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.

Yes, strength is a virtue. And this is especially true for men.

Someone commented on an old post about strength being a virtue and asked if I still thought so and if I had any further thoughts on the subject. The answer is yes on both counts.

One of the perennial questions about virtues is whether you can have them in isolation. Now, that may sound dry and academic and it certainly can be dry and academic but it needed be. Think about the police. Are you glad we have a police force? You shouldn't have to think about that. The only correct answer to that question is yes. But you also worry about abuse of police power. And you worry even though you know it's pretty rare.

Strength is like the police. It's unquestionably a good thing and yet you know that strength can be misused. Strength is scary. When I first started squatting I was shocked at how quickly I got up to weights that really scared me. The potential for damage was huge. To have strength is good but you need to figure out how to use it and you need to figure out how to develop it in a balanced way. Getting stronger is part of being better in every way but it isn't a guarantee of anything.

Learning how to use it

First, a massive qualification: My experience is that weak, snivelling little shits do a lot more damage in this world than strong men do. You will probably be a better man in every way if you get stronger. Probably. I say that because having  physical strength is going to force you to think about moral issues that you've been ducking until now.

When I started lifting many years ago, two huge moral/psychological changes followed. The first was that I started standing up to people. When I saw some jerk pick on someone, I started speaking up. I'm six foot one and I'm big. And, without really thinking about it, I started using that size and the strength I'd gained. If someone crowded me on the bus, I'd stand up tall. It seems like a little thing but I realized that for years I'd been backing away or contorting myself to accommodate pushy people and, now that I was strong, I stopped doing it.

I did the same socially. And some people got really upset. I had one woman I'd known for years start yelling at me and threatening me simply because I no longer put up with her verbal bullying. She soon made it clear that either I was going to revert to my former ways or lose her friendship. I chose to let it go. And that hurt her. It hurt her a lot. And I had to think that through. It wasn't my fault that she was unreasonable but she was pretty stuck in her ways and it was unlikely that she would change. I felt that I was just finally standing up for what was reasonable all these years but I quickly figured out that doing so was going to be devastating for her. In the end, I decided that my standing up for myself was more important than her feelings and did so even though I knew she'd go through some psychological suffering.

Strength forces you to think seriously about hurting people. You still hurt people when you don't have strength but it's easier to dodge responsibility. Once your strong, you know you can do it. You may think, that doesn't apply to me because I'm never going to be strong like an MMA expert. And that's true, but MMA fighters are in the top two percent in terms of their ability to inflict pain. Only an idiot would challenge a guy like that. But most men aren't like that. Most men are weak and pathetic and four months in the gym will make you stronger than most men. And if you do that, you have to start thinking seriously about violence and what you might do with it.

The second moral challenge was sex. Your testosterone goes way up and so does your sex drive. And so do your opportunities for sex. Women become more interested in you. In fact, any man in his twenties or early thirties who takes the trouble to be strong, get a good job and learn to be be socially adept will soon find the number of potential sexual partners available to him to be a little staggering. And then you suddenly find yourself faced with moral challenges about sex in a way that you never were before.

Balance

If you start getting stronger, one of the brutal truths you will soon be forced to face is that some other men are lot stronger than you are. That may seem obvious but our narcissism plays tricks on us. Before we try, we know that we aren't strong but part of us believes that we could be as good as anyone else if we tried and that isn't even close to true. Yeah, somebody has to be the strongest guy in the gym and it might be you but it almost certainly won't be. More likely, you'll be working out someday and some relatively ordinary looking guy who weighs 60 pounds less than you is going to come in and lift a hundred and fifty pounds more than you. And, no, you're never going to catch up to him.

Getting stronger should teach you lessons about yourself and you should use those lessons to become a better person. Not the best man there is but the best man you can be. One of the most important lessons is about reasonable limits. If  you've never worked out, you'll make huge gains at first. And then that will taper off and then the question becomes how do I manage myself now. For me, physical training was the first time I had to ask that question.

Now that I'm getting older—some stores now give me a seniors' discount—I've had to start facing getting weaker. No matter how much I train, I get a little weaker every year. That's true of people who don't train but they can hide it with self denial. You can't do that with weights: you can either move them or you can't.

Now, it doesn't follow that being forced to face this stuff will lead to wisdom. I meet people in the gym who do really stupid shit fairly regularly. Virtues don't exist in isolation. But the thing about virtues is that you don't get any of them if you don't work at them. You may still fail at becoming a man if you get strong but you will almost certainly fail if you don't.

Who wants to control your sexuality, who really is controlling it and who should be controlling it

Laws making sex outside of marriage illegal improve the bargaining position of women who want to get married, or stay married, or to maintain a strong bargaining position within marriage. Hence it is rational for women to support such laws.

That strikes me as very clever. Clever in a useful way. It's the mirror image of a cynical comment that was common when I was in college in the early 1980s: "Marriage is nothing but legalized prostitution." When clever people say admittedly shallow things like this, we are forced to think.

It seems to me that both claims are plainly false. Any man or woman who entered marriage in the belief that it was legalized prostitution would soon be far more bitter about their experience than anyone who entered marriage as a starry-eyed idealist expecting to float along on a cloud of romantic bliss. Likewise, while I'm sure that the notion that marriage would be stronger if men didn't have access to prostitution is part of the justification that some anti-prostitution activists make to themselves and others, I don't think it would make an iota of difference to the strength of marriage or marriages if it could be made illegal.

But what about pornography? That's the primary point of two authors Helen Smith calls our attention to. Michael Malcolm and George Naufal merely use the old progressive argument against prostitution as a way to frame a new progressive argument against pornography.

Traditionally, one of the reasons to enter into a marriage was sexual gratification. But as options for sexual gratification outside of marriage have grown, the need for a marriage to serve this function is diminishing. The NIH reports that the fraction of 20 year-olds who have engaged in premarital sex grew by about 50% between the late 1950s and the late 1990s. Besides premarital sex, another option is consumption of pornography, which has become widely more accessible since the proliferation of the Internet. 

