G as in Good H as in Happy

Cultural Religion

July 31, 2008

Not to be scorned. The roots, and the best hopes, and the living metabolism, of human culture draw not only from enthusiasm.

Here, from the new First Things:

John Updike, discounting himself as any kind of Christian apologist, but conveying a certain faithful reverence to ordinary life:

A world in which no better [than the mundane] is imagined, and the motions of our spirits are not at all valorized, would be one without not only an religion but without any art.

Updike's  father was a Lutheran deacon, rather like a character he describes.

That dogged deacon was, in a way, my father; and also the many, including clergy, who, against the modern grain, borrow light and lightness from ancient lamps, who suffer from a Sabbath compulsion, and take comfort in the periodic company of like-minded others, who -- to quote from 'The Deacon' -- 'share the pride of this ancient thing that will not quite die.' 

First Things' Fr. Neuhaus, with sacramental understanding, observes:

Servants of the Lord who do not quench a flickering wick dare not despise the nostalgia-laden intuitions of those for whom that Ancient Thing may one day burst into life, and life abundant.

In the cave of certain Ancient Ways, even if the wicks sometimes flicker perilously, the Fire has never failed, and the path is illuminated even if passersby see from the sidewalk only a dark edifice. Comparisons are odious and some matters not for judging. Nor embers for trampling.

Work on a small scale

A refreshing thought from a UK blogger.

If he permits me to use his words in this fashion, perhaps he will advise me how he would like it to be credited.

Justice

June 26, 2006

Tom over at Disputations spends a series of posts on the lively question of Justice. Whether or not one follows all the twists and turns of his considerations, the Thomist definition of the 'virtue of justice as "the moral virtue that consists in the constant and firm will to give their due to God and neighbor" ' introduces a worthwhile focus. Not only the will to give others their due, loving to do so.

Who can I more completely "give his due" where I haven't yet, in thinking, speaking, or taking action?

The brilliant Richard Grant, MBTI guru, maintains that Justice is the virtue which preoccupies "NT"s. Could be right. :-)

The Fisherman's Net

December 2, 2005

Saint Augustine defined happiness as the joy of truth.

Prolific systematic notes on Fundamental Moral Theology by the new "Papal Theologian," Fr. Wojciech Giertych.

Virtue and Happiness, together at last...
[Classes 5-6, 20]

Courtesy Mark Shea

The Way of Shame

October 27, 2005

Shelby Steele wrote an essay on racial politics in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that, if we have ears to hear, is a silent implosion that clears the channels and cleanses the wells. 

"A Good Corporate Citizen is Prepared."

Wal-Mart.

Not just for browbeating any more.

Regularly-scheduled complaining will -- no doubt -- resume as soon as possible after the catastrophe.

Via Marginal Revolution

Changed Minds Change Worlds

July 18, 2005

Caring less about relative position may well be the least cost "solution" to the relative income externality "problem."

Will Wilkinson and others on how much better life could be for everyone if we could think reasonably and generously about whether someone else's happiness needs to subtract from our own -- if we were to be free, finally, from the burden of envy.

Some doubt it's possible. We don't. Neither do the authors of this Harvard-Princeton paper. Wherefore the fret? What is the embedded narrative, the Lakoff frame, that would endlessly tinker unhappily with Reality?

And why would I suffer guilt about being rich? 'Tis a problem easily remedied, one way or the other.

"If I think you're my problem, I'm insane."

Join the fun. Or not. Either way, life goes on.

Still Building Big Men

July 4, 2005

For purposes of gratitude and inspiration on Independence Day, a snapshot of a solid citizen high on an unfinished bridge, from Kendall Harmon's local newspaper. One person perhaps among many in a grand collaborative enterprise.

Every culture produces admirable people of its own particular identifiable, almost archetypal, tenor. One can be proud and grateful that this is a profile of a modern quintessentially American young man. Can-do. Confidence without superiority or servility. Quiet, learned, courageous, attentive, accurate. Far from the celebrity culture. Serving the world with energy, enthusiasm, perspective, humility.

A contemporary Scot remarks:

No other country has embedded the "pursuit of happiness" - the great goal of mankind - in the foundations of the state; nowhere else is the idea of liberty so revered. There is such a thing as an American sensibility and it can be felt from the Baltic to the Pacific.

Thomas Messervy appears to be someone living into whatever heroic mettle he was born with and into.

We all can.

"Happiness is the aim of life," [Thomas Jefferson] affirmed, "but virtue is the foundation of happiness." No 18th-century Founder -- whether a Christian, a classicist or a cultivator of simple pleasures -- would have disagreed.

Here was the common assumption -- what Jefferson called a "harmonizing sentiment" -- that united Americans in their differences through the magic of e pluribus unum, making one of many. For in Christian, classical or Lockean terms, virtue at its highest meant serving one's fellow citizens, working for the public welfare, furthering the public good. It followed that virtue was the indispensable means to reconcile the conflicts of individual interest. However else they might differ in their understanding of the critical phrase, early Americans could agree that by pursuing the happiness of others, they helped to ensure their own.

...The best means to serve "the happiness and freedom of all," [George Washington] noted in his first inaugural address, was to perform "all the good in my power." As much as the search for individual satisfaction, that too is an American way, the foundation of a truly noble pursuit.

--Thomas McMahon, author of Happiness: A History, writing in the Wall Street Journal (7.1.05, subscription)

Just about the only...

...legitimate way to think about others' failures, mistakes, and even evil.

Jorge Luis Borges...

..."the other one that things happen to," arrived in Austin in September, 1961.

A readers' Borges is often like a hall of mirrors with tilting floors that cannot be escaped, that is more real than the reassuring reality outside. Here he is, in comfortingly straightforward if kabbalistic mode, on quiet virtue.

THE JUST
A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South,
a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.

(translated by Alastair Reid, quoted by Chandrahas Choudhury)

Via armavirumque

And here is what at The Chez we venerate as The Passage on The Leopard -- Inferno, I, 32

From each day's dawn to dusk each night a leopard, during the final years of the twelfth century, beheld a few boards, some vertical iron bars, shifting men and women, a thick wall, and perhaps a stone gutter stopped with dry leaves. He did not know, he could not know, that what he longed for was love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing things apart and the wind carrying the scent of a deer. But something in him was smothering and rebelling, and God spoke to him in a dream: "You live and will die in this cage so that a man known to me may look at you a predetermined number of times, and may not forget you, and may put your shape and your symbol in a poem which has its necessary place in the scheme of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem." God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and he understood the reasons, and accepted his destiny: but when he awoke there was only a dark resignation in him, a valiant ignorance, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of a wild beast.

It pleased Borges to add this gloss:
Years later Dante lay dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as alone as any other man. In a dream God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and his work; Dante, filled with wonder, knew at last who he was and what he was, and he blessed his bitter sufferings. Tradition has it that, on waking, he felt he had been given - and then had lost - something infinite, something he would not be able to recover, or even to glimpse, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.

--Jorge Luis Borges