You raise some intriguing lines of thought about the distinctions between an ethic based on "virtues" and one based on "values." Everyone has things they value, but not everyone has (or values) virtue. Values are egalitarian, but virtues are not. For some of these folks, it really does seem that any talk of "virtue" offends them because it's a reminder of how vicious they are in comparison.
Mar 11, 2023·edited Jul 29, 2023Liked by John Carter
This is why they seek to destroy the virtues of everyone else. They can't stand even seeing virtuous men. Interferes with their delusion that they are better than us, chosen by their god to rule over us mere animals. Explains their production and promotion of pornography, deviance, divorce, drugs, the seven deadly sins...
Fun fact, there originally were *eight* deadly sins.
Tristitia, or excessive sadness was formerly included.
Dante Alighieri (of Dante's Inferno) somehow managed to take it out of the list. Makes you wonder if he indulged in tristitia and wanted to excuse himself (or more charitably, he cared for someone who did so). Whatever his motive, I wonder what depression rates would be if it was still considered sinful.
I uncovered this bit of history in a podcast series a friend and I are making on solutions to problems we currently face, and the first four (five?) are going to be on virtue. I'll be dropping them soon, so maybe subscribe to my 'stack if you think that's your knack.
A few years ago, I used to attend a Byzantine Catholic church. The priest there stressed that faith was an act of the will, *not* a mere intellect assent. He described it more as "faithfulness" -- staying the course even when it is unpleasant. The Latin "fides" means loyalty or confidence. The Greek "piste" is pretty similar. I don't know Hebrew or Aramaic, but it seems like there's some linguistic basis for his claim.
I think that the bizarre interpretation of Pauline doctrine in the Reformation was largely responsible for the meaning shift.
I got into it recently about virtue with my favorite liberal troll. Virtue is fascism, he says: I replied to a comment of his, basically about how conservatives should not be allowed to participate in democracy.
By William Hunter Duncan
on March 2, 2023 at 4:26 p.m.
Replying to Matt Haas
Spoken like a true one-party authoritarian. While many so-called conservatives are not really, true conservatism is about conserving tradition, like family, a work ethic, the classic virtues of prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude.
As for sectarian chaos, I should think that would very much describe liberal identity, race and gender politics at this point.
By Matt Haas
on March 2, 2023 at 6:31 p.m.
Replying to William Hunter Duncan
Yeah, not so much. Those “values” you cite are so much pap, and believe me, when you and yours set about trying to implement your fascist fantasy agenda, you’ll find out just how unified we herd of cats can be.
By William Hunter Duncan
on March 2, 2023 at 8:50 p.m.
Replying to Matt Haas
That is the first time I have heard fascism defined as “family, a work ethic, the classic virtues of prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude.”
You must be fun to hang out with.
By Matt Haas
on March 3, 2023 at 10:10 a.m.
Replying to William Hunter Duncan
Why yes, fascists NEVER appeal to a sense of fake nostalgia about “lost” traditional values. I mean it was only the entirety of the Nazi platform, but I’m sure you must be right
They actually do believe that those things are the core of fascism. That's quite central to their understanding of the phenomenon, in fact. Which is why they do everything they can to undermine families and encourage sexual degeneracy and physical and moral frailty - weak, atomized people with no motivations higher than their dicks and their stomachs will not become fascists. That's the theory at least.
I think they are all stuck in the Jungian, boy Hero shadow. They think they are heroes saving the world, too immature to know they are projecting their fascism on people like us, who calmly look at them like the raving baby maniacs they are.
I don't really think the term fascism is all that useful, given how vaguely defined it is. Everyone just calls their enemies fascists, meaning more or less "mean authoritarians I don't like", but it has nothing to do with early twentieth century Italian corporatism which as far as I know was the only government to actually identify as fascist.
The left are commies, and they're acting the same way commies have always acted.
There used to be a somewhat useful definition of fascism and one time I linked to it on my Facebook page years ago and the next day they changed it. Why? Because the investors benefit by fascism. The most simple definition is government grants charters for public corporations and passes laws to protect these corporate business models thereby enhancing profits for the investors, which happen to include all the pension funds of government employees.
