Virtue: missing the bus

The Lemon Girl and I have lost track of how long we have been living without a car now. It is seven or eight years I think. Doing so has reintroduced me to experiences that I had long ago and now get to experience again. One of these is missing the bus.

And I get to see others miss the bus too. You see them come running towards the stop as the bus you are on is pulling away. Or running as it approaches the stop. Sometimes the bus driver sees them and is willing to stop and other times not. It's not hard to imagine what they are going through. It's a big effort they are making and something is always riding on it, if you'll pardon the expression.

Last week, we had a rental car because there were errands that needed to get done. I got into old habits of taking things a bit easier and, when the car was returned,  found myself missing a few buses. And there I'd be, looking at my phone to see the time and when the next bus was due and realizing I might not or would not be on time for my appointment.

Putting it like that makes it dispassionate and that is very different from how I actually reacted. What really happened was a combination of anger and helplessness. The moral question is: How am I going to take it? Because I cannot simply master myself at that moment. It is long-established habit that determines how I react. If I routinely allow myself to get angry at frustrations such as missing the bus, I lose the ability to control myself in such situations. (The words "ethics" and "morals" both originally meant "habits".)

Moral question? Yeah! It seems like too much to expect that anyone would get morally wrapped up in such a minor thing. Who cares? And why should anyone care? And yet it is bad for me to let my emotions run over when I miss the bus.

I know, it seems so harmless to just let myself vent a bit. After all, I did miss the bus and this is an inconvenience, why shouldn't I be allowed my little temper tantrum. But why did I expect that I should catch the bus? I expected it because that is the mindset the temper tantrum creates. We convince ourselves that we are having the temper tantrum because something we hoped for didn't work out. In fact, the temper tantrum creates a sense of entitlement in me that wasn't there before I lost my temper. A moment before I was a guy working to achieve some end and now I am standing at the stop swearing at a receding bus as if it was to blame. Worse, I'm making it a habit to lose self control rather than build it up. And, just in general terms, there is lots of evidence that losing my temper is bad for my physical health.

That divine power of his has freely bestowed on us everything necessary for a life of genuine piety, through knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and power. By virtue of them he has bestowed on us the great and precious things he promised, so that through these you who have fled a world corrupted by lust might become sharers of the divine nature.

That's from the second letter of Peter and it's in the Office of Readings for today. What could be more full of lust than me screaming with self righteous indignation at a bus that I somehow have come to believe I was entitled to catch. I didn't think that as I was getting ready that morning. I kept looking at the clock as I got dressed to go. I was making efforts to catch the bus. And yet, in the short run up the sidewalk to the stop, I somehow threw all that effort away and replaced it with an anger that drove me to a sense that I deserved to catch that bus and that it was the fault of not me but something outside me that I was missing it.

Peter continues:

This is reason enough for you to make every effort to undergird your virtue with faith, your discernment with virtue, and your self-control with discernment; this self-control, in turn, should lead to perseverance, and perseverance to piety, and piety to care for your brother, and care for your brother, to love.

Qualities like these, made increasingly your own, are by no means ineffectual; they bear fruit in true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. Any man who lacks these qualities is shortsighted to the point of blindness. He forgets the cleansing of his long-past sins.

I'd humbly suggested that there is no more easily accessibly accessible image of what that sort of blindness looks like than the person who gets angry when they miss the bus.

Pants lady hits another one out of the park

There is a brilliant post up by Simcha Fisher this morning.

You can find it here.

That is all.

Round and Round

The virtues in mad men
You haven't thought this through
This, of course, is the line that Don uses on Pete when Pete tries to blackmail him with his past. We might ask ourselves the very same question about the creators of this series. For example, if I'd been at the writer's meeting to discuss this episode, I would have raised the following issue:

Okay folks, we had this big showdown between Don and Rachel last episode. He shows up suddenly and begins talking about running away. She refuses him because this is not about being in love with her but all about him. Okay, fine. But don't you think we undermine that just a tad if we learn this next episode that Rachel has dealt with the situation by running away? That she has abandoned the store makeover that is so terribly important to her and rushed off to join a cruise?

There is a larger point here as well. If you watched Dawson's Creek or any of the other new soaps that took off from it, you will know that these shows all turn on a central moral point and a MacGuffin. The central moral point of Dawson's Creek was about growing up and leaving things behind. The MacGuffin was about whether Dawson and Joey would fall in love.