The degree to which these extra-marital options for sexual gratification substitute for marriage is an open question. Friedman (2000), among others, has suggested that one of the reasons that prostitution is so socially abhorrent is that it competes with women who seek a stable marriage. While there is a small literature on the relationship between prostitution and marriage, there is almost no empirical work on the substitutability between pornography and marriage. This paper attempts to fill the gap.

Okay, this is delusional from the get-go. Traditionally, one of the reasons to enter into marriage is love. To reduce that to "sexual gratification" is to unconsciously apply a very cynical utilitarian psychology. Notice also that Malcolm and Naufal themselves seem to suspect that the the links are tenuous in the case of prostitution and marriage weakness. They are, nevertheless, willing to plunge forward into researching links between pornography and marriage weakness. And we should further notice the implicit assumption that in doing so they are advancing the interests of women!

This speaks well to the dual purpose of our paper: extra-marital sexual opportunities can reduce marital formation and stability, and this is an important point for policymakers and for society at large since marital formation is generally regarded in a positive light.

Helen Smith, whose blog I found out about the argument from, pretty much nails it,

So, marriage is all about what bargaining power women have and finding ways to get men married off to benefit society, women and children–and maybe get better “trading partners”? Seriously? There is no mention of the benefits to men directly, only how their participation will benefit others. So all men are to be sacrificed to the cause without thought to their rights, needs or desires? It’s no wonder they have turned to porn. Prostitution was made illegal — is porn next?

 But notice something really important about this argument that Helen Smith fails to note. That is that while this argument is being made in the supposed interests of women, it is actually being made by men!

Progressivism from its 19th century efforts to prohibit alcohol to its current efforts to prohibit pornography, fraternities, manspreading, mansplaining and, ultimately, any expression of male sexuality has always presented itself as a movement driven by the interests of women. Indeed, women have always played a significant role in progressivism. But men somehow always seem to end up holding the reins of the progressive movement; not men in general but certain men and we might say a certain kind of elite male who has an interest in controlling the male sexuality, meaning to control other men. These are elite men who want to do this controlling. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, these men tended to be clergymen. Today they tend to be the credentialed elite who dominate, universities, media and the management of government bureaucracies.

They, as I will note below, frame their arguments in utilitarian terms. They say, we should do this for the good of society and they identify the good of society with what women want. As I've said over and over again on this blog, there is a common assumption of the moral superiority of women when it comes to matters of sex. If you weren't paying attention, you might think that it is women in general who are pushing this sort of thinking when it is a small group of elite men and women that is mostly dominated by men at work.

An angry man, young or hold, might read Helen Smith's argument and think, "Nasty women want me to stop using porn because they want to control my sexuality." But that's not her point. She thinks that if men don't get any benefit out of marriage they will reject it in favour of other alternatives. Pornography is only one of these. A wealthy or good-looking man could just as easily pursue serial monogamy or casual sexual partners as an alternative. Or he could enter a monastery or become a Catholic priest. Or he could become a heavy drinker. But her point is not that some alternative is pulling men away from marriage but that marriage is no longer attracting them.

There is a subsidiary point that progressives, vile little puritans as they always are, will, rather than face the fact that they poisoned marriage in the first place, now begin to ban prostitution, pornography, monastic life and alcohol so as to eliminate even the solace that a man might find there. And that's probably true but the problems start with sexuality in marriage and not alternatives to it. (I remind you that the elite men who succeeded in prohibiting alcohol sales mostly continued to drink themselves; it matters a whole lot that Malcolm and Naufel don't seem to believe their own arguments.)

Let's take this back to virtue for this blog is always about virtue. The argument that Malcolm and Naufal is ultimately a utilitarian one. It's a pretty soft utilitarian argument as all they are willing to say about the utility of marriage is that "marital formation is generally regarded in a positive light". They don't really believe what they are saying but they are saying it anyway! The mealy mouthed argument they make anyway takes a utilitarian form we might paraphrase as, "Lot's of people think that marriage formation will make for the greater good of society therefore policy makers should restrict or prohibit extra-marital sexual gratification for men if it can be proven that this extra-marital gratification makes them less likely to marry." What we need is to replace that argument, an argument even its proponents aren't committed to, with a virtue ethics argument.

To do this, we don't need to sell anyone on marriage. The vast majority of young men and women still want to get married. What we need to change is the way we tell them to conduct themselves sexually.

I've done a lot of posts on this blog under the heading of "The advice they give". In these posts I look at advice about sexuality and about sexuality in marriage. I think, and you can judge this against your own experience as this post is already too long, that there are certain commonalities in this advice.

1. Men are generally advised to constrain their sexual desires and focus on the woman. We are told that if we are courteous, supportive, loving and respectful towards women, we can hope to be sexually gratified so long as our desires line up with what the woman wants to do anyway.
2. Women are told that they should always ensure that what they really want should always have priority over doing things merely to please men.
3. Neither approach is working. Women, it turns out, are not much attracted to sensitive, caring guys who suppress their own wants to focus on women's needs. Women who choose to make their own desires a priority, on the other hand, get confused because they soon realize they don't have a clue what they really want or that what they really want doesn't fit very well with the way they want to see themselves or with the way they want others to see them.

Okay, do I have an answer to my own challenge? Do I have a virtue ethics argument for marriage? Not yet but I'm working on it. I've even thought of going back to school to work on it.

I'm sure I'll have more to say on this in the future.

Willoughby was sincere

If we wish to make something of sincerity as a virtue we must have a way to evaluate it. I won't say "measure it" because that suggests something like science. But there is something to be said for wanting to measure it for we don't just wonder if someone is sincere, we also wonder how sincere they are. The implied claim is that someone could be sincere but not sincere enough; that being sincere is not like pregnancy in that one either is or is not but rather that there are degrees of sincerity just as there are degrees of courage.