You're certainly 100% correct that they are utterly blind to their own destructive authoritarianism, which they project onto those who ultimately just want to be left the hell alone.
"Stop hitting us!" they cried, as they battered away with their fists.
Marxicissists... oh mah lordy! Ahahahaha 🐅 simply marvy!👏 On contemplating my many sins, one glaring "Oopsy" was working in Exec Recruitment last century. Using an "industrial Psychologist" (or rather, he used me,) to select the Final Three & the Briggs-Meyer playbook, we selected for N.P.D, or Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
This Playbook found the perfect, amoral, Corporate types that have decoupled us from the Owners. Ready for the Reset🫡 SARRRR!
Why am I reminded of the book Authoritarian Personality, a post-WWII project of the American Jewish Committee? I can see what have they done to those virtues and values since gaining the levers of power.
Although I grew up calling them "the seven cardinal virtues", I could at least name them all. That may be a function of a good religious education (I went to an independent, fee-paying high school).
Interestingly, my school used "courage" for "fortitude" and "moderation" for temperance.
Somehow I'm not surprised; you also ended up being a classicist ;) North American education, however, is not so thorough.
To my mind, moderation and temperance are more or less synonyms; courage and fortitude, however, are subtly different ... the latter includes the former, or can, but not vice versa.
WOW!!!~... What a wonderful essay... there should be a button for "Love" in order to acknowledge the brilliance exhibited... my time spent in reading was such a delight as to liken it to a feast... and the food-for-thought was such that I could possibly have gained weight in doing so... John, I tip my hat to this most excellent treatise on our modern society, it's temporal values and spiritual virtues lost... Well done! Well done, INdeed!!!~
A medievalist (my former profession) view: the Mother of All Virtues is caritas ie charity. If you like, you can argue that Love/agape leads to charity, since love of humanity leads to caring for humanity in a heartfelt way (my roundabout way of describing Latin caritas). Certainly medieval depictions of the Virtues accord central place to charity. Stack won’t allow pictures in the comments, but if you look up Tree of Virtues you can find nice images of a medieval kind of graphic depiction like a family tree of how the virtues and other desirable qualities interlink; charity is the centre and root of all others that branch from it.
As to virtues as aristocratic, that’s interesting you should say that. The exterior of Strasbourg cathedral has some great sculptural representation of the psychomachia (the art historian’s jargon for battle between the virtues and vices) dating from around 1300. The virtues are sculptures of seven aristocratic maidens, each standing on and trampling on the respective vice. The vices are cowering, distorted, abject figures, with the features and clothing of peasants and other lower class folk. I used these representations for my undergraduate dissertation many years ago as an example of medieval class war. I still find that argument convincing.
So I’m rather concerned about an identification of virtue with aristocracy. The Greek aristos meaning best may be the origin of the concept, but our betters have long proven to be anything but.
I was under the impression that agape included charity, much as e.g. fortitude includes strength. Certainly that divine love must, of necessity, be the chief virtue. Temperance, in my mind, is the chief cardinal virtue, but not the chief heavenly virtue.
Regarding aristocracy, I would submit that we have a false aristocracy - more of a kakistocracy in fact. My characterization of virtue as aristocratic is due to what I think is the unavoidable fact that it is hierarchical by implication - not so much the idea of eg a hereditary nobility of landed gentry. Although, that said, say what you will but the old warrior aristocracy at least considered itself to be bound by noblesse oblige (in theory if not always in fact). Our own pathocrats certainly don't. By associating the virtues with aristocracy, and making cultivation of virtue a principal focus, the probability that the upper classes will at least aspire to virtue is raised. Such depictions as you describe seem to me to have the effect of making those who see them associate virtue with high status behavior, and vice with low status; insofar as people are concerned to be higher status, they will then identify with and cultivate that which is higher in their own souls, to the general benefit of all.
Mar 10, 2023·edited Mar 13, 2023Liked by John Carter
Aristotle put justice at the head of the moral virtues, with wisdom (phronesis, which became prudence) at the head of the intellectual virtues.
Plato was the one who gave self mastery (sophrosyne, which became temperance) an important place, in at least some of the dialogues e.g. the Gorgias.
