6
6VICIOUS ACTIONS ARE NOT HURTFUL BECAUSE THEY ARE FORBIDDEN, BUT FORBIDDEN BECAUSE THEY ARE HURTFUL…. IT WAS THEREFORE IN EVERYONE’S INTEREST TO BE VIRTUOUS WHO WISHED TO BE HAPPY…. [HENCE] I CONCEIVED OF A BOLD AND ARDUOUS PROJECT AT ARRIVING AT MORAL PERFECTION…. I SOON FOUND THAT I HAD UNDERTAKEN A TASK OF MORE DIFFICULTY THAN I HAD IMAGINED…. THO’ I NEVER ARRIVED AT THE PERFECTION I HAD BEEN SO AMBITIOUS OF OBTAINING BUT FELL FAR SHORT OF IT, YET I WAS BY THE ENDEAVOUR A BETTER AND A HAPPIER MAN THAN I OTHERWISE SHOULD HAVE BEEN.
In striving to achieve happiness through “moral perfection,” Ben Franklin identified 13 virtues he swore to practice:
1. Temperance: Eat not to dullness. Drink not to elevation.
2. Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling conversation.
3. Order: Let all your things have their places. Let each part of your business have its time.
4. Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.
5. Frugality: Make no expence but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
6. Industry: Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit. Think innocently and justly; and if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. Justice: Wrong none by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. Moderation: Avoid extremes. Forebear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes, or habituation.
11. Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health and offspring—never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
13. Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
According to Franklin biographer Walter Isaacson, the Sage of Philadelphia established a disciplined regimen (see item 3, above) for integrating each of these virtues into his life, concentrating on the first until he mastered it, then moving on to conquer the second, then the third. Isaacson says Franklin ultimately admitted to failure in this enterprise. But who could live up to his standards of virtue? After all, Moses only promulgated 10 prohibitions, and his were a lot less demanding than Ben’s stringent 13.
Although Aristotle would agree with the desirability of the virtues on Franklin’s list, and applaud the resolute linkage of virtue with happiness, the Ancient would question the practicality of “shall nots.” In contrast, Aristotle seeks to portray virtue in positive terms of how we live. He says virtue is a state of the soul, much as health is a condition of the body. Moreover, virtue derives from the motivation, the preference, to choose to act rightly. Franklin clearly had that motivation, but he misunderstood the process by which virtue is achieved and underestimated the amount of work involved in the effort. As Aristotle notes, we have to build our capacity to see the difference between right and wrong, better and worse, then habitually act on the better choice. Virtue comes about when we are predisposed to act properly as a matter of habit, when we find pleasure in the good.
But what kinds of behavior are included in Aristotle’s general “predisposition”? His concept of virtue is vague and abstract; in contrast, Franklin’s list is a model of precision and clarity. And, in practice, the Ancient’s construct doesn’t really seem much different or more helpful than Franklin’s more precise prohibitions. But is Aristotle’s concept of virtue, like Franklin’s, simply concerned with the seven deadly sins? Do all of his ethics merely come down to saying petty vices, like eating too much salami, make people unhappy? After reading Aristotle, David Denby concluded:
I was bored by his shrewd, very sane advice in the Nicomachean Ethics that we avoid the extremes of behavior and choose the “golden mean” or middle way, a mode of existence practiced by the virtuous man as a way of taming the excesses of appetite. True enough, but so what?
Indeed, so what if all Aristotle is talking about is curbing excessive desire for fatty sausages. Like Denby, I found myself so caught up in the Ancient’s Franklinesque examples that I lost sight of his deeper message. But when I recently went back to reread the Ethics, I experienced a little epiphany: Offering advice to intemperate snackers is not the point of his moral exercises.
As my wife will attest, I have numerous bad habits: watching too much basketball, drinking too much chardonnay (it complements salami), avoiding exercise, tuning out when she tells me news about our relatives, and refusing to take vitamins. These vices and others like them make her unhappy. But they don’t make me unhappy. What makes me unhappy is that my career has not been as successful as I would like: My books aren’t bestsellers, nor are they often cited in scholarly tracts. And every time I think about this absence of approval and recognition, I get depressed. I assure you, I try not to let it get me down that my last 12 books were not reviewed in the New York Times, but every time I pick up the goddamn paper, let me tell you, I remember. And I get really unhappy.
