Moral rule #1

 I had to deal with a difficult situation at a funeral recently. By "deal with", I mean emotionally. There was no problem for me to solve. I was just attending the funeral of an old friend when one of his sons was, well, useless. Other people had to deal with the fallout of his uselessness and I expect they're used to it. All I had to do was resist telling him off in public, thereby making an awkward and painful situation worse for others also present.

In heroic cultures, they tend to make a distinction between being a good man and being good at being a man. The same point applies to women but it is rarely made explicitly. 

You can see it in their mythology. Achilles is very good at being a man but it's not at all clear whether he is going to be a good man in a given situation. Indeed, he fails to be a good man shockingly often. Helen of Troy is very good at being a woman but, well, same issues as Achilles.

Here's the shocking part: The Greeks valued both Achilles and Helen far above others who where much more reliably good men and women. Why? Because they knew something really important that we tend to forget. They knew that ability was the most important thing. If a hero can't protect others, nothing else matters. 

At this funeral, people needed to pull through. It was a difficult one because the deceased had been a difficult person in many ways. That meant we all had to get through this without burdening others. This one son failed and failed spectacularly. And I do mean failed. It wasn't that he deliberately set out to be a jerk. He doesn't have that much agency. A lifetime (he's in his thirties) of failing to master his own emotions led him to fail to step up to the occasion. Instead, he acted like a pathetic little drama queen because, well, because he is a pathetic little drama queen.

You may be good or you may be bad but if your just useless, it doesn't matter because nobody can count on you. And yes, this is a gendered issue: men and women share a lot of things but, on average, they have different strengths. If you're a man be manly, if you're a woman be womanly.

 

So moral rule #1 is, Don't be useless!