Though ranking the virtues is complicated by their vastly different moral vocabularies. It isn't clear that the ancients distinguished virtues in quite the same way we distinguish character traits; there was a great deal of talk about the unity of the virtues, in Plato's Protagoras and again in Aristotle's Ethics.
The line between specially moral traits and nonmoral properties is nowhere near as clear cut for them as it has been in ethics since ~1700, which is another stumbling block for modern readers.
Caritas mirrors the role of pride and (in another way) covetousness among the deadly sins, says St. Thomas. All vice begins in inordinate self love and is caused by inordinate acquistiveness. Seems quite a pleasing symmetry.
I'm not at all surprised to learn this was a common medieval take.
"Merchants are known to exaggerate". - Now morphed into fascist propaganda.
Interesting read I'm working through the links it gives body to the points made.
To avoid being a being in the cesspool I would rather use the material to grow soil fertility while feeding myself, anyone volunteering to swim in it, top to bottom, will be composted - is this a value or a virtue?
What you think is important to direct your attention and time to is what you value. That you are able to do something with that intention and time relies upon virtue.
Thank you! This one needs to be made available in audio, for our reading aversion conditioned brothers. If you have yet to read Codex Oera Linda, I recommend it, for another window into the virtues that our ancestors realized were essential.
Short, but extremely concentrated, due in part to having been worthy of inscription on our ancestors citadel walls over millenia.
Excellent article. IMO practising the theological virtues is the best way to develop the cardinal virtues. I try to say an Act of Faith, an Act of Hope, and an Act of Charity every day. Memorizing and reciting stuff like this is really good for you. It causes the content to color your thoughts and actions on a deep level.
I hear you on the values prattle. My company endlessly goes on about our "core values" and nakedly tries to instill them from the top down with the openly stated purpose being MOAR PROFIT. The fact that the profit motive totally undermines the values themselves (e.g. Sincerity and Honesty) is apparently lost on everyone. Corporate must realize what a hollow exercise it is though. They feel a need to remind everyone that values ---> profit BECAUSE they have zero faith that employees will see these "values" as worthwhile for their own sakes.
I don't think the hollowness of corporate values discourse is lost on anyone. That's one of the sources of the prevailing cynicism. We are inundated with insincere verbiage, and we all know it.
I've found it can be helpful to pray in the morning, and ask God for assistance with one of the virtues - this sets an intention to try and practice that virtue during the day. Often we have some notion of the challenges we're likely to face, and we can use that expectation to select the virtue we need help with.
Was it you who wrote a piece on the Four Temperaments? Knowing one's own temperament can also be a good guideline as to which virtues we need to practise most.
Re: valuebabble, you could be right, maybe it's obvious to everyone, but my colleagues do a really good job of pretending to believe in it. (I cannot bring myself to even pay lip service.) And when you're mouthing all the right words, you're propping the whole hollow edifice up. Moreover, just like with a habit of prayer, saying it actually does instill / install the content in your brain -- so my colleagues are internalizing the false idea that e.g. Sincerity ---> profit. It's a desperate state of affairs!
No, that wasn't me. That's certainly a useful form of self-knowledge, however.
I feel like the true believers who apparently convince themselves that the obvious lies are true must, at a certain level, know they are lies. Experience demonstrates this regularly, so for them not to notice requires their brain to notice and then deliberately delete this awareness - otherwise, it would reach the level of a conscious percept, trigger cognitive dissonance, and expose them to social threat. This process of conversive reasoning, of continuously deleting dis-confirming information and substituting that which they must believe to keep their belief structures intact, has a corrosive effect on the soul ... as for instance the man whose wife is obviously unfaithful, but manages to convince himself that she is not. What I'm getting at is, that apparent sincerity is a surface phenomenon, maintained only by great effort, which produces a state of psychic distress that then often sublimates itself in other ways.
Funny, just last night I was struggling to articulate to my spouse the essential problem with one family member. I briefly considered saying this person lacked "faith" but then discarded the idea and moved on to a very long explanation of what I thought was wrong. Now I know that "faith" was actually the correct word: "having the courage of your convictions, from which flows the will to act upon them."
