Category Archives: Personal Ethics

Strange New World

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Listening to Carl Truman’s Strange New World, I’ve been pondering an illustration he gives in one of the later chapters about the radical difference between his grandfather’s life and his own. Without going into the details, because you, reading this, can easily supply the details thinking about your own life and your own grandfather’s life, it’s immediately evident that the mental furniture, and therefore the entire approach to and horizons of life that our grandparents had, must of necessity have been radically different from our own.

Take the formative role that entertainment plays. When my grandfather was a young child, there was no such thing as the television. By the time the first television came out he would have been nearing his adulthood, which means all of his formative years and experiences had absolutely nothing to do with a visual broadcast medium that, the more you consume it, the more it is able to shape your entire perception of life on the basis of fast moving images and constantly changing angles on the same scenario.

The more TV you watch, especially if you do not also read a great deal, just of necessity the more fragmented your thoughts will become, and therefore the less able you will be to follow out extended, linear trains of thought, especially when they are presented to you in the form of inert blocks of text on a printed page. The more TV you watch and the less you read, especially the less really substantial material you read, the more reading will come to seem an entirely optional mode of presenting and engaging knowledge – not to mention in all likelihood the more boring a mode.

My grandfather was not raised in a world shaped by the television, and so of necessity he would have had an entirely different understanding of the world than I, just two generations later am able to have. This has given me a great deal of pause lately trying to parse it all out, and here’s what I have found out so far.

I watched a great deal of TV when I was a young child, and although my parents were very careful as a general rule to make sure I wasn’t watching whatever passed for trash back then (much of that relatively benign given the shocking and shameless filth that is all over “kids” TV nowadays), my young mind still was filled with thousands upon thousands of hours of simplistic idiocy in the form of cartoons, not to mention emotively connotative and manipulative oversimplifications of reality in the forms of action shows such as the A-Team and Knight Rider and Airwolf and Street Hawk.

There is no doubt in my mind that before I turned 15 I had seen literally thousands of simulated murders on television shows, literally thousands of frantic, fast-paced action sequences involving flipping cars and blazing explosions and rat-a-tat gunfire, and the constantly reinforced message of what is now being called “expressive individualism,” right down to the pervasive implication that institutions are always corrupt and only the individual is the source of true meaning and goodness.

I think it likely that the only thing that prevented me from becoming dull-minded and utterly derivative in a vulgar sense, like so many other avid young TV watchers, was the fact that throughout it all I was always a voracious reader and nearly everything I read was of a fairly wholesome imaginative or informative nature. (Well, if you discount the thousands of the comic books I consumed; although that would need a separate post to describe how most comic books when I was a kid at least had something approaching significant intellectual substance and were based on far clearer ethical norms than comic books today are.)

At any rate, trying to continue parsing out the distinction between my grandfather’s mental horizons and my own in terms of his complete lack of the TV and my deep immersion in it during our respective childhoods, Carl Truman’s extended remarks on how the Internet has changed everything for all of us connect to what I’ve already said. Without trying to summarize Truman, there’s a particularly weighty phrase that he uses when talking about the world we now all have thanks to the Internet: “plastic people, liquid world.”

Basically what this means is that our culture has devolved so far down the line of digital media-technological manipulation and control of external reality in terms of our own psychological preferences that there is scarcely anything truly in common that holds us all together.

As Truman puts it, thanks to the Internet we can instantly know things that are happening thousands of miles away in other countries, and feel very profoundly within ourselves that we have more in common with someone in a foreign nation who speaks a different language from us, lives under a different political system than us, and has ostensibly a different cultural background than us, than we do with our next door neighbor who speaks our language, lives under our the same political system, and has the same general cultural background as us.

It is entirely possible in this context that each and every one of us essentially lives next to people from another planet, since the imaginative world that they inhabit is likely extremely different from the imaginative world that we ourselves inhabit. This is why, as Truman has it, that our political disturbances, especially since 2016, are so shockingly immoderate and full of gross dehumanization of other people. Truman described how in his grandfather’s day in Britain, people who lived on the same street might come down on two different sides of a ongoing political disagreement, but both of them understood themselves to be part of a larger thing, Britain, that held them all together regardless of their differences.

