Disrupting the narrative

One of my better lents was two years ago. I had decided to construct a chronology of my life. That is to say, I had decided to go look for independently verifiable events from my life and set them down in chronological order. What I discovered, and what you'll discover too if you try it, is that some of the key events in my personal narrative happened a lot sooner than I thought they had, some had happened a lot later than I thought they had and some of them didn't happen at all.

Now just saying that raises a problem. For another way of saying things happened earlier or later or not at all "in my personal narrative" is to say that my personal narrative was just wrong, that it wasn't true. That, in case you're wondering, is what made it a lenten sacrifice. And I undertook the thing precisely because I knew that assembling such a chronology was going to blow up the narrative. I knew this because I knew that chronologies have a tendency to disrupt narratives. What I didn't know was exactly how it would do it.

I'm so addicted to narratives that I must have expected that I was going to jump from one narrative to another. Maybe from one narrative to its mirror image. I've been conditioned to think this way all my life (and so have you) by something called the hermeneutics of suspicion. That is a tendency to think that the narratives we tell ourselves hide dark secrets. That's a credible claim because sometimes they do. The problem with the hermeneutics of suspicion is that it operates on the assumption that there is always a dark and unflattering truth lingering behind the narrative.

When Joan Didion wrote, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," she meant that we tell ourselves stories in order to conceal bleak, horrible facts from ourselves. When I set out to do my chronology, I expected to find bleak, horrible facts about myself. I expected to find proof that I'd been telling myself a story to hide from myself the ugly truth that my life had been made up of chaotic and disconnected moments driven by my selfish drive for power and sex.

Before moving on, pause and notice that that too is a kind of narrative. "People tell themselves stories to hide from themselves just how meaningless and unflattering their lives really are," is a kind of narrative. Not only that but it's a brutally simplistic narrative that cannot be true. It's the sort of thing a narcissist would cling to as a last point of refuge so they didn't have to give up their belief that they are very special. If I can't be a very good person, I can be a complete failure. (There's a a theory that some murderers kill as away to bestow a kind of meaning on their lives after a long series of personal failures.)

What I found when I did my chronology was not an alternative narrative. I did indeed find that a lot of things I do were done in pursuit of sex. That's what men do and it isn't evil. More importantly, I found was that there were a number of cases where I'd believed I'd behaved badly when I'd actually behaved pretty well. And I discovered that there were certain people in my life who'd consistently told me things about myself that weren't true. These were people very close to me who'd told me over and over again that I was a bad person whose judgment was no good. They hadn't told me I was evil. What they'd told me over and over again was that I needed to be brought down a peg or two for my own good. As a consequence, I'd grown up to be a man who doubted his own instincts believing that these always concealed baser motives that I was hiding from myself.

Okay, but how do I know I've finally gotten it right? Couldn't all this be just another illusion? It might be but "might be" doesn't mean "is". To believe, as Joan Didion appears to believe a lot of the time, that we just shift from one false narrative to another is to embrace a profound form of skepticism with all that comes with that. If someone says, "You just think you've found the truth but this is just your irrational desires masking the dark truths you know to be true," the obvious response is, "How do you know that doesn't apply to what you've just said? How do you know that your persistent skepticism isn't a way of masking the dark truth that you aren't the smartest person in the room, that you aren't the only one who can see the bleak truth that everyone else is trying to avoid?"

When people close to you attack you

Here's how Thomas Friedman began his column a little more than a year ago:

I find this election bizarre for many reasons but none more than this: If I were given a blank sheet of paper and told to write down America’s three greatest sources of strength, they would be “a culture of entrepreneurship,” “an ethic of pluralism” and the “quality of our governing institutions.” And yet I look at the campaign so far and I hear leading candidates trashing all of them.  

Donald Trump is running against pluralism. Bernie Sanders shows zero interest in entrepreneurship and says the Wall Street banks that provide capital to risk-takers are involved in “fraud,” and Ted Cruz speaks of our government in the same way as the anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist, who says we should shrink government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” (Am I a bad person if I hope that when Norquist slips in that bathtub and has to call 911, no one answers?)