I'm glad that was useful. Faith is a misunderstood concept - I think two thousand years of it having been abused to mean 'believe without evidence' or even 'believe in the face of contrary evidence' has clouded it.
St Thomas Aquinas defines faith (subjectively) as an intellectual assent to a Divine truth. There is plenty of evidence for Divine truth--it's all around us and history is rich in examples! You just gotta have "eyes to see" ;)
There are people of the Left who have virtue. Those who pay extra for humanely raised meats, or forgo meat entirely have virtue. White liberals who opt to live in Baltimore and make friends across lines of class and race are virtuous. Enviros who live spartan lives or put solar collectors on their homes are displaying some virtue. (Though we might question their prudence at times.) And like him or hate him, Bill Gates has a prudent approach to green energy: he's invested part of his fortune to develop next generation nuclear power.
Over the past few decades I have seen a decline in virtue on the part of the Left. While there have always been Limousine liberals who talked the talk without walking the walk -- going all the way back to Thomas Jefferson -- this replacement of action with ever more strident Talk is the characteristic of our age. The private jet setting environmentalist who invests in replacing jungle with biofuel farms is indeed worthy of extreme contempt. Ditto for the "anti racist" who spouts Critical Race Theory from the safety of Vermont, Maine, Oregon, or a college town.
But let us keep in mind that the extreme hypocrisy we see on the Left is what the Left saw in the Religious Right back in the day. Demanding an end to the welfare state without a restoration of real charity is to be worthy of contempt. In ancient Rome, the Christian churches were mutual aid societies, and a very expensive ones for the wealthy. Here in the US, many of our schools and hospitals bear the names of saints because they were originally funded by donations. A pure for-profit system of healthcare does not work. Poor people get sick too.
You raise some intriguing lines of thought about the distinctions between an ethic based on "virtues" and one based on "values." Everyone has things they value, but not everyone has (or values) virtue. Values are egalitarian, but virtues are not. For some of these folks, it really does seem that any talk of "virtue" offends them because it's a reminder of how vicious they are in comparison.
Vicious, and also weak and contemptible. They hate that which shows them for what they are.
This is why they seek to destroy the virtues of everyone else. They can't stand even seeing virtuous men. Interferes with their delusion that they are better than us, chosen by their god to rule over us mere animals. Explains their production and promotion of pornography, deviance, divorce, drugs, the seven deadly sins...
We should never have allowed them to poison us with their "entertainment".
Fun fact, there originally were *eight* deadly sins.
Tristitia, or excessive sadness was formerly included.
Dante Alighieri (of Dante's Inferno) somehow managed to take it out of the list. Makes you wonder if he indulged in tristitia and wanted to excuse himself (or more charitably, he cared for someone who did so). Whatever his motive, I wonder what depression rates would be if it was still considered sinful.
I uncovered this bit of history in a podcast series a friend and I are making on solutions to problems we currently face, and the first four (five?) are going to be on virtue. I'll be dropping them soon, so maybe subscribe to my 'stack if you think that's your knack.
A few years ago, I used to attend a Byzantine Catholic church. The priest there stressed that faith was an act of the will, *not* a mere intellect assent. He described it more as "faithfulness" -- staying the course even when it is unpleasant. The Latin "fides" means loyalty or confidence. The Greek "piste" is pretty similar. I don't know Hebrew or Aramaic, but it seems like there's some linguistic basis for his claim.
I think that the bizarre interpretation of Pauline doctrine in the Reformation was largely responsible for the meaning shift.
Indeed, yes - hence we say eg that a woman is faithful to her husband.
I got into it recently about virtue with my favorite liberal troll. Virtue is fascism, he says: I replied to a comment of his, basically about how conservatives should not be allowed to participate in democracy.
By William Hunter Duncan
on March 2, 2023 at 4:26 p.m.
Replying to Matt Haas
Spoken like a true one-party authoritarian. While many so-called conservatives are not really, true conservatism is about conserving tradition, like family, a work ethic, the classic virtues of prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude.
As for sectarian chaos, I should think that would very much describe liberal identity, race and gender politics at this point.
By Matt Haas
on March 2, 2023 at 6:31 p.m.
