Meditations on Virtue: Part II

In part one of my meditations, I listed as cardinal virtues Self-Awareness and Creativity. Five other virtues I listed as humility, patience, courage, compassion and dignity. However, seven is not enough, so I wish to expound on seven more virtues I feel are most important.

Sacrifice - We cannot always rely on enlightened self-interest to create a good society. It is all too easy for wealth to lock itself behind vast gates, in which case it is no longer enlightened self-interest to concern itself with others. And besides, thinking that people will only do something for others if it is also in their own interests is quite a cynical position. Sacrifice, doing something for the sake of another, even at ones own expense, should be emphasized here. It is an almost mystic experience of selflessness; a transcendence of the individuated self.

Sacrifice is what makes great artists and great genii. Most people will not exchange comfort for hardship, will not exchange convention for daring, will not exchange security for freedom. Only the genius will strive after some creative passion at the cost of everything else. They are capable of so much more precisely because of their sacrifices; the life of a genius being something like one long risk.

Sacrifice taken to extremes is dangerous, as is sacrifice for a stupid cause. It can lead to horrible outcomes and supreme irresponsibility (it wasn't my fault, I was just obeying a higher power / the interests of my nation). Soldiers fighting for their beloved dictator / cabal of corporate overlords are self-sacrificing, but they are certainly not nobler for it! Yet when combined with the other virtues, sacrifice can be a driving force, a transcendent act which should defy cynicism and show our interconnectedness. A simple maxim for this virtue: Sacrifice, but for the right end.

Reliability - Repetition has a vital place in the human being. Religions have been successful at indoctrinating the masses with their maxims, and many philosophers also strive to distil their ideas into the easily rememberable. This is because repetition is important, and so is reliability.

The hum-drum is necessary and beneath no one. Predictability and mediocrity are an unsung necessities for certain tasks, and so too must we cultivate this virtue inside of us.  Honesty, robustness, stability. As drab as these things are, and as mechanical as they are, I cannot help but see them as a virtue in the right circumstances.

Persistence is, as they say, the key to success. Of course, reliability can be wretched if we are reliably being wretched! Reliability comes after the fact - once we know what we need to do, we do it in the manner of a mule. It may mean that we can become inflexible, yet with regular doses of philosophy, we can avoid becoming dogmatic, one-track creatures.

A humourous maxim for this virtue might be: Turning up is half the battle won.

Spirituality - This is a virtue sullied by dogmatic aspects of religion throughout the ages, and soiled in our modern-era by exoticizing 'Eastern' mysticism. Yet we must not dismiss spirituality because of these associations. Spirituality is part of us - all of us. When we feel reverence toward the cosmos, what we might call mystic experiences, and we have faith that it is more than a brain spasm or some delusion, we are accepting our spirituality..

In reverence and awe of the cosmos; gazing up at the immensity of space, surrounded by mighty oaks, observing the complexity of a snail's shell, standing upon the site of an old battle, questioning infinity, observing ancient ruins covered in lost languages, we are anchored to the earth-cosmos-history, feeling our ever-changing place within its bosom. We are experiencing something that came before language, philosophy, civilization. A profound sense of being.

Of all traits of character spirituality is the hardest to pinpoint, the most unpredictable. It is always just beyond comprehension. Yet this mysterious element inside us is not to be dismissed by our scientific. age. The spiritual need only be felt and enjoyed. Such a universal wonder cannot be reliably measured and tested by the empiricist's eye. Nor can it be pigeon-holed into any one religion; which might steal away our shared inheritance. 

Spirituality is a supreme paradox, for at once it is individualistic; no one can tell you how you should respond to these feelings, and also utterly selfless; the self is lost in the greater whole, in supreme moments of understanding. We must not deny it, we must not embrace it. We must let it be. My listing spirituality as a virtue is not to cultivate it, nor to force it, but merely to let it through as and when it comes. This can be a powerful unifying force, as all of us are prone to it. Perhaps it is the knot that will tie all of humanity together into universal kinship. Let us end on a maxim: As being precedes language, so spirituality precedes language.

