Can nature be improved?

Modern man is confident that nature can be improved by working on it, as in the technical arts. And yet he neglects the possibility that he himself might be improved by working on himself, as in the moral arts. When it comes to questions of technology, modern man has forsaken the idea that nature is inherently good. He's all too eager to improve it. But when it comes to questions of morality, modern man insists unhesitatingly that all natural urges are good. What earlier ages saw as attempts to improve upon human nature by training (Greek askesis), our age sees as merely irrational and inconvenient forms of repression.

Ancient thinkers once imagined a life devoted to the pursuit of virtue and wisdom was superior to a life driven by urges. But now this view is out of date. Go ahead and fulfill the urge, I tell myself. A tiny voice in the back of my mind objects. "You never read the ancients. How can you be so sure they're wrong?" But the tiny voice never lasts long. I reassure myself that ideas of true and false, right and wrong, are outdated. What matters today is ideas respected by the powerful. To consider the possibility that the powerful might be wrong demands a degree of intellectual courage I lack.

"Fulfill that urge!" screams every stream of bits from the pulpits of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. In today's ruling dogma, life is a feast where every desire must be fulfilled.

The ancient idea that the happiest and most fulfilling life is a life of intellectual flourishing, in which every moment is devoted to improving the mind, is outdated. What's the point of building up the intellect? No one cares about intellect. People are superficial. Forget intellectual improvement. Go for the money. Consume what Madison Avenue tells you to consume. You don't want to look like a fool. You want to keep up with the latest fashions. Your mind is going to perish with you anyway. What's the point of cultivating and improving it?

Socrates' interlocutors made similar objections. And ultimately there's no entirely satisfactory answer to them. If you want to devote your life to pleasure and neglect the cultivation or your intellect, there really isn't much Socrates or I or anyone else can say to change your mind. If you do decide that intellect is worth cultivating, however, we have some tricks to help you.

First, when seductive urges try to steal time and resources you might have used to improve your mind, and squander them instead stimulating the senses, put them in their place. Show them intellect is in charge and urges have no sway.

Second, remind yourself that wisdom achieved late in life can be passed on to others. Insofar as you succeed in perfecting your mind, you will become a role model for others. In this sense, the improvements you make to your intellect don't perish when you do.

The voice of sensory desires tries to undermine your intellectual confidence. It tries make you cynical. It downplays your prospects of intellectual improvement, so it can steal time and resources to stimulate the senses, time that might have been used to improve the mind.

What deters you from the path to becoming a genius or a saint is the glittering objects that lie on either side. Television programs made to entertain and amuse you distract you from books intended to educate and improve you.

Propel yourself unceasingly toward intellectual and moral excellence. Don't allow yourself to be distracted by the entertainments on board. Turn off the television. Burn the pulp fiction that no longer challenges you and was never intended to. Choose a book you'll feel afterward it was an achievement to have read.

Truths of reason and truths of fact

There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible.
Gottfried Leibniz, La monadologie (1714)

For those immersed in the day to day functions of commerce, the idea of questioning whether its tenets are true seems impertinent, irrelevant, perhaps even impossible. Commerce and the ideologies it engenders are an established fact. It is here that Leibniz’s distinction might help us see that, while commercial society is indeed an established fact, it was established not by reason but by historically contingent circumstances, and its opposite remains possible.

The most fundamental tenet of commerce is that the demands of customers must be fulfilled, whether they are reasonable or not. The architect might consider it unreasonable to build a hundred million dollar mansion for the latest billionaire while the poor remain unhoused. But her employer will tell her such reasoning is irrelevant. The reasoning of commerce, in which no opportunity for profit may be neglected, is what rules her profession, whether she likes it or not.

The idea that workers should simply stop work when the demands of their rulers become unreasonable is what animated the labor movement in the first half of the twentieth century. This idea is what gave us Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. Today’s rulers are eviscerating these programs, and unfortunately there is no longer a significant labor movement to oppose them. As wages fall and profits rise, as they did in the first half of the twentieth century, and are now doing in the first decades of the twenty-first, the only real power the working class has to oppose these unjust power grabs is the power to simply stop working. We will never exercise this power so long as we treat the ideologies of commerce as if they were sacrosanct and inviolable. A vibrant labor movement demands minds brave enough to question the justice and wisdom of the system that rules us, minds that can distinguish truths of reason from ideologies corrupt rulers have dinned into our ears so loudly and incessantly that they have become truths of fact.

Divided Faith

Professor Frank waited for all the students to be seated. He stood up and began pacing.

"Would anyone like fifty dollars?" he asked.