But after rereading Aristotle, I finally understood how his thoughts about virtue relate to breaking the most serious of my bad habits. I suddenly understood that the day will never come when I won’t want praise, honor, and approval, because those things are, in fact, goods. The reason I could never convince myself otherwise, could never shake my desire for affirmation and approval, was because those useful goods have undeniable extrinsic value. Who wouldn’t find it rewarding to be praised by others? My problem was that I mistook praise for the highest end, and getting it became my goal. It led to my unhappiness because, when I failed to get the praise I sought, I became miserable. Moreover, it’s not too great an exaggeration to say my desire for approval was insatiable; no matter how much I received, I could never get enough. Now, thanks to the threshold test, I saw that whether or not I received the desired praise and approval had little to do with me. There was little I could do to regulate its supply because the granting of it was under the control of others. Hence, after years of making myself miserable, I understood that I had to shift my focus to attaining other goods, noble ones that were not only good for me but over which I had control.
Thus my little epiphany: If the secret to overcoming my craving for salami was to learn to find pleasure in carrots, the secret to overcoming my far more consequential craving for approval was to learn to find pleasure in other, higher, goods. This was consistent with my earlier insight about the pleasure of “getting into the zone” when I was in the act of writing. It was obvious to me in hindsight that happiness is the intrinsic reward that comes from challenging work itself, and not the extrinsic good of praise from others who might consider my work well done. Yet I had failed to make that connection, and missed it with regard to my initial evaluation of John Jerome, because I was still resisting acting in a way that would make me happy. Even after undertaking several Aristotelian exercises, I still was not ready to let go of my 50-year habit of seeking approval. But with this new understanding, albeit obvious now, I was ready to move on.
And with that in mind, we, too, can better understand what Aristotle is talking about when he speaks of virtue, what he means when he speaks of breaking the habit of making ourselves unhappy by refocusing our efforts on the pursuit of higher goods. Aristotle doesn’t care much about the many little vices to which we, and Dr. Franklin, are prone. The primary habit he wants us to break is intellectual indolence, and the most important new habit he encourages us to form is self-development. Virtuous people learn to enjoy things good for them: contemplative goods like science, history, music, drama, poetry, painting, and the discussion of moral and political ideas, pursuits that elevate humans from the lifestyle of animals.
In fact, the reason Benjamin Franklin is ranked among the most respected of the nation’s founders is not that he lived by his 13 commandments; rather, it’s because he lived a life fully engaged in politics and philosophy. His curiosity was unbounded; he read widely and applied his learning in all manner of practical ways. He invented the lightning rod and bifocal glasses; he founded America’s first public subscription library and the American Philosophical Society, where he discussed scientific and social ideas with the likes of Jefferson, Adams, and Benjamin Rush. He founded a hospital and university, published a newspaper, and served as ambassador to France. In the words of ethicist Randy Cohen, “For Franklin individual virtue was inseparable from civic virtue.” He was virtuous because he pursued both the highest good of self-actualization and the complete good of community service. And that’s what Aristotle tells us we must do if we want to be truly virtuous. In effect, he tells us to try something most of us would prefer not to do.
The reading of Aristotle’s books might serve as an example of why we resist the true pursuit of happiness. Most people today do not want to read Aristotle because the task seems unpleasant, even tedious. In fact, many people who read him for the first time find him incomprehensible. Even on second reading, he is difficult to follow. But by the third time through, almost everyone finds the exercise rewarding, and those who continue to reread him receive great pleasure because, with each reading, they find something new and profound that they had not noticed before. So the challenge is to get through those initial readings.
In terms of our development, Aristotle says, “Try it, you’ll like it. Try it more than once, and you may even find it pleasurable.” Moreover, the experience of growth is self-reinforcing: Those who get pleasure from a hard physical workout are more likely to exercise regularly than are those who view exercise as drudgery. And those who exercise regularly are most likely to become fit in the long run. Similarly, those who find the pursuit of excellence pleasurable are most likely to engage in it and, thus, are most likely to find true happiness. In fact, it was through disciplining themselves in this way that Ben Dunlap and Skip Battle were able to maintain self-discipline in the face of temptations to stray from their pursuit of happiness. The trick is to learn to find pleasure from habitually developing one’s potential.
But how do we learn to enjoy what is good for us? Certainly trying to con people into believing vice isn’t pleasurable doesn’t work. But is the opposite any easier? Try telling a child that eating spinach can be pleasant. Kids, hell, try convincing me I can enjoy carrots as much as salami! By extension, it’s hard for many adults to believe that it can be as rewarding, more so in fact, to spend a day learning a hard subject as it is to spend a day at the beach drinking Sam Adams. Obviously, it will do no good telling such things to kids, to me, or to you. The best way to get the point is to experience it for ourselves. But before risking displeasure, we prudently inquire if anybody else has tried it and survived to tell the tale.