Aestheticness - By aestheticness I mean two things. Firstly, the ability to literally see beauty, even where it may not be seen. It is not a given that we take notice of beauty. Natural beauty, for instance, can be easily drowned out by garish shop-fronts, bright lights and intruding billboards. It takes time and maturity to do away with the hideous and appreciate the natural splendour of the world. Secondly I mean an appreciation of good art, music, literature and so on. In this sense aesthetics is not literally a sense of beauty (although it can be). Aesthetics is taste, consideration, not being dragged along by convention. There is a world of difference between that which is popular and that which is good. This is not to say that the good is never popular, only that what is popular is often soul-draining tripe.

Such arts should be despised, poorly constructed cash-ins reviled, copies of copies of copies disdained. Such works poison the word art! The good arts are those which rejuvenate the soul, which carry us on journeys and build our empathy, which connect us into them and leave us in awe, which make us feel connected to earth-cosmos-history, which enlighten us to just causes. We must cultivate such tastes.

Animal Kinship -  Of all human contradictions, our attitude toward animals is the most disgraceful. There are animals for keeping, and animals for slaughtering, animals for hunting, and animals for reducing to egg-laying machines and milk pumps. Of course, different animals have different traits: we would not want to keep flesh-eating tigers in our homes as often as we would like a friendly spider-monkey. Yet what we could universally accept is that each animal is an individual, and thus an end in itself, rather than something merely useful to us. In the language of virtue, an animal should be treated with 'Dignity'.

Our treatment of animals is the epitome of moral good, and this has been said from Kant, to Gandhi, to Bentham. Not only is it compassionate to take an animal into your home, and by extension into society, it is also beneficial to us if we are willing to appreciate them, their ways, their vices. I would call Animal Kinship a cardinal virtue, as it is our closest path into nature: as our societies evolve, so do our attitudes toward nature. We shape nature, as we are shaped by it; we are part of it, not separate. An animal for kin, communicating with another species - what else could indicate this truth more?

Intelligence - Intelligence, to my mind, can be boiled down to this - how well we use the knowledge and resources available to us in order to survive. It is a cardinal virtue relating to our brute survival and sanity. It is the thoughtful development of our technology to make the physical world more bearable. A humourous maxim for this virtue could be: Curiosity + Caution = Intelligence!  We take it for granted that we have the basic intelligence to survive, and will continue surviving into the future. I do not think we should take this for granted - humanity is a deeply stupid beast, capable of making immensely idiotic decisions.

Self-destruction seems to be hard-wired into us. Just not destroying ourselves is a supreme achievement which we should praise highly: it is only by cultivating intelligence that we might develop the long-term thinking necessary to survive into eternity.

Temperance - The elder cousin of humility, temperance has rightfully been called a cardinal virtue since the ancients. Indeed, the arch-master of temperance, Mr. Epicurus, predicted the atomizing misery which material excess (consumerism) would bring two and a half thousand years ago! The self-restraint of an Epicurean springs from the real pleasures of life; friendship, independence and an analyized life; filling oneself with goodness. Luxury and debauchery is seen only as a very occasional indulgence, and not something to hate oneself for.

Temperance must be distanced from the romance of religious asceticism, of bodily self-hatred, self-righteous sacrifice and devotion to 'the divine'. We are not practicers of temperance because we are humbling ourselves before some 'divinity'. We practice temperance because it gives us happiness here, on earth.

Excess is dismal, foolish, destructive. Temperance negates excess. One who honestly believes in the virtues must have the temperance to disdain from their destructive appetite; one of the greatest vices threatening our future on this planet. I do not put the sorry state of our moral place in the world entirely down to 'evil' or powermongery, but to the rampant desires of ordinary people, with their false promise of satisfaction. In this day and age temperance is possibly the most important virtue of all.