The students exchanged nervous glances. They had never been asked this particular question.

After a minute of silence, a brave student in the front row—let's call her Sally—raised her hand.

"Why do you want fifty dollars?" asked the professor.

She hesitated. "To buy things."

"Excellent," responded the professor. "When you give people money, they give you things. How do you know they will do that?"

"Every time I went to the store before, they gave me things when I paid for them."

"Excellent. Why did they do that?"

"Because they're making a profit."

"And why do they want to make a profit?"

"So they can spend it on things for themselves, I suppose."

"You mean, because other people accept money in exchange for things?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because they also want to spend it."

"They have faith people will be persuaded by money?"

"Yes."

"Are there any other ways to persuade people."

"Yes, many other ways."

"For example?"

"Logical arguments."

"Suppose you told the cashier at the supermarket you were hungry, but didn't have any money, would he consider this a logical argument?"

Sally laughed. "Probably not."

"What about mercy? Does pleading for mercy sometimes persuade people?"

"Sometimes."

"If you asked for mercy, what would the cashier do?"

Sally laughed. "Probably call the police."

"Excellent. And do you think they would show mercy?"

"I'm not so sure."

Professor Frank wrote in capital letters on the chalkboard: FAITH. "You have more faith that the cashier would be persuaded by money than that he would be persuaded by logic or mercy. Is that right?"

Sally nodded. "Yes, I suppose so."

"Excellent. Now I would like to tell you a story. Francis was a monk who lived in Assisi, a town in Italy, in the twelfth century. His father was a merchant, and expected Francis to follow him in his trade. But Francis refused. In fact, Francis renounced all his property and position. Other monks soon began following him. One of the first lessons he taught them was that they were never, under any circumstance permitted to handle money. Now, here is question for the whole class. Can anyone think of a reason why Francis might have had such an aversion to money?"

A student in the back timidly stammered a conjecture. "If I offer money to the grocery clerk, I'm relying on his faith in money, not his faith in God, to persuade him to help me."

Postscript:

Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.
François de La Rochefoucauld

Adam Smith tells me by pursuing my own self-interest I will be led, as if by an invisible hand, to advance the interests of others. I need no longer be ashamed of my greed, Smith assures me. It's a salutary incentive to industry.

Clearly the thief doesn't promote anyone's interest than his own. The con artist doesn't promote anyone's interest than his own. The invisible hand argument is only plausible in a framework of law. Our lawbooks double in size with each passing decade in an attempt to keep private and public interest aligned. Is it working?

The notion that my own greed advances the interest of society has become the new form of hypocrisy. We all know it simply isn't true. And yet we keep telling ourselves it is to justify our cupidity.

There's no doubt that greed motivates many people to produce many useful things. But for whom? Do we really fulfill our duty to society by diligently working to advance the interests of the few, while ignoring the poor and oppressed?

Here I have ready at hand another hypocrisy. The rich are rich because of hard work. The poor are poor because of indolence. Again, I know it simply isn't true. But somehow I persuade myself I make the right choice when when I report to work Monday morning, ready and eager to serve customers who can pay and ignore those who can't.

Autonomy

I understand that it’s sometimes necessary to submit to a heteronomous authority in order to achieve an autonomously chosen goal. But when I see how similar the goals pursued by my contemporaries are, it becomes implausible to suppose that they were autonomously chosen. The desire for autonomy is rare. The desire to be rich and successful is far more common than the desire to be free.

The passion for autonomy finds no means of expression in a society where all means of expression have been transformed into commodities. Autonomy isn’t a commodity that can be bought and sold. It's free. And at the same time it’s infinitely precious. It defies the logic of the commodified intellect.

Clumsy Atheology

Richard Dawkins, the prototypical neo-atheist, shows that God doesn't exist as substance. He seems to have forgotten Aristotle's explanation that there are several ways of being, of which substance is only one. A triangle and the number two do not exist as substance. They exist as form. God certainly exists as form. The form is thoroughly documented in the sacred texts of the world's religions. But, Dawkins objects, the form refers to nothing that can be empirically observed. Well, yes, Professor Dawkins, there is no substance that corresponds to the form, because, as Aquinas could have told you, God is not a material substance.

