No Hypocrites, No Heroes, No Humble Worship
One kind of creativity is making unexpected connections. Wodehouse excelled at this kind of creativity. I just read where Fink-Nottle, on a vegan diet, started weeping at a sunset, because the color reminded him of a nice, underdone slice of beef.
Most of my creativity comes to me second hand. Providence makes the connections for me. “Look on this picture, and on this,” Providence says, and all I have to do is look, and think.
The concept of worship has been on my mind lately. That started back in July with Bruce Charlton’s essay asking why we should worship God. It’s hard to answer questions about worship without knowing what worship is, and I didn’t quite. I first tried to define worship. But the question lingered.
Last week at General Conference the brethren kept mentioning worship, mostly in passing, but as something obviously important and obviously good. Elder Eyring’s comment on hero worship particularly caught my attention. Elder Eyring seemed to define hero worship as “the feelings we sometimes have of admiring heroic figures.”
Then Bruce Charlton brought worship up again.
Taken all together, it was clear that in one hand Providence was holding out worship for examination.
This week Providence opened its other hand. Two links came in to the Virtue that Has No Name post. (Both links were from interesting essays in their own right. See here and here.) One of the links came from a blog I’m not familiar with, so I scrolled down a little. There was a post on . . . worship:
The one thing we must always do is worship God.
-thus the Cry in the Dark blog.
I took the hint.
The meat of the post
In large part, worship is the orientation we assume towards a being that is far above us in some capacity. Hero worship has that orientation. So does worshipping God, naturally. It’s probably even true in the heady kind of knight-and-damsel romance, where you “worship the ground she walks on.” The lover’s adoration does not mean that his beloved is superior to him in everything. But it does mean that she has a quality, womanliness and femininity, which he respects and admires and in which she very much exceeds him.
The virtue with no name is the selfless quality of loving and respecting values that you don’t excel at. It is the cripple who admires athletic excellence, the sinner who condemns his own sins, the good loser who admits that the competition was fair, the fox who refuses to lie that the grapes were sour.
Juxtaposed, worship and the virtue that has no name are obviously in the same territory. Worship, in fact, looks like an application of the nameless virtue. The act of worship is intrinsically an acknowledgement of some goodness that you lack.
For some years I’ve been puzzled how all the parts of the modern structure fit together. Equalitarianism, relativism, deconstruction of heroes, and the cult of authenticity are all pillars of the great and spacious building. But why those pillars in particular? Was it just coincidence? One answer is that the modern structure is only secondarily a set of ideas. At root it was and is a myth or a story of pre-civilized life in a Garden of Eden setting where there no wants, no sins, and no social structure. The story connects the ideas.
But the nexus of worship and the nameless virtue reveals that the ideas are themselves connected. They are companion vices.
Here’s a diagram showing the nameless virtue and its linked vices.
The vice that opposes the nameless virtue is the cult of authenticity. When authenticity becomes a cult it says you do whatever your inmost child says to do, because any mismatch between who you are and how you feel, on the one side, and what you advocate and claim to be good, on the other, is inauthentic.
When put that way, it becomes clear why the cult of authenticity leads to moral relativism. Any objective moral standard creates the possibility, really the certainty, that people will fall short of the standard. Which would make them inauthentic. So objective moral standards must go. But if objective moral standards must go, heroes must go too. What makes a hero a hero is some kind of excellence far beyond the norm. By definition, however, most of us will be at the norm. Therefore recognizing true heroism would recognize a yawning gap between what we value and who we are. That yawning gap is very inauthentic. So heroes must go. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that progressive Christianity tends to downplay Christ as a real person. If the atonement is more than a metaphor, it starts to look pretty damn heroic.) If necessary, heroes must be helped to go with a little subversion. Did you know Washington didn’t cut down the cherry tree? True story. Also he was gay.
No heroes mean no God. God is manyfold what heroes are. (Or, if there is a God, he is a buddy object, not an object of awe). The cult of authenticity also demands equalitarianism. Any recognition that people aren’t completely equal means that some people are better than others. It entails the old mismatch between who we are and what we value. So meaningful differences must go. There can still be differences. They just can’t matter. In particular, the differences can’t lead to different outcomes on things people value, like status or prosperity.
The god within is a jealous god.
Filed under: Deseret Review | Tags: Bruce Charlton, cult of authenticity, LDS, Mormon, Mormonism, nameless virtue
Thrasymachus
October 9, 2014
Here’s something about pagan heroes I wrote, tangentially related-
http://acryinthedarkblog.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/the-existential-hero/
Bruce Charlton
October 9, 2014
I’m following these articles, but for whatever reason I am not, so far, able to ‘get’ what you are saying or why – despite re-reading. The diagrams I find completely baffling! I shall await developments…
G.
October 10, 2014
Bruce C.,
they are amateur forays into the study of virtue. Like something a Confucian would do if he were a Christian.
