Why our elites suck, part 2.

Harvard students under investigation for mass cheating scandal.

Why our elites suck...

... by David Brooks:

Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else. This attitude prevails in the Ivy League, in the corporate boardrooms and even at television studios where hosts from Harvard, Stanford and Brown rail against the establishment.

As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.

If you read the e-mails from the Libor scandal you get the same sensation you get from reading the e-mails in so many recent scandals: these people are brats; they have no sense that they are guardians for an institution the world depends on; they have no consciousness of their larger social role.

The Truth of Art - "That Lying Son of Bitch Johnson" Division.

Christopher Fountain points out the following:

Lowlife imitates art

Fired drive-through bully explains:

[Rachel], you should know that I never planned to say the things I said to you that day, and how I said them. I planned to peacefully participate in the August 1st YouTube post where Jackson Pearce asked people to simply order a large water to show support for the gay community.

But when I got to your window, after seeing all the people in and outside the restaurant that came to support Chick-fil-A, I lost it. I just lost it. I couldn’t believe the number of people came out to support a corporation that associates themselves with anti-gay groups, like Exodus International and the American Family Association.

(From Forrest Gump) Boyfriend Wesley explains to Jenny why he had to smack her around:

Jenny? Things got a little out of hand. It’s just this war and that lying son of a bitch Johnson and…

Actually, that's an interesting explanation on the part of Adam Smith.

Look at what he says caused his "near-psychotic break" - "But when I got to your window, after seeing all the people in and outside the restaurant that came to support Chick-fil-A, I lost it. I just lost it."

What Smith is saying is that he was surprised at the number of people who disagreed with his position. Perhaps he was surprised that there were such people or that they were sufficiently motivated to turn out, but whatever the real reason was, the genesis of his break was his surprise that there were so many people who disagreed with him.

It makes sense that in a fit of cognitive dissonance, he would "break" as he tried to make reality conform to his mental structure of reality by seeking to explain away what he was seeing, i.e., everyone else was deluded or evil or ignorant or whatever.

So, he suffered a "break."

The real issue is why was he surprised?

The answer is, obviously, that the other side has been marginalized to such an extent that liberals can go through their life without confronting the uncomfortable reality that there are real people who disagree with them and that these real people aren't the caricatures of evil they expect. And, so, when that happens, a person like Smith begins to treat real people - even innocuous, minimim-wage employees - according to the caricature.

Prudence, according to Joseph Pieper, is the foundation of ever virtue. Prudence is nothing more than the habit of the intellect that recognizes reality itself. Without prudence, we can't hope to exercise the other virtues, such as justice or love.

The "Hypocrite" Defense...

...because a 47 year old man acting like a "crazed sex poodle" is obviously a good thing.

Zombietimes echoes something I've been thinking recently.  After pointing out that the "well, at least Weiner isn't hypocrite" defense is emerging from the fever swamp of the radical left, Zombie notes the buried premise in the argument - the argument is actually asserting that liberals aren't hypocrites because they don't believe that marriage and/or sexual fidelity are actually a virtue or a moral obligation.

Well, for the “at least we’re not hypocrites” sentiment to make sense, there must be an agreed-upon starting point — one which the liberals themselves are confirming each time they make this argument. And what must that starting point necessarily be? For conservatives to be hypocrites when they do something immoral, then that means they must profess a moral ideology in the first place. And — here’s the key — for the liberals to be let off the hook when they do something immoral, then that means they must profess an ideology with no moral claims whatsoever.

While hypocrisy may be "the tribute that virtue pays to vice," at least a hypocrite recognizes that there is such a thing as a virtue and a vice. [Fn.1]  Getting rid of hypocrisy by getting rid of virtue is a bad trade.

This tactic seems to be fully in spirit with what Chesterton in his own aphorism referred to as "deny the cat" [Fn. 2.]:

If it be true...that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat. --GK Chesterton, "Orthodoxy"

_________
 
1.  The maxim that "hypocrisy is the tribute that virtue pays to vice" comes from someone named La Rochefoucald.  La Rochefoucald's name is invariably attached to the maxim by cognoscenti, apparently to show their faux-sophistication inasmuch as who La Rochefoucald was or why anyone should be particularly interested in what he had to say is never explained - people just act - or, rather, bluff - that they know who La Rochefoucald was, such as by stroking their chin and muttering, "ah, yes, La Rochefoucald...."
 
Wiki provides this synopsis:
 

François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac (15 September 1613 – 17 March 1680) was a noted French author of maxims and memoirs. The view of human conduct his writings describe has been summed up by the words "everything is reducible to the motive of self-interest," though the term "gently cynical" has also been applied.[1] Born in Paris in the Rue des Petits Champs, at a time when the royal court was oscillating between aiding the nobility and threatening it, he was considered an exemplar of the accomplished 17th-Century nobleman. Until 1650, he bore the title of Prince de Marcillac.