After examining numerous examples of the lives of sultans and voluptuaries, I became convinced that I could not become happy continuing to pursue the pleasurable and useful ends they desire. But that was a relatively easy call. It was much harder to convince myself I could become happy if I disciplined myself, instead, to do things typically associated with bitter medicine, say organizing the performance of a Shakespearean play for hospitalized seniors. So I cast around for an example of a contemporary Aristotelian whose behavior I could try on for size, much as I had analyzed the careers of anti-Aristotelians. I looked for someone, like them, with whom I could identify, someone roughly my age with similar professional interests yet more successful than me; that is, not someone like the reclusive and unsuccessful writer John Jerome. If I were to emulate a virtuous person, I would need to feel I wasn’t giving up too much in terms of useful and pleasurable goods.
About the time I was writing this chapter, I read several glowing profiles of Stephen Carter, professor of law at Yale and author of seven books on such diverse topics as politics, ethics, race, and religion, in addition to scholarly articles in his academic specialty, contract law. I had known Carter professionally for a decade and was aware of his diverse interests and broad range of abilities. Yet, like many who thought we knew him, I was awed when, in 2002, I learned that he had written a masterful, bestselling novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park.
My acquaintance with Carter was through his occasional work in adult education, and I was impressed that the business and government leaders he taught invariably described him in terms of modesty, civility, thoughtfulness, and virtue. Carter not only reads and teaches Aristotle, he lives the Ancient’s good life; in fact, Carter indirectly quotes Aristotle on the foundation of government in a New Yorker interview by David Owen: “I see the family as prior to the state.” According to the article, Carter, his wife, and their two children are a close-knit family who pray and study the Bible together. Carter explains his family-oriented values to Owen:
My life is pretty simple, in many ways. I spend time with my family, I read the Bible, I go to church, I write, I teach my classes—and that’s my life. I play chess, but I don’t have any spectacularly interesting hobbies.
“He has no discernible vices, either,” Owen observes. Like my aforementioned colleague, Alan, Carter abstains from the seven deadly sins while practicing all the cardinal virtues. Unlike Alan, Carter is virtuous in Aristotelian terms: He takes intellectual risks and is engaged in important political issues. In fact, his life isn’t “simple.” He is an outspoken defender of the right of religious people to practice and espouse their beliefs in public forums and institutions, a conservative position that often puts him at odds with academic colleagues. But Carter doesn’t worry about gaining the approval of the likes of us; instead, he is interested in making the strongest rational case possible for what he believes, even if that makes him unpopular. Not coincidentally, one of his finest books is on the subject of integrity. Most important, in his quiet way, Carter practices what he preaches. When Owen asked him about the moral dilemmas created by the $4 million advance he received for his novel, and by the fame and fortune attendant to a related movie deal, Carter answered:
One element of the old-fashioned way in which I was raised is that you don’t talk about money…. I will say this, though, and I want to put it delicately: We are … of the traditional Christian view that from those whom much is given much is required. Whenever we have financial good fortune, our first obligation is to recognize that we are supposed to give a lot of it away—and really a lot of it. That is just an absolute obligation of the faith.
What intrigues me most about Carter is that, unlike many university professors today, he uses his academic career to become a truly educated person. Until quite recently, the position of professor afforded the finest opportunity for an individual to live Aristotle’s contemplative “life of the mind.” But over-specialization and the anti-Aristotelian desire to make all fields “scientific”—even such imprecise disciplines as the humanities, social sciences, and particularly the Ancient’s own field of philosophy—has caused the professoriate to dig deeper and deeper into narrower and narrower channels of inquiry. As a result, over the years, fewer and fewer scholars have viewed an academic career as the vehicle for becoming broadly educated men and women.
The trend has been limiting to the lives of professors, bad for students, and ultimately self-defeating in making some disciplines irrelevant to the practical world, and for exactly the reasons Aristotle anticipated 25 centuries ago. Carter understands that Aristotelian virtue requires something more than an academic career. Merely to be educated is not the same as to be happy, and many professors, perhaps most today, do not lead good lives by Aristotle’s standards. Indeed, narrowly focused academics are no more virtuous than people who narrowly pursue wealth or do repetitive technical jobs. So in an era when many professors choose to burrow in academic foxholes, it’s heartening to learn of a few, like Carter, who choose to use their privileged profession to develop a full range of serious interests. Moreover, my assessment of Carter’s successful career is that he demonstrates that it is possible to be both happy and productive. The way he has chosen to live illustrates that one can excel in one’s technical or professional field and, at the same time, be a complete human.
I concluded from analyzing Carter’s behavior that I, too, had a choice. He showed me there is no necessary trade-off between being productive in the economic sense on the one hand, and pursuing noble goods on the other. What was required of me was the moral imagination to make the combination of the two work and the discipline to stick with the behavior needed to get me where I wanted to go.
