Virtuous and Gentle Discipline

[steepholm]

 It’s a truism that the brave person is not the fearless person, but the one who does dangerous things despite their fear. This has always made me feel a little a sorry for those who are naturally fearless. Are they condemned by their natural boldness never to qualify as brave?

 

My maternal grandfather was one such. One hundred years ago he was a young merchant navy officer when his ship (with an unwise cargo of saltpetre, horses and oily rags) caught fire. The captain went mad because of his terrible burns, and the order was given to abandon ship. So my grandfather took to a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic with some other men, and they spent a couple of days trying to stop themselves from falling asleep. One man failed, and the last day was spent in company with his corpse – which they had to keep in the boat in case of a later investigation by the Company. Eventually they drifted back to the crippled ship, which was still afloat, and the fire mostly out; and in due course were picked up by another vessel.

 

Later, bankrupt during the Great Depression, my grandfather wrote an account of that experience in the hope of making some money. But he was no writer, and it never got beyond manuscript stage. (I typed it up later.) He had no imagination, you see – an essential ingredient of fear. So, when he was on deck during D-Day, firing his ship’s guns at the German bombers (he commanded one of the fleet that brought the floating harbour to Arromanche) perhaps he wasn’t being brave at all. If he didn’t know the meaning of fear, how could he face it down?

 

This leads me into a more general maunder. 

Do virtues in general need to be consciously and effortfully practised, to be really virtuous? If nature or training makes good behaviour unconscious, then does it lose some of its moral weight? No one gives a medal to a bullet-proof vest for taking a bullet: only to the bodyguard who throws himself in the bullet’s path. But the bodyguard’s training is aimed at making him more like an inanimate object – it ducks under the conscious, decision-making part of the brain and works to trigger a reflex. Perhaps a by-stander with no training would deserve a bigger medal still for doing the same thing?

 

I wonder whether this is where my ambivalence about good manners comes from. Saying “Please” or “Thank you” is a habit we try to inculcate in children, but insofar as it is a habit, is it worth less? Shouldn’t we be trying to inculcate gratitude and consideration for others in general, and hoping that its outward manifestations will bloom unbidden? Perhaps, but as a strategy it’s patchily effective at best. We admire sprezzatura, but this is itself defined as a kind of neglect, the evidence of a grace that is (or appears to be) unconscious. But even if it’s unconscious now, we might still give credit for the hard work that went into making it unconscious, just as we admire the previous hard work of the musician whose playing of the instrument seems effortless. We know they didn't get that way without doing a lot of scales.

 

Christian iconography sometimes shows Christ on the cross looking serene and God-like, sometimes agonized and all too human. The Christ of “Let this cup pass from me” and “Why hast thou forsaken me?” is easier to empathize with, and braver according to the truism with which I started; as God, Christ may be generous and loving, and even self-sacrificing – but “brave”? For the same reason, I find angels hard to sympathize with, or even admire, having a sneaking feeling that virtue comes too easily to them to be worth very much. And yet they seem to be firmly in God's good books despite this. The sneaks.

Comments

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

This bothers me too. But I think I'm coming at it from the opposite angle.

In particular, it bothers me in the context of Pullman's His Dark Materials. It troubled me a great deal, and still does, that Lyra is initially able to read the alethiometer by grace, making it a talent that can be taken away from her. I resented deeply that she is left having to learn - the hard way - a skill that used to be effortless.

It triggers all my own issues about being a gifted child in a classroom where the message is always 'it's the effort that counts'. How is one ever to develop any self-esteem if one is constantly told that what is done without effort has no value?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes indeed. And yet, at the same time we are asked to admire, say, the young Mozart because he was so effortlessly gifted. There's something seriously inconsistent there!

As for HDM, I think part of the answer lies in the von Kleist essay Pullman has cited as an inspiration, but a larger part in the fact that just a few microns beneath the surface of that book lies a lifetime's worth of Protestant guilt. Pullman is a lapsed Anglican the way some people are lapsed Catholics.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Are we actually being asked to admire Mozart, or his music? If the result is good, it doesn't matter if it was effortless or not. (We also admire Beethoven, who was also gifted but struggled for almost every note.)

