your mother.”
He replied and said to him,
“Teacher, all of these I have observed from my youth.”
Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him,
“You are lacking in one thing.
Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor
and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
At that statement, his face fell,
and he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

To embrace one thing is to reject others.

I'll stop here not because this is a complete thought but simply because I must stop somewhere.

This meditation was inspired by the eighth episode of the first season of Mad Men. The title of the episode was "The Hobo Code". There will be more such meditations coming.

An utterly mundane observation about hypocrisy

We condemn moral hypocrisy harshly but ineffectively. Compare with the case of smoking where a barrage of condemnation has actually produced a reduction in smoking rates. There is no way to measure hypocrisy, of course, but I don't think anyone imagines there has been a reduction in hypocrisy rates.

The thing that strikes us about hypocrisy is not that it exists but that it is expressed publicly. It would be one thing to condemn others for what we do ourselves. You could do that silently. What we actually see is very public condemnation of others. This can be very overt but it can also exist in the form of a very quiet deference for moral standards we don't follow ourselves. If anything, the latter case is worse.

A long time ago, Raymond Chandler condemned a kind of moral defeatism that isn't hypocrisy in his novel The Long Goodbye,

You were a nice guy because you had a nice nature. But you were just as happy with mugs or hoodlums as with honest men. Provided the hoodlums spoke fairly good English and had fairly acceptable table manners.

As I say, that's not hypocrisy. Terry Lennox lives up to his standards. The relevant part is the line about being just as happy with mugs or hoodlums so long as the behaved well publicly. Our morality tends to be public and civilized. It exists where we can be civilized. Where we can't, we're private about it. That's why we're hypocrites who don't stand up for others whose failings are no worse than our own, because that would be to go public.

The wolf's perspective: The Good Wife is what Breaking Bad would look like if it had been done honestly

The Good Wife started and ended with a slap. Seven seasons ago, Alicia Florrick slapped her husband across the face in the moment she realized that her life was not what she thought it was. And in the series finale, Diane slapped Alicia across the face in the moment she realized Alicia was always going to put her family, and herself, first. Both moments signified a turning point for Alicia Florrick. Only this time, we won’t get to see what comes next.

I would think you shouldn't need to know what's going to happen next to understand this ending. Others feel differently. A Google search for "Good Wife Ending" and "ambiguous" gets 215,000 hits. But if you watch this carefully, I think you'll see that there is no ambiguity at all.



Pay particular attention to how she pulls herself together and goes on. That's exactly how she responded to the virtual slap life gave her in the first episode. In a sense, what we see here is an incredible kind of strength to keep going. But the something about this strength feels empty. And that's a problem because a lot of people wanted a happy ending for Alicia. Now in denial, all they see ambiguity where they should see emptiness.

The question we are naturally inclined to ask is whether she "deserved" that slap. That's a ridiculous question however. Of course she deserved it! What matters is whether it will have any effect on her. It won't. Alicia's life is exactly what always happens to people like her. That's a plain and simple, and utterly unambiguous, fact. Which makes it rather difficult to accept if you identify with Alicia and, if online comments are anything to go by, a lot of women identify with Alicia.

"The moment she realized her life was not what she thought it was."

For Walter White and Alicia Florrick the moment comes when, even though they both had tried very hard to be a good decent person, they discover that the most important people in their lives don't really respect them. They make a show of respecting them but this show, which was convincing until now, is suddenly shown to be the sham it is. That's the believable part. The unbelievable part is that Walt then goes into the business of making and selling meth. People who've been respectable middle class citizens all their lives don't do that. And they don't do that because it's terribly important to them that they are able to continue to see themselves as good and decent people. "Meth dealer" doesn't go with that.

Getting on with life does. Most of the evil most of us will be responsible in our lives goes under the heading of "getting along with life". And that is what Alicia does. We jump forward six months and we see her going back to work at a law firm. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that. Where there is potential for evil is the trap of moral narcissism and that's the trap that Alicia Florrick walks into. She, like all of us, is already part way there for we all want to think of ourselves as good. When your moral life comes to be primarily about preserving that sense of yourself as good, you're a moral narcissist. You stop doing things in order to bring about good for yourself and others and start doing them to avoid shame.

The crucial moment to borrow a line from Wittgenstein, is when "the decisive move in the conjuring trick is made, and it was the very one that seemed to us quite innocent." The decisive move is to think, "I'm a good person, I didn't deserve that." As if it would be okay to brutally betray a bad person! We make that move because it guarantees us our victim status. Thereafter, we have to remain a good person in order to maintain our moral authority. And that's why it's a conjuring trick: because we assume we know what moral authority looks and feels like. We don't for the simple reason that we don't have any moral authority simply by virtue of being a victim. Truth is not a feeling! We are convinced we need that moral authority, however, because, otherwise, how would we know that we are innocent?