The Confluence

 

Have you ever been referred to as a consumer? If you have, then you have been insulted. And worse than insulted, you have also been targeted by powerful men for moulding; socially-engineered into something less than you are. You have been belittled and dehumanized, reduced from a Whole being into a single part. You have been made into a statistic to be scientifically examined, reduced to an ever-hungry mouth for the producer to feed. As the producer is a parasite seeking to profit from you, being referred to as a consumer is not so different to being referred to as prey. Greedy prey, stupid prey - the fly who saw the spider's web but crashed into it all the same.

We must not be satisfied with being a feeder, a mere sucking mouth against the teet of hedonism. Ignorance is never bliss, it is uncertainty and frustration, the inability to see beyond the next fix. Ignorance means being unable to make and understand choices; it is the enemy of freedom. We need truth and enlightenment. There is more to us, which we must dare discover; a balanced being, a whole being, a free being.

It was only when reading the work of the world's first self-proclaimed anarchist that I came to realize all of this. And it starts somewhere extremely simple. How we are addressed shapes how we become, in the same way that being praised or insulted might raise or lower our esteem. Proudhon referred to his audience as 'citizen-reader', and it sent me into an upward spiral of thought and discovery.

The confluence -

A confluence is the point where two or more streams form into a single river. How many confluences make up the whole of us is perhaps beyond categorisation. In fact, even categorising things into neat little sections is suspect, as life and being is never so simple. Nonetheless, I will endeavour to present three large and definite tributaries which make up our totality. Ideally, we would all have an understanding and appreciation of these aspects, rather than being trammelled into any individual one. Understandably, we specialize in various places, and are not equally spread across all aspects of our being.

Economic - There are invariably those who value money above all other things, like Dragons upon their golden hoards. For these sorry people the term consumer might fit extremely well, for the concept of a consumer is a creature which exists wholly in the realm of economic transaction (Homo Economicus). They are the ones who want to get things with absolute certainty and familiarity, moving as the crow flies without appreciating the journey. They are easily malleable, and can be satisfied with any conditions provided they get their reward at the end of it.

They obtain their monetary rewards by doing what they would not like to do because they have the promise of spending it on something they want at the end of it. Monetary gain is the consolation for what is often dreary and unimaginative labour. Perhaps we all need to be cajoled into action sometimes and led along by the carrot on the stick a short distance. But to live exclusively for the weekend is to sacrifice five-sevenths of ones life to the machine.

Money is glorified beyond the sum of its parts and becomes a thing of value of itself, rather than a piece of paper used to promise the bearer such and such a sum. It also becomes the main unit of comparison and competition, such that one can never be satisfied with how much one has, for there is always someone with a little more. Thus the value of money is symbolic, rather than useful, and one's attachment to it is not the attachment to one's tools or actual needs, but a symbolic attachment. It is to build oneself on an imaginary foundation (and we call such people 'realists'!) To be disdainful of such a one-dimensional money-clutching character is not elitism - it is simply being something more than an unimaginative creature!

I should like to think that the hypothetical hoarding Dragon I have described above does not really exist. I should like to think that the bulk of our species is somewhat more subtle, and that economic realities are not the be all and end all of existing on this Earth. To the enlightened, economics is but one tributary leading into the river of totality. Economic calculations are a necessary head-ache but one which we would all rather was done away with it. Spending power might illicit the occasional burst of joy, but this would not be an addiction, but an occasional vanity.

Political - Everyone should be political. Not because there is much gain in it, but rather to prevent suffering losses for it. At least in our present epoch of representative democracy (demagoguery), politics is very much a case of damage control. It is equivalent to self-defence.

What is the value of a voice? What is the value of a vote and a movement? I should answer that these things are as valuable as the 'economic' category above. Just as obtaining things by exchanging currency can cause good feelings, so too can discussing things. The difference of course is that discussing important things is free.

The power is there, waiting to be taken, and it costs nothing but effort and time. We should long to have a share of power in government and public affairs, as it is in our interests to do so. The disillusionment with a crooked system (see any currently existing system) only feeds into that system. One of virtuous and balanced character should strive to create something new if the existing surroundings threaten the virtuous. This also is a political action.