The real controversy I see over Mozart's early music is over whether admiring it is proper or not. The symphony Mozart wrote at age 8 may be superb for an 8-year-old, but it's pretty mediocre by any other standards. All of his actual masterpieces date from the age of 18 or over. Some say we should stop playing his early work (not in a sense of censorship, but in a sense of: there's only so much programming space, and better stuff to fill it). One critic snapped, "Anyone with a legitimate scholarly reason to study this stuff can just read the score. They aren't difficult pieces."

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I think it's precisely because the music was (by other standards) mediocre that we must conclude that it's Mozart and his precocity we're being asked to admire in this case, rather than the end product. But perhaps it's useful to distinguish the two senses of "admire" here. After all, it can suggest standing back in a kind of awe at something remarkable: we can admire a view of the Grand Canyon, or a precocious child, or a man who eats chicken nuggets for breakfast but still manages to beat the world 100m record, but does that mean we find them admirable in the other sense? I suspect that, just as the word "admire" has come to mean both "look on in wonder" and "think estimable", so the concepts themselves have tended to become confused on occasion, and that this is a pity.

Of course, we can also admire in both senses people who undertake titanic struggles to produce their art - saying "Wow!" and "Well done!" in the same breath. I certainly listen to Beethoven's late quartets differently knowing that he wrote them when he was deaf, and I'd find it hard to disentangle (pace what I said in the last paragraph) my different admirations in this case.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

I understand exactly what you're saying, but am not entirely sure I agree with it, if only because it conflates something that's natural with actions. I'm one of the 'gifted' children lamentables mentions, and it's not only difficult to develop self esteem because of the emphasis on effort, but also because anything you do gets discounted, because, well, you're smart.

Except that this doesn't mean you don't put in effort -- it's just a different type. My biggest challenge is the simple act of sitting down and doing things, because that ability to throw together my schoolwork in a quarter of the time it took many of my classmates led to the most appalling work habits ever. So, natural talent combats with a natural tendency to waste it -- and I wonder if that isn't true of most very talented people, no matter the sort of talent.


Which is a long way of getting to my point, in a grammatically incorrect way, because this sentence has no main clause...

The point is, even when you have some sort of inborn talent or grace, it comes with its own challenges. One of them is often the inability to really understand why other people can't do what you do, unless you try to see things from their POV. Another is one of learning to be graceful, and tread the line of real humility. It doesn't really matter that we feel we didn't do well enough, if someone else finds it admirable. By denying their thanks, or admiration, or praise, we are in some ways telling them that their own perceptions are off. And so we look carefully into ourselves and see that which is praiseworthy in their eyes, reflect on whether it came with challenges, and then thank them appropriately. To me, learning to accept such admiration with grace is itself a challenge.

In terms of Christianity, isn't it really all about the constant struggle between grace and our natural inclination (I mean this in a doctrinal way) towards sin, especially where sin is defined as not actively using and living up to that grace? That's sort of the catch-22 of Christianity -- one can always do better, so even if one is naturally good and thoughtful, and kind, if one doesn't find ways of actively expressing those things, it's not bad, but it's also not living up to one's potential. And just as with any other inborn talent or grace, you don't get to just sit back and say, "well, I'm good enough." This also helps to explain the need for a triune God -- or at least an incarnate one. God cannot be all the things that Christ is, He cannot suffer as a man, except as a man. So wholly man and wholly God at once. Part of the ineffability, innit?

[calimac.livejournal.com]

One of them is often the inability to really understand why other people can't do what you do

This is one reason people who are brilliantly good at something often make lousy teachers of it, unless they're also brilliantly good at teaching - and the two types of genius, being different, do not often coincide.

C.S. Lewis, who was a brilliant teacher, preferred to write about subjects he wasn't that expert in. He says in the introduction to one of his books that two students can often help each other over difficulties that their teacher can't even see any more.

As a person perched halfway between the experts and the novices regarding computers, boy do I ever get that both coming and going.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Talents come with their own challenges, to be sure, and the parable of the talents means that one can never rest too complacently in their possession. I think that's very relevant as far as the way the person involved might be expected to think about themselves.

