Friday, January 27, 2012

Virtue







Words have always fascinated me, unlike numbers which do not seem to register very well in my brain. I have some favourite words, like crepuscule and merry and jubilant. I like it that words often have histories, like families.
The other day I talked about charisma. Today I'd like to mention virtue. Virtue is like charisma in that its original meaning is not the same as its present, popular meaning. When we talk about virtue today- usually in some amusement- we mean something like chastity or goody goodiness, even something a little sissified. But the vir part of the word is the Latin word for man. So by my amateurish etymological reasoning, virtue must originally have meant manliness.
Now there's something that's decidedly out of fashion. Manliness now means too much testosterone. Macho, another word that has faded from common use, is a word that caricatures the male of our species. The captain of the Costa Concordia, by the looks of him, would be the perfect picture of the Macho Man. Of course it was only a pose, there being nothing virtuous about deserting his sinking ship and leaving his passengers and crew to die.
It was another beautiful day in Lotus Land, a beautiful day for walking along our working waterfront, and for enjoying a coffee on the patio of the Fol Epi Bakery. I also spent $8.00 for a loaf of their delicious sourdough bread. It's a busy little place and almost idyllic where young mothers (and dads, since we are so enlightened now) bring their toddlers and dogs, and watch the ducks on the ponds and the rowers in the harbour. None of them have the look of people who ever get their hands dirty except when they plant tomatoes in their balcony pots. They are all good looking, seem intelligent, and I'm sure they eat the right organic foods and cycle to work.
I would guess that I was the only one who enjoyed the sound of Lafarge Cement's gravel crusher chugging away across the water.
It used to be that women did all the hard jobs while men sat around and polished their swords while listening to tales of heroic battles or memorable hunting expeditions. In the Middle East I think that's still the way it works. In many ways a woman's status there is worse than a slave. A slave at least represents a valuable investment, but a woman is disposable. In most native American cultures women did the fieldwork, built the houses, made the clothes, cooked, cleaned, and carried away the sewage. Such work was despised by any self-respecting Arapaho warrior, and was one of the reasons they despised white men.
That's where the word virtue comes into it. Virtue came to mean a man doing his duty, even if it meant going down with the ship while the women and children got away. That's the way it worked when the Titanic sank a hundred years ago. Things are different now.
At some point in our history manliness (virtue) meant supporting a family, protecting a family from the hardships of life as much as possible... in other words, work. Of course, there have always been men who sought to escape those kinds of duties, but all evidence indicates that those who work are much happier than those who don't. Quite simply, there is something immensely fulfilling about spending your life doing useful work.
For some reason that has always escaped me, feminists have done there best to return things to the old ways, where women do those hard jobs. And it doesn't matter that it is now pretty well established that children raised in a family consisting of a father and a mother where the father has the primary responsibility of providing food and a home are happier than single parent environments, that children grow up healthier and happier, and that the whole community benefits.
We've done pretty well under that system. Too bad it's gone out of style.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Victoria in January, part II





