Tag: Virtue

Small is Beautiful, pt. 6

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My final post on Small is Beautiful. Other posts on Schumacher can be found here.

Schumacher includes another section, on Social Organization, that I won’t survey in detail, primarily because I found it to be the least interesting in the book. I imagine there’s quite a bit of sophistication that I missed, therefore, and don’t want to shortchange him. Schumacher was himself the director of some very large-scale and successful organizations, and he almost certainly offers quite a bit of insight into the subject. Just one more reason for you to check out the book for yourself.

The guiding principle behind Schumacher’s ideal social organization is the venerable principle of subsidiarity, that matters (politial, social, etc.) ought to be handled by the smallest, most local, or least centralized competent authority. Things generally ought to be handled by those who are closest to the situation at hand yet who have enough power to properly deal with the situation. Whenever possible, power ought not be assumed by higher powers unless absolutely necessary. In these cases, the burden of proving their unique capability to handle a given problem lies with the higher power:

they  have to prove that the lower level is incapable of fulfilling this function satisfactorily and that the higher level can actually do much better.

Small is Beautiful, 261 (emphasis his)

Moreover, when the higher power steps in, this must be recognized as an exception, not a rule. So, if a higher power is required to deal with the stresses put on a local system that outstrip that locale’s capacities, the nature of the exception and the scope of the higher power’s intervention needs to be clearly delineated and limited. For example, if the federal government is required to dramatically intervene in the governance of individual states to repair the damage, social and economic, of some natural disaster or social unrest, that intervention ought not be permanent. The aftermath of disaster is not an excuse to destroy subsidiary authority, but to support it until the crisis has passed. At which point, the higher should cede control back to the lower. The fact that this essentially never happens is one of the great problems of modern governance.1

Subsidiarity is, of course, one of the core planks of Catholic Social Teaching, and it was one of the gateways which led to Schumacher’s own conversion. So much for his discussion of social organization. Again, I encourage you to check out the whole book, he’s got a lot more to say.

We’ll thus wrap up our discussion of Small is Beautiful with some quotes from the book’s conclusion.

First, an identification of the central problem the book confronts:

In the excitement over the unfolding of his scientific and technical powers, modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type of society that mutilates man.  If only there were more and more wealth, everything else, it is thought, would fall into place.  Money is considered to be all-powerful; if it could not actually buy non-material values, such as justice, harmony, beauty or even health, it could circumvent the need for them or compensate for their loss.  The development of production and the acquisition of wealth have thus become the highest goals of the modern world in relation to which all other goals, not matter how much lip-service may still be paid to them, have come to take second place.

Small is Beautiful, 313

Note, the book was published more than 45 years ago. The problem has only gotten worse.

Next, the recognition that the problem is not one of technical incapacity or inadequate allocation of resources but a philosophical and spiritual one that can only be resolved, therefore, by philosophical and spiritual transformation:

We shrink back from the truth if we believe that the destructive forces of the modern world can be “brought under control” simply by mobilizing more resources–of wealth, education, and research–to fight pollution, to preserve wildlife, to discover new sources of energy, and to arrive at more effective agreements on peaceful coexistence.  Needless to say, wealth, education, research, and many other things are needed for any civilization, but what is most needed today is a revision of the ends which these means are meant to serve.

Small is Beautiful, 314-5

How might we begin this spiritual transformation?

Everywhere people ask: “What can I actually do?” The answer is simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order.  The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind. 

Small is Beautiful, 318

The solution lies in the virtues:

Out of the whole Christian tradition, there is perhaps no body of teaching which is more relevant and appropriate to the modern predicament than the marvelously subtle and realistic doctrines of the Four Cardinal Virtues–prudentia, justitita, fortitudo, and temperantia.

Small is Beautiful, 316

Cultivate the virtues in yourself and seek to build the structures that will enable others to do the same. It is this, not AI, not “more education”, not “green” technology, that will save you and, with you, us.

Where to Begin

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If someone should ask, “I would like to make progress in moral life; where shall I begin?”  then we would probably answer, “Wherever you will.  You can begin with a fault of which you have become conscious in your profession or occupation.  Or else you can begin with the needs of the community, with family or friends–wherever you have ascertained a failing.  Or else you may be aware that some passion has power over you, and you may strive to overcome it.  Basically, all that matters is that you should be honest and sincere and make a determined effort.”