But more generally, the gifted child scenario covers only a small subset of the problem I'm wondering about (if problem it be), which is, I suppose, how "present" does one need to be in one's actions for them to have worth - and particularly moral worth? Can being virtuous become a habit, if by habit we mean something one hardly needs to think about?

When I was young and curmudgeonly, which of course I never am now, I used to have a slight contempt for "empty words" and formal politenesses, and saw them as hypocritical, or meaningless at best. Now, I'm not so sure. Maybe I've just developed a decadent taste for formality itself, but I'm inclined to think that I was just too puritanical in my definition of what "counted".

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

I think that we can acquire the habit of virtue, but that its function is to decrease the frequency that virtue is challenged, not eliminate it. But then, I don't think doing something automatically is necessarily exclusive from being mindful. When you thank someone in a shop, for example, you are still recognizing that they have done something worthy of those words, even if you are not as present and mindful as you are when a friend goes our of hir way to help you. And I think having the one in the back of your head helps you to see better the greater deeds as being important. Hmmm. But even the ones that seem unimportant mean something to the person who does them. And having worked in the service industry, I know that what may seem to you to be mindless and automatic is missed in its absence.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Some of these questions I am dealing with in a project. My fumbling pea brain tends to think that the result weighs strongly, though not to everyone. Effort that produces an effect gains the most respect, but there is also the sex-and-awe element in the effort that makes for glory. A group of people can expend maximum effort to build a house, and they are admired at the time; if those same people expend the same amount of effort to pull some children out of quicksand who fell in when a bridge collapsed, they will be talked about locally as long as anyone who saw it lives, and maybe to the next generation. The same people make the same amount of effort in a mad cavalry dash against the Persians (Alexander the Great) and word of it spreads far and wide, and captures the imagination for generations.

I do think that some of those whose recounting are factual felt fear, but they can't express it. Learning to write an account is tough, as you hinted. I remember back the summer of '69, a cousin recently returned from the Vietnam conflict was telling us about the fighting there from the grunts' eye view. Later--years later after his failed suicide attempt--we understood that he had post-traumatic stress syndrome very, very badly. At the time, everything he said was flat and dull, to the extent someone, I think my brother, said, "Weren't you scared?" when P was talking about horrific firefights, screams, etc. "Shitless," P said. "Fucking shitless. All the fucking time." But there was no hint of it in his narrative.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

One of the great pleasures of good writing comes when you find an expression of exactly what you were thinking, but put more clearly and vividly than ever you could have done.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Context and result certainly matter, though the three examples you give are also increasingly dangerous for those who undertook them, and I fancy that that's part of the fame formula as well.

I do think that some of those whose recounting are factual felt fear, but they can't express it.

True enough, and that wasn't the best evidence to bring forward for the fact that my grandfather was, as it happened, both fearless and unimaginative - at least by my mother's account (I was only five when he died). One thing about his story that made me smile was that he started it in the third person (thinking, I believe, that this was more 'proper' to a literary effort), but after a few pages couldn't keep up the mental effort of pretending to be someone else, and wrote 'But now we will let X tell the story in his own words...', writing the remainder in the first person.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Danger is certainly an element indeed. Though even that can be relative. (It could be that the men at the broken bridge were in far more danger than the Macedonian cavalry, who broke the Persians swiftly, but so much of that is perceived danger. "Outnumbered many to one" seems a more visceral threat than "broken bridge over a swamp."

That's kinda cool re your grandfather's writing.

Yes, I've heard of fearless people. My brother was like that. He used to think it was fun to surf on top of a speeding car, and he did stuff like skateboard in swimming pools (in fact I think my brothers invented it--they definitely made it popular in Hawaii, which was where they were living in the seventies) and other really, really crazy stuff. He might even have loved going to Vietnam if they would promise he could do crazy things with helicopters but they wouldn't take him because of his criminal record. My younger brother volunteered for the army in the late seventies, got swept out of boot camp into Seal Training because he was so fast and so fearless, and he utterly loved the grueling physical part of the training. (He couldn't stick the rest, and went AWOL.)

[gair.livejournal.com]

I can't believe you don't like angels!!!