Thin Ethical Lives

 I get this really cool newsletter from The Hedgehog Review, looking over the latest articles (I went looking for Flaubert without luck) I got the sense of a theme. The thinness of modern ethical talk.

Like some noted in What the Ancients Knew: Rediscovering the breadth and depth of formation, I started my return to life with Aristotle (along with David Hume). Give a look at my posts under "Pretrial Detention" on the right column of this blog.

Provided with a diverse menu of Western and other ethical traditions and accepting the common assumption that human progress will extend indefinitely, why are so many people now returning to ancient sources, even if they can be harmonized with the late modern world as “rational” and “compatible with science”? Part of the answer lies in the thinness of ethical life in the twenty-first century, reduced as so much of it is to calculations of utility and the maximization of individual happiness. Aristotle and the writer of Proverbs were among the first to notice that the enabling moral quality of courage requires hope. Why risk anything if we have no faith that we are headed somewhere worth going to?...

I started with Aristotle because I had never read The Nichomachean Ethics. Since I thought my COPD would put an end to me before I came home, I thought I had better take the opportunity to read the book. Moderation is the key to Aristotle. Having been wildly immoderate with my despondent thoughts, throwing a temper tantrum of spectacular proportions, Aristotle was a sharp rebuke.

And this sounds very familiar even now:

In the twentieth century, the self came to define the goals of nearly all aspects of life: Our careers had to be fulfilling, our marriages had to bring happiness, our religious experiences had to be part of our self-improvement projects, our children became our friends, our communities and our service to them had to give us satisfaction, and our causes often became expressions of our ever-changing identitarian commitments. Yet what Robert Bellah called “expressive individualism,” Charles Taylor named the “authentic self,” and Alasdair MacIntyre labeled “emotivism” has not proved satisfactory.3 We are left longing for a more substantial ethical foundation, if not for ourselves, then for our children, whose largely skills-based education leaves them ill equipped to handle lives increasingly lived online, where anger, shaming, posturing, envy, and pornography reduce the human to the most instrumental, transactional, and consumerist terms.

 The government would like me to be a great danger to the wider world when I think much of my problem (and many I have met similarly situated as I am) came from the internet. There is a divide between the world online and offline. We can immerse ourselves to our detriment online - and there is much of the ugliness noted above. We are only now understanding the harm it does to children. Nothing in the Yahoo chatrooms helped my problems with despondency. It helped push me towards an increasing anger at existence.

And who shows up in the article?

The most famous ancient work on formation, Aristotle’s second treatise on ethics, received its name (at some point) from that of the philosopher’s son, Nicomachus, who was still young when Aristotle died. Like his works on the natural world, metaphysics, politics, and literary theory, Aristotle’s work on ethics was the fruit of a philosophical way of life. 

Schole, or leisure, was the essential component. Those hours of the day free of work or other preoccupations, schole demonstrated the “meaning we wish to give our lives” and “what sort of person we are,” as Aristotle’s recent biographer Carlo Natali puts it,9 or “freedom from … life’s necessities,…from worries and cares,” in Hannah Arendt’s formulation.10 Aristotle’s idea of flourishing derived from examining the observations and expert opinions he had gathered and expounded about the nature of the good life. In no small way, Aristotle chose this life for himself. But the life of theoria was at least equally social: an expression of his noble family line—especially his mother’s—that was enjoyed among friends and advanced students, passed down to his intellectual descendants as to family.

Reading this paragraph, we should think on what is American culture: 

The more decisive formative influence was Greek culture itself. Greek intellectual and cultural achievements, not least in ethics and politics, were, as the historian Victor Davis Hanson argues in his pathbreaking book The Other Greeks, “the logical fruit of the groundwork of agrarians, Greek farmers who are now all but lost to the European historical record.”11

I have been thinking of Aristotle's flourishing because I ran across the idea while researching my law review article. It seems to me to be something we have ignored in this country - or we have mistaken material goods as evidencing the flourishing of human beings. We do live in a consumerist society, after all.