Now, there is a tremendous problem with sloppy logic here. Donald Trump is running against pluralism? Not exactly. We wouldn't say that someone who opposes a certain kind of exercise is opposed to physical fitness. But there is a deeper problem than that and it's in the last line. Grover Norquist wants government to have much less influence over our lives and he used a colourful metaphor to describe that. Friedman wants Norquist to suffer.

And note that wanting smaller government is taken as being identical to wanting to shut down emergency services. Is Friedman actually so stupid as to believe that? Think carefully about your answer because if he isn't stupid then he is dishonest and manipulative.

I suspect that a big part of what motivates Friedman is fear. He can't imagine life without big government and so he engages in vicious and unfair attacks on people who think otherwise. A consequence of this way of thinking and behaving, however, is to shrink our sense of community. In Friedman's world there are good people who believe in big government (and Friedman can't imagine quality government being anything other than big government) and there are people he wishes would suffer because they have the wrong beliefs. That doesn't leave a lot of common ground.

Social psychologists have long known that we present different faces to different people. We do this based on the level of commitment. Friedman may well wish Norquist, whom he doesn't know or care about, dead for simply having the wrong opinions but he is unlikely (I hope) to think the same thing if his wife or one of his children became a libertarian. He might wish that they didn't think this way and may even have heated arguments with them about it. But he'd still love them. If, on the other hand, he meets someone on the bus and they express such a view, he might decide to change seats. The degree of commitment to the person matters.

For that reason, we can usually be more open with the people closest to us. We can say what we really think and not worry that they are suddenly going to start yelling and screaming at us or that they will stop speaking with us. But what if they do just that?

Facebook is a particularly interesting test case for this. You present more or less the same face to everyone on Facebook. What does it mean if people who are supposed to be in your core group of close friends and family respond to your opinions with anger and threats to cut you off while others calmly accept your right to have these opinions? It means they aren't really your close friends or family anymore. They may even be your enemies now. It's nothing you did. They chose this. You don't have to do anything about that. I'd argue that you shouldn't do anything about it. I mean, you shouldn't retaliate or try to convince them to change their minds.

Temperance and courage

Temperance: curbing the passions Courage: strengthening the passions against fear.

Those are Thomistic definitions cribbed from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I'm an Aquinas neophyte so I can't vouch for how good they are (I'm inclined to trust the source though).

From the same source, chastity, sobriety and abstinence are parts of temperance, as you would expect. But so is humility along with meekness, clemency and studiousness. Studiousness!?

One of the big challenges reading Thomas and Aristotle is that so much of it seems so sensible that you can just read it and nod along because everything you see seems easy to accept. I find I need to stop myself and force myself to see the weirdness: Why is "studiousness" a form of temperance?

Here is a list that goes with courage: endurance, confidence, magnanimity, patience and perseverance. We need to not nod along but see how some of those are weird enough that we need to think how they fit in.

Occasionally, the difficulty in achieving or avoiding certain objects can give rise to various degrees of fear and, in turn, discourage us from adhering to reason’s instruction. In these cases we may refuse to endure the pain or discomfort required for achieving our proper human good. Note here that fear is not innately contrary to reason. After all, there are some things that we should fear, like an untimely death or a bad reputation. Only when fear prevents us from facing what we ought to endure does it become inimical to reason.

Sometimes, however, we should risk death or loss of reputation. It's not an easy calculation to determine what circumstances merit that.

As I've noted before, there is something masculine about courage. That isn't to say that there aren't courageous women or cowardly men but there is a natural link in the mind. Some would think me sexist for saying so but I don't think so.

Looking back on my life, I grew up in a female dominated household and studied at female-dominated schools. Of the four cardinal virtues—prudence, temperance, courage and justice—the first two tended to get the most emphasis.

You see everywhere this in our culture. There are a whole lot of people out there who call themselves "social justice warriors" but they are really about controlling other people not about being just to other people. Their morality is the morality of the pack. And we can see this in how they stampede one way and then another. There is something pathetically cowardly about them, the way they shout down and attack in groups. It's really an attempt to shame others into conforming.

The problem here is not that they are "womanly" so much that there is a lack of balance. We need more courage and justice in our systems and our fathers didn't help us to acquire that. 