That thing, the national consciousness, was a shared reality that had significant weight and which transcended all of their differences and allowed them to navigate those differences without destroying everything around them. But largely thanks to the Internet, which fragments consciousness and culture in a way very much worse than the TV did, this type of substantial commonality doesn’t exist anymore.

So now my thoughts turn to the great fissure that has existed for about the last 70 years or so called “the generation gap.”

My own father’s life, growing up with the then newly-established TV, was already because of that vastly different than his father’s life growing up without it. And my life, growing up with a much more firmly established and variegated TV life than my father, was already because of that vastly different than his.

And although like my own parents, I have been very careful for the most part to limit my own children’s exposure to popular entertainment via movies, music, and websites, and although they are all voracious readers like I and my wife were, there are still many tell-tale signs in them that their lives and expectations of life have been very differently formed than mine or my father’s or my grandfather’s simply because they have never lived in a world without the Internet, let alone one without a TV. (The three youngest have never lived in a world without smartphones, and even though they don’t have one, everyone they know does and that has certainly impacted their view of life.)

Obviously this post could go on and on trying to parse out these distinctions, they’ve really been driven home to me for about the last 5 years as I’ve paid close attention to the entertainment that young people are constantly surrounded with and which forms their tastes and desires and perceptions of what is true and good and beautiful.

For instance, there have always been kids who thought it was funny to talk about their teachers being physically harmed. After all, when you’re young and hormonal and have no real perspective on anything, it might seem pretty funny to imagine that hopelessly boring math teacher who’s making you do a bunch of stuff that you don’t want to do because you’d rather be outside playing or aimlessly bantering with your friends about trivial nothingnesses, getting killed, so now you’re free of all that stupid stuff. Even when I was in about the 6th grade I remember kids on the bus singing a send up of “Glory, glory, hallelujah” in which their “teacher got shot in the face with a loaded 44 “so she ain’t my teacher anymore.”

Utterly horrific from the standpoint of any rational person, but even if you might be inclined to say “Kids will be kids and they’ll grow out of it,” look around you at the kids nowadays and, no, they have not only not grown out of it but have simply descended even deeper into that kind of malicious darkness because of what they’ve been exposed to in the movies and music to which they’ve been given largely unfettered access – modes of content and content itself that even kids of my youth would scarcely have been able to conceive in our worst nightmares.

Just watch some of the stuff they watch. Read some of the books they read – if such vulgar verbal bilge can even be called “a book.” The vastly multiplied desensitizing effect that has come from CGI movies and overly realistic video games, not to mention the insane explosion of the ability of anyone with a phone and an Internet connection to become an instant viral video star no matter how shockingly asinine the content they produce, combined with the aforementioned lack of perspective that’s just a part of being young, really can make it seem quite hilarious to joke about teachers getting shot or dying from fatal diseases that they contracted from eating too much spicy chicken at KFC, and so forth.

And that’s before you get to their lack of real heroes. My grandfather’s generation would have had the veterans of World War I to talk to them about valor and perseverance and honesty and integrity and giving up your life for other people even at the cost of great personal pain. My father’s generation would have had that with the World War II veterans. I had that to some extent since my dad was a Vietnam veteran and some of my other uncles had served in the military.

On top of all of that I had Colonel Hannibal Smith (The A-Team) and Michael Knight (Knight Rider) and Jesse Mach (Street Hawk) and Stringfellow Hawke (Airwolf), not to mention Superman (“Truth, Justice, and the American Way”)and Spider-Man (“With great power comes great responsibility.”)

I’d like to say I had Justin Martyr and Augustine and King Alfred and so on, great heroes of the Faith, but I didn’t, since the Christianity I was raised with was anti- historical and anti-intellectual. (But that too is another long story, and I’m trying to write a different chapter of that by making sure my own kids have all of those Faith heroes as their own models.)

Today’s young people have almost nothing but anti-heroes, or else “heroes” who are essentially exactly like them: self-absorbed, overly-emotional, and completely unable to distinguish between their own personal desires and what is true, good, and beautiful.