But, whoa, had I again loaded the dice by choosing such an extreme example of Aristotelian virtue, as I feared I had done earlier when choosing the extremely un-Aristotelian Clark and Ellison? Certainly, that would be the case if Carter had been “born virtuous.” But I know him just well enough to detect signs of the character flaws that afflict us all. More telling is the sub-text of his novel: The book portrays the lengthy and painful struggles of a middle-age law professor to overcome his misplaced desires and discipline himself to choose aright. In interviews, Stephen Carter may make the possession of virtue appear easy, but in his fiction writing, he shows us that it is extremely hard work for everybody.
Yet, it is obviously easier for a professor to pursue happiness than it is for a person who has “a real job and career,” particularly someone like the CEO of a big company who is doing the socially necessary work of wealth creation. It may seem that people in their shoes have no choice but to pretend vice is virtue. As Lord Keynes wrote in the 1930s, only after we are all rich can we “once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.” “But beware!” Keynes warned,
The time for all this is not yet. For another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair: for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.
In this view, economic progress depends on continuing to choose useful over noble goods, and career/economic success depends on making oneself unhappy.
But don’t the facts belie Keynes’s contention, even among those who are not fabulously rich? For example, married couple Isabel Geffner and Peter Guzzardi were enjoying successful editorial careers in the high-stress world of New York publishing when, in their late forties, they decided the quality of their lives would improve if they moved and took lower-paying jobs in family-friendlier Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Explains Geffner:
I felt like I could reinvent myself. I didn’t have to be one thing as an adult. I had been a book publishing person, and that was great, but now I was going to do something different. I loved being in school. The sense of being engaged and alive was like a fountain of youth. I didn’t worry about getting hired at my age when I got my degree—I figured if I’m good at what I do and I care about it passionately, I’ll get a job. If I choose to go back to grad school again at age 65, I’ll have a similar attitude then.
Having now earned a master’s degree in social work, she is running a nonprofit agency, spending more time with the kids, and contemplating a lifetime of more learning and career changes:
When I went back to school I fell in love with learning in a way that I hadn’t when I went to college the first time. I came home one day and said to my husband, “Maybe I’ll get a master’s in biochemistry and art history.”
Out on the West Coast, another contemporary Aristotelian, Sheena Paterson Berwick, recently followed in Geffner’s shoes, also without benefit of being rich. Growing up in a poor family in Glasgow, Scotland (her parents were soldiers in the Salvation Army), Berwick was forced to leave school at age 16 and enter the competitive world of journalism in order to support herself. Gradually working her way up the ladder over the next 30 years, she eventually became editor of Toronto’s Saturday Star and an editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Most people at that point would either have congratulated themselves on a job well done or reached for the gold ring: a job with one of the prestigious national dailies. Not Sheena.
Berwick wanted an education, and she wanted it for purposes other than credentialing, status, or making up for youthful deprivation. She wanted an education clearly and simply because she hadn’t fully exercised many aspects of her potential. So, in her early fifties and with only modest savings, she enrolled as a full-time undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has since graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude. Significantly, she didn’t major in finance or computer science. With the wisdom that comes from experience, she realized higher education is too valuable an opportunity to waste on learning a trade. As she had observed, people who look back most positively on their undergraduate experiences often are those who had pursued a liberal education and later got their career training in graduate school or on the job. She simply did it backward. At an age when most of us would say, “Hey, I’m too old to learn this stuff and, anyway, what practical good would it do me to try?” she majored in English and won the UCSB Italian Department’s Dante Prize for her essay on The Divine Comedy. Moreover, while earning her degree, she volunteered her managerial skills to help a community center pull out of an administrative mess.
What Aristotle means by virtue is exactly Sheena Berwick’s self-discipline and willingness to test her mind in new fields and new ways. Likewise, Aristotle encourages all of us to challenge and stretch ourselves, learn new things, and ask tough questions about the way we live. Yet, because we fear that the experience will be unpleasant, we resist his call and studiously avoid asking ourselves difficult questions about the way we conduct our lives. Worse, we fear if we read and think deeply about moral questions and about the consequences of such for our own behavior, the process will lead us to make unpleasant choices about how we should then act. So why should we work hard to do something that doesn’t seem fun? As Canadian songwriter/poet Leonard Cohen writes, “You are locked inside your suffering and your pleasures are the seal.”
