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Little Me vs The Big Me & crooked timber
History, even Plutarch's list of exemplars, is full of Big Me personalities: Alcibiades, Alexander, Sulla. We love seeing Big Me personalities taken down a peg, but we put up with them when they are playing for our team, Patton leaps to mind here.
p11 And now we get the "crooked timber,"
...Moral realists are aware that we are built from "crooked timber" -- From Immanuel Kant's famous line, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." People in this "crooked timber" school of humanity have an acute awareness of their own flaws and believe that character is built in the struggle against their own weaknesses. As Thomas Merton wrote, "Souls are like athletes that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers."
At least in the context of military history, I certainly see that this is true. Sheridan might have been the best commander of the American Civil War but the war ended before he could be fully tested, so it's hard to look past Sherman, who had so many more opportunities.
Frances Perkins & Mount Holyoke College
I've always assumed a Classical education was built on studying the Classics, learning Greek and Latin so you could learn the lessons of a thousand years of literate civilization. That with this foundation of knowledge you can then go on to learn anything you please. This account of Holyoke suggests that, at least here, the character building aspect went even deeper. The Christian form this character building took is obvious for a region settled by Puritans, but I wonder if men's colleges were so very different? (I don't know.) I imagine many of them also had Christian aspects and that even those that didn't probably followed similar practices in being more concerned with building the character of undergraduates than in determining their personal strengths. I would have found this frustrating, but I can see the point of it. I can see why Brooks praises this approach.I wonder if the Great Books colleges keep this aspect of education in mind? Do they include books that will challenge the students as well as inform them? When I dream up lists of books that I would want these programs to teach, I tend to go with titles I think would be the most approachable and entertaining. Maybe this is a mistake. God knows I learned more from trudging through Fernand Braudel's dry and endless prose than I learned from any number of more user friendly books.
But what was the end purpose of this character building? The obvious answer is to populate John Winthrop's "city upon a hill." As he wrote, "We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us." So, again, you can't really remove this sense of "character" from it's Puritan context.
This sense of character, which we will see repeated in Dorothy Day, is even markedly different from the Russian Orthodox sense of religious character represented by Zosima. This is a more Protestant, Calvinist, Jansenist; a more bourgeois interpretation of character than Dostoevsky favored, which is why Brooks need to go all the way back to Augustine.
It's also why the author has to be very careful about even glancing in the National Socialism/Communism direction. Could be why he mentions Tolstoy and Dostoevsky but never Thomas Mann.
It is worth noting, however, that a great many of the Christians who spent the centuries following Luther savagely killing each other, had wonderfully developed characters in the sense Brooks advocates here. And it's probably hard to find an Islamic suicide bomber who hasn't found his "calling" or her "vocation." It's easy to imagine a version of this book edited for an Islamic State audience.
Perkins and FDR
Something that is very rarely commented on is that the New Deal was unsuccessful in breaking the Great Depression. Many fine programs resulted but you can't cure a crisis of capitalism with a socialist band-aid. It was the war, by giving work to everyone in America who could work, that brought back the happy times.
p44 She [Perkins] also reflected on a distinction that had once seemed unimportant to her. When a person gives a poor man shoes, does he do it for the poor man or for God? He should do it for God, she decided. The poor will often be ungrateful, and you will lose heart if you rely on immediate emotional rewards for your work. But if you do it for God, you will never grow discouraged... The person thus is performing a task because it is intrinsically good, not for what it produces.
This is, of course, the same logic that allowed true believers to participate in Stalin's genocide in the Ukraine and Hitler's Final Solution, with a clear conscience.
And is this really what the average person means by "intrinsically good?" If you burn me at the stake to save my soul, I suppose we have to give you credit for feeling good about it, but is any real good done? Is an act good because it makes the doer feel good about themselves regardless of the effect on the receiver of this good? I just don't see that Brooks has completely thought any of this through.
For both Perkins and Day, the consequences of their good works -- the outcomes for the poor people who will always be with us -- seem secondary and almost accidental. The real point is not to do good but to be holy.
That said, however, I suspect they probably have a better chance of doing actual good than the bureaucratic social worker who is just following procedures and doesn't care at all. I can't help thinking that the best solution to the "homeless" problem I see everyday on our streets is something very like the monasticism that became popular as the Roman Empire in the West was collapsing. This may be the only place where Dostoevsky, Day, and I see eye to eye.
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