Someone might be courageous enough to kill spiders but be at a complete loss when dealing with bats. I'm not suggesting that there is a unit of courage but we all understand that some people might be brave enough for some circumstances but not for others.

Courage can also be learned and trained for: if you practice facing small things bravely, you will prepare yourself for facing the big ones.

It doesn't seem to me that you can discuss sincerity in  those terms. I think to talk about sincerity as being more or less strong is nonsensical. I fact, I'd argue that sincerity has nothing to do with strength at all—you can be the very worst sort of moral weakling and be sincere.

I don't mean to say that sincerity is nothing. I don't think it is terribly useful for building or evaluating character.

Is he or isn't he?

"Is he sincere," seems a natural enough question. Bill says he will love Janice to the end of time and she wonders if he is sincere. But is it really? If Janice really has to ask, then she obviously has little knowledge of his character. If she knew Bill to be a good, caring and responsible person, she wouldn't be asking the question because she would not only know him not to make such a statement carelessly, she would also have some notion of his ability to carry through on his promises.

For someone can make promises, both explicitly and implicitly, and be absolutely sincere in making them and yet fail miserably in keeping them. This is where John Willoughby comes into the picture for his love for Marianne Dashwood is sincere. This is not a matter of interpretation but a plot point. When Willoughby shows up while Marianne is sick late in the novel, the whole point of the conversation he has with Elinor is to bring this fact into clear light; Austen wanted to make it clear to the reader that there was no room whatsoever to doubt Willoughby's sincerity. For Marianne, it is some comfort to learn that her judgment of his sincerity was not wrong. But, having acknowledged that, we are left with another problem for if he was (and is) sincere in his love and yet behaved the way he did, what good is sincerity?

The early American pragmatists were brought face to face with this problem by the civil war when it turned out that some of those who held sincere anti-slavery views were cowards in action while some others who cared little for the plight of the slaves distinguished themselves by fighting very bravely.

Children of alcoholic parents often have the uselessness of sincerity driven home in particularly brutal fashion. Their alcoholic mother or father will make declarations and promises that are absolutely sincere and then fail to come through with heartbreaking regularity.

For Austen, the virtue that really mattered was constancy. Constancy isn't enough by itself: a constant racist is not a virtuous man or woman after all. But constancy, unlike, sincerity, can real work in a moral life.

By the way ...

A fascinating thing about Willoughby as a character in a novel is that he has failed as a man before the story even begins. Nothing he could do could make him a worthy husband for Marianne because he has already poisoned things by having sex with the 15-year-old Eliza. He'd be a better man, if he would accept his Aunt's conditions and do right by Eliza after having gotten her pregnant but he would still be less than a whole man because he no longer loves Eliza after having met Marianne.

I knew a guy who was much like Willoughby in university. Dave was very successful with women. He wasn't a pick-up artist, by which I mean he didn't run up great numbers of conquests. But he was always with a beautiful sexual partner and there were always other women vying for the chance to replace whoever his partner of the moment was.

After graduation, he got a job at the Bamboo Club in Toronto and carried on in his ways. I hadn't known him terribly well at university and had assumed that Dave was a cynical man who cleverly exploited women's emotions to have sex with them. I got to know him in those later days, however, and found that he was anything cynical: he was sincerely loved by the women who fell in with him and he sincerely loved every woman he ever was involved with.

Ultimately, though, the women all gave up on him. They didn't hate him . One of the most trying things for those of us who wished we had a quarter of Dave's attractiveness for women was that they spoke of him admiringly but regretfully even after the break up. They still seemed to wish that their relationships might be rekindled and actually work out the second time. He had everything they wanted for love but not what it took to make a marriage.

Dave, like Willoughby, was immensely attractive as a sincere lover but not much of a man in the final analysis and "constancy;" is a good word to describe what was missing in him. . I recently finished the Sylvie Simmons biography of Leonard Cohen and reached the same conclusion about him.

Saint Ambrose and the inner life

Today is the feast of Saint Ambrose. One of the most famous stories about Ambrose, recounted in the Augustine's Confessions, is that he read without moving his lips. If you are unfamiliar with the story, check out this post of Father Z's where he talks about it.

There are two kinds of questions to consider here. The first is what is it that made this experience unusual? Had nobody figured out how to read without moving their lips before Ambrose?  That seems unlikely. It is more likely, given the context, that most people simply did not read without moving their lips. Why not?

The passage quoted by Father Z (with his added emphasis) is telling:

Now, as he read, his eyes glanced over the pages and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. Often when we came to his room—for no one was forbidden to enter, nor was it his custom that the arrival of visitors should be announced to him—we would see him thus reading to himself. After we had sat for a long time in silence—for who would dare interrupt one so intent?—we would then depart, realizing that he was unwilling to be distracted in the little time he could gain for the recruiting of his mind, free from the clamor of other men’s business. Perhaps he was fearful lest, if the author he was studying should express himself vaguely, some doubtful and attentive hearer would ask him to expound it or discuss some of the more abstruse questions, so that he could not get over as much material as he wished, if his time was occupied with others. And even a truer reason for his reading to himself might have been the care for preserving his voice, which was very easily weakened. Whatever his motive was in so doing, it was doubtless, in such a man, a good one. 

Reading was a public act. Ambrose stood out for Augustine not because he could do this but because he flouted a social convention by reading silently. Even if you were all alone, you read aloud such that, should someone come into the room, they could hear what you read.

It's not hard to think of reasons why that might be. Books were expensive and rare and so were the people who could read them.  That's one possibility. And there is also a related moral possibility that you shouldn't be locking your reading away.

