First of all, thanks to all who sent me books, warm things to wear, cookies and cards; these have been vital to maintaining my sanity as the semester winds down. We are now in finals period, and all of my kids have finished their finals already, which I guess is a lucky thing because it means that I am buried in a mound of grading a week and a half before most of the other teachers and will therefore be able to finish early and get out of Longhu for a little while. Assuming I keep working at this morning's pace, which, fueled by oatmeal and Ladytron, blazed through almost half of the exam, I'll finish by the weekend. That was too many subordinate clauses.
There have been several ideas batting around in my head. I suppose I still owe an explanation for the dancing bears photos (or at least for the title: why do people like to watch dancing bears? it's not because they're good dancers, but because they're bears...dancing), and there's some crazy news to share as well. But right now I want to try writing a little something that I've been mulling over for a while. Inspired by some conversations with Aparna (who else) and a book from G & G and the song "Seven Deadly Virtues" from the musical Camelot, I'm gonna try to find a positive spin to put on each of the seven deadly sins (just as Mordred puts a negative spin on each of the seven heavenly virtues). Some look to be easier than others. This isn't thought completely through and I'm a little crazy from the grading, so bear with me (pun intended).
The Four Horsemen
These are the engines of progress, the mighty steeds that pull society forward.
Greed/Avarice
This is one of the two that inspired me to try to complete this list. One of the most surprising ideas in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is the theory that people working in their individual best interests agregates to the greater good of society. This theory seems to be borne out pretty well by evidence that self-interested (i.e. greedy) decisions are the driving force that regulates prices in a free market, which has generally been shown to be the best way to raise the standard of living and create a more harmonious society. Apparently, 6 billion people pulling in opposing directions cancels out to a force arrow pointing forward. This apparent paradox, that doing things for yourself actually helps others, as well as its more doubtful converse, that doing things for others may hurt them in the long run, is at the center of conservative and liberatarian doctrine. It is a phenomenon that, distatefull as I find it to be, has thus far stumped all of my attempts to find any counterarguments. It is one of the centeral topics that I consider in this blog.
Pride/Vanity
This was the second inspiration for this entry. In several conversations with a variety of people (i.e. with me, myself and I; oh, and with Aparna), as well as in American Beauty the idea has come up that doing things out of vanity can actually be healthy. For instance, there are many, many people who stay in shape, or at least keep from getting tremendously out of shape because they are vain of their physical beauty. As much as I enjoy group exercise, I have definately found that if I have no one to exercise with, the only motivation that gets me off the couch is a fear of getting fat. Likewise with concerns of hygene, many people stay clean to keep their skin clear and their hair from getting greasy. Although they may do these things out of vanity, they nevertheless have the effect of keeping people healthier than they might be otherwise. Imagine that - our standards of beauty are actually standards of health! So stop bitching about overly-skinny actresses, stop watching "America's Top Model" and do a couple crunches! Pride also has the important effect of counterbalancing excesses of any of the other sins and even itself. How? People don't want to be viewed as greedy or gluttonous or lazy or envious or vain or rageful or lustful so they will temper their other impulses, if only to put forward a face of benevolence just as they will bathe and shave, if only to give that face of benevolence milky-clear skin.
Lust
Lust is a pretty easy one as well. Procreation and the continuation of the human race depends on people getting over the sometimes substantial hurdles of communicating with each other. Without lust whipping their flanks, how many people would be willing to put up with endless hours of shopping or their significant other's video game obsession? Lust, perhaps after greed, is the most Darwinian of sins: it is only natural that evolution would select for lustful organisms over those disinterested in sex.
Gluttony
Gluttony may seem a little hard to argue for in today's increasingly obese society, but in the context of history it made sense for people to eat everything they had now because they might not have enough later. Then, because of their consumption of all their resources, people would again be forced to get out and seek what they needed. In a broader sense, gluttony means not just excessive eating, but excessive consumption in general. This has been shown to help spur on consumer markets in America, and can be theorized as a way of putting on a more metaphorical sort of fat for the winter. Nevertheless, it is the vice I have the most difficulty arguing for.
The Trafic Light
Is it just coincidence that the color of envy is green and the color of rage is red? Unfortunatly my wonderful metaphor breaks down here: sloth is light blue; greed and gluttony are yellow and orange.
Envy
Green means go. Envy is the flavor-enhancer of the sins. When avarice or lust or vanity or gluttony is not enough to motivate people to do something, the sight of someone else getting the money or the girl (or boy) or the hot body or the short ribs is sometimes enough to push them over the hump and get them to do what's in their best interest. While you might argue that envy can be destructive, that people might just destroy their rivals' gains rather than pursuing their own, in practice this is generally not the case. Why? Because of anger.
Anger/Rage
At first glance, anger seemed to be a hard sin to argue for. In itself it has no particularly good results. But rage does have the advantage of acting as an emotional stop sign; it is the bitter aftertaste to envy's MSG. If envy has the pernicious side-effect of causing distructive impulses, the rage that this destruction provokes is generally enough to make the perpetrator seek out a more proactive way to feed the green-eyed monster in the future. If people were pushovers, the four horsemen would see the green and run roughshod through the halls of progres; this would create a zero-sum game or worse, where people kept taking each others toys and stomping on each other's sand castles. The vengeful reaction this provokes changes people's value calculus to make a less destructive solution the ideal.
Sloth
Like anger, sloth serves the much needed function of telling people to hold their horses, unlike anger, it does so in a way that defuses rather than ignites conflicts. If people were lustful and avaricious but not lazy, life would be like a gangster film: maybe entertaining but ultimately destructive. Gluttony, in particular, with its tendency to consume everything irrigardless of need demands a mitigating force; sloth is that force - the force of friction. Conversely, sloth on its own would result in a total lack of progress. It is in combination that these qualities balance out - the four horsemen are enough to get a slothful sinner out of bed, lazyness is enough to bring the teetering wagon back from the precipice.
This essay was intended in all humor, but I nevertheless think that it demonstrates something interesting. For whatever reason, the qualities most valued in religion (and not just Judeo-Christian religion) are typically those least present among the populace. The paradoxical thing is that these "worst impulses" appear to have been quite literally bred into us, and for good reason. The interesting side effect of this, is that while people can do things for "the right reasons" for a limited amount of time, they revel in doing things "for the wrong reasons," but it appears that there is nothing wrong about that. So long as impulses are in balance, they are ultimately good for the individual and society.
Note that there are (at least) two ways to define balance. The Aristotilian way to define balance is that each virtue is a mean between two extremes, which are vices (for instance, liberality is between prodigality and miserlyness and gentleness is between wrathfullness and timidity). While this is a step up in nuance from the standard Christian way (which ironically enough was developed after Aristotle and in part from his work) it nevertheless does not appear to properly capture the sort of balance I have theorized. A better model is the rock-paper-scissors form of balance in which each item balances one and is balanced by another. A more complex form of this is seen in Chinese philosophy, which relates the five phases (Earth, Metal, Water, Wood, Fire) to each other through both a productive and destructive cycle (thereby connecting each phase to the other four). This phase theory is then applied to everything from bodily systems to tastes and emotions. The central element of the theory is that each must be present in the proper amount, it is unbalance that causes problems. This appears to hold the most water in terms of my newly developed theory of the balance of the seven sins. Actually, the Chinese sense of balance just seems much more true to life (once you can get beyond the metaphor itself) than any of the dichotomies of Western philosophy.
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