From there, we slowly evolve into morally callous human beings, which is precisely what Alicia does over the next seven seasons. Whether you see it or not will depend on how susceptible you are to moral narcissists. For most of us, the answer to that question is, pretty damn susceptible!

There are early hints of trouble. In the fifth episode of the first season, Alicia is about to put another woman through hell by exposing her affair. There is a good case to be made for doing this. The problem is that Alicia is not concerned about the pros and cons for other people. What concerns her is what this says about her. She needs to know if this makes her a bad person. As if that wasn't bad enough, she goes to her daughter to get this reassurance. A morally serious adult does not go to children when looking for a moral assessment and they especially don't go to children who are completely dependent on them.

Darkness at Noon

Show us not the aim without the way.
For ends and means on earth are so entangled
That changing one, you change the other too;
Each different path brings other ends in view.

The most pathetically obvious hint ever dropped in a TV series is the name of the series, "Darkness at Noon"  that Alicia watches over the last few seasons. Setting matters and it matters a whole lot that The Good Wife is set in Cook County. Cook County is not only the most corrupt jurisdiction in the USA, it's been or been in the running for most-corrupt-jurisdiction every year sine 1921. If you can make it there, you're probably evil. It ought to bother Alicia's fans a lot more than it does that she succeeds so well in this environment.

The second thing that ought to trouble us is that Alicia, right from episode #1, she is clearly good at manipulating people. She starts with people she barely knows and slowly builds up to her closest friends. Her epitaph might well read, "She could always use a friend." Once she convinces herself that the end is justified, that it will not hurt her status as the good person wronged, Alicia goes to work with a lack of remorse that is chilling. If you notice it.

If we don't, we're on her side because we've all had a moment when we realized that our life was not what we thought it was. And the story, this is where it gets brilliant, is told from her perspective. Alicia struggles but succeeds and we root for her the same way you root for a jewel thief or an assassin when the story is told from their perspective.

"No one is what they seem to be." Alicia says that in the first season. And she's right. Funny thing is, that should be obvious. We don't see it because we're so busy hiding our own secrets. If you think you're the only one improvising and that everyone else has a script and is sticking to it, you don't notice anything unusual. Alicia has the advantage, if you can call it that, of having been rudely awakened to all this lying. Remember the old song by The Who? "I can see for miles and miles and miles ..." Well, Alicia can.

Moral character and moral acts

The issue for those of us watching at home is, "When do we get off this merry-go-round?"

I believe that if a story is truthful about the human moral landscape, it will probably not lead people too far astray. It’s the stories that do a fabulous job of presenting a false moral world that I worry about. I found Eat, Pray, Love and Sex and the City to be far more problematic than The Kite Runner and Breaking Bad, even though the latter two stories contain horrific violence and the former don’t. Eat, Pray, Love and Sex and the City present a beautifully alluring world in which selfishness leads to a glamorous, fulfilling life, whereas The Kite Runner and Breaking Bad speak truth about what is good and what is bad, and accurately show what tends to happen when we choose selfishness over love.

That's Jennifer Fulwiler explaining why she liked Breaking Bad. Of course, neither Eat, Pray and Love nor Sex and the City were meant to be portrayals of evil. Their creators thought they were creating a vision of the good life. The creators of The Good Wife, on the other hand, set out to create an account of a badly lived life in a beautifully alluring world where selfishness tends to pay off. That comes at a risk but it also has the advantage of being much closer to the world we live in that Breaking Bad was. Which brings me to this:

One of the main themes the series explores is the truth that “if you do evil things, you will bring evil into your life, even if you were attempting to achieve a greater good.” In this episode, the main character once again thought he’d do one small bad thing, because he had all these elaborate ideas about why it would ultimately make his life better. I watched with the character as his plans crumbled and his one bad action triggered a chain reaction of evil that spread even into his loved one’s lives, and I felt his pain as he found himself burdened with new and more painful problems.

If you're a Catholic, you may recognize the logic here. Some acts are bad because of their effects. We call them extrinsically evil. There is nothing wrong with lighting a charcoal fire but if you light it in the house you will kill everyone inside with carbon monoxide poisoning and, if you do this knowingly, you are a murderer. That is very different from an intrinsically evil act which is an act that, by its very nature, is evil. There is no context—no equivalent of lighting the barbecue outside in a well-ventilated space—where it could be a good act. Some people don't believe in intrinsically evil acts. I'm not one of them and I have no trouble putting dealing meth on the list.

