Traditions that might not deserve reverence

A few more notes on reverence and I’ll move on. If you’ve been following, this line of thought is entirely the fault of Paul Woodruff, whose book Reverence, published in 2001, seems profoundly relevant today.

One of the difficult points about reverence is that it’s not reverent to show respect for something that doesn’t deserve it. That is not showing reverence for the truth.

A lot of the social upheaval in this country involves questions about what deserves our respect. An easy example is the Confederate monument on the courthouse lawn. But what about other traditions that were once showed respect and now are controversial.

What to do about beliefs that once were used by religious leaders to justify slavery and then segregation, for example? Or traditions that involve the subjection of women to male authority? Or the treatment of gay people as some sort of lower caste?

Woodruff contends that reverence is not a feeling but the capacity to feel certain feelings and emotions at the right time — when those feelings tend to lead toward right action. Those feelings start with a sense of human limits. Since we feel that a human being is a weak, error-prone creature, we stand in awe of things that beyond us: the wonders of nature and ideals such as beauty and justice. We feel respect for our fellow creatures that suffer along with us, and we feel shame when we measure ourselves against our ideals, particularly in cases of bad behavior.

But what do we do with the traditions we’ve inherited? Woodruff says we have a couple of options. The first is we can treat them like a Greek temple, the Parthenon, say. We can preserve them and honor them as an achievement from a different time without actually wanting to live in those spaces. But if we do choose to live in a tradition, we need to renovate it and maintain it, just as you’d renovate an old house. The world changes, buildings (and traditions) decay, and if we are going to live in a traditional edifice we need to make arrangements, at least, to spare the neighbors from having to cope with fire hazards and sewage.

Woodruff is an interesting thinker. He points out that, long before we had religions, at least religions as we know them today, we had reverence.

He’s convinced me that this virtue needs more attention.

• Source: Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue; Oxford University Press, 2001. 

Learning from a comedy of errors

When I was a student, philosophers usually pooh-poohed any notion that ethics could be based on emotions.

Since the time of Plato, most philosopher had held that feelings were untrustworthy and needed to be firmly governed by reason. But I never was sold on any system of ethics based on rules.

One night 45 years ago, in the old student slums west of the University of Texas, I woke to hear a woman shrieking in the apartment next door. I thought she was being killed.

I pulled on a pair of jeans and had trouble getting my right foot through. I hopped on my left foot down a second-floor balcony to the neighbor’s door. I was just out of the Navy, and I always carried a pocketknife in the right hip pocket.

A man staggered out of the apartment. I recognized him as the neighbor. He ducked as a lamp flew by and smashed on the lawn below. 

I looked inside the apartment. The woman who was screaming had just moved in with the neighbor. She was smashing his stereo system with the fury of Medea. She’d just found out that her new love had already strayed.

The point of the story is that I acted without any ethical rule or principle in my head. In fact, I didn’t think at all.

It’s probably not a good idea to go into a place where you think a person is being murdered armed with a pocketknife. It was not courage because I was not aware of the risks. I simply didn’t think. I was half asleep.

And so I did not, as John Stuart Mill would have advised, consider whether the greater good would have been served by injecting myself into the fracas. I didn’t think of Kant’s famous Categorical Imperative.

I didn’t think. I acted on feeling. Someone needed help. When I did think, I could see that I had it all wrong. If anyone needed help, it was not the stereo-smashing Medea.

Yesterday’s note was about Paul Woodruff’s view of reverence.

Here’s his suggestion for a way to look at it: “Reverence is the well developed capacity to have the feelings of awe, respect and shame when they are the right feelings to have.”

As Woodruff says, if you feel awe at the sight of an ancient tree, you are probably experiencing reverence. If you feel awe at your own wisdom, you are probably not.

This way of looking at reverence fits Woodruff’s way of looking at virtue. In his view, virtue is a capacity for feeling the right emotion at the right time. 

Woodruff contends that emotions are what move us. Feelings, not reasons and arguments, make us act.

I think Woodruff is right about that. Feelings move us, even when our thinking is nonexistent— or comically bad.