Replying to William Hunter Duncan
Yeah, not so much. Those “values” you cite are so much pap, and believe me, when you and yours set about trying to implement your fascist fantasy agenda, you’ll find out just how unified we herd of cats can be.
By William Hunter Duncan
on March 2, 2023 at 8:50 p.m.
Replying to Matt Haas
That is the first time I have heard fascism defined as “family, a work ethic, the classic virtues of prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude.”
You must be fun to hang out with.
By Matt Haas
on March 3, 2023 at 10:10 a.m.
Replying to William Hunter Duncan
Why yes, fascists NEVER appeal to a sense of fake nostalgia about “lost” traditional values. I mean it was only the entirety of the Nazi platform, but I’m sure you must be right
They actually do believe that those things are the core of fascism. That's quite central to their understanding of the phenomenon, in fact. Which is why they do everything they can to undermine families and encourage sexual degeneracy and physical and moral frailty - weak, atomized people with no motivations higher than their dicks and their stomachs will not become fascists. That's the theory at least.
I think they are all stuck in the Jungian, boy Hero shadow. They think they are heroes saving the world, too immature to know they are projecting their fascism on people like us, who calmly look at them like the raving baby maniacs they are.
I don't really think the term fascism is all that useful, given how vaguely defined it is. Everyone just calls their enemies fascists, meaning more or less "mean authoritarians I don't like", but it has nothing to do with early twentieth century Italian corporatism which as far as I know was the only government to actually identify as fascist.
The left are commies, and they're acting the same way commies have always acted.
There used to be a somewhat useful definition of fascism and one time I linked to it on my Facebook page years ago and the next day they changed it. Why? Because the investors benefit by fascism. The most simple definition is government grants charters for public corporations and passes laws to protect these corporate business models thereby enhancing profits for the investors, which happen to include all the pension funds of government employees.
Mentally denied! Hahahaha!
True. I only used the term fascism because of the idea they are projecting. Neo-marxist all the way, or Marxcissists as you say...
You're certainly 100% correct that they are utterly blind to their own destructive authoritarianism, which they project onto those who ultimately just want to be left the hell alone.
"Stop hitting us!" they cried, as they battered away with their fists.
Projection, exactly. Appears that none of them can see it while they are in it. Some, like Rechenwald, break out of it and can then see.
Marxicissists... oh mah lordy! Ahahahaha 🐅 simply marvy!👏 On contemplating my many sins, one glaring "Oopsy" was working in Exec Recruitment last century. Using an "industrial Psychologist" (or rather, he used me,) to select the Final Three & the Briggs-Meyer playbook, we selected for N.P.D, or Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
This Playbook found the perfect, amoral, Corporate types that have decoupled us from the Owners. Ready for the Reset🫡 SARRRR!
Why am I reminded of the book Authoritarian Personality, a post-WWII project of the American Jewish Committee? I can see what have they done to those virtues and values since gaining the levers of power.
Although I grew up calling them "the seven cardinal virtues", I could at least name them all. That may be a function of a good religious education (I went to an independent, fee-paying high school).
Interestingly, my school used "courage" for "fortitude" and "moderation" for temperance.
Somehow I'm not surprised; you also ended up being a classicist ;) North American education, however, is not so thorough.
To my mind, moderation and temperance are more or less synonyms; courage and fortitude, however, are subtly different ... the latter includes the former, or can, but not vice versa.
There's also "resilience", which may be more capacious than either word, but that I've not heard used anywhere as a substitute term.
That has a very modern ring to it, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Value to me reeks of the longhouse
Virtue, on the other hand, goes hand-in-hand with tonic masculinity
Maybe not a perfect comparison but there's something there
WOW!!!~... What a wonderful essay... there should be a button for "Love" in order to acknowledge the brilliance exhibited... my time spent in reading was such a delight as to liken it to a feast... and the food-for-thought was such that I could possibly have gained weight in doing so... John, I tip my hat to this most excellent treatise on our modern society, it's temporal values and spiritual virtues lost... Well done! Well done, INdeed!!!~
A medievalist (my former profession) view: the Mother of All Virtues is caritas ie charity. If you like, you can argue that Love/agape leads to charity, since love of humanity leads to caring for humanity in a heartfelt way (my roundabout way of describing Latin caritas). Certainly medieval depictions of the Virtues accord central place to charity. Stack won’t allow pictures in the comments, but if you look up Tree of Virtues you can find nice images of a medieval kind of graphic depiction like a family tree of how the virtues and other desirable qualities interlink; charity is the centre and root of all others that branch from it.