That said, I also suspect that the list of intrinsically evil acts is a relatively short one. Most of our moral lives will be lived without our having to avoid such acts. Our moral lives will, however, involve hundreds of acts that might be either good or evil depending on the context. Alicia Florrick (I love the Lil Abner feeling that comes with that name) is a woman who tries to choose good acts but does so for the wrong reason.

And that wrong reason really hits home for she, like me and probably like you, acts to maintain her sense of herself as a good and decent person. That may seem relatively anodyne but it isn't but it can be really hard to see why it's a problem. And that is the way it should be presented in fiction.

There will be much more to say about this in the future.

Pietas

"Pietas" and its obvious English derivative "piety" is a challenging virtue for me.

Originally, virtue meant excellence and it was something worth pursuing as its own reward. For the Greeks and Romans moral law was relatively unimportant. Aristotle acknowledged that you had to have laws but they were of relatively minor importance.

That all had to change with Christianity for it was heir to a whole lot of scripture that said that moral law was very important. So what's the relationship between virtue and the law? For Aquinas, virtue seems to still be its own reward. Later, in the manualist period (17th to early 20th century) moral law became supreme. Virtue was worth pursuing because it made you better at obeying moral laws. Virtue by itself was nothing. And so a virtuous person became not someone who was good at doing something but a person who was good at not doing things. By the early 20th century, the expression "a virtuous woman" came to mean a woman who had not had sex if single and had had sex with only her husband if married. And it was generally taken that the when the married woman had sex she did so out of duty rather than enthusiasm on her part. (Men were held to the same standard in theory but not in practice.)

Sexual "virtue" in women was only the most extreme example. Morality came to mean our duty to follow the law both in Catholic and protestant teaching. Today, the reigning conception of ethics for most liberals remains deontology, that is, a morality of duty. To be sure, liberals have discarded many of the sexual duties as well as filial piety towards parents and state but duty remains the central concept and, as social justice warriors demonstrate daily, woe on the person who failed to recognize the reigning notions of duty and wore a sombrero on the Cinco de Mayo. Not surprisingly, some people rejected, and continue to reject, this sort of morality as duty as something cold and inhuman. Because it is cold and inhuman!

Pietas means many things but it definitely includes duties to other human beings and not just God. In a world where we define virtue not as a quality that a human being has, not as something they are, but as a matter of performance, we are going to tend to see the pious son as the one who always does what his parents want him to do. His virtue doesn't make him anything because he is only valued to the extent that he performs as desired.

HIGH PERFORMANCE ORIENTATION societies have characteristics such as...

• Value training and development.
• Value competitiveness and materialism.
• View formal feedback as necessary for performance improvement.
• Value what one does more than who one is.
• Expect direct, explicit communication. 

LOW PERFORMANCE ORIENTATION societies have characteristics such as...

• Value societal and family relationships.
• Value harmony with the environment.
• View formal feedback as judgmental and discomfiting.
• Value who one is more than what one does.
• Expect indirect, subtle communication.

Piety towards your parents is going to be a very different thing depending on which sort of environment you are operating in. Presumably, we will all travel between both. That is to say, our job will be a high performance orientation environment and our family and friends less so. It makes sense to fire someone because you think you can find someone who can perform better. It makes sense to value the high-performing employee above the low-performing one. It makes sense to value these people for what they do more than for what they are. In fact, we judge it a vice to hire friends and family over others. In this world, I and others will judge my piety as being indistinguishable from obediently conforming to the expectations my superiors have of me.

Someone might object that conforming seems not to match modern liberal society where rebellion and competition are valued. Yes they are valued but only to the degree that they serve a shared set of values. Our "rebels" all conform to a narrowly proscribed set of values. Try being a  conservative rebel and nonconformist on a university campus and you will be sneered at and maybe even brutally suppressed. You may only rebel according to accepted models.

The limit for liberal deontology is Kant's principle that we never treat others solely as means. So, while you will treat the hired hand—for instance, the barista who makes your coffee this morning—as a means, you will not treat them solely as such. Assuming an opportunity ever comes up for you to think of them as anything else but the means to get a  good cup of coffee but it probably won't. At the other end of the scale are the people who you see primarily as ends in themselves. But only primarily; there could be kinds of performance that would lead you to sever relations with them but there probably won't; most of the time, their performance will not affect your relationship for you value them for who they are (as ends in themselves) rather than what they do (as means).