Where Ben Franklin thought virtue could be acquired quickly and by obeying rules (“Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles”), Aristotle says it takes time and effort to build the habit of right reasoning and subsequent right behavior. In order to break the comforting seal that habitually locks us into self-defeating behavior, the Ancient says we need to embark on a series of exercises to develop our moral muscles. To illustrate what he means, he cites the practical case of a man who must struggle to control his anger. Aristotle starts by acknowledging that everyone gets angry from time to time, so if a person’s face occasionally turns red, that doesn’t signify anything about his character. Nor should we be concerned with inherited traits: It is morally inconsequential if someone’s face is red all the time. But if a person habitually becomes inflamed with anger, and those who know him are constantly on edge waiting for the tell-tale signs of red ears and cheeks indicative of an oncoming eruption, that is a valid indicator of a character flaw.
Aristotle then calls positive attention to the person who is prone to go red-faced with anger but has learned to control it. In general, he concludes that it is virtuous to be even-tempered. But he doesn’t stop there. His discussion of the emotion is nuanced: He goes on to say there are times when anger is called for and appropriate. In fact, if one does not become angry over a grave injustice, he says one cannot be considered virtuous. The secret is in knowing when to be angry and then how to direct it usefully. The virtuous person, he says, becomes angry at the right time, over the right issue, and to the right degree. He then cites examples of questions we might ask of ourselves in order to develop the moral muscles needed to allow us to do that habitually. Properly understood, his example of anger management is not only practical, it serves to illustrate how we can free ourselves from the prison of whatever particular emotion might prevent us from behaving virtuously.
Here’s a current example of what I think Aristotle is getting at on the subject of anger: In 2004, the Bush administration argued that charges leveled against it by counterterrorism expert, Richard Clarke, should be discounted because the ex–White House aide’s judgment was warped by anger. That argument gained some traction with the public. Understandably, Americans expect a level of institutional loyalty from public servants and find unseemly those who kiss and tell (especially those “jilted” by their bosses and trying to “even the score”). And it did appear that Clarke had become seriously disgruntled when he found himself out of the loop at the White House and his advice ignored by then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. But if we apply Aristotle’s tests to the subject, we can ask ourselves if Clarke’s undeniable anger was either justified or adequate reason to discredit the veracity of his critique.
A look at what is known about the behavior of indignant employees in public and private organizations provides a framework for understanding Aristotle’s perspective. In the early 1970s, MIT social scientist Albert O. Hirschman posited that employees who disagree with company policy have only three options: “exit, voice, and loyalty.” That is, they can (1) offer a principled resignation, (2) try to change the policy, or (3) remain loyal “team players.” Experience shows that most people choose option three, the path of least resistance. They swallow whatever moral objections they have to dictates from above, concluding that they lack power to change things or, worse, will be punished if they attempt to do so. Indeed, such “loyalty” is assumed. Most executives expect that employees will be good soldiers and not question company policy (or, if they do, will go away quietly).
But sometimes employees find the actions of employers so unconscionable that they feel they have no choice but to resign and “go public” with their objections. Typically, this is the last resort for those who have voiced disagreement internally and exhausted channels of appeal but feel they were not given a serious hearing. On rare occasions, a respected organizational insider will proffer such a principled resignation; but, typically, those who quit over matters of principle are powerless outsiders, or those who have been pushed to the extreme of quitting by the disrespect shown to them by superiors. After all, how many employees would resign if they felt they were listened to and their opinions respected, even if they didn’t get their way on a matter of principle? In general, people have to be angry as hell before they quit and go public. And because anger is such an unattractive, unsettling, and even frightening trait, angry people seldom have much influence and are easily dismissed by those in power as “out of control.”
But anger can be a socially useful fuel, as the wrathful 2004 presidential candidacy of Howard Dean illustrates. Dean seemed legitimately angry over the Bush administration’s decision to invade a country that he believed had no intent to attack America and presented no real threat to the nation’s security. His anger-fueled campaign served the purpose of mobilizing his party to challenge the administration’s war policies (those Democrats who weren’t angry enough had acquiesced to the invasion of Iraq). Even though he was a member of the opposition party, whose supposed duty is to offer loyal criticism, Dean paid a price: His hostile demeanor was ridiculed by allies and foes alike. And when Dean ultimately went red-faced wiggy on national television after a primary loss, he obviously blew it by Aristotle’s standards of appropriate anger: He got angry at the wrong place, to the wrong degree, and over the wrong issue.
In contrast to politicians, angry ex-employees risk a lot more than being mocked by late-night talk show hosts. They open themselves to attacks on their personal lives by the considerable force of their threatened institutions. That’s why most workers have to be totally teed off before they violate the norms of organizational loyalty. To get angry enough to face onslaught on one’s character and veracity requires not only fundamental disagreement over policy—typically involving the conviction that a moral principle has been violated—but also deep personal hurt. Such were the mixed motivations in recent high-profile corporate cases of whistle-blowing at cigarette-maker Brown and Williamson and at Unum Provident Insurance. In both instances, corporate leaders responded with the standard organizational defense that the whistle-blowers’ testimonies should be discounted because the ex-employees were “disgruntled” (they were portrayed as angry “nut cases” with enough skeletons in their closets to outfit a Halloween ball).