Jane Austen and fortitude

After yesterday's post, I think I am prepared to answer a question that has long puzzled me: Why did Jane Austen rate constancy so high? It was, for her, the supreme virtue. That is to say, of the virtues a human being could develop by themselves, constancy was the highest and the most important. It was the virtue that made all the other virtues work together.

That's worth lingering on for a moment to remind ourselves of a really basic point. Honesty and patience are both virtues but even a person possessed of these needs to have a higher virtue directing them to be virtuous in a general sense. It wouldn't do to be honest with Nazis nor does it make sense to be patient with them, except as a ruse to save your life right now and, ideally, set them up so you can defeat them in other ways later.

For Jane Austen then, constancy was the virtue that pulled the others into line. That is interesting in that it conflicts with the standard order which tends to place prudence and justice above constancy. For example,  the Catholic church, following Aquinas, prudence is the supreme virtue. Aquinas said that justice serves prudence because prudence was the greatest human virtue. Constancy was a product of fortitude and it, third on the list, served both justice and prudence. Now, there was no good reason for Austen to accept Catholic morality but she would not reject it out of hand either.

I think the way to answer the question is to approach it from another angle because it's a bit easier to figure out why she didn't simply take fortitude in preference to constancy. Fortitude or courage were too much associated with masculinity for Austen's purposes. Jane Austen was not a feminist, at least not in the modern sense, but she was very much concerned with women and that was a decidedly rebellious thing to do in her era. We might call her a more prudent rebel than, to pick the obvious example, Mary Wollstonecraft.

Austen was well aware that physical fortitude and moral fortitude (which is another way of saying constancy) were related and even knew that moral fortitude was impossible without physical fortitude. Fanny's success is very much a product of her physical fitness and Marianne Dashwood's near disaster is very much a product of her failing to take care of her body. But Austen saw physical fitness as something that was not wholly in a woman's ability to control herself. Fanny's fitness depends on Edmund Bertram standing up for her and making sure she gets opportunity to exercise.

Now we might condemn Austen for not being feminist enough on this point but her attitudes are probably the result of her recognizing the grim realities of her time. Women simply were dependent on men for protection to a degree that we find it hard to imagine.

The more difficult question is why Austen emphasized constancy while recognizing that physical fortitude was a necessary but not sufficient condition for it. Why not, as tradition had, embrace a more general virtue that included both physical and moral fortitude? The answer to that, I think, is that she did so precisely because a woman's physical health was not under her control, which is to say her body was not under her control. And, in the late 18th and early 19th century, it was not. That is hard for us to grasp because a woman's right to control her own body is the starting point for feminism.

And we can carry that logic on to see that prudence and justice were also matters that were largely outside a woman's control. In a rigidly controlled class structure such as existed at the time, what counted as justice would have been fixed items for most people. Likewise, being prudent is less important when most of your fate is contingent on matters you could not hope to control. The very richest would have been able to get away with things that others could not, and we see that reflected in a characters such as Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice but Austen grasped that for women of her class, that is to say, the lower gentry, "prudence" and "justice" meant no more than conforming to what was expected of you.

Constancy becomes the supreme virtue because it was the most important virtue that is mostly within a woman's control. It is there that a woman can succeed as a woman to the degree that success is possible. And we read Austen incorrectly if we fail to see how much of Elinor's, Elizabeth's and Fanny's fate is beyond their control; things could have gone very, very wrong for any of them even had they always behaved absolutely impeccably. In fact, we can see that Fanny had far less leeway than Elinor and Elinor had less than Elizabeth. Emma, on the other hand, is rich enough that she could be far stupider and still get away with it, as she did.

Austen's position on the virtues is, for the above reasons, very much like that of the Roman stoics. They were also writing in a rigid society where what counted as justice was largely given and where prudence was likely to be over-shadowed by reversals of fortune you could not hope to control. They, however, emphasized courage and believed that human beings should be indifferent to their emotions. Austen recognized that emotions could be channeled—that a moral life required us to bot nurture and control our feelings. That makes her one of the most important writers on morality of the modern era.

I think it also, and I'll come back to this, makes her worthy of being called not just romantic but the greatest of the romantics.

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.

Constancy 2

Some final thoughts about constancy and, for now, Elinor Dashwood.