Now, it may also seem that families will be low performance oriented environments where people are valued for what they are. Well, they should be but they tend not to be. My family certainly wasn't. A standard of performance according to expectations set down by management was very much the reigning morality. One of my mother's frequent admonishments to her children was "If you want to be part of this family." My mother wasn't a horrible person. She just didn't get what a family should be and she didn't because she grew up in a high-performance-orientation society that didn't (and still doesn't) get what a family is supposed to be. Her understanding, like that of many (perhaps most) mothers of her generation of filial piety was always that her children should do what she wanted and share her values. (See Betty Draper as the supreme example this.)

"Name don't blame," as therapists say. It's pointless to blame our parents for this. My mother was as much a victim of this as a perpetrator, which is to say she learned it all from a very ambitious Irish mother who had driven her children to success. (We blame WASPs for this mentality but there is nothing peculiarly white or protestant about the work ethic.)

So what can we do about all this now? The solution our liberal culture pretends to offer us is a rejection of piety but it does this by substituting one kind of piety for another. For example, we used to be puritanical hypocrites about sex and now we are puritanical hypocrites about food and the environment. Besides, I think piety, including filial piety, is a very important virtue that is essential for us to have a happy, healthy state and to pursue happy, healthy lives. "Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you." This is, St. Paul tells us, the first commandment with a promise. If all it means, however, is a requirement that we live up to our parents' expectations it is a cold and inhuman law and no virtue at all.

Nietzsche from the Wolf's perspective

Why truth?

Because, way back on the playground, there was a kid who was bigger, stronger, smarter and better looking than the rest of the kids. He wasn't a bully but he had superior advantage and he used it and adults didn't rein him in much because he was smarter and better looking in addition to being bigger and stronger.

And we wanted to be treated "fairly". The problem is that all the things we didn't like about what this kid did with his superior advantage we would have done too had we had that advantage. Every reasonable doubt we might raise about him in our desperate insistence that superior advantage was not the same thing as superior tout court could be raised against our own perception. So we need a neutral concept that is separate from anyone's particular perception. Objective truth, that's the ticket.

And you can still go with that if you're so inclined, Check back with us when you have worked out the problems that go with "objective truth". I hope you don't mind if we get on with our lives in the meantime.

And we might also note, while you're working at it, that all attempts to arrive at some sort of objective truth until now have failed. So Truth, is really an illusion and a willingly held illusion is a kind of lie.

Okay, so what's wrong with this? Perhaps nothing.

Except language. To make all this work, Nietzsche has to imagine a bunch of atomistic human beings arriving at language so that we could use it as a tool to cooperate. And that's backwards.

Human beings tend naturally to cooperate. We also tend naturally to stab one another in the back but that sort of treachery is only possible against an assumption that cooperation is the normal state of affairs. Language isn't a tool to make cooperation possible. Rather, language is possible because human beings are beings that share activities. It's not something that we do; it's something that we are. Humans are beings that share activities with other human beings (and some other animals) the way fish are animals that swim in water.

The truth that goes with this is not the sort that rationalistic philosophers hanker after but it's real enough and it's more than some sort of meaning created by a supreme act by some sort of super man.

And it isn't art either.

It's the kind of agreement that is necessary to share a form of life.

Daddy's girl 2

Eleven years ago this month, Ayelet Waldman published an essay in which she said she loved her husband more than her children. She went on to suggest that it was the sexual intensity in her marriage that caused this to happen. It caused quite a sensation. The hatred flowed like Niagara Falls. Some people threatened to turn her in to social services for abusing her children.

A decade later, she stands by the essay and good for her. But she didn't go far enough. Loving your spouse more than your children not only doesn't do them any harm, it helps them. Loving your spouse gives you the strength to love your children better.

The love between a parent and child is not equal. As a parent, you have to to love your child. You have to forgive your child. You have to give your child more than they give you. You need a source of strength to do that. You need to love someone in a truly reciprocal relationship between adults to achieve that and the best way to do that is a loving sexual relationship.

When you don't have that, you will make unfair demands on your child. You will ask them to support you in matters they shouldn't have to worry about. You will share with them things they shouldn't have to think about. Neither of you will notice it happening but you will be denying her the chance to become a fully-developed, independent adult.

Many of us have to deal with the negative effects of having a mother who is too focused on her children (and I may say something about some day but the subject has been thoroughly covered elsewhere). Though that is far and away the more common problem, some fathers deal with a cold and distant wife by bonding with their daughters. This bond typically starts as early as age five but becomes particularly intense when their daughters, as many children tend to do, switch allegiance from their mother to their father in their teens. That shift in allegiance is a powerful source of good if it is a shift from one role model to another. Not because there is something wrong with mothers as role models but because there is something wrong with only having one kind of primary role model and your mother is a giant influence on your early life. But something else, and decidedly not good, happens when a daughter switches from one love object to another instead of from one kind of example to another.