Saint Augustine, as Father Z notes, is determined to be charitable. Based on his other experiences of Ambrose, he assumes that the goodness he has seen in his outer life must also be true of his inner life. What Augustine doesn't say, but is unintentionally implied by what he does, is that there are reasons why someone might be reading silently that are not admirable. Most obviously, I could be reading porn. Less obviously, I might be keeping something really good solely to myself intending to later whip it out as if it was the product of my own thinking.

I could keep on meandering along these byways but the question I want to ask is this: Suppose the "inner life" were nothing more than what we do when we read without moving our lips? I mean, suppose that there were nothing I could do in my inner life that I could not, in principle, do outwardly? In that case, it becomes very easy to think of the "inner life" as a possible cesspool of corruption and evil.

I mention this because there is a tendency to talk about an inner life as if it was something only morally cultivated people were capable of; as if, as it were, we lived in a  society where most people could barely read and where, therefore, being able to read read without moving lips would be an indicator of superiority. We, therefore, talk as if developing your inner life will make you better.

Suppose a woman approaches me and asks if if I have ever read Hans Urs von Balthasar. I answer her question, confessing to my relative ignorance of the guy, tell her what little I do know, confess that I've always wanted to read more and then suggest that we might both read a particular work of his and discuss it together. That's my outer life. My inner life could match it more or less. Then again, I might be thinking, "Boy it would be great to see and handle those magnificent __s! If we meet regularly to discuss Balthasar and she starts to like me, then maybe ... ."

The point here is not that that is uniquely evil. Every woman knows that men think about them that way and there would be something wrong with a woman who did not hope for and even deliberately provoke such reactions at least some of the time. Our entire civilization, especially the parts having to do with courtship, relies on our knowing how and being willing to play a double game. The point rather is that there is nothing necessarily good or terribly mystical about an inner life.

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.

Favors metacommentary: Two out of three ain't bad

Okay, I'm going to have to admit that Hana Rosin is a lot sharper than I gave her credit for. My only excuse is that I was fixated on her particular blind spots but the problem with that is that we all have blind spots. Anyway, she really hit a lot of good points this week.

Let's start here:

Seth, I think you omitted one other important reason why Don does the favor for young Mitchell Rosen: his man-crush on Arnold. Given the way Don fixates on Arnold, I often wonder whether he’s sleeping with Sylvia just to become enmeshed with the good surgeon. 

The psychological insight at work here is called mimesis.  In it we form crushes on people not because we desire them but because we desire to be like them. The most obvious example of this is a child for the parent. Mimesis creates a sort of instant tension because the one experiencing it will see the person they imitate both as an object for imitation ("I want to be like you") and rivalry ("I want to replace you").

If that is really what is at work here, and I hope it is because it would give this season some real meat and purpose, then Don is not attracted to Sylvia in her own light but because he wants to be like Arnold Rosen who is married to Sylvia. This, by the way, is a very male thing. If a man you admire is suddenly attracted to a woman you would not normally find beautiful, you can be sure that you too will suddenly find things about her that are beautiful, not because her beauty wasn't always there but because you hadn't really tried looking for it.

In the eyes of some critics, mimesis explains everything about art and culture. That's overstating it but it is a powerful, and usually neglected force in human life.

I'll carry on with the rest of the paragraph I cite above:

Similarly, at their drunken confessional dinner, Peggy accuses Pete of being in love with Ted. Of course, that’s where the episode stopped being subtle. I can’t tell you how irritated I was at the Benson knee press. It’s always such a letdown when a mystery is solved and the answer is … He’s gay, even if Internet rumors have long abounded. How much more satisfying if the answer had been … nothing, as you wished for last week, Paul, and Benson had remained his thoroughly inscrutable shiny self for the whole of the season. Although I suppose we should have guessed it, since the vibe between Bob and Joan was more Elton John and Marilyn Monroe than Don and Sylvia.

Yesss!!!!! (Not incidentally, how much more satisfactory the drama will be if the root causes of Don Draper turn out to be ... nothing.)

As I was saying last time, the really irritating thing about Bob Benson's sexuality is how it's wrapped up in a nice guy motive and it isn't really, you know, sexual. This was the problem with the sexual roles women used to be offered: whore or the female equivalent of Bob Benson as gay man. I think Rosin would have been able to make her point more forcefully if Benson had been a woman for then the fundamental injustice of it all would have jumped out: all the other male characters on the show are allowed to have raw sexual desire and this guy has to be this neatly dressed, super-polite and thoughtful eunuch who just wants love. That is the way wives and mothers used to be portrayed and it is one of the great victories in a show such as Mad Men that female characters are show to be driven by irrational sexual passions just as men have always been. Why not gay men too?

As I hinted yesterday, I think a gay Pete makes much more sense. He acts like a man denying something about himself to himself would do. I knew a gay guy just like him in the 1980s who similarly overcompensated to the point of getting married and having children.

There were some who saw Bob Benson as a Don-like character and that makes sense if we think of the episode wherein the history of Don's relationship with Roger is revealed and how Don ingratiated himself with Roger. But the problem with that is that it's too narrow. To paraphrase Cary Grant: the force driving Mad Men is that everyone wants to be Don Draper, including Don Draper (a point I will return to).

Okay, now I want to trouble you with a thought that may make you uncomfortable. Here is what Rosin has to say about Don encouraging Sally to become a party to his lies:

As for what Don said, it was surely bad parenting—Sally knows what she saw—but there is something profound about asking a child to collude with you in an obvious lie. (Marjorie Williams addressed this question in her beautiful essay about Santa Claus and dying of cancer.) Contrast Don’s decision to lie with Pete’s to bully his way into what he sees as the truth about his mother and Manolo. Pete refuses to see that “it’s complicated,” as Don tells Sally, so he winds up in a cruel place where he robs his mother of her only comfort, fires Manolo, and sneers at Bob Benson. Sometimes we need our lies—something an ad man understands better than anyone.