I've been thinking about Elinor in comparison to the stoics. The stoics also believed that emotions entailed judgments. They believed we should resist emotions. When I feel passionate in response to something I see, I should resist that passion and be rational instead. They thought of emotions as passions, things that drove us, that we were being passive when we allowed our emotions to run.

And that is certainly true in some cases. If I let my anger run free, I will soon reach a point where I am a raging out of control. And Elinor, in the quote I began with, was worried about a similar process with another emotion.

She knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next—that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect.

The process whereby we allow our anger to feed itself and become more and more convinced we are are entitled to lash out at others is like that.

The stoic solution, however, is very different from Elinor's. She would reign in her feelings. She is willing to let them drive her. She is Platonic in the sense that she thinks the passions are a force to drive our lives like a horse drives a chariot. They would act as if they didn't have any. They believe that by doing this, they act more rationally. Eilnor doesn't think that way. She thinks having feelings is very important; she believes that they are what drives us in helpful ways.

To do so they have to be the right sort of feelings. We have to have a fundamental disposition. If I spend a lifetime letting myself lose my temper, my fundamental disposition will be harmful. If I spend it channeling and controlling my emotions, I'm more likely to have a good fundamental disposition.

That opens up a whole lot of questions that I don't necessarily want to answer now so I'll stop here for now.

A Lenten Project

I don't own this image or the words attached. I found them on Facebook. I do mean to own them in the sense of internalizing the moral attitude expressed. (If you do own the image and/or words and object to my using them, let me know.)

Constancy

Just a few pages past the quote discussed in my last post, we get a contrast between Elinor and her mother. It's an interesting contrast because both are in agreement about what should be done. The difference is not the outcome of their decision-making but the way the decision lines up, or not, with their feelings.

Mrs. Dashwood has been greatly upset by Fanny who has suggested to her that Elinor may be attempting to win her brother Edward's affection. And there can be little doubt that Elinor could easily wish for such a thing and it is only through considerable restraint that she is keeping what she might wish from becoming a hope. Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters believe that love should be allowed to run its course and, should a man in line to inherit a fortune (or one already in possession of one) fall in love with a girl of only small fortune so be it. Fanny, on the other hand, can only see a girl after a fortune and she seeks to warn Mrs. Dashwood that such a thing will not be allowed.

And here we might, as difficult as this may seem, pause to show a little charity towards Fanny. Her job in life is not to distribute wealth or to promote social equality but to look out for the interests of her family. She would have known, as would have all of Jane Austen's readers, that even great fortunes could be lost. In the modern west, we can be egalitarian because we are relatively well insulated from destitution. We imagine that everyone could give something up and we'd all still be comfortably well off. Fanny is cold and calculating to be sure but being cold and calculating is a matter of degree; we can be certain that Mrs. Dashwood, Marianne and even my beloved Elinor, do not imagine a world in which any of their class might marry a male servant out of love. By the standards of the day, Fanny is no better than she ought to be but she is at least as good as she ought to be.

What all that adds up to is that, much as we might wish her more open-hearted, Fanny's attitude is not so unreasonable as to be simply dismissed. Even today, it is entirely reasonable for a parent (or other relative acting on their behalf) to respond with some suspicion towards someone who seeks their son's or daughter's love. And so, even though we are on her side, we might wonder at the strength of Mrs. Dashwood's reaction to what Fanny has said.

In any case, it is while so stirred up that she receives the offer of a cottage some distance away from Norland and that makes a difference in how she decides.
She needed no time for deliberation or inquiry. Her resolution was formed as she read. The situation of Barton, in a county so far distant from Sussex as Devonshire, which, but a few hours before, would have been a sufficient objection to outweigh every possible advantage belonging to the place, was now its first recommendation. To quit the neighbourhood of Norland was no longer an evil; it was an object of desire; it was a blessing, in comparison of the misery of continuing her daughter-in-law's guest; and to remove for ever from that beloved place would be less painful than to inhabit or visit it while such a woman was its mistress. She instantly wrote Sir John Middleton her acknowledgment of his kindness, and her acceptance of his proposal; and then hastened to shew both letters to her daughters, that she might be secure of their approbation before her answer were sent.
Her decision, as it happens, is a good one. We can see, however, that, in another mood, she might just as easily have made a bad one. Contingency has played a huge role in what she does. And, had her mood inclined her to make a bad decision, she would have made it irrevocably.

