This is a bit of a state of the union piece in which I review some part where the search for virtue has gotten me. It's probably only of interest to me and maybe two other people on the planet. Perhaps. It's also long. I wrote it earlier this week as I will be out for the morning on account of it being Remembrance Day here in Canada and I want to remember the many brave men who fought for the freedoms and security of my country.
For my mother, the moral life was largely a psychological thing. She talked about people competing with one another and responding to what others did in terms of competition and being threatened. There were two, and only two, kinds of moral failure for her.
For my father, the moral life is largely a managerial project. He believes that our ultimate purpose is to successfully manage the people and challenges before us. If things go wrong, they need to be fixed according to the best managerial principles.
In Conrad's novel Typhoon there are a bunch of Chinese labourers going back to China from working building a railway overseas. They each have their collected earnings in the form of gold coins that they carried in little boxes. At one point. the storm destroys all the boxes and all the coins end up in a pile against the lee rail. And there is a huge moral problem in that each man had different amounts of wealth and there is now no way to determine how much they had so each can get back what he deserves. The hero of the novel, Captain MacWhirr, simply orders his officers to divide the money equally among the labourers. My father admires that sort of managerial approach and it is a good example of his belief of how, when push comes to shove, managerial considerations should trump all others in moral decision making.
As was the case with my mother, the key thing here is that my father believes that the foundation of all morality is a series of secret rules that life really runs on. The world divides into people who know this (the managers) and those who need to be managed because they don't know the rules.
Please don't read any anger into those characterizations. There was some anger when I hit the age of about seventeen or so but I quickly realized that lots of people see the moral life the way they do. And both psychology and management have a lot to do with moral success and they both did more good than bad living as they did and, in my father's case, as he continues to live.
At seventeen, I fell into a third kind of belief which was that the moral life is an aesthetic project. I saw a girl of about seventeen or so the other day who clearly believes this now. She was dressed in a garish pink dress and torn black fishnet stockings. Her hair was magenta and it was an open question whether the colour of her hair clashed more with her dress than the stockings did. But the point, for her, is that the ensemble makes an artistic statement. If she goes to university she may learn how to use a specialized language that will allow her to talk about what she is doing in moral terms but she doesn't need to do that for the intent here is clear enough: she is using all the tricks other girls use to look sexy in order to make a statement that is artistic and not driven by anything as basely pragmatic as the need to attract attention from boys.
This way of seeing the moral life is also based on a belief that there are secret rules that life really runs on. And as with the two ways of life above, it tends to divide the world into insiders who are supposed to know the rules (aesthetes) and outsiders who, whether they realize it or not, are of a lower order.
Interestingly, the aesthetic life no longer has anything to do with the love of beauty that drove aesthetes up until the early twentieth century. And one of the things that obviously distinguishes the aesthetic life of our day is that it is so much more obviously a fraud (to the point of being a pathetic embarrassment) but the other two are fraudulent too. And aesthetics do have something to do with the moral life and they matter just as much as psychology and management do.
And just about all modernist moral thinking is driven by the belief that there is a secret set of rules that need to be discovered along with a belief that modern people are better positioned to figure out what these rules are than the ancients were. In many cases, moderns believe that it was impossible for the ancients to figure out the secret rules. One of the many ugly aspects of twentieth century modernism was that it was always and everywhere an elitist phenomenon.
Because modernism failed, there is an alternative (and it failed really early, its failure was already obvious to some in the 19th century). This alternative is to believe that there are no secret rules, that success in the moral life is a matter of contingency and fashion accompanied by a willingness to act boldly in the knowledge that there are no ultimate rules. Curiously, people who believe this also divide the world into insiders who know the rules are just contingent and that real success is a matter of what you can get away with and outsiders who really believe in the rules and are, therefore, inferior.
There are writers who exemplify each of these beliefs.
By the way, you can get some insight into how Allen and his fans really think by reading the following story line summary from IMDb:
My belief is that nowhere is the dictum of Wittgenstein that nothing is hidden more important than in living the moral life. Everything we need to know is right on the surface. One writer who exemplifies this view is Evelyn Waugh and that is why he is a favourite of mine. Some other examples are Joseph Conrad (especially his early books), Hemingway and Anthony Powell.
For my mother, the moral life was largely a psychological thing. She talked about people competing with one another and responding to what others did in terms of competition and being threatened. There were two, and only two, kinds of moral failure for her.
- You could fail to control these psychological forces in your own life.
- You could fail to allow for the power these psychological forces had over the lives of others.
For my father, the moral life is largely a managerial project. He believes that our ultimate purpose is to successfully manage the people and challenges before us. If things go wrong, they need to be fixed according to the best managerial principles.
In Conrad's novel Typhoon there are a bunch of Chinese labourers going back to China from working building a railway overseas. They each have their collected earnings in the form of gold coins that they carried in little boxes. At one point. the storm destroys all the boxes and all the coins end up in a pile against the lee rail. And there is a huge moral problem in that each man had different amounts of wealth and there is now no way to determine how much they had so each can get back what he deserves. The hero of the novel, Captain MacWhirr, simply orders his officers to divide the money equally among the labourers. My father admires that sort of managerial approach and it is a good example of his belief of how, when push comes to shove, managerial considerations should trump all others in moral decision making.
As was the case with my mother, the key thing here is that my father believes that the foundation of all morality is a series of secret rules that life really runs on. The world divides into people who know this (the managers) and those who need to be managed because they don't know the rules.