That's a good, and very, very profound, point. I know, I know, this particular secret seems and odious one but we need our secrets and having secrets requires lying. For it is complicated especially when we bond especially close to someone. That is obviously going to be true of sexual relationships but also of child-parent ones. Think of the difference between the adult who is still capable of loving their father or mother and the one who hates him or her. The secret to loving her is not to be blind to your parents' sins but to be aware of them and grasp that it is complicated and, therefore, to collude with their lies to some extent. It is the adult or teen who really hates their mother or father who wants to drag every last ugly sin out into the daylight.

Hold that thought, and consider this brilliant insight that gets two thirds of the way home:

Lately I’ve begun to think of the show as operating on two very different planes. One is full of fairytale conflict and Jungian archetypes and Biblical-level dramas. This is the plane on which Don and most of the characters from earlier seasons are trapped. The plot twist that led Sally into her worst Freudian nightmare was straight out of a 17th century play: a purloined letter. (In classic French farce characters are always eavesdropping behind doors and screens.) Meanwhile the original spirit of the show—rooted in a particular moment in American history and moving along with the decade—resides with the newer characters.

That's so true. The worst episodes this season have been the ones that explore the supposedly deep psychological roots of Don's behaviour.  (I'll leave aside the biblical issues for a moment.)

Meanwhile, however, there is the "original spirit of the show". Rosin gets this wrong and does so in a way that is typical of her and her generation. But go back to the first season and you will clearly see that the original spirit of the show is indeed a particular moment in history that has been lost. The show is driven by nostalgia for a particular kind of manliness and, although to a lesser extent and less lovingly, for a certain sort of womanliness.

And here we get to the point that separates people. As I said above, even Don Draper isn't Don Draper but he wants to be. There is an entrenched line of criticism that says that is his great moral failure and that he should embrace authenticity instead. But Don Draper is not an unusual creation. A whole generation of men and women left behind their rural and ethnic roots to become something like him. Think just of actors and singers:

Archie Leach became Cary Grant
Doris Kapplehoff became Doris Day
Bernard Schwartz became Tony Curtis
Ann-Margret Olsson became simply Ann Margret
Anita Belle Colton became Anita O'Day
Dino Paul Crocetti became Dean Martin
Norma Jean Mortenson became Marilyn Monroe
Allen Stuart Konisberg became Woody Allen

I won't go on but I could. Nowadays performers still change their names but most do so to seem more exotic than their given names would suggest. Al those people above changed their names so as to seem less exotic and to conform to a sort of ideal of all-American virtue. And it wasn't just a new name they sought but a new personality to go with that image. Don Draper too didn't want to be a dick anymore.

Final thought for now: in the opening season, Weiner dropped some heavy biblical hints about Don Draper as a sort of Moses character. Now, if we step back to Rosin again. For her, the most important thing about the show is its portrayal of a moment of historical "progress".

Meanwhile the original spirit of the show—rooted in a particular moment in American history and moving along with the decade—resides with the newer characters.

She cares about where the thing is going. But no one would have watched a show that featured only those newer characters and their progress.  The entire appeal of the show for five seasons was in Don, Roger and Joan. At the same time, we all knew they had to get swept off the stage at some point. And thus the nostalgia: something was gained but something was lost when characters like them disappeared from American life. And one way to handle that dramatically would be to have Don Draper be a sort of Moses character who leads us to the promised land but cannot enter into it because of his own sins.

Unlike Rosin, I miss characters like Don and Roger and think a lot of our current cultural problems would be solved if men were encouraged to adopt characters like theirs again. And I'd have put Bob Benson in with them until he became the rather sad character he became last Sunday night. The central lesson of the show, as I've said many times before, is that who and what you are trying to become is more important than being or trying to be the person you "really are".

Mad Men vs Breaking Bad: How sin gets started

When we don't want to understand sin, we inflate it. My church has a flyer up right now advertizing a "documentary" about the porn industry. It promises revelations about a huge and organized group of exploiters who crush the women who do porn. It's not unlike the various exposés we see from time to time of "the white slave trade".

Now the first thing to understand is that these things do happen. There are a few women working in porn and prostitution who have been manipulated into the job by vicious uncaring bastards (of both sexes). But those cases are a tiny minority. The overwhelming majority of women who go into porn and prostitution do so with their eyes wide open. Prostitution exists everywhere on the earth and has existed everywhere in history. That doesn't happen with activities that people don't do naturally. There is nature—human nature—at work here.

Prostitution and porn (and porn is really just a kind of prostitution) are just like games, families, tribal groups, leadership hierarchies and private property. Anywhere and everywhere you have human society, these things tend to follow.

And that is why it is so damaging to imagine that the porn industry must be this giant conspiracy to undermine civilization. Yes, exploitation of human beings finds porn the way flies find garbage but it never starts that way.

The other problem with this sort of inflation of sin is that it tends to put men in the drivers seat of the great bus to prostitution and porn and treats women as helpless passengers. In economic terms, it explains these things entirely in terms of the demand side. But it always takes two to tango and there are always women keen to supply these things.

All of which is a rather roundabout way of getting to what's wrong with Breaking Bad. The set up is completely artificial. Even fans of the show grasp this on some level for they will acknowledge that the the whole meth lab thing is too far over the top to be credible. And that is true but there is a much deeper problem and that is that it is also psychologically incredible.

Anyone old enough to remember the early days of the abortion will remember this argument:

Think of the poor woman with six children she can't afford to feed who finds herself pregnant with a seventh.

That's a close relative to the story to that of Walter White. A good person in a very tough place is faced with a a seemingly impossible new consequence chooses to do a bad thing. There are lots of others like them.

Here's the thing though, abortion has been legal a long time and we know quite a bit about who gets abortions and, guess what, it's not women who already have six children. By an overwhelming margin, the majority of women who get abortions are single women with jobs. No matter whether you believe abortion should be legal or not, you cannot seriously pretend that abortion is typically a choice made by women in desperate circumstances. The numbers alone tell us this: there are hundreds of thousands of abortions every single year.

