Amazon Review

As always, a "helpful" vote would be appreciated.

				The Four Cardinal Virtues by Josef Pieper Edition: Paperback Price: $17.27		72 used & new from $3.55
A Common Sense Guide to a Life "Fully Alive.", November 19, 2012 This review is from: The Four Cardinal Virtues (Paperback) This book cannot be praised enough. In it, Josef Pieper lays out the dimensions and interrelationships of the four cardinal virtues - Faith, Justice, Fortitude and Temperance. Pieper brings the virtues to life within the life of the reader in a way that modern readers obtain something that modern society does not equip them with, i.e., a vocabulary to talk about the really big ideas without which life is not worth living, which vocabulary is provided care of the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas. For example, we learn from Pieper some surprising things about that most prosaic of virtues - prudence. Prudence, according to Pieper, is nothing more, and nothing less, than a person's acceptance of reality. This virtue requires that a person cultivate openness toward truth, an awareness of truth when it is presented to him, and a willingness to submit to truth. This last, then, requires the cultivation of "docilitas" - the ability to take advice - and a willing to be silent so as to allow reality to intrude into the person's mind. Prudence is the "first virtue." Without prudence, no one can be just or temperate or persevering because these virtues must conform to reason, which, in turn, requires a conformity with reality. "The good of man consists in being in accord with reason." (p. 24.) Pieper explains why a narcissist can never truly be virtuous: "Whoever looks only at himself and therefore does not permit the truth of real things to have its way can be neither just nor brave nor temperate - but above all he cannot be just. For the foremost requirement for the realization of justice is that man turns his eyes away from himself." (p. 21 - 22.) The Four Cardinal Virtues is filled with these kinds of quick, aphoristic insights that made me experience a "eureka" moment where Pieper crystalized something I had known but didn't know that I knew since I lacked the ideas and the vocabulary. Pieper then tackles justice, temperance and fortitude. "Justice is a habit whereby a man renders to each one his due with constant and perpetual will." (p. 44.) Pieper observes that with this definition arises the implication that something precedes justice, namely "what is due" or the right of the person to whom something is due. From this insight Pieper explores a Thomistic, communitarian view of justice that avoids the excesses of individualism and totalitarianism. Fortitude, or bravery, is the next virtue. Fortitude cannot exist without prudence: "only the prudent man can be brave." (p. 123.) Without prudence, an action can be stupid or rash or overly timid depending on circumstance. Prudence precedes fortitude by indicating the right level of bravery appropriate to the circumstance. Likewise, without justice there is no fortitude. (p. 125.) "'Not the injury but the cause makes martyrs,' says St. Augustine." Often forgotten in this day age as a virtue, fortitude carries with it a positive relationship to (just) wrath. (p. 130.) the passion that motivates a person to the willingness to attack evil is a virtue, although it seems that most moderns and modern Christians prefer a milk-toast approach to this virtue. Temperance is the fourth virtue. Today, temperance is associated with bodily pleasures, but the classic temperance included spiritual temperance as well, such as the virtue that regulates the desire for knowledge being "studiositas" as compared to the pathological need for sense perception which is the vice of "curiositas." (p. 198 - 199.) It is a worthwhile exercise to read the section on temperance to see how moderate St. Thomas Aquinas and the Catholic tradition is when it recognizes that virtue is the means between two antipodal vices. Even a disordered turning toward the goods of the world is not necessarily a mortal sin if it does not involve a turning away from God. (p. 173.) Even fasting can be a sin if done to strenuously because it is against reason to overtax nature. (p. 183.) Modern libertines, who can only imagine an either/or world - either all sexual activity is good or we face a world of repression and prudery - would benefit from seeing the nuance that comes from looking at the world as if it had three poles - not two -with two being the extreme of behaviors and the third being the mean in between. This is a great book for us modern barbarians who need more than a little bit of classical wisdom to find our way to a truly human life. "The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God." - St. Irenaeus Comment | Permalink

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.

Public Discourse and the Virtue of Prudence.