In the first generation of the Marvel movies, they at least had a pretty decent portrayal of Spider-Man and a pretty decent portrayal of Captain America. But as those movies have devolved along with everything else, now they have Doctor Strange navigating an absolutely chaotic and meaningless multiverse and explicitly deciding in one of the most recent movies that evil is simply too physically and metaphysically powerful to be beaten by good, so the only way to beat it is to become evil oneself by using evil means. Even when it’s not like that, evil is more often beaten not by superior character but by superior firepower.

Lacking proper heroes, what today’s youth have is a world that is run only in terms of Power: there are the Haves, and the Have-Nots, and what you want to make sure you are, almost regardless of how you have to make it happen, is one of the Haves. And it all costs, absolutely at all costs, make sure that no one calling himself an adult is ever able to tell you “who you really are” or expect, as if it is really a good thing and not simply his own personal preference backed up by force, a certain code of behavior or a certain code of dress from you.

TV and the Internet did not create this way of thinking, of course. Growing up just does involve some level of divergence from parents and teachers as one becomes a mature and self-directing individual. But because these visually and digitally manipulative technologies have served up to several generations an incessant diet of emotive preference-based and intellectually vacuous “fun” entirely aimed at maximizing individualistic perception and expression, can anyone blame today’s youth for feeling an uncrossable divide between themselves and their elders?

To bring this back around to Carl Truman with whom I started, as he puts it, the world he himself lives in would have been just about incomprehensible to his grandfather. And in much the same way, the world my generation lives in is just about incomprehensible to the current one, and the gap only seems to be widening every day. The crisis of meaning, the crisis of trust between the generations, the crisis of whether there can be any meaningful future involving anything remotely identifiable as “the common good” is a very weighty and currently unresolved set of questions.

Who’s To Say What’s “Beautiful”?

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“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I wonder how often we think about what this means in terms of different angles of approach.On the one hand, saying that beauty is in the beholder’s eye quite easily slides into the kind of total subjectivism about truth and goodness that permeates our culture. For if what matters is *my eyesight*, well, just whatever *my eyes* are delighted by is beautiful (and so also true and good). No external control is possible.

This is how we wind up with thinking “art” is just whatever comes out of an individual’s own personal soul, no matter how lacking in technique and taste it is, and then thinking further that no one outside of that individual soul has any right to criticize. (Having just said “taste,” that brings up another angle of the subjectivism problem: “De gustibus non est disputandum” – “There ought to be no disputing about matters of taste.”)

But on the other hand, beauty really *is* “in” the eye of the beholder, for it’s only by means of an EYE (whether the physical organ or metaphorically the mind) that beauty can be perceived. So this leads to another way to read the phrase, namely, by asking questions about the status of the functioning of the eye that’s doing the beholding. And this is much closer to an objectivity of beauty, for no one can deny that not all eyes see (blindness) or that some eyes see along a spectrum of poorness (near-sighted, far-sighted, etc.).

From this fact it follows that some perceptions of a thing that call it “beautiful” are actually false perceptions, regardless of how evident or true or good the perceptions seem to the individual eye beholding them. If one’s eyes aren’t functioning properly, one’s opinions about what is and isn’t beautiful (and so, what is and isn’t true and good) can’t be given total credence.

And so to the point: as I’m reading Bonaventure’s “On the Soul’s Journey to God” some more, in speaking of what we can know about God from observing and reflecting on the things He has made (His “vestiges” and “images”) Bonaventure says several times in close succession that true “beauty” means “harmonious symmetry” or “proportion of harmony.”

He gives three sub-criteria for understanding proportion and harmony:

1) in relation to the principle from which it flows (the likeness, or not, of a certain created thing that we’re calling “beautiful” to a perfect original),

2) in relation to the medium through which it passes (the calibration, as it were, of the “power” of the perceived beauty relative to the object it beautifies),

3) in relation to the term on which it acts (the perceived beauty fills a real need in its recipient, such as taste and touch)

All these criteria do have a subjective dimension: each of us has to make a personal judgment about whether something we’re calling “beautiful” meets these tests (for if it doesn’t, we are likely misusing the term “beautiful” and maybe going far astray by calling evil good).

