Ethics – Page 9 – Achilles & Aristotle

Relevant Complexity 5) Age

Talking to someone at work, she said she’d been surprised that a very experienced chap in his late 50s had come on a training course.

We concluded that age shouldn’t matter in deciding who gets training. I know plenty of pig-headed twenty and thirtysomethings who’d have got less and will give less as a result of that training course – it’s openness to new ideas that matters.

It dawned on me that nearly all the people I most enjoy conversation and contemplation with, are at least ten years older than me. And many much older. When it comes to thinking about things, you can’t beat the right sort of older person.

Contemporary society glorifies youth. But younger people haven’t always got much to say. Of course there’s freshness and simplicity but relevant complexity in people takes time to grow.

Openness, curiosity and the experience of age are key attributes of the Aristotelian ‘friend in contemplation’. Aquinas’s ‘prudentia’ – practical wisdom – is not innate, it is learned. Wisdom takes time. Forget youth, when comes to interesting people – the oldies are the goodies.

Ethics, Life, Psychology, Work

Narcissi

The path to self-knowledge is long and hard. And who is to say whether apparent progress is more than illusion or self-delusion. But I do become increasingly irritated by narcissism. Forgivable, indeed to some extent inevitable in children, why does it persist so in adults?

Of course we are all to some degree self-obsessed. We live alone inside our own thick skulls. But once you’ve been around a few decades you really should know better. As I felt like saying to a number of people this week: “It’s not all about you.”

Apparently, psychopathic behaviour persists in society at a low level, because, if you’re the only psychopath in the village you’re onto a winner – the amoral cat among law-abiding pigeons.

Perhaps that’s why narcissism persists in the workplace too. But we’re supposed to be at work for some form of common good, not to stroke narcissists’ egos. And I’m not just having a pop at bosses, it’s everywhere.

Here’s a handy checklist I stumbled upon today which sets out the warning signs:

Reacts to reasonable criticism with rage, shame or humiliation

Takes advantage of other people to achieve his or her own goals

Has feelings of self-importance

Exaggerates achievements and talents

Is preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, intelligence, or ideal love

Has unreasonable expectations of favorable treatment

Requires constant attention and admiration

Disregards the feelings of others, lacks empathy

Has obsessive self-interest

Pursues mainly selfish goals

I pass the test on most of this lot. Maybe I need to watch myself occasionally on ‘expectations of favourable treatment’ – bizarrely and genuinely I still believe I’ll win the lottery one day.

But at least I can occasionally raise my head from admiring my own reflection to look myself honestly in the mirror. Narcissists, take a proper look at yourselves.

Death, Ethics, Life, Philosophy

Death Becomes Us

I’m reading the ‘Death’ edition of the redoubtable Philosophy Now magazine. And a bone-rattlingly good read it is too. Death dissected through metaphor, thought experiments, cool logic and rational argument.

The core issue, this issue: as medical technology advances should we prepare for immortality or stick with three score and ten? Imagine a typical lifetime of 300 years, the necessary absence of children, the ceaseless marinating in one’s own juices.

As always with philosophy there are no easy answers, but plenty of better ways of thinking about the problem. I remember reading the last half chapter of Julian Barnes ‘A history of the world in 10 1/2 chapters‘ at university as suggested by my philosophy tutor.

It perfectly captures the problem of eternal life – and heaven. Once you’ve had sex with everyone, studied and discussed everything, got your golf handicap down to a straight 18 (‘holes in one’ all the way round) and scared yourself at the ‘Hell’ theme park, what’s left to do.

Easy to say with the expectation of a good few years ahead, but I’m with Aquinas – the human animal makes no sense outside or beyond nature’s limits. Philosophy has always wrestled with it, but ‘death becomes us’.

As Seneca said its not so much the shortness of life, it’s not properly filling it, which is the tragedy.

Ethics, Life, Philosophy

Montaigne on Virtue

Three hundred and one dailylit.com episodes of Essays in and Michel de Montaigne serves up another view I 100% agree with, five centuries on. When it comes to ethics the the answer is staring you in the face – in the bathroom mirror.

To ground the recompense of virtuous actions upon the approbation of others is too uncertain and unsafe a foundation, especially in so corrupt and ignorant an age as this.

“What before had been vices are now manners.” – Seneca

You yourself only know if you are cowardly and cruel, loyal and devout: others see you not, and only guess at you by uncertain conjectures, and do not so much see your nature as your art; rely not therefore upon their opinions, but stick to your own:

“Thou must employ thy own judgment upon thyself; great is the weight of thy own conscience in the discovery of virtues and vices: which taken away, all things are lost.” – Cicero

Or as my son’s preferred sage Master Yoda might say: the keeper of your own conscience are you.

Achilles, Art, Ethics, Life

The Ploughman

There’s a good piece in The Guardian today, likening our response to recession, Global economic crisis and a troubled Euro, to the indifference of the ploughman in Brueghel’s ‘The fall of Icarus’.

Nick Cohen writes:

All Brueghel shows of Icarus is a small pair of thrashing legs disappearing into a vast sea. Farmers on a clifftop carry on ploughing the fields and watching their sheep as if nothing has happened.

It’s easy to focus on Icarus – and the reminder that however high we rise, or low we fall, fewer may turn their heads than we imagine. But the ploughman is interesting too. Ignoring disasters is as much a survival adaptation as avoiding them. Human beings are resilient because we plough on.

Yesterday morning, as the kids were clambering on a climbing frame in the park, a bloke let his big aggressive-looking pit bull terrier scour a hole – as he loudly conversed with his mate and quaffed a can of lager.

It bothered me and drew my attention away from my children. I wondered if I should do something. Am I personally responsible? Should I act?

But then a perverse thought came to mind. There are thousands of people behind closed doors in the Victorian terraces in the surrounding streets. Perhaps some are shouting, perhaps fighting, perhaps worse. The world is full of bad things happening at this very moment. But I can’t and don’t set out to fix them all.

So why choose this one to pick a fight over, just because it’s there and noisy? Why worry more about the pitbull than my kids? In fact why worry about it at all. So I focused back on the kids and ignored the dog.

Although it makes me feel bad, I reckon sometimes it’s ok to be the ploughman. As Auden wrote of Brueghel’s painting:

Everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure.

The Greeks reckoned all human life was tragedy, usually played out with cruel drama. Some tragedies deserve our attention, some not. Choose your battles as they say, life’s too short and the sun is hot.