God is the most noble of beings. Now it is impossible for a body to be the most noble of beings; for a body must be either animate or inanimate; and an animate body is manifestly nobler than any inanimate body. But an animate body is not animate precisely as body; otherwise all bodies would be animate. Therefore its animation depends upon some other thing, as our body depends for its animation on the soul. Hence that by which a body becomes animated must be nobler than the body. Therefore it is impossible that God should be a body.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part 1, Question 3

When the atheist says, "God exists only in your mind, not in reality," he sees this as a problem with God, rather than a problem with reality. But if God doesn't exist in reality, this can only be because we ignore the message of His prophets. We use piety one day a week to adorn merciless greed on the other six. We have given up trying to mold ourselves into the form of God and settled for ourselves as we are. Greedy. Selfish. Merciless to the poor and oppressed.

We have ceased trying to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. We have closed not only the Bible, but also Plato, the Pali Canon, and all the great books that once taught us about God and prayer. Now we fill our leisure with television, and then claim we have no time for God.

To come to know God is to come to know and perfect your own conception of the good. With every passing year, more and more false prophets preach from their Madison Avenue pulpits, "The good is pleasure! The logos is Wall Street! The market is God!" We bow and say, "Yes, teacher, teach us about the good." Then we take pilgrimages to Disneyland and Rodeo Drive to visit the temples of consumption and offer our reverence and devotion to the market god.

In his first letter, Peter tells his parishioners to rid themselves of all malice and deceit. He tells them to stop gossiping about the faults of their neighbors. Leave your adult self behind, he says. Become like a newborn babe. Suckle on pure spiritual milk as you grow up again.

I must go back to infancy and begin my education all over. I must deliberately forget the trash Hollywood and Madison Avenue have dinned into my mind. I must replace it with pure spiritual milk from saints and sages. The spoiled milk of false prophets whose true goal is not my salvation, but their profit, has been making me seriously ill.

Rid yourselves of malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. Like newborn babes, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.
1 Peter 2:1-2

But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way?
1 Corinthians 3:1-3

Do you want to be genuinely happy?

Do you want to be genuinely happy? If so, why do you listen to the madness dinned incessantly into your ears from Hollywood and Madison Avenue?—a message created not by those whose true motive is to help you be happy, but whose motive is their own self-enrichment. “Buy this,” they say, and we obey. Ignoring saints and sages whose message is contrived for purely altruistic motives, we hearken to conmen who want money for the false form of salvation they offer.

We laugh at the rustic who prefers his Bible to his newspaper. But which message was created to try to help its audience, and which merely to enrich its billionaire owners? The monk claims he is happy. How absurd! He doesn’t have all the comforts and conveniences we’ve been taught to want by our dubious choice of reading material. That’s why we look down on him. That’s why we call him rustic.

I love you. And that’s why I hate to see you fall into the hands of these deceivers, who are intent on transforming your soul from a house of God to a den of robbers. “Want this! Want that! Nurture the greed in your soul, as if were a sign of health.” That’s the message Madison Avenue dins into our sacred temples every minute of every day.

It is not only of the house of God which we should be jealous, overturning the tables of the moneychangers within. It is the house of God in our own souls. Kick the moneychangers out of the temple of your soul. They and their greed don’t belong there. No matter how often they din the message into your ears “Buy this!” “Buy that!” “Want this!” “Want that!” “Consumption is good!” “Greed is Good!” you must ignore it. It is corrupting your soul. Happiness is to be found in loving your neighbor as yourself, not in exploiting him for profit and celebrating the conquest with champagne.

The false prophets have amassed trillions peddling their message of greed. And because they have so much, it is they who have the resources to purchase the airwaves and coaxial waveguides that bring us our daily dose of information. If we want to hear the faint message from the saints and sages, the only message that has any hope of making us happy, we must first tune out all the false messages from the prophets of greed.

Before you allow any form of communication access to your soul, ask yourself about the motives of those on the other end. Are they trying to help? Or are they trying to make a buck? To determine the answer to this question, look at how they live. You're more likely to hear a message that's sincerely intended to help you from someone with disinterested motives. That means someone whose needs are simple, whose needs are met, someone who wants to give his wisdom away—the most precious commodity, free for the taking.

Throw the moneychangers out of the temple of your soul. Turn off the television. Shut the newspaper. Unplug the computer. Install free ad blocking software. The precious moments when you’re alone should never be wasted. They should be devoted to becoming a happier, better, kinder, nobler person. If you’re lucky enough to know how to read, that means devoting your free time to reading about those whose have given their lives to becoming happier, better, kinder and nobler—not con artists on Madison Avenue who want to seduce you into their glittering and false world to make a buck.

Before you allow a stream of bits or pixels into your brain, make sure its source is someone who wants nothing in return.

It is not only of the space in the Church which we ought to be jealous, but also of the interior of the house of God in us, so that it might not become a house of merchandise, or a den of robbers.
Ambrose