To take the reverse order, The MacGuffin in Mad Men is Don's secret identity. The central moral point is establishing him as some sort of Moses figure who will lead people to the promised land of the 1960s. A promised land he will not, presumably, be able to enter himself.

The problem, of course, is that this is a soap opera. That means it just keeps on keeping on until it is canceled. Every season the show has to give it's all. Some individual episodes can afford to digress but the show will mostly have to revolve around this central moral issue over and over again without ever fully resolving it. Matt Weiner has come up with a neat way to deal with this in that it is the penultimate show of each season that deals with the resolution of the big conflicts. This final show is more a tableau without any particular plot advancement.

The seasons they go round and round
And thus we get the Kodak Carousel slide projector. There is a great subtle criticism of it here. "What is the benefit of this thing," asks Don. It's a very good question as there was none and yet when Kodak introduced it, everyone bought one. The reviewers at photography magazines all talked about this novelty as if it were a major technological advancement just like Kodak wanted them to. You almost wonder sometimes if the real reason for some episodes in this series isn't to put the screenwriters' quandaries about how the show should advance into the mouths of characters.

So we have a bunch of slides in this episode with no advancement or resolution.

Portraits of four marriages
 First we get Pete and Trudy. Having commented endlessly about the shallowness of Pete's character, we begin to see him showing some real depth here. He's beginning to see through his father in law. Not in the sense that he is beginning to see the man as an impostor, more in the sense that he is beginning to see that some of his own desires are morally acceptable. He is beginning to see that the fact that you want something does not make that desire evil. That you you do not need to simply accept the done thing as correct.

What he fails to see, at least so far, is how much of his maturity he owes to his wife. Jane Austen makes a big point of how marrying the right person can morally improve even very unpromising people and Pete is a good example of that.

Don, interestingly enough, is at another stage of the same process. There is a lovely moment talking about the upcoming weekend with her family when Betty turns to Don and says, "I don't think you don't want to go," and he says, "I'm sorry, was I unclear about that."

Okay, it's a post feminist age and we're used to taking the desires of women as always justified and those of men as always questionable. And Don has committed the cardinal sin of not being true to his authentic identity; even worse, the sin of rejecting and hiding this identity. And yet, who could possibly not be on his side on this one?

Then there is Francine and Carlton. She confides with Betty after finding out about Carlton having an affair and Betty's reaction is all about herself. It's really quite astounding how little feeling Betty has for any other human being. Even her own children's struggles are just another excuse to focus on herself.

Finally, we have poor Harry and Jennifer Crane. It's telling that Harry is the only guy we have seen pay a significant price for his infidelity. This is perhaps because he has the only truly committed marriage of any of the characters. And thus one of those real-life truths: those who recognize their sins as sins often seem to suffer more for them. Betty's lack of virtue never leads her to suffer for her sin because she is so utterly self-centered she never sees anything as her fault. Ultimately, she loses herself. Harry suffers and suffers horribly.

An interesting side question here is how Jennifer found out about his tryst. There was nothing to stop Harry from simply lying.

Confidence
The character I will miss most in Season 4 is Ken Cosgrove. He is far more interesting than Pete Campbell to me. We have a delightful subplot concerning he and Peggy this episode, a delightfully male subplot. Ken and Peggy are auditioning women for radio spots and Peggy decides the best-looking of the women sounds most confident.

She is wrong of course. We get this lovely bit of dialogue.

Peggy: Say something to her. Make her feel beautiful. You know, the confidence that comes with beauty.
Ken: Peggy, a woman who looks like that will never sound confident because she never is confident.

All of this takes place in a control booth so the woman they are talking about can't hear them even though they can hear her. This is a lovely touch just like real life. The beautiful woman is always aware that she is being looked at and judged but can't know exactly what others are thinking of her. That's why Ken is correct to say "a woman who looks like that will never sound confident".

I wonder if any of the female actors caught the point. It's one of those things that is perhaps more clear to men. The pursuit of sexual power through beauty ultimately buys a woman very little. And you can see it for yourself by looking at very sexy women, they, as Ken says, never behave confidently because they never are confident.

I have compared this show to a minstrel show in that we have people assuming masks to play the different part. Nowhere is this clearer than with the women. Do an image search for any of the female principals. What will strike you is the extraordinary lengths they go to to make sure that they do not look in real life like the characters they play on the show.