Spiritual - The concept of spirituality is one stained by misunderstanding, misuse, and mistrust. Understandably so! Our first introduction to spirituality often comes through dogmatic religion, which drives the dissatisfied toward atheism. Conventional religion is so flagrantly repulsive that it encourages us to denounce spirituality as dangerously stupid, for the most dogmatic of priests oppose all other aspects of human being (such as scientific endeavour) which they consider threatening to their little bubble of perverse power. This might also lead to rational and open-minded religious people being 'tarred with the same brush'.

The necessity of a specific God, or belief in a certain set of scriptures, is also a problem for spirituality. There is nothing worse than competitive religions. Only tolerant religious groups should be tolerated! For that reason I believe spirituality requires total openness and should be proclaimed as an universal individualism. It is a deeply personal experience where, paradoxically, the personal vanishes - for self and all often become interwined during such experiences. But the personal does not vanish forever, and the individual is still left to interpret and ponder their experience, and that is what makes such a spiritual moment special.

I wish here to purify the idea of the spiritual, including within it things we can immediately identify with: to aimlessly observe a white horse grazing in a gladden field; to be lost in a piece of music and to forget time; to see the logic in the absurd; to be part of the unexplainable life of the city; to use language in a nonsensical way; to create art in luminous splendour; to touch the nose of a cat with your own; to imagine one is a sorcerer of a lost race saving a dying realm; watching smoke rise from an incense stick recognising that it doesn't really go anywhere; these are all spiritual experiences.

The spiritual does not align with what is arrogantly called 'the real world', and it is not just a consolation used to maintain a regimented life. The spiritual must be purposeless when all around us demands 'as the crow flies rationality', and accumulation, and severity, and pretension.

Real poverty lies with those who are incapable of fully appreciating this side of themselves. The spiritual does not need to be mutually exclusive with other more 'practical' aspects of our being; they can all co-exist.

Close -

Like any Virtue Ethicist I stand at the foot of the mountain I have raised, dwarfed by its splendour, cast into its shadow. Is it an impossible task to be a balanced and virtuous creature?

Selim 'Selim' Talat

Meditations on Virtue

'We do not discover purpose through virtue, we discover virtue through purpose.'

The purpose of a sword is to cut through resistant materials. A 'virtuous' sword is one with a sharp edge. The purpose of a cup of green tea is to fill the body with intoxicants, stabilize metabolism and act as a stimulant. A 'virtuous' cup of green tea is one with the appropriate minerals. The purpose of a tap is to allow water to be drawn whenever one needs it. A 'virtuous' tap is one which does not leak and allows the free flow of water.

The purpose of a human being...is much trickier. In the above examples we can identify 'virtues', or qualities, which enable a thing to fulfil it's purpose. This is largely because we - human beings - have designed these things for specific purposes. Sometimes they can have alternative purposes - a broken sink painted green with pink spots would probably be considered virtuous in a modern art gallery - but generally speaking we know the primary use of a tool or technology.

But what is the purpose for we human beings? Our origins, the dreams of our ancestors, our place in nature , where we are going, is far more complex than the destiny of a tap! It may seem like it is hard for philosophers to come up with answers. Nonetheless, we must not yield the question of what purpose is to politicians, to scientists, to theologians or psychologists. The question of the good life was asked in great detail by ancient philosophers, and with philosophers it had best remain.

I believe human purpose to be related to more than just our own personal flourishing and emotional well-being. To place too much emphasis on personal emotion and our immediate surroundings is to lose out on principles which can be universalized. To live the good life for oneself is part of our purpose, but the same conditions which allow us to flourish ought to be available to all. Why shouldn't they be? If we have benefited from living in certain conditions, and it is possible to share such conditions elsewhere, it only makes sense that we should be as fair as possible. Thus, the perfect 'soil' for human flourishing lies not only in individual character building, but also in the way we order society, and the world at large.