Moreover, many institutional leaders argue that employees owe loyalty to them as individuals. In contrast, whistle-blowers typically say they owe their first allegiance to their organizations. Indeed, it is when employees believe their leaders betray their organization’s integrity that their anger mounts sufficiently to justify the risks of whistle-blowing. Nothing makes formerly loyal employees angrier than values-betraying leaders who claim, “L’etat, c’est moi.” In contrast, Aristotle says the organization takes precedence over its leaders.
Hence, to the administration’s charge that such critics as former Treasury secretary Paul O’Neil, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, and Richard Clarke were “too angry” to be trusted, Aristotle would say, of course they were angry: “Those who are not angry at the things they should be angry at are thought to be fools.” If they weren’t angry, they would still be inside, loyally carrying out orders, or trying to voice disagreement through established processes. They had tried that, failed in their attempts to be heard, and then opted for vocal exits. Doubtless, it would be prettier if whistle-blowers weren’t so angry, but anger is often a necessary spur to doing the right thing. Indeed, what might have happened had Secretary of State Colin Powell allowed his reported anger over the decision to invade Iraq to overcome his military-disciplined instinct to loyally fall into line with administration policies? Had he instead resigned and publicly voiced his concerns, would Americans then have been so accepting of the questionable evidence on WMDs? Who knows? But it does seem clear that if we too quickly ignore the angry words of disgruntled former officials, fewer of them will be willing to step forward, and there will be fewer safeguards of the public interest. Aristotle adds one important admonition: “The good tempered man is not revengeful.”
As I read Aristotle, I couldn’t help but recall the most difficult career issue I have struggled with: what to do when the leaders of the organization I worked for betrayed its essential values. Because I had firmly believed in those values, my response was over-the-top emotional: I became mad as hell. When I expressed that anger to colleagues and friends, their response was, “Cool it. They’re not going to change, so it won’t do you any good to get angry. If you can’t live with the situation, then just quit. But don’t burn bridges by making a stink.” One friend went so far as to tell me that my anger was “unattractive.” Frankly, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to think about the issue and didn’t know how to behave. But because the only thing more damning that can be said about an employee than that he is “angry” is that he is “disloyal,” I bottled up my emotions, quit, and went quietly away.
Years later, the organization was still in a tailspin, and I found myself still angry and not at all certain I had done the right thing. In retrospect, I wish I had been able to analyze the issue with the help of Aristotle’s insights. After rereading what he has to say about anger, I now feel my response had been half-right, at best. I still believe I did the right thing by quitting when my bosses put themselves above the values of the organization, but I don’t think I channeled my anger in a useful way. Before I quit, I should have tried to offer them a constructive suggestion by which they could have gotten back on track. And after leaving, I think I erred in not having had the moral courage to “go public” to call attention to what was happening. Had I reached out to powerful individuals who also cared about the organization, I might have prevented the leaders from damaging its integrity. For that course to have succeeded, I would have had to be clearly acting for the good of the organization and not in a “revengeful” spirit. Aristotle’s insight that virtuous people become angry at the right time, over the right issue, and to the right degree now allows me to see that, by repressing my legitimate anger, the act of quitting not only had no constructive impact, I also made myself unhappy. Had I asked myself the questions Aristotle raises, I think I might have directed my anger more positively and gotten rid of it much sooner.
The ultimate end of all Aristotle’s philosophical exercises is ethical: He wants us to learn how to spot a moral issue, weigh the consequences of staying on the current course of action, and then apply our moral imaginations to the task of creating better alternatives. To do so effectively, we must expand our moral capabilities, which we do by developing the most human (rational) side to control or channel the least human (emotional) side. He says we acquire virtue when we habitually learn to listen to our human side and come to desire morally good things. Hence, to become virtuous, we must engage in exercises that build a disposition toward “right reasoning.” Because much of life is a matter of practical choice—should I do this or should I do that?—people who discipline themselves to view such choices as matters requiring conscious moral deliberation are those most likely to make right choices for themselves in the end.
As in psychology, the process of philosophical deliberation begins with self-awareness, often with the realization that I am not happy. To Aristotle, as to psychologists, the reasonable man or woman then asks, Why is it I am not happy? Some may answer, I am unhappy because of what others are doing to me. If so, the reasonable person will put herself out of the way of harm from others. Having done that, both psychologists and Aristotelians suggest this person should also ask, What am I doing that makes me so unhappy? And both define folly as doing more of the same: An unhappy man drinks more to make himself happy; an unhappy rich woman seeks more wealth in order to be happy; and so on down the list of things typically expected to cure unhappiness. Instead, both Aristotle and the modern psychologist call trying a new course of action the beginning of wisdom. The Ancient says this is done most effectively by engaging in a planning process in which alternative ends and means are consciously and analytically evaluated.