As to virtues as aristocratic, that’s interesting you should say that. The exterior of Strasbourg cathedral has some great sculptural representation of the psychomachia (the art historian’s jargon for battle between the virtues and vices) dating from around 1300. The virtues are sculptures of seven aristocratic maidens, each standing on and trampling on the respective vice. The vices are cowering, distorted, abject figures, with the features and clothing of peasants and other lower class folk. I used these representations for my undergraduate dissertation many years ago as an example of medieval class war. I still find that argument convincing.
So I’m rather concerned about an identification of virtue with aristocracy. The Greek aristos meaning best may be the origin of the concept, but our betters have long proven to be anything but.
I was under the impression that agape included charity, much as e.g. fortitude includes strength. Certainly that divine love must, of necessity, be the chief virtue. Temperance, in my mind, is the chief cardinal virtue, but not the chief heavenly virtue.
Regarding aristocracy, I would submit that we have a false aristocracy - more of a kakistocracy in fact. My characterization of virtue as aristocratic is due to what I think is the unavoidable fact that it is hierarchical by implication - not so much the idea of eg a hereditary nobility of landed gentry. Although, that said, say what you will but the old warrior aristocracy at least considered itself to be bound by noblesse oblige (in theory if not always in fact). Our own pathocrats certainly don't. By associating the virtues with aristocracy, and making cultivation of virtue a principal focus, the probability that the upper classes will at least aspire to virtue is raised. Such depictions as you describe seem to me to have the effect of making those who see them associate virtue with high status behavior, and vice with low status; insofar as people are concerned to be higher status, they will then identify with and cultivate that which is higher in their own souls, to the general benefit of all.
Aristotle put justice at the head of the moral virtues, with wisdom (phronesis, which became prudence) at the head of the intellectual virtues.
Plato was the one who gave self mastery (sophrosyne, which became temperance) an important place, in at least some of the dialogues e.g. the Gorgias.
Though ranking the virtues is complicated by their vastly different moral vocabularies. It isn't clear that the ancients distinguished virtues in quite the same way we distinguish character traits; there was a great deal of talk about the unity of the virtues, in Plato's Protagoras and again in Aristotle's Ethics.
The line between specially moral traits and nonmoral properties is nowhere near as clear cut for them as it has been in ethics since ~1700, which is another stumbling block for modern readers.
Root of our problem: "we have a false aristocracy - more of a kakistocracy in fact".
Caritas mirrors the role of pride and (in another way) covetousness among the deadly sins, says St. Thomas. All vice begins in inordinate self love and is caused by inordinate acquistiveness. Seems quite a pleasing symmetry.
I'm not at all surprised to learn this was a common medieval take.
"Merchants are known to exaggerate". - Now morphed into fascist propaganda.
Interesting read I'm working through the links it gives body to the points made.
To avoid being a being in the cesspool I would rather use the material to grow soil fertility while feeding myself, anyone volunteering to swim in it, top to bottom, will be composted - is this a value or a virtue?
What you think is important to direct your attention and time to is what you value. That you are able to do something with that intention and time relies upon virtue.
Thank you! This one needs to be made available in audio, for our reading aversion conditioned brothers. If you have yet to read Codex Oera Linda, I recommend it, for another window into the virtues that our ancestors realized were essential.
Short, but extremely concentrated, due in part to having been worthy of inscription on our ancestors citadel walls over millenia.
Excellent article. IMO practising the theological virtues is the best way to develop the cardinal virtues. I try to say an Act of Faith, an Act of Hope, and an Act of Charity every day. Memorizing and reciting stuff like this is really good for you. It causes the content to color your thoughts and actions on a deep level.