Indeed, Aristotle’s ethical course was oriented toward eudaimonia, human flourishing—a soul activity in accordance with complete virtue, living well and acting well—in ways that require sufficient resources, but the completeness of one’s virtue and the result of one’s efforts to do well could be fully known only after one’s death. Often glossed today as happiness, eudaimonia is discussed by Socrates, who, according to a passage in Plato’s Euthydemus, argued that all human beings wish to do well.17 Eudaimonia, then, is “a name for our real interest and what all human action intends to pursue or achieve.”18...

That doing well concept captures nicely what I came to eventually as what I would do when released from prison. My PO and probably the counselor running the group therapy will not think anyone is capable of reaching such a conclusion without their supervision. Oh, well. They may be correct about the majority of people. They would have been right about my cluelessness - circa 2009. After all, have we not replaced ethical training with propaganda from different political tribes?

I do believe I agree with this full paragraph:

Chief among the many lessons we moderns can draw from moral formation in antiquity is the necessity of “thickening” both the breadth and depth of formation. The ancients knew, and likely could not have imagined otherwise, that formation required depth, drawing in every part of a person: mind, soul, and body. They also assumed that the crafting of young lives necessitated breadth, drawing on every institution available: civic, religious, political,

I do not see how to accomplish this formation in the jumble of racial and gender and economic and political issues that disrupt our culture. We have states banning books on slavery!

Talking to CC, I am reminded that there are people out there who did not have the resources I had. That I do have. I threw them away once, but they were still in my head in a faint way. Returning to philosophy revitalized those resources for living better than I did before my arrest. 

The Denial of the Moral as Lived Experience: What became of moral formation in a democratic society? by James Davison Hunter takes the above a step further. I am sure I do not agree with all of his premises, but I do agree with his conclusion. It is a thought I acquired long ago, in the early days of my being a lawyer.

Should we be surprised? As among progressives, we find among conservatives a similar if differently motivated denial of the moral as a category of lived experience. We see this in the failure of follow-through—a failure to recognize that healthy moral formation is impossible without moral community; that coherent moral cosmologies only become adequate for those who aspire to their ideals when those cosmologies are rooted in the practices of local institutions, the collective memory of forebears, and the words and lives of a community’s exemplars. Within much of conservative activism, the language of morality is weaponized in ways that run roughshod over the liminal spaces of context, subtext, contingency, and subtle distinction, where the moral life is actually lived and where moral wisdom is required. The rare legislatives successes of conservative activists (such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade) become largely pyrrhic. What law, after all, can compel the love of a woman for her unborn child or faithfulness to one’s spouse or sacrificial commitment to one’s children or the bonds of family togetherness? And what policy can legislate generosity toward the needy or care of one’s neighbor? The law is not nothing, but it cannot do the slow work of moral formation or the even slower work of building a sustainable and integrated moral order.

In sum, instrumentalizing the moral, either through science, therapeutic technique, or politics, invariably produces a thin, often legalistic ethics detached from lived experience

His solution may find opposition in the First Amendment. Also, I am not so sure that even within the moral pluralism he deplores there is not a unity of virtues. But then I am a reader of Hume and Nietzsche and William James. In the following, I detect in Mr. Hunter the hint of a pluralistic universe:

The young will be formed. The question is how. Precisely because of the inescapable relationship between persons and their communities, it is only within the particularities of the distinct social and moral ecologies they inhabit that it will be possible to discover the conditions in which a moral and civic formation oriented toward decency, kindness, generosity, respect, fairness, justice, and beauty can be cultivated. Only through acknowledgment and respect for the particularities of distinct moral and ethical traditions and communities, including emerging ones, can there be a hope of addressing the deep differences intrinsic to a demographically, religiously, and ethnically diverse democracy. Instead of engineering an inclusive moral culture independent of our many differences, there is now a possibility of finding common ground through our differences. That task is certainly more difficult than the strategy pursued by the current regime of formation, yet taking on that task may be the only way to adequately address the ethical needs of the young, the obligations of citizenship, and the requirements of our fragile and divided democracy.

I certainly agree we need to take a serious look at our entire culture and the ethics underlying it. Who wants to start?

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