Charisma is a word that was heavily overused in the seventies and was accordingly dropped from favour. Of course, it was misused, as words usually are when they are bandied about by people who hardly know their real meanings.
As I watch and read the commentariat tie themselves into knots over Newt Gingrich's unlooked for win in South Carolina, it seems to me that it would be a good time to give some thought to that wonderful word, charisma. It means, quite simply, grace. But not the kind of grace that makes us think of ballerinas and such. No, this is the kind of grace that comes from above- from that higher realm I wrote about the other day.
I first started thinking about that idea when I became fascinated by the music and personality of the composer Richard Wagner. Some of the most glorious music ever written came out of his fertile imagination. It was noble, it soared, and it transformed the history of music. It was a seismic event in the music world of the 19th century. Many people hated it... and still do. That's not a bug, as they say, it's a feature. What really fascinated me was that this gift that was visited on Wagner was undeserved. Not to put too fine a point on it, by all accounts Richard Wagner was a jerk. He was not a nice man. His music was noble, but his person was petty, mean, vindictive and callous. He was especially good at using women to advance his interests and then ditching them as soon as they became inconvenient. And he didn't particularly care if they were already married, or that he was married to someone else.
Another figure more familiar in our times who had charisma was Steve Jobs. Since moderns don't grasp the ancient Greek concept of charisma, the term 'reality distortion field' was invented. But charisma was a far better expression.
Because charisma enables its host to see things the rest of us don't. While the rest of us paw over the same old bits of the puzzle, trying to arrange them in some way that will help us understand, the Steve Jobs and Richard Wagners of the world see solutions in one blinding glance. While the rest of us are afraid, they dare. That lack of fear, and the unrelenting will to advance a vision is another attribute they have that distinguishes them from the rest of us. And above all, they are able to enlist a following of devotees to become their shock troops and allies, without which they could do nothing. They are able to convince the more ordinary among us to do their bidding. The more talented and dedicated and numerous that following may be, the more likely the charismatic individual will have a major impact on the world.
But it's always wise to remember that Adolph Hitler had charisma. Jimmy Jones had charisma. Sometimes it enables evil instead of good.
At any rate, when I saw the videos of Newt Gingrich inspiring the crowds at the South Carolina debates, I knew I was seeing charisma. And if those silly commentators- even ones I greatly respect, like Mark Steyn- are still pawing over the entrails of past scandals, of various political platitudes, of political promises, etc, etc, they entirely miss the point.
Barack Obama had (has?) charisma, too. I responded in horror, just as most of the political pundits (even the conservatives) are recoiling in horror at Gingrich. He is erratic, they say, he changes his mind about things. One day he is trying to reduce the deficit, the next he is sitting with Nancy Pelosi discussing the global warming hoax. Except they weren't saying it was a hoax. But something tells me this man is the one to turn back the tide- or maybe he is the tide. Barack Obama may have been the high tide of statism, and he may have been necessary to show anyone willing to listen that his way is the way to slavery and oppression. The tide, the seasons, they go back and forth and all we can do is adjust and try to decide which wave to latch onto.
One perceptive writer on the Gingrich phenomenon compared him to Winston Churchill, and I wouldn't disagree with that. In his victory speech Gingrich spoke of American exceptionalism, which sounds a lot like charisma to me. Like Gingrich, America has lots of warts. In spite of the warts America has been the light of the world for over two hundred years. That's charisma. There's a lot more I could say about that, but I just turned 69 today and I tire easily. And it was a beautiful day in Victoria. It was warm, the sun shone, and Victoria looked young and beautiful again. Yes, I think Victoria has Charisma, too, as does the earth and especially the human race. Yes, environmentalists, we humans are also part of Nature... and though sometimes my faith is shaken, I really know that we are what the earth has been striving toward for all these eons.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Victoria in January



After snow, wind. Winter the season of dark and cold, a time of endings setting the stage for renewal. Often we are urged to anaesthetize ourselves against the sense of loss we get from this time of year, or for the ups and downs of our internal seasons. I often think that there must be a higher realm, invisible to our senses, but where the core of our being lies, a place which has its own seasons, its own weather, a place with its own hills and valleys, beauties and pitfalls, its own dangers and afflictions, but a place that is more permanent and lasting. This is the realm our souls inhabit, and this world of our senses, what we call Creation, is an extrusion of that realm. Plato set forth such a theory when he tried to understand how we know things through reason. He believed that our souls were able to see things because they were illuminated by the uncreated light of pure reason which had its origin in God. I take the concept a little further. Many philosophies have looked at this same problem and concluded that the world is an illusion, or the creation of an evil being and that the rational thing to do is to ignore it. Stoicism taught that we could learn to ignore pain. It was a popular doctrine among the militaristic Romans. Since I subscribe to the view that God is good, I conclude that he has a reason for sending us out on this strange journey we call life, and so I think its wrong to try to wall our selves off from the pain we receive from our injuries. Just like physical pain teaches us about the dangers of the physical world, the deeper pains of our inner beings is telling us something we need to know and try to understand. So whether we anaesthetize ourselves with drugs or philosophy, it's a mistake.
The strange thing about pain is that it tells us that we are alive. Pain is feeling, and we are constantly told to get in touch with our feelings. Sometimes you have to shut them down to get through a difficult time, but if you don't have them you are just as good as dead.
What brings on this train of thought is the experience of a friend of mine who lost his mother a few months ago. "Get over it," he is advised. But you never do really... and you shouldn't. If you lose a loved one it leaves a gaping hole in your heart. It heals, but the scar tissue never goes away.
And today I read a piece about what happens to people who become bonded together in marriage and then separate. She likened it to a two pieces of wood glued together with a super adhesive. They can be pulled apart but they can never be put back together again because both halves of the union have been too damaged. When the damage occurs to a human soul it becomes an ulceration that will never heal. The writer was trying to explain why a young girl should not yield to the first seducer that comes along. She also made the point that men and women are complementary. One has attributes the other lacks. We can't be complete beings without each other. This is why gay marriage is wrong. Man with man, woman with woman, these are sterile, dead end relationships which defeat the spring. With them there is only death. There can be no renewal.
Being human we are prone to do ourselves injury, but when we do let's not blame God. Let's think and ponder as the pain of our own foolishness washes over us, and thank him instead for giving us the means of finding our way back. As for that other realm, I believe we came from there and I think we are going back. I do not believe that there is death after life.
As someone who has been permanently damaged by my own folly I welcome the winter for its role in forcing me to think about it all over again.
The streets are barren today, the wind gives the illusion of life to dead leaves and scraps of newspaper which skitter along the pavement and jump up into the air.