I hear you on the values prattle. My company endlessly goes on about our "core values" and nakedly tries to instill them from the top down with the openly stated purpose being MOAR PROFIT. The fact that the profit motive totally undermines the values themselves (e.g. Sincerity and Honesty) is apparently lost on everyone. Corporate must realize what a hollow exercise it is though. They feel a need to remind everyone that values ---> profit BECAUSE they have zero faith that employees will see these "values" as worthwhile for their own sakes.
I don't think the hollowness of corporate values discourse is lost on anyone. That's one of the sources of the prevailing cynicism. We are inundated with insincere verbiage, and we all know it.
I've found it can be helpful to pray in the morning, and ask God for assistance with one of the virtues - this sets an intention to try and practice that virtue during the day. Often we have some notion of the challenges we're likely to face, and we can use that expectation to select the virtue we need help with.
Was it you who wrote a piece on the Four Temperaments? Knowing one's own temperament can also be a good guideline as to which virtues we need to practise most.
Re: valuebabble, you could be right, maybe it's obvious to everyone, but my colleagues do a really good job of pretending to believe in it. (I cannot bring myself to even pay lip service.) And when you're mouthing all the right words, you're propping the whole hollow edifice up. Moreover, just like with a habit of prayer, saying it actually does instill / install the content in your brain -- so my colleagues are internalizing the false idea that e.g. Sincerity ---> profit. It's a desperate state of affairs!
No, that wasn't me. That's certainly a useful form of self-knowledge, however.
I feel like the true believers who apparently convince themselves that the obvious lies are true must, at a certain level, know they are lies. Experience demonstrates this regularly, so for them not to notice requires their brain to notice and then deliberately delete this awareness - otherwise, it would reach the level of a conscious percept, trigger cognitive dissonance, and expose them to social threat. This process of conversive reasoning, of continuously deleting dis-confirming information and substituting that which they must believe to keep their belief structures intact, has a corrosive effect on the soul ... as for instance the man whose wife is obviously unfaithful, but manages to convince himself that she is not. What I'm getting at is, that apparent sincerity is a surface phenomenon, maintained only by great effort, which produces a state of psychic distress that then often sublimates itself in other ways.
Thank you for this inspirational post!
Funny, just last night I was struggling to articulate to my spouse the essential problem with one family member. I briefly considered saying this person lacked "faith" but then discarded the idea and moved on to a very long explanation of what I thought was wrong. Now I know that "faith" was actually the correct word: "having the courage of your convictions, from which flows the will to act upon them."
I'm glad that was useful. Faith is a misunderstood concept - I think two thousand years of it having been abused to mean 'believe without evidence' or even 'believe in the face of contrary evidence' has clouded it.
St Thomas Aquinas defines faith (subjectively) as an intellectual assent to a Divine truth. There is plenty of evidence for Divine truth--it's all around us and history is rich in examples! You just gotta have "eyes to see" ;)
Thanks. I needed this.
This was very encouraging and motivating. Thank you
There are people of the Left who have virtue. Those who pay extra for humanely raised meats, or forgo meat entirely have virtue. White liberals who opt to live in Baltimore and make friends across lines of class and race are virtuous. Enviros who live spartan lives or put solar collectors on their homes are displaying some virtue. (Though we might question their prudence at times.) And like him or hate him, Bill Gates has a prudent approach to green energy: he's invested part of his fortune to develop next generation nuclear power.
Over the past few decades I have seen a decline in virtue on the part of the Left. While there have always been Limousine liberals who talked the talk without walking the walk -- going all the way back to Thomas Jefferson -- this replacement of action with ever more strident Talk is the characteristic of our age. The private jet setting environmentalist who invests in replacing jungle with biofuel farms is indeed worthy of extreme contempt. Ditto for the "anti racist" who spouts Critical Race Theory from the safety of Vermont, Maine, Oregon, or a college town.
But let us keep in mind that the extreme hypocrisy we see on the Left is what the Left saw in the Religious Right back in the day. Demanding an end to the welfare state without a restoration of real charity is to be worthy of contempt. In ancient Rome, the Christian churches were mutual aid societies, and a very expensive ones for the wealthy. Here in the US, many of our schools and hospitals bear the names of saints because they were originally funded by donations. A pure for-profit system of healthcare does not work. Poor people get sick too.
Wisdom is implicit in prudence, I think.