Let me make this process concrete by way of another example. In early 2002, the great, former basketball player, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, took a job coaching in the second-tier United States Basketball League. Significantly, he did not blame others for having failed to land a more lucrative and prestigious job in the NBA, where former stars of his caliber are more typically employed. Instead, he acknowledged that he had been a loner in his playing days, dour and standoffish, and that after he retired, he hadn’t nurtured relationships with league owners and officials: “For the longest time, I didn’t want to talk to the press or to management…. I guess I can look in the mirror and only blame myself for that.” At age 54, Jabbar saw the consequences of his own behavior in a way he couldn’t when he was younger, then he committed himself to a course of change.
When I read about Jabbar’s transformation, it dawned on me that throughout my own career, I had behaved similarly. I hadn’t attended professional meetings, hadn’t formed relationships with people who could give me access to the resources needed for an academic writer to succeed, hadn’t done most of the normal and expected things my professorial peers had done to advance their careers. It now occurred to me that this was a major reason I had never been as successful as I had hoped. Like Jabbar, in my fifties, I have been forced to conclude, “I can only blame myself for that.” With this insight, I now have to choose whether or not to change my behavior. Do I want to start schmoosing with people I sought studiously to avoid for 3 decades or keep doing things “my way”? Either way, I have to live with the consequences of my now-conscious choice.
Here’s another instance where psychologists and philosophers part company: The former believe making a choice about how we should allocate the time of our lives is related to our feelings, and the latter believe it is an intellectual and moral issue. Aristotle won’t let Jabbar and O’Toole off the moral hook by copping the plea “we were prisoners of our passions.” Many psychologists would counsel us “to go with our feelings,” but Aristotelians worry our feelings may take us in the wrong direction. Doubtless, President Clinton went with his feelings when he chose to pursue his affair with Monica Lewinsky. In fact, the reason I hadn’t done the things necessary to advance my career was that I had “gone with my feelings” of disdain for careerism and self-promotion. Like Jabbar, who went with his feelings about how and with whom he would spend his time off the court, I had avoided conferences and cocktail parties because I found the impersonal nature of such events painful.
The issue isn’t whether my actions were right or wrong back then, but rather to understand how I immaturely had failed to think through the consequences of acting on my feelings. I hadn’t made a conscious choice about how I should spend my time. Like a dumb kid, I had assumed I could thumb my nose at convention—and attending academic conventions—and still find conventional success. My fantasy wish was for success to come in a painless and easy way. Now I recognize that it was no one’s fault but my own that things didn’t work out as I had desired. The lesson for me today is that I must make conscious choices, and, to do so effectively, I must think through the probable consequences. In Aristotelian words, to become a mature person, I must “plan with my entire life in view.”
Aristotle is a great believer in personal responsibility. This should not be confused with the advice of pop psychologists who counsel each and all to be responsible for our own lives, which is true but limited. Because we were “abused children,” some psychologists tell us that we have a right to behave as self-indulgent adults and that we will find happiness if we “listen to our inner child” and pursue the fantasy goods we were denied by our ogrelike parents. In distinction, Aristotle believes we are responsible for our own character. The issue is not “forget all others; I have a right to do my own thing,” but “how can I develop my potential and be a virtuous and productive member of my community?”
To the psychologist, unhappy men and women need to think less and feel more. To the Aristotelian, they need to learn to think and desire aright. To become happy, they need to explore intellectually and rationally the nature of happiness. If they discipline themselves to engage in such moral deliberation, instead of assuming whatever direction their passions lead them is true north, they eventually might discover a coincidence between the pursuit of wisdom and virtue on the one hand, and a profound and lasting experience of real pleasure on the other.
Granted, getting out of the emotional woods involves a lot of hard work. We have to explore consciously the extent to which the pursuit of our passions leads to a good end. We have to think through what and how many material goods are necessary for a complete and virtuous life. We have to ask ourselves how we should use the time left in our lives. Finally, on discovering what we need to do to make ourselves happy, we have to commit to doing those things until they become habitual and pleasurable. None of these things is easy. But is it reasonable to assume our current course of intensifying the very actions that make us unhappy is more likely to succeed?
To quit making oneself unhappy, Aristotle says we have to ask what is ultimately good about being human, to identify which virtues are consistent with that end, to deliberate what actions we might take to live a virtuous life, and then to practice their pursuit. Most of us can’t do that effectively because our moral muscles aren’t adequately developed. Aristotle says that people in poor moral condition continue to act against their long-term self-interest, and continue to make themselves unhappy, until they engage in exercises to make themselves “fit.”