The ultimate society which allows us to fulfil our creative purpose is a meritocracy. Under such circumstances a person may succeed or fail based on their own efforts and not on their place in an unequal society (as in our current false-meritocracy). But never should anyone be doomed to failure, or locked into stagnant success. It must remain a fluid meritocracy - for ideas grow old, and systems grow obsolete. Everything must be held up to scrutiny and change. The foundation of such a meritocracy is, perhaps paradoxically, egalitarianism. We cannot have fair and honourable meritocracy without equality preceding it, and in a too-competitive environment we risk permanently stratifying people into classes, thus destroying the notion of society, and therefore meritocracy. Of course, this ideal 'soil' for us to flourish is far from realization; we live in a world of hierarchical politics, entrenched obsolete institutions and growing inequality. Against this tide I present seven virtues I consider the most important in our struggle to fulfil our purpose - the flourishing of an individual's creativity to make the world a better place.

- Self-Awareness: The ability to realize one's own consciousness is the first virtue. This I believe is the key to wisdom, and thus the discoverer of human purpose. Through self-awareness we can know what it is we want for ourselves. Without such direction, we can be easily manipulated. Without such direction, we are void. Such a void can be filled by any authority, or remain empty and be glossed over by rampant desire-fulfilment. Self-awareness must fill the void through its perpetual searching, it must find direction within ourselves, and ready us for the inevitable changes we will need to make. Only through such daring reflection can we distinguish where our ideas have come from: did we accept them ourselves after conscious deliberation or were they imposed upon us from the outside? How much of our personality traits have we chosen, and how much have we absorbed through habit and soaking in our environment? What do we want to keep, and what 'demons' do we want to exorcise?

By examining our actions we become sceptical. Once we habituate to this scepticism, we have an automatic shield which can filter out falsehood. Self-awareness is thus the first step into wisdom. It is also important for self-control, and can provide us with recognition of what we are capable of. It is the most important virtue, but not the cardinal virtue; self-awareness is like the necessary soil in which the ultimate virtue may take seed.

- Humility: One who has humility is not competitive in a win-at-all costs way. Whilst competition can be a good driving force, without humility it is bound to become destructive and create a world of egotists and show-offs; as per our own consumerist dystopia. As so many problems of unequal wealth distribution and competition for status pervade our age, humility may well be one of the most powerful virtues which bring about a fairer situation - if only the powerful and boisterous could be convinced to embrace it!

Humility can be the source of a great sense of humour. Laughing at ourselves makes life bearable, and prevents us from taking everything too seriously. The 'seriousness' and pretense of society is the veil hiding many evils which lurk beneath. A sneering maxim against this pretentious evil could be: Polite lies trump vulgar truths. Laughter must wash away this arrogance, exposing the flesh of our hypocrisy to scrutiny.

- Courage: The first two virtues of self-awareness and humility must come before courage. Courage can be a vice if one is courageous for the wrong reasons. Yet without courage, we cannot defend that which we hold dear. As we must fight to create any form of change in ourselves, and in society, we need courage. We can discover the best of all possible options through wisdom, but courage is to put ideas into action. Daring to speak out and be wrong is also a massively courageous act. To this end, the following maxim can be useful: Action without thought is stupidity. Thought without action is cowardice. Cleverness is not enough - we must be daring!

- Compassion: We have to concern ourselves with the journeys of others, as others will concern themselves with us. It is a simple, mutual exchange at the heart of it. We should recognise that compassion for others is compassion for ourselves, for it is impossible to be truly satisfied in a world of inequality and suffering. As the virtues should be qualities leading us to create the ideal society, we recognise that our character is influenced by the culture which created us. Without compassion, we can love only those who are immediately around us, and this is a form of 'loving tyranny', where anyone outside of our immediate sphere ceases to exist.

Compassion, blossoming out of our natural connection to all things, is to be spread as far as the mind might reach. The true test of the heart lies as much in caring for a stranger than it does a loved one. If we need a more direct stimulus to be compassionate, let our own suffering lead us to empathy, and it need not be an abstract idea.