Then one thing will lead to another.  For the life of man is a whole.  If he grasps it anywhere with determination, then his conscience awakens and strengthens his moral power in other respects as well, just as a fault anywhere in his life makes its influence felt everywhere. 

Romano Guardini, Learning the Virtues that Lead You to God, 25

A Flat Stanley World

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The modern world often feels very hollow, flat and dull.  But why?  We live in an age of riotous color and spectacle, of the greatest material abundance in human history.  In our pockets we carry devices capable of bringing us the most beautiful music, the greatest works of literature, and conversations with our loved ones in an instant.  And we’re constantly told that we’re at the bleeding edge of history, the most enlightened, most moral, marching on the vanguard of the sweep toward utopia.  Why does it all feel so tawdry and false?

Dietrich von Hildebrand suggests that the problem is a lack of reverence, which is, on his account, the foundation of all authentic virtue:

Wherever we look, we see reverence to be the basis and at the same time an essential element of moral life and moral values.  Without a fundamental attitude of reverence, no true love, no justice, no kindliness, no self-development, no purity, no truthfulness, are possible; above all, without reverence, the dimension of depth is completely excluded.  The irreverent person is himself flat and shallow, for he fails to understand the depth of being, since for him there is no world beyond and above that which is visible palpable.  Only to the man possessing reverence does the world of religion open itself; only to him will the world as a whole reveal its meaning and value.  So reverence is a basic moral attitude stands at the beginning of all religion.  It is the basis for the right attitude of men toward themselves, their neighbors, to every level of being, and above all to God.

Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Art of Living, 8

Without reverence, there is no wonder, no virtue, no depth.  We’re flat and empty.

How many people there are who are never lastingly influenced by great works of art, or by delight in beautiful landscapes, or by contact with great personalities.  The momentary impression may be strong, but it strikes no deep root in them; it is not firmly held in their superactual life but disappears as soon as another impression makes its appearance.  These men are like a sieve through which everything runs.  Though they can be good, kindly, and honest, they cleave to a childish, unconscious position; they have no depth.  They elude one’s grasp, they are incapable of having deep relationships with other people because they are capable of no permanent relationship with anything.  These men do not know responsibility because they know no lasting bond, because with them one day does not reach into the next one.  Even though their impressions are strong, they do not penetrate down to the deepest level in which we find those attitudes that are over and above the changes of the moment.  These people honestly promise something one moment, and then in the next is has completely disappeared from their memory.  They make resolutions under a strong impression, but the next impression blows them away.

The Art of Living, 11

You must defeat this tendency to flatness within your soul, inculcate wonder and reverence.  Sit in silence and stare at nature, trees swaying softly in the breeze, the patter of the rain, the never-ending rolling of the waves.

Priorities

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It is a very serious perversion to view professional work as the serious part of life, and family life as relaxation.  No, the time we spend with our loved ones is not the time to relax and take it easy, but rather the moment to put on our festival garment, the moment to accomplish a real sursum corda (the elevation of the heart to God).
Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Art of Living, 55

Avoiding Acedia in Intellectual Work

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I have a small library of notes on things I want to write about, yet feel daunted every time I try.  Sometimes I’m tempted to simply say “read ____,”  and leave it at that.  Resisting that urge today, I’m going to try to write a little about one of the most important of my companion books, the book that more than any other defines my vocation, Antonin Sertillanges’s The Intellectual Life.  

I will not offer a summary of the whole book.  For one thing, you should read it for yourself.  For another, the summary already exists.  Sertillanges is developing the principles found in a short letter of (pseudo-) St. Thomas, De modo studendi.  Thus, for a (wholly inadequate) summary, turn to that.

Instead, a single key insight, namely Sertillanges’s recognition of the fundamental vice that afflicts those engaged in intellectual pursuits: the great enemy of contemplation, the noonday demon, and the characteristic sin of our age, acedia:

The great enemy of knowledge is our indolence; that native sloth which shrinks from effort, which does indeed consent now and then capriciously, to make a big effort but now and then capriciously, to make a big effort but soon relapses into careless automatism, regarding a vigorous and sustained impetus as a regular martyrdom.

The Intellectual Life, 124

Truth is eternal, and thus we shouldn’t be surprised to see this particular truth recognized by others in the same arena.  Indeed, the fact that an insight is shared and recurs over and over again throughout history among those who have given an issue serious thought is good evidence that it’s true.  So we see that the manifestation of acedia in the intellectual is the same pattern diagnosed by Robert Boice in the best book I’ve ever read on overcoming writer’s block (without which, I would have never finished my dissertation). Long periods of desolation, bursts of frenzied activity, torpor, depression, and despair.  Rinse, repeat.