The diagrams show relationships between virtues and vices. Virtues have vices that distort them or parody them, and they have vices that are simply their opposite. Each virtue also has another virtue that in a sense is its opposite. So in this diagram, the Nameless Virtue and Sincerity are at least superficially in tension with each other. This might be clearer if instead of Sincerity I called that virtue Integrity–the virtue of consistency and wholeness between the your speech, your actions, your thoughts, and your feelings, and your present and past selves.
If you don’t get the diagram, it may be because I have the relationships wrong. If so, I’d welcome your pushback.
Or it may be that you simply don’t see what the point is. Here’s the point for me: discovering implicit truths about the virtues and vices that we aren’t fully consciously aware of. For instance, the above diagram reveals that there is a virtue that our society has so suppressed that we don’t even have a name for it. In this particular post, contemplating the particular complex of virtues and vices that I’ve diagrammed here, and contemplating it in conjunction with my study of what worship is, has revealed deep connections between some of the fundamental vices of the modern structure that I wasn’t fully aware of. Here’s another example–seeing that the Nameless Virtue and Sincerity/Integrity are in some sense in opposition to each other prompts a line of thought on how to reconcile them that eventually leads to repentance and the atonement. That is something we already fully believe, but arriving at it from a new angle adds depth and color. For me, it also strengthens my testimony when I find that the same truths have multiple avenues that lead to them.
The diagram method is part of a larger creative method that you use yourself, although I don’t think you are fully aware of it. This creative method consists of identifying some formal method or insight, then running a bunch of different facts though it to see what shakes loose. I think of it as the grist-and-mill method: the formal method or insight is the mill, into which you throw as much grist as possible. The method can seem a little mechanical or artificial, and probably it isn’t the deepest kind of creativity. But so many people overlook it anyhow that it usually yields results when tried. Also, I find that doing something like this is a spur to creativity in general. Unexpected insight in one area sensitizes the mind to unexpected insight simpliciter.
You and your colleague Woodsley, if I got the name right, are doing grist-and-mill with your deleterious mutations insight. You keep tossing in different stuff like Mouse Utopia, sexual reproduction, child mortality, species extinction, and coming up with novel understandings as a result.
For this creative method to work, the mill doesn’t have to be an absolute and fundamental truth. It just has to a practical, workable approach. I’m not convinced that understanding virtues and vices as opposed and parodying pairs is the basic inmost truth about them. Neither am I convinced that deleterious mutation is as much the basic question of evolution as you seem to think, though no doubt important. But that really doesn’t matter for the purpose of generating new insight.
Bruce Charlton
October 10, 2014
That’s helpful, thanks.
J. Greenwood
October 12, 2014
So the nameless virtue is being god-fearing (in awe of God)?
G.
October 12, 2014
Of course no one would have idea what you meant if you said that being God-fearing was the opposite of being authentic, but at a deep level I think you are absolutely right.
Zen
October 13, 2014
Ok, I may only be a theologian of the most amateur sense, but we are speaking the English Language. We have mugged countless languages for their vocabulary. If we don’t have a word, we invent it. We need a name here.
G.
October 14, 2014
My creative juices are running low. Any thoughts?
Patrick Henry
April 6, 2015
http://www.henrydampier.com/2015/04/authenticity-is-bullshit/
TE
May 11, 2015
Here’s a theory, the virtue that has no name is the “meekness,” of the beatitudes.
G.
May 11, 2015
I like it, TE. Meekness has always needed a little something to distinguish it from humility.
Andrew M.
June 22, 2015
It seems I’m a bit late to this convo, but I’ll add my 2 cents. I had a good long think about this un-named virtue. It may be difficult to name, since virtues and vices often seem to have nebulous borders with their neighbors.
When I started looking for a name for this virtue, I thought of words that have been subverted and attacked by culture to undermine their meaning (because the natural man desires we become cynical about virtue). The virtue word that came to my mind was “piety” (and its nuanced neighbors).
Being pious is to look outside of one’s self and to see duty and obligations from God and decency in our environment and making an honest attempt to fulfill/comply with/obey those obligations. Hypocrisy, focusing on the honors of men, distorts piety by attempting to appear as good without actually being good. Self-authenticity looks inward and opposes piety because serving the inward feelings supersedes external duties and obligations placed on one by Heavenly Father. Anciently, the abdomen could be the symbol of gluttony, but was considered the seat of the deepest feelings. Some people allow themselves to be ruled by their worldly desires and inward feelings, rather than the sovereign God who ought to be their Ruler.
Phillipians 3:18 (For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ:
19 Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.)
I try to pay more attention to words that culture attacks. “Sanctimony” used to mean the character of a holy person, but since the 1800s, it has been used near universally as ironic or pejorative (since the definition has shifted a la “gay”). “Pious,” “piety,” and “holy” seem to be getting the same treatment lately. Modernity is continuing to sneer at virtue. I think we have crossed the threshold where when these words are used, someone is really accusing someone of hypocrisy, or cynically mocking others who are genuinely trying to do good as they understand it.
G.
June 22, 2015
* I thought of words that have been subverted and attacked by culture to undermine their meaning*
That sounds like a very useful mental exercise. I’ll have to try it myself.
That connection to the abdomen and deep feelings and the sins of authenticity is truly excellent.
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