I sometimes claim to be an Aristotelian even though I have only read a fraction of his works and understood considerably less. But a few things I do hang on to, such as the doctrine of the mean: every virtue lies in the middle between two associated vices, one in the direction of too much emotion, the other in the direction of too little emotion. For example, bravery is a moral virtue lying between the two vices of recklessness and cowardice. A coward has too much fear and a reckless person has too little. So, apparently, Spock was an Aristotelian. Sort of.
The doctrine of the mean is not a bad thing to keep in mind these days when the political environment is so extremely polarized that it gives me a headache. In order to pursue a bit of moral virtue I subscribe to both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times which I see as occupying different political poles. Mind you, there are those that think that they are both not extreme enough! In any case, I was reading the New York Times this morning and stumbled across an opinion piece by Ross Douthat who is supposedly a conservative voice at the paper. The piece is titled I’m What’s Wrong With the Humanities and I enjoyed both the humility and the humor (both moral virtues, I believe). Quoting the last part:
“The humanities sealed their own fate,” the Temple University professor Jacob Shell tweeted in response to the Heller article, “when they refused to adjust to playing the needed role of intellectual ‘rightist’ critique of soc science, technocracy.” As a rightist myself I’m inclined to see this take and raise it, and suggest that if you care about transmission of the humanities through the digital age you should be looking to classical Christian academies more than to the Harvard faculty.
But a more modest version of Shell’s argument would be just that the humanities need to be proudly reactionary in some way, to push consciously against the digital order in some fashion, to self-consciously separate and make a virtue of that separation.
I think I and some of my commentators have made similar arguments here--going back years. The irony is that we are making those arguments in, yep, a digital format. Being able to share one's thoughts with a wide universe of other people is a profound benefit in my mind. What perplexes me is how horribly it has turned out for so many. I very much doubt there is any kind of political solution to what is really a moral problem. Aristotle tried to answer the question "what is the best way to live?" One simple answer is to avoid extremes of too much emotion and too little emotion. This pretty much applies in all aspects of life, even in aesthetics.
Let's have some Bartók! The Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is always a favorite:
The so-called left-right spectrum is of course entirely too 1-dimensional to encompass human thought and values. The so-called "left" of today looks nothing like the left of the industrial age. For a living fossil of that class-based ideological perspective, try The Militant newspaper. It's a good example of how twisted and rigid thought can be, selecting true facts to grossly distort and poison understandings --even as it assumes a "comprehensive" and "historical" ambit. It is, however, an excellent example of genuine Marxist politics, in case you're looking for a 19-th century philosophy to guide your 21st-century life. But whatever is wrong (or right) in it, it certainly shows how today's "left" of identity politics has virtually no connection to the left of a few generations back.
ReplyDeleteAnd more to your central point, I share your affinity for the virtue of the mean, which is not necessarily a halfway point between any set of extremes but rather a balancing of valuing and conserving our basic institutions and culture as an inherited and mostly functional way of living shaped by much human trial and error and experience, yet also being able to lovingly criticize and try to fix those inheritences as the world and humanity continues to change and, sometime, even "progress."
I agree entirely. I chose the Bartók because it is an excellent example of just that kind of balancing. On the one hand it makes a lot of use of traditional musical forms: the sonata da chiesa layout, fugal textures and so on. But at the same time it uses innovative symmetrical harmonic structures and novel instrumental techniques like tympani glissandi.
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