The root of this vice is cowardice.  That may sound strange or self-aggrandizing, casting the work of an academic as courageous, but it is nevertheless true.  To succumb to acedia is to quail in the face of our vocation, to hear the call and shirk at the price:

To get something without paying for it is the universal desire; but it is the desire of cowardly hearts and weak brains.  The universe does not respond to the first murmured request, and the light of God does not shine under your study lamp unless your soul asks for it with persistent effort.

The Intellectual Life, 6

It’s not merely a fear of work, however, not mere laziness.  Rather it’s a fear of the obligations that a vocation entails.  These obligations extend beyond ourselves (and beyond our students, our professors, and the academy as a whole for that matter), and that’s what’s truly terrifying about accepting a call, the knowledge that to get the benefits we must not just do the work, but do it well.

[Acedia] is a lack of magnanimity; it lacks courage for the great things that are proper to the nature of the Christian.  It is a kind of anxious vertigo that befalls the human individual when he becomes aware of the heights to which God has raised him.  One who is trapped in acedia has neither the courage nor the will to be as great as he really is.  He would prefer to be less great in order thus to avoid the obligation of greatness.  Acedia is a perverted humility; it will not accept supernatural goods because they are, by their very nature, linked to a claim on him who receives them.  Something similar exists in the sphere of mental health and illness.  The psychiatrist frequently observes that, while a neurotic individual may have a superficial will to be restored to health, in actuality he fears more than anything else the demands that are mandated, as a matter of course, on one who is well.”
Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 119
The final two sentences strike home.  How often does a failure to work accompany an indulgent descent into mental unwellness?  Are you not heeding the call because you are miserable or are you miserable because you are not heeding the call?
Acedia, therefore, is the great enemy and a formidable one.  Luckily, the solution is very simple.  Unfortunately, the fact that it is simple is not the same thing as easy.  The way to expurgate a vice is to practice the opposite virtue, and to practice the virtue opposed to sloth, we must work (hence, why Dante has the slothful sprinting through Purgatory).

Do something, or do nothing at all.  Do ardently whatever you decide to do; do it with your might; and let the whole of your activity be a series of vigorous fresh starts.  Half-work, which is half-rest, is good neither for rest nor for work.

The Intellectual Life, 96

I see in my students and in myself so much indecision, so much fuddling around, when what must be done is to simply decide and begin.  Once begun, we should proceed until the work is done (failing on this last bit was one of the great struggles of my dissertation writing).

An important bit of practical advice is in place here. When you have decided on a work, when you have clearly conceived and carefully prepared it, and are actually beginning: settle immediately by a vigorous effort the quality that it is to have. Do not count on going back over it. When laziness whispers: “Go ahead anyhow now, you will come back to this later,” say to yourself that this idea of going back on what one has done is nearly always an illusion. When you have once gone down the slope, you will hardly climb up again.

The Intellectual Life, 230-1

We shouldn’t look at this need to work as a burden, or at least not as a heavy burden.1  Rather we must know it as beautiful, our participation in the unfolding of creation.

We must always seek, always endeavor.  Nature makes the wilderness flower anew, the star to shine, the water to flow down slopes, round obstacles, into empty places, dreaming of the sea that waits it yonder, and which it may at last reach.  Creation in every one of its stages is continuous aspiration.  The mind which is potentially all things can of itself no more limit its ideal forms than the natural forms of which they are a reflection.  Death will set the limit, and so will our own inadequacy: let us at least have the courage to flee the frontiers marked out by laziness.  Infinity, lying before use, demands infinity in our desire, to correct as far as may be the gradual failure of our powers.

The Intellectual Life, 126-7

Infinity lies before us, in all its intoxicating wonder and stomach-churning danger.  To approach it demands courage, but we would not be called were we not capable.  What remains, therefore, is to trust, to allow the love that nourishes our work to overpower our fear, to step out and explore.