Stated his way, the task seems daunting. Yet, in practice, a surprisingly large number of mature men and women turn the trick. David Heenan’s Double Lives documents how 10 individuals with successful conventional careers decided in midlife to carve out second and third parallel vocations and avocations. For example, Lawrence Small was a senior executive in the financial industry when he decided to pursue his nonbusiness interests in anthropology, art, languages, and music. Small, now secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, divides the time of his considerably broadened life among such activities as playing flamenco guitar, collecting folk art, speaking four languages, wind surfing, scuba diving, and long-distance bicycling. He told Heenan, “I’ve done what I’ve done in terms of my many interests because I couldn’t exist happily without doing these things.”
Heenan also tells of Pat Williams, who decided not to let his relatively untaxing job as a front office executive for a professional basketball team limit his personal growth. He has written 18 books and run 13 marathons, in addition to being an active pater familias to a brood of 19 children, 14 of whom are adopted. Williams explains that leading such a full and fulfilling life requires planning: “To manage time, you’ve got to have your values lined up,” he told Heenan. “Your values have to be written down and constantly reviewed and studied.” Heenan, who has himself successfully pursued three parallel careers as a business executive, writer, and educator, suggests that the reason most of us choose to remain unidimensional workaholics instead of liberating our lives with discovery and experimentation is because we “let procrastinations, excuses, or regrets” get in the way of our dreams. His advice: “Don’t just dream—do something. Set in motion a chain of activities” that will expand horizons. In true Aristotelian fashion, he concludes, “Most of us rely on a narrow field of expertise to support our ego and self-esteem. Learn to suspend what you know to discover what you don’t know.”
If this sounds repetitive, it is, and that is the point Ben Franklin missed with his one-week virtue exercises. To change our behavior, we must repeatedly address the sources of our resistance until we finally wear them down and overcome them. We do so by surfacing the rationales we cleverly offer to protect and justify our current behavior, then logically and coolly dispel each of them over and over again in an iterative process for as long as it takes. In essence, that’s what midlife psychotherapy is about. In our forties, psychiatrists help us to explain our self-defeating behavior in terms of what others did to us in our childhood. In our fifties, Aristotelian philosophical therapy gets us to think about the ways we make ourselves miserable and what we need to do to break those habits.
So what are we to do? Aristotle says virtuous people are those who learn to (a) spot a moral issue when they see it; (b) use a disciplined process for choosing both ends and means; (c) make choices “because of themselves” (for example, repay a debt because it is due and not because you will get a bad reputation if you don’t); and (d) “proceed from a firm and unchangeable state.”
Aristotle is a realist. He understands that we each have our own equivalent of the yacht or country estate that beguiles and entraps voluptuaries, even if it is only a new PT Cruiser or a Bang & Olufsen stereo system. We all have irrational material desires that get in the way of the pursuit of real happiness. Hence, we conclude, “I’ll postpone serving on the school board until I’ve saved $400,000 for a condo in Vail.” And he recognizes that we each have our own irrational desires for acceptance and honor that are as bad for us in ounce quantities as they are for sultans by the gallon. Nonetheless, Aristotle says we all have the capacity to change those desires, and we have within us sufficient capability to choose a right course of action no matter what our starting place may be and no matter how rich, powerful, or old we are. Moreover, we have the responsibility to do so. Foremost, we are responsible for choosing the right object of our lives. So, instead of engaging in a Franklinesque exercise to identify a list of moral prohibitions, Aristotle suggests that we ask ourselves a set of tough questions about how to make the best use of the increasingly scarce time of our lives:
To what extent do I engage in moral deliberation about the ends I pursue and the means I use to pursue them?
To what extent is my pursuit of goods driven by unconscious appetites? What passions rule my behavior? What can I do to gain control over those passions and appetites?
To what extent do I behave in intemperate ways?
How can I build the habits of temperance and right desire?
When I set a moral goal, do I hold fast in its pursuit?
How can I train myself to do those things habitually that will lead to the development of my highest-order human capacities?
What moral capacity do I most need for developing self-discipline? How should I begin to develop it?
What activities do I currently find pleasurable, but which prevent me from becoming happy in the long term?
As Aristotle observes, most of us spend the first 5 decades of our lives resisting the manifest need to ask such questions. And most of us direct our boundless powers of denial to avoiding the need to pursue those virtues that, alone, can make us happy. The overarching question is, How do I start to develop the right desire to do so, and how do I then find the strength to stay the course? The answer, in part, is that we begin the process “with a little help from our friends.”