One thing that's missing from the midterms

 The midterm elections are coming up and at least some of the rhetoric seems to anticipate civil war. Before you invest in a new survivalist shelter, consider this: The turnout in Texas’s primary elections soared to almost 18 percent.

“Soared” is not facetious. The 2022 turnout was the best in the last six midterms.

Why, in a state where we’re so wound up we’re talking about drilling militias on the courthouse square, do 80-plus percent of the registered voters stay home?

The problem, oddly enough, involves reverence.

Paul Woodruff, a philosopher at the University of Texas, pointed that out in his book Reverence more than 20 years ago.

Woodruff noticed that a lot of people who argue about politics don’t vote. These people are interested in the bottom line. They understand that one vote is highly unlikely to make a difference. So they advocate and donate — but spare themselves the wait at the polls.

What’s missing, in Woodruff’s view, is the cardinal virtue of reverence. 

Voting is a ceremony. It is an expression of reverence — not for our government or our laws, not for anything manmade, but for the very idea that ordinary people are more important than the juggernauts who seem to rule them.

If you’re just worried about the bottom line, you skip the lines. If you have a sense that the democracy is about something larger, you commit yourself to the ceremonies, great and small, that honor it. You have reverence for that mysterious, hard-to-define, beautiful thing — and you show it.

As the campaign heats up, I’d like to see people talking a little less about civil war and little more about reverence. Obviously, the people who are shouting and threatening care about something. Reverence is a way of thinking about that care to see how it stacks up.

• Source: Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue; Oxford University Press, 2001.

818

 When the word “genre” came up in a conversation about books, I thought of 818.

It’s a place in the Dewey Decimal System: “Literature: American Miscellany.”

I love all kinds of books. Any talk about a favorite genre wouldn’t help in my case. I read the ancient Greeks. I love the natural sciences, philosophy and history, which are in other parts of the library. If you’re in section 818, the essayists are nearby. So are the short story writers.

But time and again, I check section 818, just to see what’s there.

I’ve found Thoreau’s Walden and Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth. Also Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie, H.L. Mencken’s Minority Report, Paul Auster’s Winter Journal, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life and Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross, which seems like a novel to me and so seemed misfiled.

Maybe these notes on 818 ought to come with a couple of caveats.

First, “Misc.” is a place where librarians stash books that they don’t know what to do with. And so 818 will tell you a bit about the psychology of your librarians.

Second, 828 is British Miscellany, similar stuff with an English accent, and there are good translations of other languages in 838 (German and Germanic), 848 (French), etc.

In these 8*8 sections, there are diaries, journals, notebooks and a fair number of essays, which should be in 814 (for Americans), 824 (British) and so forth.

But these things I’d call essays — Walden, for example — are puzzling essays. Some poor librarian just didn’t know what else to do with them.

I’m not big on genres. The books I like the most seem not to fit the usual structures and so end up in the section for misfits and curiosities.

In my mind, I’ve done you a favor. I’ve told you about one of my best fishing holes.

If you don’t believe me, go to your library and see what’s there. If you find something good, please drop me a line.

• For another find in 818, see "A bit more on noticing and collecting notes," Sept. 15, 2021.

Why it's hard to explain Texas politics to outsiders

 Some companies have environmental, social and governance policies. Some banks, for example, have anti-discrimination policies. They won’t do business with companies and individuals that have bad records on human rights.

The Texas Legislature got into a fit that some big financial institutions on Wall Street were discriminating against the industries that produce guns and gas. And so legislators passed a law that said financial institutions that had such policies couldn’t do business in Texas.

The problem is that Texas has thousands of cities, school districts and other local governments that issue bonds for capital improvements. The more customers you have bidding on those bonds, the better interest rate you’re likely to get. If you’re selling bonds and you chase one-third of the bidders away, you’re likely to have to pay a higher rate.

A couple of researchers got curious and estimated how much Texans are paying in higher costs: $303 million to $532 million.

It would be understandable if Texas’ leaders had got in a fit with big banks on the East Coast and punished them. Instead, Texas’ leaders got in a fit with banks of the East Coast and punished us. They got angry and took it out on the taxpayers they represent.

It’s hard to explain to outsiders the ideologies of Texas politics, which are zany enough. But it’s harder to explain the prevalence of bad thinking. You can find inexplicable cases at every level of government. It’s been that way since I started watching 50 years ago.