To go back to the hypothetical woman who cannot afford to feed the six children she has: women in her place almost never choose abortion. Seeking an abortion is not in character of someone who has already had six. The same problem applies to Walter White. Yes, he is feeling trapped, helpless and (most importantly) unmanned but his whole life speaks against his making the choices he makes in the show. If he's put up with the humiliation he has put up with so far, he'll put up with more.

All of this is important because we don't sin the way Walter White sins. How do we actually sin? Well detraction is a good example. I call up a friend and suggest we meet for coffee. Over coffee I tell him about a third friend. "I'm really worried about Karen," I say. "she's having an affair with someone she met at work. I'm sure this is all very exciting about her but she's put her marriage and children at risk."

It all sounds soooooo concerned but it's absolutely vicious. Why am I talking about this? Or, rather, Why the ____ am I talking about this? That's the nature of sin. It's not someone in a situation so desperate that what would normally seem like an insane choice starts to feel reasonable. Sin always starts with someone in a very comfortable situation making a choice that is so easy that they can just do it, like snapping their fingers. David sees Bathsheba and thinks, "I could have her." Bathsheba thinks, "Wow, the king called for me and my husband is away at battle." The choice to sin is so easy, it feels like an idle choice.

Next week, if Breaking Bad isn't about sin, what is it about?

Mad Men: The sin of detraction and other honour-related issues

The post on the moral stance towards male agency in Mad Men and Breaking Bad that I promised yesterday will have to wait until tomorrow.


Meanwhile, some thoughts about Joan and the difficulty she faces. I noted yesterday that people are very harsh in their moral assessment of Don but tend to be forgiving of every else on the show for moral faults that are every bit as significant as his. We all do this, we explain away as "understandable" the moral failings of people while hating the failings of those we want to dishonour. The bottom line lesson is this: The fact that some moral failing is true of X is never good enough reason to publicly denigrate them nor is it good enough reason to judge them privately (judge not lest ...).

Here is an interesting example from a site that produces some of the best, and quite possibly the very best, Mad Men commentary out there:

At the same time, she’s dealing with a pissed-off Harry who, being Harry, can’t express a thought without offending someone; usually a woman. Again, this will be debated wildly, but we think Harry had a point about everything except how Joan got her partnership.

That is very, very close to right but not quite. Harry definitely should not have said it. He should, in fact, have said nothing at all. But Harry is absolutely correct about how Joan got her partnership. You could argue, and you would be right to do so, that Joan had more than earned her partnership in other ways but she actually got it by whoring herself out.

By analogy, image that Lisa owns a highly valued harpsichord and she has two nieces. There is Christina who wants the harpsichord because she wants the status that comes with having an instrument that famous musicians like to borrow to perform on. She doesn't play the instrument herself nor has done a thing to help her aunt care for it. Meanwhile, Lucy loves the instrument itself and played it regularly and oversaw the care of the instrument for the last thirty years while her Aunt Lisa was unable to adequately do so because of her old age. Lucy has even covered a lot of the maintenance and insurance costs out of her own pocket. By all rights, the harpsichord should go to Lucy.

Aunt Lisa, however, has made no provision in her will for passing on the harpsichord. Lucy realizing this and foreseeing a bitter fight with Lucy over it, takes advantage of her Aunt Lisa in her dotage and has her write up a codicil specifying that Lucy get the harpsichord. It's perfectly true that Lucy deserves the harpsichord but she still obtains it in a  way that is both immoral and illegal. The same is true of Joan's partnership.

Harry's moral failure was not in that what he said but the fact that he did say it. And this is wrong even if it is true. In Catholic terms, Harry commits the sin of detraction. Detraction is saying something true about someone that will hurt their reputation. It's a sin.

It's a sin that a lot of people find hard to grasp. Suppose I see Michael shoplifting. If I confront him directly and privately, tell him I know what he has done and insist that he fix the situation, that is no sin. If I alert the store detective that is no sin either for the store has a legitimate interest in stopping shoplifting and so do I as a consumer. If, however, I tell a bunch of people about it over drinks it is a sin. It makes no nevermind  if I do it to lower Michael's status and raise my own in their eyes or I if do it just because it's fun to gossip. It's a sin. A serious, mortal sin.

And that is where Harry goes wrong. Actually, it's where he goes really wrong. He was already going seriously wrong just by barging into the meeting and blurting out his frustration. He should have had a quiet meeting with Roger, Don or Bert in which he expressed his hopes and frustrations without mentioning Joan at all.

We've seen this before in Mad Men. For example, it is detraction when Peggy's sister goes to a priest and, under the guise of confessing her "concern", tries to lower Peggy in the priest's eyes by telling him about Peggy's pregnancy. Everything she says is true but that doesn't reduce the sin one tiny bit.

It's worth noting that moral self righteousness is always a component of detraction. To commit this sin is to believe in our own moral rightness.

There is a flip side to it all, by the way, and that is that there is a positive requirement as well as a negative prohibition when it comes to honour. I'm morally obliged to protect my own and other people's honour unless there is a very good reason not to. Honour means "high respect" and my caring about the honour of people I don't like is a way of loving them. And I am obliged to love people I don't like. It's not an option.

It applies, as I say, to my own honour and it is worth noting that Joan fails herself badly here. Tom and Lorenzo, whom I quoted above, bring this out nicely in their analysis of Joan's character. They note that Joan is, in many ways, an unpleasant person but that she has always had good sense about preserving her own honour. And that makes her even accepting the Jaguar deal very much out of character.

This, by the way, was why we had such a hard time believing last season that Joan would sleep with a client to get a partnership; not because she was morally opposed to it, but because everyone in the office would know and she’d be exposed in a way she never had before. Remember, people at SCDP still gossip about whether or not she and Roger had an affair, 14 years after it started; 2 years after it produced a baby. She’s good about keeping her cards close to her chest.