And:

The Maximes, however, had no such fate. The author made frequent alterations and additions to them during his life and a few were added after his death. It is usual now to publish them in their totality of approximately seven hundred. The majority consist of just two or three lines, and hardly any exceed half a page. The view of human conduct they describe has been summed up by the words "everything is reducible to the motive of self-interest" but this is somewhat unfair. La Rochefoucauld reflects on the conduct and motives of himself and his fellows. His Maximes represent the mature thoughts of a man deeply versed in the business and pleasures of the world, and possessed of an extraordinarily fine and acute intellect. There is no spite in them, nor is there any boasting or gloating, but their literary value even surpasses this ethical soundness. For brevity, clarity, fullness of meaning and point, La Rochefoucauld has no rival. His Maximes never become platitudes, nor yet dark sayings. He has packed them so full of meaning that it would be impossible to pack them closer. He has sharpened their point to the utmost, yet there is no loss of substance. The comparison which occurs most frequently, and which is perhaps the most just, is that of a bronze sculpture—a completed work, yet one whose workmanship is not over-detailed. Their sentiment is never merely hard, as the sentimentalists pretend, but has a vein of melancholic poetry running through it which reflects La Rochefoucauld's appreciation of the romances of chivalry. The maxims are never singular; each could give rise to a whole sermon of application and corollary. And the language in which they are written is French, still at the peak of its power, chastened, but as yet not emasculated by the reforming influences of the 18th century.

In the light of that glowing review, it might be worth taking a gander at the entire Maxims.

2.  "Deny the cat" - what a great name for a blog.  Oh, wait,  it already is a great name for a blog.

Go out and buy Tinman.

Neal McDonough has been fired for refusing to engage in "TV sex scenes" with Viginia Madsen on "Scoundrels."  McDonough's reason for refusing is that it would conflict with his deeply-held Catholic beliefs.

How rare for someone to have deeply-held beliefs that they sacrifice for.

Good for him.

The Virtue of Anger

I'm cross-posting this from Facebook so I can preserve a few links here:

Even if there is such a thing as "righteous anger", and it seems to me there is, it wouldn't follow that "anger is a right". Do you disagree, Mr. Bradley? :)

My response:

Good question.

If righteous anger is a virtue - i.e., a passion ordered by reason against injustice in the right way at the right time - then it is a part of human flourishing or excellence, then it is a natural right because natural rights are those things inherent nature that are a part of human flourishing and excellence. All virtues are by definition natural rights.

As for the first question, the virtue ethics tradition has traditionally recognized "righteous anger" as a virtue. Check out this site - http://www.copiosa.org/virtue/virtue_meekness.htm - for this observation:

"When we say that Meekness moderates the Passion of Anger according to the Dictates of Reason, it is because the Passion of Anger, in itself, is neither Good nor Evil. It can be either. There is such a thing as a Just and Righteous Anger. We have examples of this when Christ drove the Money Changers out of the Temple (Matthew 21:12), and when He looked upon the Pharisees with Anger because of their Hardness of Heart as He cured the Man with the Withered Hand on the Sabbath (Mark 3:5). Again, Moses was filled with Righteous Anger when he broke the Tablets of the Law as he came upon the Israelites Worshiping the Golden Calf (Exodus 32:19)."

And then there is this obsevation by St. Thomas - http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3158.htm#article8 - defining the contrary vice to "anger":

"Anger may be understood in two ways. On one way, as a simple movement of the will, whereby one inflicts punishment, not through passion, but in virtue of a judgment of the reason: and thus without doubt lack of anger is a sin. This is the sense in which anger is taken in the saying of Chrysostom, for he says (Hom. xi in Matth., in the Opus Imperfectum, falsely ascribed to St. John Chrysostom): "Anger, when it has a cause, is not anger but judgment. For anger, properly speaking, denotes a movement of passion": and when a man is angry with reason, his anger is no longer from passion: wherefore he is said to judge, not to be angry. On another way anger is taken for a movement of the sensitive appetite, which is with passion resulting from a bodily transmutation. This movement is a necessary sequel, in man, to the movement of his will, since the lower appetite necessarily follows the movement of the higher appetite, unless there be an obstacle. Hence the movement of anger in the sensitive appetite cannot be lacking altogether, unless the movement of the will be altogether lacking or weak. Consequently lack of the passion of anger is also a vice, even as the lack of movement in the will directed to punishment by the judgment of reason."

"The lack of the passion of anger is also a vice."

So, if we have anger as a vice and "lack of anger" as a contrary vice, then under virtue ethics there has to be some median condition which is the virtue, and that virtue is described as "righteous anger" which is ordered to charity and directed against injustice, evil etc.