Ethics, Living The Good Life

 Ethics are about living the good life. The good life is not about life as a party. It is about the kind of life that lets us be the best human beings possible. Start with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics; to me, that's ground zero for Western ethics.

Bringing the quest for the best life for humans, How to live a good life in difficult times: Yuval Noah Harari, Rory Stewart and Maria Ressa in conversation (The Guardian) has much to say about technology devaluing human nature.

RS One thing that is so striking about the modern age is that we’ve lost an ethical vocabulary in engaging with leaders. I mean, fundamentally, what is Donald Trump? He is shameless. It would be very difficult for Aristotle or Cicero or a Renaissance theorist of politics, or indeed the writers of the American constitution, to imagine this degree of shamelessness, this degree of contempt for constitutions, contempt for minorities, contempt for the truth, the open performance of immorality. And very difficult also to imagine that we would have entered a world where we, at some level, are so tempted to just enjoy the spectacle, and have just lost the ability to be shocked that every day he does three or four things which in the old world would have shocked us to our core.

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YNH I think that more people need to realise that we have to do the hard work ourselves. There is a tendency to assume that we can rely on reality to do the job for us. That if there are people who talk nonsense, who support illogical policies, who ignore the facts, sooner or later, reality will wreak vengeance on them. And this is not the way that history works.

So if you want the truth, and you want reality to win, each of us has to do some of the hard work ourselves: choose one thing and focus on that and hope that other people will also do their share. That way we avoid the extremes of despair. 

Bulwark does movie reviews, and Randolph Scott, Virtuous Loner of the West is part of that, but I think it applies here, too:

ONLY SCOTT’S CHARACTERS DEMONSTRATE self-mastery, but not even he is perfect. No one is. Because, in these stories, sin crouches forever in the doorway. Scott’s rectitude can give way to hubris and judgmentalism. It is easy to falter: “A man can cross over anytime he has the mind.”

Ultimately, the superiority of a Scott character is not the result of his righteousness or efficiency, but his grace and compassion. What makes Scott different from later heroes—photocopied Ford-by-way-of-Kurosawa, macho images divorced from meaning—is that he knew what lonesomeness was for.

“I liked the loner,” Burt Kennedy once explained. “I always thought that one secret of a good Western is that the leading man should be able to walk away at any point, but he chooses not to, and that’s what makes him a hero.”

Or as Scott might say, “There are some things a man just can’t ride around.”

You want a better world, it has to start with yourself. That is the voice of experience speaking, folks. The other route is nihilism depression, suicide.

sch 10/7