I'd add to that that it is also very unlike Joan to be a whore for money. We saw in her dalliance with Roger that Joan had no trouble being a secret whore for the sheer pleasure of being a secret whore. (Note to women: this is what most men want their partner to be: a woman who is willing to let herself go entirely for sexual pleasure without moral qualms when she is with him while being absolutely proper in the self she presents to the rest of the world. Most men don't have a Madonna-whore complex because they want both-and and not either-or as Freud worried.) Roger doesn't get over Joan because she was the perfect example of both-and right up until the Jaguar moment. That is what amde Joan morally superior to Jane Sterling and Megan Calvet, both of who use their sexual connections for personal gain.

(And notice how Roger seems less interested since then. If these two are going to get together, they both have something big to forgive the other for.)

This is where our modern concern about hypocrisy gets things deeply wrong and where the morality of people like Don, Roger and Joan is superior to that  of the 1960s. Everyone has things they do in the dark, as Harry distinguishes things. But it is precisely for that reason that it is less of a sin. That's just human weakness. The sin comes from not having the sense to allow what happens in Vegas to remain in Vegas.

Mad Men: Let's change the conversation

The commentary on Mad Men is often more fruitful for analysis than the show itself.

Notice for example, how Hanna Rosin saw the exact same show that I reported seeing yesterday:

The broader theme (and it’s a little Phyllis Schlafly for my tastes) is that free love isn’t really free. If you dive into the late 1960s sex scene, then you either come out with a huge hangover (like Joan’s friend Kate) or you’re a total lascivious buffoon (like Megan’s swinger bosses). In the meantime, Don’s brand of adultery is so old-timey it’s biblical, freighted with crucifixes and prayer and long meaningful looks. In fact Don is the peeping Tom of the episode, spying on Peggy, spying on Megan, a spectator to the action going on around him but not really able to participate.

The difference between us is moral. I like the moral point here and she doesn't. Aesthetically speaking, however, we are on the same page.

Two preliminary points, the first of which is going to seem a little pedantic: there are no crucifixes in the Bible. (To be even more pedantic, Sylvia is wearing a cross not a crucifix.) There were, in fact, no crucifixes anywhere until at least the tenth century. It's not Biblical but medieval. And that is tremendously important. The theme here is renunciation. Don says, "I want to stop doing this." (But not yet as Augustine would finish it.)

The second point is the notion of freedom inherent in Rosin's view. She doesn't just want people, especially women, to be free to make their own choices in sexual matters, she wants them to be able to make these choices and have good consequences follow from them. She and I agree that Megan's swinging boss come off looking like idiots. The difference is that Rosin seems to think that is some sort of manipulative twist by the show's producers; she thinks there is a possible dramatization that would be equally, if not more credible, in which these characters come across as fun-loving, well-adjusted people.

The problem, as anyone who ever had the bad luck to interact with them can tell you, is that swingers are lascivious buffoons. This isn't some sort of distortion of reality. It's dramatically credible because that is what people who drain sex of all the things that make it human are like.

The medieval sex that Don engages in is not without its moral pitfalls of course and he certainly isn't without moral failings but it's miles more interesting than anything the swinging sixties had to offer. And it is that because it is human.

Choose your character and then become him or her

The other thing that strikes me as interesting about Rosin's commentary is the narrative arc she wants to see. The show tends to tell the same stories over and over again only with slight variations so you don't actually get anything that looks like the sort of narrative arc you'd get in a novel. Notice, for example, that we already had this Don goes to an exotic land seeking peace in Season 2 and in Season 4. He even walks into the ocean seeking to be made clean at the end of Season 2. That's the way it tends to be in television when the show drags on for season after season and then suddenly stops.

And before you condemn that, ask yourself what is more like real life: the arc with a sense of an ending you find in a novel or the repetition with variations you find in television?

Anyway, what is the narrative arc that Hanna Rosin looks for amongst all this debris? Not surprisingly, it concerns a woman trying to change her life. The woman is Megan:

It struck me that by acting, Peggy allows herself to feel a little less, which is precisely what Megan does in her love scene. That play within a play unfolded beautifully. The first shot showed Megan dressed up in her maid’s uniform lounging on a couch, and because we’d never seen her on set, it wasn’t clear if this was “Zou Bisou Bisou,” Downstairs edition, or what exactly was going on. Then pretty soon Megan (as the maid) was on her back on the bed, with “Rafe” all over her. Her acting dilemma is a real one for the era. I recently  saw the movie Hitchcock, which is about the making of Psycho. It takes place a few years earlier than this episode, but one of its main themes is Hitchcock’s rage about his leading ladies always betraying him because their husbands insisted they quit, or lay off on the love scenes, or button up their shirts. That doesn’t excuse Don’s despicable behavior, of course. But it does create the interesting dynamic that Megan, the youngest of all the adults and the best placed to let loose in the late ‘60s, is practically the only character on this show whose moral compass seems to point true north.

I quote this lengthy bit because I want you to see how much Rosin is on Megan's side.  And why not?

That acknowledged, I think Rosin is missing some serious problems with Megan's moral compass. For Rosin misses the point completely here. The drama is indeed telling us to recall scenes from last year but not the ones that made Rosin feel good.

I apologize for the horrible image quality but Apple won't let you take screen captures in iTunes anymore. You can see enough, however, to catch that the connection the shwo makes is not with the Zou Bisou Bisou moment at the opening of last season but with the fantasy she ad Megan shoots at the end:

I'm pretty sure that is the same sound stage that they shot last years final episode on. It's vertainly the same set up: girl with unrealistic dreams in a bedroom with a fairytale bed.