Elinor supports the decision but the role her feelings play is very different.

Elinor had always thought it would be more prudent for them to settle at some distance from Norland, than immediately amongst their present acquaintance. On that head, therefore, it was not for her to oppose her mother's intention of removing into Devonshire. The house, too, as described by Sir John, was on so simple a scale, and the rent so uncommonly moderate, as to leave her no right of objection on either point; and, therefore, though it was not a plan which brought any charm to her fancy, though it was a removal from the vicinity of Norland beyond her wishes, she made no attempt to dissuade her mother from sending a letter of acquiescence.

There are a lot of words here but they do not carry equal weight. Notice the emphasis on "that". It was Jane Austen's choice to do so. The point we are to take is that there are other heads on which she might well oppose her mother's decision. And we should be able to figure out what those are for the second most important word in that paragraph is "wishes". Elinor has always thought it prudent for them to settle "at some distance" from Norland but this is rather more distance than her "wishes" would have it.

She knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next—that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect.

Austen is too careful a writer for us to not take her word choice very seriously. It matters a whole lot that Elinor's feelings towards Edward at this point are wishes and not hopes or expectations.  Had she allowed her feelings to proceed so far, she might have stood against her mother's choice.

Another to think about it would be to ask ourselves whose decision is most in line with their feelings. At first glance, we might say Mrs. Dashwood for her decision is in complete harmony with her feelings at the time she made the decision. To put it that way, however, is to see the problem for, at other times, it would not be in line with her feelings. And how strong can your feelings really be if they are there one minute and gone the next? Elinor, on the other hand, recognizes that she has a divided self. She realizes that her feelings are often at war with one another, pulling her in two directions at once. Her feelings, I would argue, are stronger for they don't wax and wane depending on shifting circumstances.

The third most important word in the paragraph describing Elinor's feelings and choices above is "prudent". Prudence is a virtue and we could not deny that Elinor has it. But prudence is a matter of degree as seen by Austen's choice to modify it with the word "more". It is not a foregone conclusion that Elinor will make the more prudent choice; in some cases, she might allow her feelings to overrule prudence. Not because she would abandon sense for sensibility alone (we might say "sola sensibility" here because Austen's theological position vis a vis traditional protestantism is very much to the point here) but because she possesses another virtue, to a degree that her mother does not, that is more important than prudence.

The virtue that Mrs. Dashwood is weak in by contrast to her daughter is called constancy. I don't have time to prove it now but for Jane Austen, constancy is the key virtue, higher even than prudence and that is saying something. A good Christian, Austen would rate faith, hope and love above constancy but she would also regard those as graces, which is to say that they are virtues we can only hope to attain with God's help. Of the virtues we can attain through our own efforts, constancy is the greatest. That Mrs. Dashwood lacks constancy is clear from the above; in a different mood she would have chosen differently. That she, Marianne and Elinor all have strong feelings is counted in their favour—to have strong feelings is a virtue, perhaps even a grace—but virtues don't stand by themselves. Without the other virtues, no one virtue is any good.

That, and I'll finish here, also applies to constancy. Here is a dictionary definition of constancy:

the quality of being unchanging or unwavering, as in purpose, love, or loyalty; firmness of mind; faithfulness.

We can see that other virtues are listed. The definition does not speak of constancy in sloth, hatred or resentment.

Sense?

"She knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next—that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect."

I've known people like that, men as well as women.

"She" in this case is Elinor Dashwood. There is no character in literature I identify with quite as much as I do with Elinor. Not that I lived up to her standards. It is more of an aspirational thing than a matter of commonality; I think I'm a lot like her but not so much as I should be.

The issue here is exactly what the title of the novel would have us suspect: sense and sensibility. Elinor is a perfect balance of both. That, I believe, is the key to understanding this novel. The key moment of Pride and Prejudice is the one where Elizabeth says, "Till this moment, I never knew myself." I had a moment like that myself this year. But that sort of moment could never happen with Elinor. Elinor already knows herself.