Yet all these criteria also have an objective dimension: a stick figure is NOT “beautiful” compared to, say, a Rembrandt painting; food that is so spicy in terms of “power” that it seriously injures the tongue is not proportional to the sense receiving it; the need for pleasure is not actually / rightly fulfilled by partaking of addictive substances.

To end where I began then: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” That’s really easy to say, but not at all really easy to understand. Surely much of our cultural confusion comes from how flippantly we think of beauty (and so, by conversion, of truth and goodness)?

Politics Rightly Conceived

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Politics. Love it, hate it, or neither, we all think we know what it is. I’ll wager that when you hear this word politics associations like these, spelled out by the online Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, readily come to mind:

  • a: the art or science of government
  • b: the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy
  • c: the art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government

Or if it’s not verbal definitions that come to your mind when you hear the word politics, perhaps it’s images like these:

These are some of our images, and they carry with them whole developed stories, some aspects of which we never imagine we should question – after all, aren’t these things just “The Way Things Are”? Why should we look any deeper? Don’t symbols interpret themselves for those who live in the world they create?

Perhaps not. While it is true that symbols and definitions matter to real politics, it is precisely the stories they tell that from time to time need to be reexamined. Republics don’t last just because freedom. Republics, rather, have to be actively maintained from generation to generation by people who care enough to evaluate present circumstances in the light of more fundamental originating and guiding principles. 

So what, then, is “politics”? In what follows I’m going to be quoting a lot from the Greek thinker Aristotle because I think the things he says are quite easily understandable, and offer us a rich and humane understanding of “politics.” 

Let’s get started with the opening phrase of Aristotle’s book The Politics, written almost 2,500 years ago, but just as common-sensically relevant today as it was then:

Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think good. 

Aristotle, Politics 1252a1

Here, in a nutshell, is the most fundamental axiom of that which is truly politics: it begins as part of a quintessentially human search, in community with other humans, for that which they think good. 

Several things are stated by or follow from this axiom.

One is that a state is a community. This equation may seem counter-intuitive to us, because to us the word “state” brings up images and connotations of a vast, clanking, usually grid-locked machine which exists outside of the people and is always interfering in some way or other with their freedom.  “The state” for many of us today who confuse the role of active citizen with that of perpetual carping critic isn’t itself a community, but really the antithesis of a community – just a bunch of self-interested individual power-hungry administrators always trying to “pull one over” on We the Free People.

But simply put, on the terms of Aristotle’s words above, this modern idea of state held by many of us is disordered and actually anti-political because it imagines the governing authority as an external force more or less arbitrarily constituted and having no intrinsic right to, well, govern us.  On the contrary, for those who gave us most of our very vocabulary of “politics,” the Greeks of the classical era, the state is the organic expression of the natural human desire to congregate with other humans and seek an orderly, good-oriented life together. 

Here is a crucial point: the state can take a variety of outward forms – monarchies, aristocracies, democracies, and so on – but it is not in its most fundamental, inner self something arbitrarily imposing itself from outside on the people. The state rather is the community because it is the highest expression of human cooperative living. It always involves a good bit of administrative interaction with the citizens, but unless it is a tyranny simpliciter (more on that in a future post), the state is really and truly the public and civil outworking of a particular group of people who are seeking a common end.

To try again in other words, the state and the people are actually one thing – which is why Christian thinkers such as St. Augustine so readily argued that a people always has the kind of government that reflects its own (the people’s) character (City of God V.19). To try to position oneself ethically and socially and administratively outside the state that is the reflection of the larger body of people of which oneself is a part is, again, anti-political.

I’m sure you can see how radical this understanding of state is, but if we reject it, we really will have nothing but a brute external force arbitrarily imposing itself on a bunch of isolated individuals – which means we will have no actual society, no community, and no true politics. (It’s worth noting that later in the same chapter I’ve quoted from, Aristotle says that someone who isn’t part of a state so defined is either a brute animal or a god – but not a human being.)

