A Few Reflections on Gratitude

Another Thanksgiving day has come and gone,bringing in its wake postings and platitudes, and occasionally deeper reflections and expressions of gratitude, the disposition, emotion, or attitude inextricably involved with thanks.  Thankfulness and giving thanks are important, but often overlooked, matters for ethics, a soon-or-later necessary dimension of any sustained, common, well-oriented moral life. Why do we discuss it as infrequently as we do in my field, moral theory?

I suspect for many of the same reasons it's not all that much more often discussed specifically, thematically, whether we look to other academic or professional disciplines,  or turn our gaze upon the broader spheres of ordinary activity -- we've got so much else to focus on, attend to, and talk about together.  Time runs out, seemingly more quickly each passing year -- and so paradoxically, we have to cut out and dedicate a portion of that ever-scarcer resource in order to "make the time" for giving thanks, let alone thinking about, meditating upon, pondering gratitude.  And yet, if we pay attention, it is not too difficult to discover, even stumble across philosopher and theologians who did examine and analyze this distinctively human attitude, affect, and activity.

Is Partisanship a Vice?

We're near the end of the long-dragged-out forced march of another national election season -- though "season" has become a misnomer for a process that now takes well over a year.  The main debates are finished -- those two-side televised contests, a lion's share of limelight going to the presidential contenders, a healthy share taken by their sidekick cubs, with scraps, offal, trimmings, and marrowless bones left for the publicity-starved third-party debaters to wrest away or share -- whatever they may decide. I must register my partial relief now that the debates are finished -- merely partial though, because it takes almost no time in our media-saturated environment for the assessments of these back and forth staged deliberative discussions to proliferate.

And, it actually would not be that bad if in fact most of what passes for commentary actually did comprise something like "assessments" -- even admittedly biased ones. What is so galling, so irritating, and so . . . downright depressing is the spectacle, repeated almost endlessly of people I thought I knew better -- and thought more highly of -- blithely in some cases, snidely and smugly in others, and in yet others accompanied by vitriol, rabidity, fear-mongering and ultimatums, engage themselves in what is really just pure partisanship, plain and simple -- all the while concealing that very behavior from themselves, and projecting it onto their political opponents.  Not only is there a visible, palpable viciousness (in the general sense) coloring both their filters and their statements -- there's also a distinctively moral slippage, a continued and unmarked failure, a different and more troubling viciousness --expression of which, and encounter with which, is rapidly becoming a nearly unavoidable dimension of everyday existence.

Hate and Anger in Aristotle

When we come to what are often called "negative emotions" -- things like fear, jealousy, anger, hatred -- feelings, affective responses, moods -- there seems to be a strong tendency in our contemporary society, particularly when it's a matter of politics or culture -- to do three different but connected things.  One of these is to easily, even automatically, project these onto others, typically others against whom we sense ourselves as being opposed.  Another is to deny or rename them on our own parts, or failing that, to excuse them in ourselves by displacing responsibility to those other people who "started it," i.e. who provoked the reactive emotion on our own parts.  The third is to employ and invoke language or concepts of emotions and morality in careless, uncritical, simplistic ways.

A prime example of this is the indiscriminate use of the term "hate."  As of late, the Left has proven itself more effective than the Right in misusing this term and notion, extending it to their opponents, whether real, assumed, or only imagined -- but they certainly don't have a monopoly upon it.  With a few exceptions -- typically those glorying in it -- it seems most people are willing to take for granted that "hate" or "hatred" is always bad, so accusing another of it, or being accused oneself, takes on a status almost of a logical deduction.  Hate is bad.  So-and-so hates.  Thus, So-and-so is bad (and we're justified in hating them, or maybe just expressing our outrage, or disapproval, or pity, or. . . )  Aristotle said several useful things about hate -- and about the closely associated emotional dynamic of anger -- which would well be worth considering in our current cultural situation.

How Do We Get It Wrong? Four Ways Aristotle Addresses

In the piece I started yesterday, I promised to talk about how and why a contemporary virtue ethicist and a classic virtue ethicist distinguish different types of moral failure from each other.  Discussing the contemporary, Alasdair MacIntyre, I placed more focus on the why -- the reasons we ought to be concerned not only whether we've done wrong, but to what degree, for what reasons -- and what we learn about ourselves in the process, including how -- like a bus that has left the road for short-cut dirt paths and is now bouncing over unfamiliar, dusty, and trackless terrain -- we might discern not only the overall direction we need to steer back towards, but how we might discern where trails run, which grooves and ruts we need to avoid and which might lead us back onto the straighter, more reliable roads towards the good.

As the post got longer and longer, I had to defer my promise to discuss Aristotle -- one of the worthies among the Virtue Ethics's classic thinkers -- since the whole goal of Virtue Ethics Digest was to have shorter pieces than those you might find on my other blog, Orexis Dianoētikē.  So, here it is, with more attention tonight to the how and less to the why in Aristotle's works -- though I don't want to give that short shrift, and will accordingly discuss that first.

Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, and Politics of Anger

A lot has been written and said recently comparing the two mass political movements essentially based in the politics of anger -- Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.  In fact, so much is currently out there that practically any site I could arbitrarily select to link to here would fit the bill -- so long as it mentions the two movements in some comparative manner.

James Sinclair, in Occupy Wall Street vs The Tea Party (where he also sets out one of the more interesting Venn diagrams overlapping the two groups) sets out, summarizes, and links up an excellently balanced set of comparisons.