If we have a look at the full quote from Pride and Prejudice, we can see it all clearly.

"How despicably have I acted!'' she cried.—"I, who have prided myself on my discernment! — I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust.—How humiliating is this discovery!—Yet, how just a humiliation!—Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.— Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.''

Elinor would never court prepossession and ignorance and drive reason away. Her sister Marianne, on the other hand, could easily do so. And does.

Exactly how she does so is what we see in the quote at the top. From conjecture to belief, what does that mean? The explanation comes after the dash in three progressive emotions: wish becomes hoping and hoping becomes expectation. But how?

Well, I know how I'd explain it. I'd go with Robert Solomon's argument that each emotion embodies a judgment. There is the judgment that leads to the emotion. Wishing is based on a judgment about facts. We always wish for something. But there is a second judgment that follows. We become aware that feel an emotion and that ought to imply a further judgment.

It won't lead to a further judgment unless we train ourselves to make it. There are natural progressions to emotions and Elinor, for we are surely in her head here, has diagnosed one accurately. I say progressions for they don't inevitably lead the way they do here. I've known people who go from wishing to resignation. The point is that it's an habitual way of proceeding. Elinor knows because she has seen it many times before. Marianne and her mother don't know because they don't have "sense".

"Sense" cannot, and does not, mean rationality here. All three of these women are equally rational.  They are, in fact, equal in both rationality and feeling. Sense is something else. I have some notions of what that might be but I'm withholding judgment for now. That is, after all, what Elinor would do.

Disagreeing with my father

This is the first of a series of cross postings from another blog of mine called Rum, Romanism and rebellion. I've decided to use the other one as a place to write a sort of public diary, a place where I will take some selections from my private journal and put them "out there" just because. AT the same time, I will take some posts from there that I have put up over the past three years and share them here.

I love my father but see things differently than he does. This photo, which he shared on Facebook, is a good source to draw out how I disagree.

My father was sharing a post by the Anglican Diocese of Fredericton who were, in turn, sharing it from Michael Baisden Live. I'd never heard of Baisden before but, according to Wikipedia anyway, eight million people listen to his radio show.

The sentiments above, are typical of those who value getting along above truth. As a consequence, arguing with them is not a matter of establishing what is or isn't true. It should be obvious, that while it is true that apologizing requires bravery when you have something to apologize, apologizing for things that aren't their fault is what spineless wimps do. Likewise, while it is sometimes the case that truly strong people can often forgive what moral weaklings continue to resent, weak people show their weakness by forgiving what they should not. And if you forgive what you should not forgive you will never forget but will stew in resentment for decades.

There is, however, little point in trotting out facts in the face of such sentiments for what really matters to the person who says, or posts, such things is avoiding conflict. The strategy at work here, and that is what it is, imagines that the natural state of the world is to be at peace. As a consequence, evil enters the world when people stir things up and peace can be obtained if everyone agrees to just get along.

But the truth is that world is naturally chaotic and order is only maintained because brave, strong people work to keep it that way. When warranted, an apology is a good thing. Strength is always a good thing and, sometimes, forgiving is a sign of strength. Apologizing and forgiving to get along, on the other hand, is neither brave nor strong. It's surrendering in order to get peace. and that is a mistake in many ways.

For starters, it just doesn't work. Apologize to a bully and they will only bully you more. But there is a deeper problem.  It involves what Robert Glover calls a covert contract. Notice the wording, "The first to apologize ...". The first? Shouldn't only the person who has done wrong apologize?

If you challenge the person who pushes the above sentiments, their first line of defence will be to argue that it takes two to tango. And that is where the nihilistic roots of the argument get revealed. Yes, two people can start a fight by both being pigheaded but that is a relatively rare phenomenon. Most conflict starts because one side is being unreasonable. But the person who suggests that you apologize when you are attacked doesn't care about that. They just want peace and they imagine that an apology will buy off the attacker. Why? Because it's a contract: "I'll let you have your way if you stop being aggressive." But it's a covert contract so this never actually gets said. The other person simply hears an apology and assumes, therefore, that you really think it's your fault.

About thirty years ago I figured out that this is a recipe for unhappiness. The truth matters and sometimes you have to stand up for the truth even if it means conflict.