This is odd because one of the features of television stardom is that the character is much more famous than the actor playing the character. Typically, the person playing the role assumes aspects of the character in order to please the public (and actors, having little confidence, are usually painfully keen to please the public). Not here though. Here the characters are masks just like minstrel show characters.

A picture of unhappiness
The rest of the show is mostly devoted to showing us a picture of Don's unhappiness.  And yet, and yet, and yet. What actually happens? For all the pseudo-psychological claptrap that people saddle their explanations of Don Draper with, what we see is a guy functioning and functioning very well.

I don't mind saying it again, the real effect of this show is that men want to be like Don Draper and women want to have a man like him. That is the odd conflict. If the post 1960s world is such an advance, why do we so love Don Draper and his cool behaviour? Don is not morally perfect but he shows us real virtue over and over again. It is something only he and two other characters (I'll get to them in a minute) do.

We see two crucial things here. We see creepy Betty again pursuing Glen Bishop like she was some sort of emotional child molester. I know some people read this scene as proof of how isolated and alone Betty is but, damnit, she is an adult and Glen is a child and her behaviour towards him is inexcusable. What we actually see on the screen is a little boy showing more emotional and moral maturity than a married woman. Put yourself in Helen Bishop's place, wouldn't you do just exactly as she has and keep your son from this creepy woman?

Which brings me to the other thing: the beautiful slide show and Don talking about it. What we see on the screen, of course, are portraits of happiness. What we are aware of is just how unhappy the Draper marriage is. What this show will not do—because no modern show could possibly do this—is accept the degree to which that unhappiness is the fault of Betty Draper. No, I'm not saying Don is blameless. His affairs are appalling. But we can see, even if the screenwriters cannot, that Betty Draper is a lousy wife and a lousy mother

And that is significant because, as I have said many times before, Betty Draper is not an early 1960s character. She is not typical of that era, she is typical of our era. A point that a commenter inadvertently makes below. Betty is the sort of person who expects the world to take her seriously but refuses to act in a morally serious manner. This is where the minstrel show aspect of the show pays off in a big way. Because Betty is an obvious mask, her character can afford to be more real in other ways. The twenty-something and thirty-something men and women watching this show don't have to imagine some far away time and setting to see a Betty Draper. We all have to deal with both women and men of her type now. She is 100 percent 2010.

It's Don Draper, Roger Sterling and Joan Holloway we need the show to help us visualize. These three characters—all obviously intended to be anachronistic to our world—that we admire the most. I don't think the creators pictured it working out this way. They haven't thought this through.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures ...

This is a conditional claim, as I noted before. And that raises the interesting question: Is it? (If you came here looking for the original quote, you can find at the bottom of this post.)

I don't think so. Did Fitzgerald agree with me? Yes, I think he did. He wasn't much of a man but he could write almost as well as Edith Wharton, which is to say that conditional is no accident. Gatsby's life is tragedy but it isn't unmerited tragedy.

Betty Draper is very much like Gatsby in this sense. Her personality is just like his. Don Draper is quite the opposite; he is a sort of anti-Gatsby.

Acquiring virtue is not a matter of a unbroken series of successful gestures.

It makes me think of my neighbour Dermot. Back when he was five, Dermot never failed to be Dermot. His personality was a successful series of unbroken gestures and to have continued in this light would have been to grow up to be an adult very much like Betty Draper. Now that he is a full years older Dermot and those of us watching him have a far less clear notion of who he is. His progress is much more like that of someone trying to learn how to play a musical instrument. He makes mistakes and he has to stop and start over again and again. Now he sometimes fails to be Dermot because being Dermot is an end he is aiming for.

Virtue, unlike personality, is about trying over and over again. And that is the difference between Don and Betty Draper. His offences, his serial infidelities for example, are serious and (at this point anyway) more troubling that Betty's. But he is a man of virtue and she is a child.

And what many take to be his most serious offence—"living a lie"—is no offence at all.

If you are joining me here, this series starts here.

The next post in the series is here.

The quote is from The Great Gastby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and it is the narrator Nick talking about Jay Gatsby. Here is all of it:

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promise of life, as if he related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the 'creative temperament'—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.

The moral claim

Tyler Cowen also claims that stories make us unhappy. Because stories lead us to imagine our lives in certain ways, they also try to lead lives that are appropriate to these stories. But, Cowen asks, are our lives really like that?