And do you remember how Megan got there? Not by earning it but by asking her husband to get her the job and, not incidentally, betraying a friend in the process. And then the camera pans back to reveal Don watching just as he watched the set up for the shoot of the shoe commercial. 

The similarity doesn't end there. In last year's finale, a woman walks up and asks Don a question and that signals pretty clearly that he is now bored with Megan. Her childish routine has reduced her in his eyes. This year, a woman Don hates, a woman who represents the kind of sexuality he hates, walks up and whispers, "You like watch, do you?" It may be that, more than anything else that puts him off.

Don likes to do sexual things in the dark by subterfuge and seduction and not by mutual consent that has been carefully negotiated in the light of day. That shouldn't be a surprise, my bet is that Hanna Rosin much prefers the same thing no matter what she might say or even think differently.  In any case, I'm pretty sure Don got some pleasure out of watching in the dark until that damn woman came along and ruined it with her pandering.

Either way, Megan has lost something by trading a business partnership with her husband to pursue fantasy dreams. And that matters because ... continued tomorrow.

Hip and cool as virtues

Timidity — bravery — recklessness

Whenever people talked about virtues in the past they used three words. One word meant that you had not enough of the quality in question, a second meant just the right amount and the third meant you had too much. Virtue meant having a good balance.

Now we tend to talk about virtues in purely binary terms. You are either chaste or you are not. As a consequence, chastity (which actually means being controlled and disciplined about sex and how many people you have it with) has, for most people, come to mean not having sex at all. Bravery has come to mean complete disregard of danger. Prudence has come to mean being, well, it has come to mean being a "prude".

We've tended to do that for two reasons. The first was modernism. Modernists saw morality as a matter of law. First you used your reasoning to figure out what the moral law was then you obeyed it.

And that is where the second part came in. That second part is pietism and puritanism. Pietism, which was a huge influence on Kant, emphasized a kind of extreme vigour in the living of life. It ignored the realities of human nature and said everyone should strive to live up to an extreme level of performance in everything. Puritanism did likewise. Once you had rationally determined what the law is, then it was your duty to follow the law. And it was your duty to obey the law even if, odd as this may sound, even if it was completely contrary to what the beings it was applied to tend to be like. If silence was a virtue then dogs were to never bark even though barking is something dogs tend to like doing.

This set up a sort of odd competition between the various Christian religions of the time. The praise of restraint transmogrified into an insistence on complete abstinence. The most damning effect of this was on sexual morality. There had always been people (Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine for example) who pushed the notion that virginity was the ideal we should all aspire to, but the thing hit ridiculous depths with the beginning of modernism.

And if we are honest, we can still see traces of it today. Even the defenders of sexual "freedoms" are heavily influenced by it as they tend to instinctively go to the opposite extreme recommending not that people should feel free to enjoy controlled sex lives but rather pushing promiscuity and sexual recklessness on everyone. The mirror image of any vice is just another vice.

Okay, but what has all this to do with being "hip" or "cool"? Well, the problem is that binary thing. We tend to think of people as being either hip or unhip or cool or uncool. And that is odd because we tend to admire not the hippest person or the coolest person but the one who shows balance and restraint. I'm no fan of Jay Z, for example, but if you compare him with other rappers, it's pretty obvious that the near universal admiration thrown at the guy is a reflection of his balanced life. He is edgy but not a criminal. he has credibility as a lover but he is married, he is a rebel but a successful businessman and so forth.

If we are going to get to the point where we can talk about hipsters in anything resembling a sane fashion, we have to think of it the way the ancients thought of virtues.

And it is a virtue by the way. You may sneer at me for taking a minor virtue so seriously, and go right ahead with my blessing, but it is a virtue.

The thought for the day

I'm not blaming the victim, I am observing a universal rule: the common denominator in all of your failed relationships is you.
                                                         The Last Psychiatrist

It seems to me that that is a really good place to start thinking about virtue. You can easily lie to yourself about any other measure but counting is just counting. How many failed relationships do you have? Not teen romances, as I've said before, they are supposed to end. But since you were twenty, how many?

Of course, we could do it with anything. How many times have you handed your assignments in late? But relationships seem more important.

Here's a question, "What if there is no better measure of your worth as a human being than your ability to make a successful marriage?"

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.

Someone who really gets virtue

Simcha Fisher, affectionately known around here as "the pants lady", has a great post up on virtue, what it is and how to get it.

Here is a taste:

Anyway, last week I decided to try something new:  I wasn’t going to have a goal. I was just going to make the teeniest, tiniest improvement I could manage, the slightest motion away from my emotional squalor, and try and do that for one day.  I was just going to try and get control for one stinking day.

The rest is here. I strongly recommend reading all of it.

Phillipa Foot

Has died.

She was one of the great founding figures in the revival of virtue ethics and a hero of mine when I was in university. I'll have a lot more to say about her tomorrow.

For now, I'd like to confess that I was once madly in love with her.This was before I'd read even a word of her philosophy; at a time when I thought I would find nothing of value in her writings (for reasons that I will explain tomorrow).

What I fell in love with was her name. It  was the only thing I knew about her when I fell in love with her. Isn't "Phillipa Foot" the most perfect name imaginable? And if not that name, how about her maiden name "Phillipa Bosanquet"? These are like the names of heroines in classic English novels only I don't think there is a novel in the entire English novel tradition quite good enough to contain Phillipa Foot.

Back when all I knew was her name, I fell in love with her and I imagined a secret affair I would have with her. It would have to be secret because a woman with a name like Phillipa Foot would insist on her privacy. I used to imagine sitting with her having tea and oatmeal cookies in a quiet room having a quiet conversation about novels and morality using every bit of my will power to remain relaxed and calm although I would be craving the great sex I knew we would eventually work our way up to.

Great sex I won't elaborate on here not just because it never happened but also because, you know, it would be a betrayal of everything a woman with a name like Phillipa Foot would stand for.