However, we cannot always be compassionate, especially not to those who would destroy us. Nor can we allow it to be the sole, blanket response to whatever problem may arise. Compassion could be insulting, and threaten our virtue of humility. An easy maxim to remember this can be as thus: Respecting others is as important as loving them, as we shall see in the next virtue.

- Dignity: We must tread softly with compassion. To be too willing to help can be patronising. Worse yet, to be compassionate to someone can accustom them to dependency, especially if we do not recognise their ability to be self-aware. Creating such dependency is not a virtue.

Dignity is the ability to decide for oneself what one will do, or not do. It is freedom; especially freedom from harm or coercion. Dignity is the virtue which arises from the sum total of all our individuality; it is the sacred pride which rests around an individual's character like an aura, protecting them from any injustice. It promises us our own space to grow and develop, and prevents people from dominating our lives and trampling our individual privacy.

The dignity of the individual relates to the actual physical and mental person: who they are, not what they possess. A person's private property, therefore, is not their dignity, though it may be their means toward it - I am not defined by the house I happen to live in, but without it I have a much harder struggle to find any dignity, privacy, safety, and so forth. Dignity, rediscovered in what we do and not what we have, is the anchor of virtuous character; if we are dignified then we might treat others with the respect they deserve. When we place the dignity of private property over the dignity of individuals, we end up with absurd acts of waste, such as having more vacant houses than homeless persons.

- Patience: All things good take time. There is nothing of value that is instant, and little of value that is given. We must be able to wait. So many 'evils' come not from malice, but impatience. At great speed it becomes hard to consider those in our way. Patience is not a virtue in the consumerist value system. Far from it, it is an obstacle which needs to be torn down! Patience is eroded away by convenience and withered to nothing by instant gratification.

Willingness to suffer through bad periods is essential in our struggle as individuals and world-savers! Knowing when to strike is more important than the strike itself. We must have nerve. We must be prepared to wait generations. Revolution is impatience taken to extremes. At the same time, we must not allow patience to give us an excuse to do nothing. Nor must we hide from the world and allow ourselves to become lax.

- Creativity is the 'cardinal' virtue. It is creativity that makes life bearable and presents us with progress, in creating new technologies, works of art, great philosophy, and so forth. The self-generative principle inside each of us must be given the opportunity to flourish, for the incredible results it will produce.

Creativity gives us a form of purpose, but certainly not a linear one; for we never know what will emerge from us. Rather than aiming for a horizon, which, when reached leaves us feeling disappointed, creativity is spontaneous, and perhaps a little more unpredictable. It could almost be called a divine gift, if only there was such a celestial realm.  Yet there need not be any transcendent planes of existence to explain human creativity; it is what it is, a gift of Nature, and it is all that we need to be bathed in eternal wonder. It is we who created the gods, not the gods who created us. Creativity is all the magic and divinity a humanist needs.

With creativity as the primary virtue, there is less need for temperance and moderation. For it is not restraint and harsh discipline that leads to blessedness, but blessedness that leads to restraint. And the way we become blessed is by harnessing our own individual creativity. Frugality also follows creativity, as the creator-artist is more concerned with their project than any hoard of wealth.

Through creativity we can complete ourselves, and rarely grow bored. To overcome soul-dampening consumerism (a lack of creativity, an unsatisfying void-filler) we need this virtue. It enables us to do much with little. Resourcefulness is also a virtue enshrined within creativity. Doing something new with what is already there is the pinnacle of human ingenuity - we don't always need to create something new! It is creative use of our resources that will enable us to to be environmental world-savers, not more resources.

So much hinges on this virtue becoming cardinal, though never an end in and of itself. Art for art's sake is creativity as an end in itself, and is as contrived as it is pretentious. One last dangerously catchy maxim for the road!: Creativity without justice is trivia.

I do think that creativity is massively political. What will tear down the grey walls of inhuman bureaucracy and flatten the towering pyramids of unequal class and status? My answer is simply to transcend these things and imagine something better. And this 'transcendence' follows from the recognition of oneself as the pinnacle of human evolution - an artist – and to be an artist one must possess the cardinal virtue of creativity.

Selim 'Selim' Talat