I dated two daddy's girls in my younger years. It has a lot to say for it in some ways.

1. A Daddy's girl gets really close to her father. They had little secrets, in-jokes and a private language that only they and their fathers shared. That's also a natural thing for any couple to do. When you date such a woman, she easily creates an intimate, private world with you because she's been practicing since she was a child. 
2. She picks up on guy activities really quickly. You can go sailing, fishing, drinking with her just like one of the guys.
3. She and her father united against Mummy because he wasn't getting what he needed from Mummy and, his daughter will conclude, Mummy wasn't good enough for Daddy. Mummy was cold and unavailable and a Daddy's girl is determined never to be that. 
4. Unlike Momma's boys who tend, as Robert Glover puts it, to remain monogamous to their mothers, Daddy's girls are very sexual. To become like her mother would be to betray Daddy. She thinks that Mummy let herself go. She thinks that because she judged her mother from the perspective of a woman in her teens looking at Mummy in her forties. She sees this cold and dowdy woman and vows to be forever hot. 

And that all sounds pretty good. But there's a fatal flaw in it. For, no matter how good it seems, this woman will always relate to you as a child to an adult. She will never accept full responsibility for the relationship. Her only responsibility is to keep on being the woman she thinks is true to her father. She will not only not care about your emotional needs and vulnerabilities, she'll get angry at you for even having any. And she'll betray you and get angry at you for even daring to be hurt. Daddy always remembered his little princess, the reverse was not the case. And when she did do something for him, she did it on the expectation that his gratitude was automatic and extravagant. She didn't do it for him but for the reward it gave her. And that worked for them. It won't work for you.

Again, the sexual side sounds great except that she isn't doing it for you. She isn't even doing it for herself. She's doing it out of fear of failure and long before she actually reaches the age her mother was when she first judged her so harshly she will begin to see that she has set an impossible standard for herself. Only she won't see it as a standard she set for herself. She'll see it as something the world, and that includes you, is imposing on her. And you really don't want to be around when that happens; the massive cognitive dissonance and narcissistic rage will redefine personal cruelty for you. It may be directed at others (like you, for example) or it may be directed at herself; either way, it will be horrible.

Some stuff I'm just working out

In theological parlance faith, hope and love are known as the theological virtues. Faith is especially related to the intellect and its pursuit of truth, hope to the memory and its experience of beauty and love to the will and its appetite for goodness. (from Benedict XVi: A Guide for the Perplexed)

Hope is related to memory and its experience of beauty! That is fascinating. I don't much about all this as the medieval accounts of the virtues are new to me.

The text goes on to say,

The theological virtues are also related to the Gifts of the Holy Spirit with wisdom, understanding and knowledge having a particular association with faith, fortitude with hope, and fear of the Lord and piety with love.

Why does fortitude go with hope?

Fortitude is a cardinal virtue. That means a lot of stuff but the thing that I'm thinking about now is that it is one of the virtues that you can cultivate on your own. That is unlike the theological virtues which only come with grace. On the other hand, how do "gifts of the Holy Spirit" work? Is the fortitude that comes as a gift of the Holy Spirit a special variety of fortitude that cannot be had through conscientious habit formation alone? Probably.

Fortitude, in Catholic moral thinking, is what gives us constancy. Is that constancy the same as what Jane Austen understood as constancy? It gets tricky here because the vocabulary is fluid.

In the medieval discussion of the virtues, "fortitude" replaces the classical virtue of "courage". Fortitude is understood to be more than courage. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (#1809) says,

Fortitude is the moral virtue that ensures firmness in difficulties and constancy in the pursuit of the good. It strengthens the resolve to resist temptations and to overcome obstacles in the moral life. The virtue of fortitude enables one to conquer fear, even fear of death, and to face trials and persecutions. It disposes one even to renounce and sacrifice his life in defense of a just cause.

For Jane Austen, the supreme examples of Constancy are Fanny Price in Mansfield Park and Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. We see it most impressively when Sir Thomas, irked at Fanny for refusing the marriage proposal of Henry Crawford, sends her home to endure the squalor of poverty in the hopes that this will make her change her mind. Fanny holds out even though it becomes painfully obvious to both her and us that she may live a horrible life as a price of her constancy. So, yes, I'd say that Austen means the same thing by constancy as the Catholic church does by fortitude.

And that's all I'll say for now.

PS: It is the Feast of Saint Agatha today and fortitude is the virtue of martyrs (speaking in the classic Catholic sense and neither in the sense of passive aggressive family member trying to undermine you nor of terroristt murdering others while committing suicide.)