Please don't read any anger into those characterizations. There was some anger when I hit the age of about seventeen or so but I quickly realized that lots of people see the moral life the way they do. And both psychology and management have a lot to do with moral success and they both did more good than bad living as they did and, in my father's case, as he continues to live.
At seventeen, I fell into a third kind of belief which was that the moral life is an aesthetic project. I saw a girl of about seventeen or so the other day who clearly believes this now. She was dressed in a garish pink dress and torn black fishnet stockings. Her hair was magenta and it was an open question whether the colour of her hair clashed more with her dress than the stockings did. But the point, for her, is that the ensemble makes an artistic statement. If she goes to university she may learn how to use a specialized language that will allow her to talk about what she is doing in moral terms but she doesn't need to do that for the intent here is clear enough: she is using all the tricks other girls use to look sexy in order to make a statement that is artistic and not driven by anything as basely pragmatic as the need to attract attention from boys.
This way of seeing the moral life is also based on a belief that there are secret rules that life really runs on. And as with the two ways of life above, it tends to divide the world into insiders who are supposed to know the rules (aesthetes) and outsiders who, whether they realize it or not, are of a lower order.
Interestingly, the aesthetic life no longer has anything to do with the love of beauty that drove aesthetes up until the early twentieth century. And one of the things that obviously distinguishes the aesthetic life of our day is that it is so much more obviously a fraud (to the point of being a pathetic embarrassment) but the other two are fraudulent too. And aesthetics do have something to do with the moral life and they matter just as much as psychology and management do.
And just about all modernist moral thinking is driven by the belief that there is a secret set of rules that need to be discovered along with a belief that modern people are better positioned to figure out what these rules are than the ancients were. In many cases, moderns believe that it was impossible for the ancients to figure out the secret rules. One of the many ugly aspects of twentieth century modernism was that it was always and everywhere an elitist phenomenon.
Because modernism failed, there is an alternative (and it failed really early, its failure was already obvious to some in the 19th century). This alternative is to believe that there are no secret rules, that success in the moral life is a matter of contingency and fashion accompanied by a willingness to act boldly in the knowledge that there are no ultimate rules. Curiously, people who believe this also divide the world into insiders who know the rules are just contingent and that real success is a matter of what you can get away with and outsiders who really believe in the rules and are, therefore, inferior.
There are writers who exemplify each of these beliefs.
- Henry James, Proust and Dostoevsky are all psychologists and it is no accident that aesthetes are often the antogonists in their stories. (Jane Austen could be made to fit here too.)
- Ian Fleming, Patrick O'Brian and John Grisham—the sort of fiction that a lot of men like to read—are exemplars of the belief that life is largely a management problem—and it is no accident that the antagonists in these stories are psychological manipulators.
- Elizabeth Gilbert, Azar Nafisi, Rebecca Wells and others too numerous to list—the sort of fiction and non-fiction that a lot of women like to read—are exemplars of the belief that moral happiness is largely an aesthetic issue and it is no accident that cold-hearted managers are often the antagonists in these stories.
By the way, you can get some insight into how Allen and his fans really think by reading the following story line summary from IMDb:
Chris Wilton is a former tennis pro, looking to find work as an instructor. He meets Tom Hewett, a well-off pretty boy. Tom's sister Chloe falls in love with Chris but Chris has his eyes on Tom's fiancée, the luscious Nola. Both Chris and Nola know it's wrong but what could be more right than love? Chris tries to juggle both women but at some point, he must choose between them...Got a picture of the movie? Sounds rather anodyne? Okay, here is another, more accurate, story line written by me:
Chris falls in love with and gets engaged to Chloe who offers him a chance to move up the social ladder but also has an affair with Nola who has more erotic power (consisting mostly of her having really big breasts). Nola, however, gets pregnant and threatens to expose Chris thereby ruining his chance with Chloe so he murders her. Will Chris's guilt trip him up and expose his crime or will he get away with it.Now ask yourself, what sort of person can watch the movie I have just described and then write a summary like the one at IMDb? Pretty chilling thought isn't it? "[H]e must choose between them" is pro-choice with a vengeance.
My belief is that nowhere is the dictum of Wittgenstein that nothing is hidden more important than in living the moral life. Everything we need to know is right on the surface. One writer who exemplifies this view is Evelyn Waugh and that is why he is a favourite of mine. Some other examples are Joseph Conrad (especially his early books), Hemingway and Anthony Powell.
> : she is using all the tricks other girls use to look sexy in order to make a statement that is artistic and not driven by anything as basely pragmatic as the need to attract attention from boys.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your overall point, and I likely agree with your particular point here, but it shouldn't go unmentioned that her weird dress could be
(a) counter-signalling (she's so hot that she's hot even when dressed like a clown)
(b) a filtering tool - she's interested in a certain type of artistic bad boy, and those neo-goth-architect-student guys like girls dressed like Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club.
Thanks for the comment, you've raised a fascinating point that is well worth exploring. Yes, I agree, there are women who do both of those things. I saw a girl just yesterday who was doing the first in a big way.
ReplyDeleteMy first thought on filtering is that I admire women who use filtering with the caveat that it matters a whole lot what she is filtering out. I suspect that some filtering is a way of projecting self hatred and you see women who filter for a certain type largely because they think that is all they are good for. That aside, I admire women who make it very clear they are only interested in quality. I would even go so far as to say that I think that women who don't filter at all are women to avoid.
Second thought: women who filter for quality get a lot of grief from guys who worry, sometimes with good reason, that they are the ones being filtered out. It actually takes a fair amount of character and courage for a woman, especially a young woman, to keep her filters up in our culture.