When asked to describe what their life was like, Cowen tells us that most people defined in terms of stories. The most common example of the stories people saw their lives in terms of a journey (51%), a battle (11%), the seasons (10%), novel (8%), a race (5%), a live performance like a play (5%), or a carousel (4%). There are a few undecideds and "other" as well.

Very few people, Cowen points out, see their lives as a mess. And yet a mess is, he insists, what it probably is. He goes on to ensure us that this could be a good thing; that we would be happier* if we just accepted that our lives are messes. That's the moral claim. We just make ourselves miserable pretending that our lives are journey's when they are actually messes and we should stop doing that.



* I can't help but notice that the specifically moral argument he uses is more akin to Aristotle than typical modern morality. Modern moral arguments tend to be about making the right choices. But when people just talk about what really matters to them, happiness always looms large just as it does for Cowen here.

CS Lewis's Four loves

Okay, let me begin by admitting that Iwas raised by liberal Christians and was, consequently, fed a steady diet of CS Lewis from an early age. Even though I resisted reading any of the many Lewis books in the house, I was being fed the stuff indirectly as he, along with Thomas Merton and a liberal reading of Thomas Aquinas, was such a huge influence on my parents thinking that almost everything they believed was coloured by something Lewis wrote. Even now I will sometimes say something that I honestly believe to be my own thought and be told that I am in fact quoting some Lewis book I have never read.

Lately, I have begun to read some of his stuff and find it all familiar and harmless for the most part.

With one exception. The Four Loves strikes me as a painfully shallow, self righteous and wrong-headed piece of writing. I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading it (following Jane Austen's example, I advocate reading promiscuously). I just think it's wrong. And I have at least one significant ally in this.

Deirdre McCloskey bases a lot of her thinking on Christian love but, like my parents, she is strongly influenced by Lewis to the detriment of her thinking.

Bougeois?

I am reading, with mostly positive feeling but also with some reservations, Deirdre McCloskey's The Bourgeois Virtues. It's a book that has long needed to be written and I commend her not only for doing it but for having the courage to tackle the project.

One of my reservations concerns McCloskey's definition of 'bourgeois":

... city dweller practicing an honoured profession or owning a business or functionning at a managerial level in someone else's enterprise, including governmental and non-profit enterprises.

For starters I'd note that Elinor Dashwood would not make the cut under this definition; neither she nor her parents had to work for a living and she does not live in a city. I don't think any definition of bourgeois that can't accommodate Elinor Dashwood is worth having.

I also wonder about "city dweller". The dwellers of some cities, I am thinking of really big cities and cities where governments or universities are the prime employers, are often characterized by their rejection of bourgeois virtue. More generally, the sense of shared public goods in some cities tends to overwhelm qualities of independence and self reliance that are, I'd argue, an essential part of bourgeois virtue.

Picking up from that last point, I'm not at all sure that government and non-profit employees can be counted on to maintain and uphold the bourgeois virtues. Here in Quebec in the 19th century there was a situation where the private sector bourgeoisie was so culturally dominated by people with appointed positions in government and the church that bourgeois virtues were undermined. This had very negative effects on the culture at large that the province still struggles with today.

You could argue that we are in considerable danger of seeing a similar misfortune hit the United States, especially some of the blue states.

Her situation in life

Catherine Morland is solidly planted in the middle class. Her father is a clergyman which is a profession at the point in time that he lived. And it is becoming more professionalized (according to an essay over on Victorian Web, much to the detriment of the Church of England. This rings true to me because the clergyman becomes an ongoing issue from Austen on is still an issue as late as the novels of EM Forster.)

Mr. Morland has two good livings. The family is not wealthy but they are comfortable.

This is important and is a detail about Austen that does not bother readers but deeply disturbs academics and intellectuals. She is about as bourgeois a novelist as you will find. Her virtues are the bourgeois virtues. And she writes at a time when these virtues are slowly gaining ascendancy over those of the aristocracy as the governing values of modernity.

Okay, as long as I'm being arrogant and cocksure: Harold Bloom is quite wrong. Shakespeare does not create modern humanity. No artist does, capitalism and Christianity create modern humanity. But if we ant an accurate portrayal of modern humanity as it is being created, the novels of Jane Austen are the place to go. (And it is because this development is so well portrayed in Austen that some academics and intellectuals don't like her)