The foundation of every virtue is prudence because every virtue is an habit, and every habit is an act, and every act is a moment when the will makes a decision in the concrete and particular facts of the situation. According to Joseph Pieper, "The meaning of the virtue of prudence, however, is primarily this: that not only the end of human action but also the means for its realization shall be in keeping with the truth of real things. This in turn necessitates that the egocentric "interests" of man be silenced in order that he may perceive the truth of real things, and so that reality itself may guide him to the proper means for realizing his goal." (Josef Pieper, the Four Cardinal Virtues, p. 20.)

This Washington Examiner article provides a nice insight into how true self-knowledge plays a role in our knowledge of the truth, which, in turn, plays a role in the virtue of public discourse. The article examines the recent study by "partisan liberal" Jonathon Haidt which statistically demonstrates that not only are liberals deluded about their ability to understand the views of other people, but that conservatives actually have such an ability:

"A liberal can talk coherently about what the conservative view is because people like me actually do listen," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said in an interview last year. "We don't think it's right, but we pay enough attention to see what the other person is trying to get at. The reverse is not true. ... The other side has dogmatic views."

Is this true? Are liberals like Krugman more open-minded than their conservative counterparts? Do they understand conservative views better than conservatives understand liberal views? University of Virginia psychology professor Jonathan Haidt has actually studied these questions, and the answers appear to be "no." In fact, the exact opposite seems to be the case.

In his new book, "The Righteous Mind," Haidt describes a study in which more than 2,000 Americans were asked to fill out questionnaires asking them how much they agreed with statements like this one: "I think it's morally wrong that rich children inherit a lot of money while poor children inherit nothing."

One-third of respondents were asked to fill out the questionnaire according to their own views. One-third were asked to fill it out as they thought a "typical liberal" would. And the last third were asked to fill out the survey as if they were a "typical conservative."

Haidt found that moderates and conservatives could accurately predict how liberals and conservatives would judge each statement. But liberals were far less capable of mirroring their ideological counterparts' thinking. Those describing themselves as "very liberal" did worst. Apparently, contra Krugman, the more liberal you are, the less able you are to understand other people's beliefs.

And:

Haidt, who was raised by liberal Jewish parents near New York City and has voted as "a partisan liberal" in every presidential election, later explains how this moral blindness can affect us all.

Liberals, Haidt argues, fail to appreciate the "moral capital" that successful societies have built up over years of cultural evolution. "Moral capital" includes the values, virtues and institutions in a society that "enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible."

When liberals passed the well-meaning welfare programs of President Johnson's Great Society, they failed to anticipate how the new system "increased out-of-wedlock births and weakened African American families."

This blindness is not confined to American liberals like Krugman. Lord John Maynard Keynes, the intellectual father of liberal economics, said the following of himself and his college friends: "We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom, experience, and self-control to do so successfully. ... We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions, and traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists."

And in case you thought Keynes might have gained some humility as he aged, he later added: "I remain, and always will remain, an immoralist."

Keynes and Krugman are just the latest in a long line of thinkers that suffer from what Haidt calls the "rationalist delusion," or the belief that one can simply deduce all moral truth through reason alone. "The rationalist delusion is not just a claim about human nature," Haidt writes. "It's also a claim that the rational caste (philosophers or scientists) should have more power." Or in the case of Keynes and Krugman, that economists should have more power.

Not that conservatives have any kind of monopoly on moral truth. Haidt believes that although conservatives "do a better job of preserving moral capital," liberals are better at noticing "certain classes of victims" and fighting corporate power. But conservatives who understand that such positive qualities exist in liberals should not necessarily expect reciprocation.

And that last part ties directly into the failure of public discourse in our culture. Without prudence - which is nothing more than "knowing the truth" - the virtues of justice and tolerance and temperance cannot properly function.

Via Mark Shea, who opines:

It certainly comports with my experience here in ultra-violet Blue Seattle. I suspect there are Mississippi Klansmen more open to new ideas and the blandishments of reality than some of the Lefties I’ve worked with at the University of Washington. I remember one woman handing me a book catalog full of stuff like the Federalist Papers and the writings of the Founding Fathers and her sole concern was not the actual content of the books, but simply whether or not the publisher was “conservative”. She had an absolutely primitive and visceral fear of contracting ritual impurity if The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin was purchased from a publisher with the wrong tribal allegiances.

His caution to conservatives not to by into tribal allegiance is dead on.