This raises a second implication of Aristotle’s words, namely, that true politics is never a solitary affair, but consists in actions taken as part of a community. “Mankind,” plural, “always act to obtain that which “they,” again plural, think good. Thus, any activity that gets labeled “political” but which concerns only an individual self – such as very strong claims of “personal rights” that supposedly trump all other concerns – is fundamentally not political, but an indication that oneself is either below the level of humanity or above it. For only animals and gods (classically conceived) don’t need or seek communitarian relationships, but follow only their own internal desires.

A third implication of this opening remark by Aristotle is that regardless of disagreements, it remains true that those others are seeking something which they think good.  No matter what political party we belong to, no matter how vehement debates may get, we’re all at the beginning, middle, and end in the same boat of seeking something which we think good.  As both classical philosophy and Christian theology in its classical mode maintain, no one seeks something evil, because evil is not a thing and so can’t be sought. All objects of desire, being real things in the world that the good God made and called good, are good in themselves – evil comes in how they are sought, which a question of the will, not the material (Augustine, Confessions VII.12; Enchiridion 3-4).

It’s when people who inhabit the same civic boat think differently about good that the process we immediately associate with the word “politics,” controversy and debate, begin to take center stage.  Disagreements about what is good are the material of the political (justice-seeking) process, but the crucial point remains that the grasping after and the achieving of mere power is not politics proper, but only the manifestation of the political impulse to live with others seeking the good. 

Disagreements about the good will always happen as people, Aristotle’s “political animals,” seek to live well with each other. That is why true politics has, over the millennia of Western culture, developed quite sophisticated concepts and practical tools aimed at helping civic bodies navigate internal disagreement about the good.

What’s happened in the Modern world – the world that has fundamentally shaped us all in ways of which we often aren’t even self-consciously aware – is that we’ve largely forgotten the organic, natural fundamentals of sociality that Aristotle explained above, and so we have come instead to characterize politics as just another species of that most terrible of artificial human actions, war.

But real politics is not war, and so war is not “the continuation of politics by other means.” War is neither the means nor the end of the political process; peace through the achievement of justice is. Contrary to what seems to be popular wisdom today, even among many Christians more in tune with modern anti-philosophy than with classical philosophy, war occurs when, as Cicero put it, human beings cease to act like human beings and instead begin to act like beasts (De Officiis 1.34).

When war occurs, it is because true politics – the art of persuasion by reason – has failed. By implication, then, those who seek and practice warfare in such a manner and attitude as to make such conflict simply a synonym of the word “politics” reveal that they are beasts masquerading as humans.

Volo, Ergo Sum (“I Want, Therefore I Am”)

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A problem with identity politics is that Christians are supposed to find our most fundamental identity in the unchanging Christ, not in entirely contingent circumstances of our personal desires and wills.

Yet every last one of us has been shaped all of our lives by our culture of consumption, which is based on the assumption that all desires – even ones created in us by incessant advertising for things we neither need nor are going to be reasonably enriched by – are good and just do deserve to be satisfied as such.

Why should we not be able to get a hot, juicy hamburger just the way we personally want it at practically any time of day or night? ‘”The customer is always right,” we readily chant when something we want seems obstructed by a factor or force outside ourselves. Do we ever stop to wonder whether such utterly self-centered reasoning might not be incompatible with natural human virtue, let alone with Christian ethics?

A result of being incessantly formed by the culture of consumption is that even though we are Christians we just are oriented toward defining ourselves in terms of our desires rather than in terms of Christ and His Gospel. Moreover, even though we are Christians we just are already disposed toward taking the aggregate of our desires as our “identity.” And our “identity,” being too inwardly-curved and jaded a thing to realize that self-satisfaction is not a good per se, at all moments strives to order our social and political and even our religious thoughts and actions in directions most calculated to avoid deprivation of our wants.

Ironically, then, given so much of the superficial “Christian worldview” talk that is the bread-and-butter of purported thought leaders among us, it seems that identity politics isn’t just something “Liberals” do. An obsession with “identity” and the disordered political thought that follows in its wake goes right down deep into the bone marrow of every self-styled “Conservative,” too. Why doesn’t this give us pause?