1. The yoke is easy, the burden light, etc.

True Philistines

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At that moment the realization hit me-and has never left me since: true Philistines are not people who are incapable of recognizing beauty; they recognise it all too well; they detect its presence any where, immediately, and with a flair as infallible as that of the most sensitive aesthete-but for them, it is in order to be able better to pounce upon it at once and to destroy it before it can gain a foothold in their universal empire of ugliness.  Ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge, obscurantism does not result from a dearth of light, base taste is not merely a lack of good taste, stupidity is not a simple want of intelligence: all these are fiercely active forces, that angrily assert themselves on every occasion; they tolerate no challenge to their omnipresent rule.  In every department of human endeavour, inspired talent is an intolerable insult to mediocrity.  If this is true in the realm of aesthetics, it is even more true in the world of ethics.  More than artistic beauty, moral beauty seems to exasperate our sorry species.  The need to bring down to our own wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendour that is towering above us, is probably the saddest urge of human nature.

Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness, 42

This is a wonderful book, with an even more wonderful title.

Intersections of Athletics and Virtue

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Summer always inspires me to think deeply about ultimate.  This year, that’s resulted in reading a lot of military strategy (about which I’ll hopefully have something to say soon) and re-reading Timothy Gallwey’s classic, The Inner Game of Tennis.  Inner Game is probably my favorite book on coaching and teaching, and I’ve long attempted (and often failed) to implement lessons from it in my own work in the classroom and on the field.  On this re-read, I was struck by the affinity of the central pillars of Gallwey’s method with Josef Pieper’s writings on the virtues.

At the heart of the process outlined in Inner Game is the idea that true learning requires, first and fundamentally, that we see reality as it really is and allow ourselves to act accordingly.  The word “allow” is significant here.  Gallwey suggests that there’s a sense in which your body already knows the techniques, strategy, etc., which you’re attempting to master and that the goal of the teacher is to shepherd you towards a realization of this, guiding you towards something already present, as opposed to pouring new, alien knowledge into a previously empty vessel.  We might think of this as akin to the idea that a block of marble already contains within it a statue, and that the artist’s chisel merely strips away at the excess, making manifest an inner form which has always been.  Learning considered this way is essentially a form of remembrance or re-cognition, an understanding which has a long lineage in classical philosophy and towards which I’m deeply sympathetic.

This all maps very closely on to what Pieper has to say about the virtues.  For, to Pieper and to the classical tradition which he inherits, to be virtuous simply is to live in accordance with reality.  Therefore, to recognize, to see, things as they really are is the root of all virtue, the first and most important step which lies at the heart of the good life.

All duty is based upon being.  Reality is the basis of ethics.  Goodness is the standard of reality.  Whoever wants to know and do the good must direct his gaze toward the objective world of being, not toward his own “sentiment” or toward arbitrarily established “ideals” and “models”. He must look away from his own deed and look upon reality.

–A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, 11

The apprehension of reality and making of decisions in accordance with it is, more properly speaking, the virtue of prudence:

Prudence, the formal basis and “birth mother” of all human virtue, is the cautious and decisive faculty of our spirit for shaping things, which transforms the knowledge of reality into the accomplishment of the good.  It encompasses the humility of silent, i.e., unbiased, understanding, memory’s faithfulness to being, the art of letting things speak for themselves, the alert composure before the unexpected.  Prudence means the hesitant seriousness and, so to speak, the filter of reflection and yet also the daring courage for definitive resolution.

–Brief Reader, 15

It is, I believe, the hesitant seriousness accompanied by daring courage for definitive resolutions of which Pieper speaks that athletes experience when they’re “in the zone.”

Gallwey’s directive to the student to see things as they truly are, and to the teacher to guide the student towards this recognition (primarily through images, another affinity between Gallwey and the classical tradition), is thus ultimately a directive to cultivate prudence within the domain of sport.  To achieve mastery, we must become virtuous, at least with respect to the area in which we seek mastery (think also of courage, justice, and temperance in Ultimate).

We quickly realize a problem with this: at any given time, we only have access to a narrow sliver, the barest hint of a larger reality.  Yet we must act and, more often than not, act rapidly.

The man who does good follows the lines of an architectural plan that has not been devised by himself or even totally understood by himself in all its components.  This plan is revealed to him moment by moment only though a narrow cleft and a tiny gap; in his transient condition, he never perceives the specific plan for himself in its global and definitive form.

Brief Reader, 17

There cannot be a system or rulebook which governs our reactions in all situations.  Any such attempt a comprehensive guidelines will flounder against the shoals of reality.  The athlete rigidly cycling through a preset list of reactions will fail.  A morality which is predicated solely on the following of some abstract set of rules will collapse.  Instead, we must shape ourselves through the application of broad principles to the immediate apprehension of reality through a constant, self-reflexive process of re-orienting ourselves to that reality.

Thus, we must determine those principles.  And in the meantime, open our eyes.