• Source:  The study was done by Daniel G. Garrett, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Ivan Ivanov, an economist with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. A good summary is here: 

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/texas-fought-against-esg-heres-what-it-cost/

Carruth's wonderful anthology

 A recurring theme of these notes: the forces that shaped me. And I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to mention The Voice That is Great Within Us.

The anthology of 20^th century American poetry was edited by Hayden Carruth, a World War II veteran who got a master’s degree from the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill and survived electroshock treatments when his delightfully encyclopedic mind broke down. For a while, he cobbled together a living as a farm hand, reviewer and typist. He gradually regained his health, writing poetry.

I never call the book by its title. To me, it’s Carruth’s anthology. I don’t think anyone else could have compiled it.

I started to list the poets that Carruth had introduced me to. Instead, let me just mention one, Hy Sobiloff, who had, like Carruth, had a strange and wonderful mind.

Hyman Jordan Sobiloff, 1912-1970, was an industrialist who ran several companies. For a while, he took poetry lessons from Delmore Schwartz, who lived in Greenwich Village. Sobiloff would have the chauffeur park around the corner as a matter of manners.

I love Sobiloff's poem “The Child’s Sight.” The poet is delighted to be in the company of children. “They have included me” is a recurring line.

The poet stops with the children to look, touch, taste and notice.

            The child’s wisdom is in saying.

            They say what they see when they see it.

            I am beginning to remember how

            When I don’t say it when I see it

            I remember it differently.

My memory works like that. And, when I read the poem, I was surprised that people whose lives are so different — an eccentric poet and an ordinary reader — should have minds that work in similar ways. Being reminded of how much human beings have in common is a good reason to read poetry. 

• Source: The Voice That is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, edited by Hayden Carruth; New York: Bantam Classics, 1983.

Paul Woodruff's idea of justice

 I’ve been thinking about the notion of justice outlined by Paul Woodruff in The Ajax Dilemma. At least one friend is interested in a conversation about it. So I thought I’d give an account of it, in case others want to join in.

Professor Woodruff says we confuse justice with fairness. Fairness is based on rules and principles and is measurable. Justice, a broader concept, is not.

A classic case of fairness is equal pay for equal work. The pay is either measurably fair or it isn’t. The problem is that the concept of fairness gets fuzzy at the edges, when we try to decide what’s fair pay for unequal work (the work of a doctor, a nurse, a records technician and janitor in a clinic, for example). All the work is necessary, but the achievements are different, and the rewards should be too.

Woodruff says justice is giving everyone in a community her due. A community is a circle of respect. So it’s essential to honor (i.e. give respect to) each member for his contribution. But since each contribution is different, what’s just can’t be derived by rules.

Justice depends on leadership — a kind of wisdom among all members of the community, those at the bottom as well as those in authority. Leadership recognizes the unlike contributions that each individual makes and honors them.

The whole thing goes awry when people don’t feel they are being respected or honored. When we are dishonored, we feel excluded from the community. We usually react badly.

In Woodruff’s account, good leaders are the same as good followers. Good leaders don’t really care if they are in charge. They are seeking the common good — the best for the community, not what’s best for themselves. What they really care about is an environment in which everyone can flourish.

Justice is the social glue that keeps a community together when there is a dispute. It builds a sense of trust. It’s never perfect, but in a just community almost everyone is looking out for the common good. There’s a sense that everyone is going to get his due. People are going to be respected and honored for what they do, even though everyone’s contribution is a bit different. 

In an unjust society, everyone is out for himself. Instead of an atmosphere of trust, we have an atmosphere of suspicion. Conspiracy theories abound. Those in authority are not leaders. They are not concerned about the common good. They’re just in it for themselves.

I should have said this an account of my understanding of Professor Woodruff’s idea. My understanding is evolving. The best advice is to read the book, which is excellent. 

In the meantime, I’m curious about how this hits you. Is this what you mean when you’re talking about justice?

• Source: Paul Woodruff, The Ajax Dilemma: Justice, Fairness and Rewards; Oxford University Press, 2011. For other notes on the book, see July 22 and July 24, 2022.