Because we’re so unreflective about desire itself, especially in terms of its relationship to human nature and hierarchy of goods, it all seems pretty harmless when we’re standing in the coffee shop line anticipating ordering in just such a way that the drink will be just super satisfying in the half-dozen highly-refined ways we’ve come to expect as if it were some divine birthright.

Which of us goes to the store philosophically wondering why we just ought to be able to obtain a pen that is super comfortable for our very own unique hand to hold and use? (And which of us philosophically wonders, when we can’t find that exactly right pen why we’re actually irked by the store’s failure to provide use with immediate and acceptably affordable satisfaction?)

And of course, there is our “need” to have a phone of just the right style, color, and make that we won’t ever ask ourselves why it is that we pick it up 85 times a day or why we even “needed” a doohickey that incorporates the function of 50 devices into 1, instead of a lesser model that only replaces only 32 devices – a horror of a deficiency that would make our lives so much less convenient.

But with all of our very selves already unconsciously defined in a thousand ways by the expectation that the world owes us the satisfaction of our desires, however trivial or important, it can then look pretty normal to church-hop in pursuit of just that right kind of service that will “meet my needs.”

It can look pretty unobjectionable for parents to break a financial contract with a Christian school because, while in a fit of self-centered pious introspection of the deliciously comfortable (and just obviously right) insides of their own “consciences” they decide that, well, darn it and I’m sorry, but the curriculum “just doesn’t work for our family.”

The problem with all of this seems to be less that we don’t know the Bible – because the Bible is pretty clear about our duty to cultivate virtues like self-denial and contentment with what has been provided for us. The problem, rather, seems to be that we have for too long failed to cultivate the proper kind of conceptual apparatus and language to talk meaningfully and persuasively about fundamental issues of our loves and their accompanying desires.

Thus, even when we are speaking to other Christians whom we find disagree with us on such matters as the ones mentioned (and many others, including education), we are already fighting an uphill battle of persuasion because neither they nor we ourselves have a habit of thinking about desire itself in terms of the fixity of human nature and a corresponding hierarchy of goods that to varying degrees either cause that nature to flourish or weaken.

The bitter truth of the matter is that we all have “identities” that we have personally, privately constructed for ourselves on the basis of reasoning which might be described in Latin as volo, ergo sum – “I want, therefore I am.” Any arguments we make for or against ideas – theological, political, economic, educational, whatever – are automatically perceived by others in just the same manner as assertions about whether Burger King is better than Arby’s or Apple than Microsoft or the original Star Wars movies than the prequels.

This is an enormous problem precisely because while everyone else evaluates our ideas as “opinions,” we invariably take our ideas as simple “facts.” One result of the superficial dichotomy turns out to be that even the perpetual Conservative appeal to “Objective Truth” has not escaped a much more fundamental subjectivizing that is extremely difficult to spot, let alone to combat. Everyone likes to quote Weaver’s phrase, “Ideas have consequences,” but few of us attain to the realization that ideas are already intrinsically wrapped up in loves and accompanying wants that, since we’re all consumers at heart, we don’t readily expose to rigorous self-critique.

Think about that the next time you hear a “classical” educator opining that something he grandiosely titles “The Christian Worldview” must be absolutely opposed to tattoos, skinny jeans, particular modes of taxation, public schools per se, “weird” dietary principles, political and economic theories that don’t elevate individual rights to a maximally comfortable level, or any other issues that, upon close inspection, belong not to any intelligible concept of adaptable human nature but only to a particularly narrow concept of nurture.

Volo, ergo sum in such cases transmogrifies itself into the very ugly, and very unclassical confusion of tribal identity with cosmopolis – the very thing the entire great philosophical tradition of the West almost constantly warns us of – the constancy of the warning being required because each generation seems to start all over again with the same obtuse hearing trouble as the one before.

Thanks to our culture of consumption having formed us all into mostly uncritical pursuers of desires we take to be good simply because they are ours, we are all fundamentally subjectivists in a way that ought to alarm us and drive us out of ourselves and back into the texts of our great tradition, determined to read them and meditate on them anew with fresh eyes and minds willing to consider whether or not things we take as absolutely fundamental to our “identities” actually do inflect truth well or merely blind us with sophistry and illusion.