I’ve worked in a number of places where making some kind of a judgement about people was necessary. Working in a prison, for instance, I don’t think I ever met someone who was fully guilty of the crime they’d been sentenced for. Even those who shared their crimes with me would almost always fail to mention the worst bits. As school governors we got so used to inflated references that we rarely took them into account. On one occasion a reference had been forged by a family member who was a headteacher. When writing references there was an accepted code that meant any reference that failed to recommend the applicant “without reservation” would almost always be spiked. Once, even on an appointment committee, we only discovered later that a teacher we took on a five star reference added at the last minute was inserted into the shortlist by his brother in law who used his muscle as an HMI. Perfect humans always turn out to be ‘human humans’. It was an arduous task to sort the sheep from the goats and we didn’t always get it right. Most of us hardly know the answer to whether we’re sheep or goats either, and so the business of writing a CV or a job application; training to be a lawyer or standing for parliament becomes a tremendous ethical struggle. Of course the really bad ones just lie about it and often rise to the top very quickly.
When my Dad died I didn’t feel able to take his funeral service. I never had any doubt that he loved me and that I loved him, albeit in our own fashion; but our relationship was quite challenging. He came back from war service badly physically and psychologically damaged, his mother had died when he was very young, his father was absent from his life for his early years – away fighting in Afghanistan (does it ever end?) So he suffered from agoraphobia, often drank too much and lived on valium for years. My mum became his unhappy carer. I was a very difficult and challenging adolescent and so it was all very reactive and neither of us was any good at it.
Anyway we eventually patched things up, largely through our shared interest in politics but when he died – the day after he asked me to shave him for the first and only time – (which became a sacramental memory) – I decided to let someone else take the service. But having heard hundreds of dishonest and misleading funeral addresses I wrote a couple of A4 sheets telling the real story, assuming that he would use it as a crib sheet and embed it into his address. He didn’t. He just read it out! and afterwards our oldest son said “That was the darkest sermon I’ve ever heard”.
Steering a middle course between reckless honesty and downright misrepresentation is one of the basic habits that characterise the virtues I wrote about yesterday – Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Courage. Truth telling without spite (Justice) is one of the leading virtues – so Aristotle taught – to achieve eudaimonia, flourishing. Thirty years in Parish ministry taught me that there were many things you should say in a funeral address and many that you should never – ever – mention. On one occasion I took a service for a notorious adulterer, whose son, during his address, brought the house down by saying that his dad was a great comfort to the ladies of the village. Piloting a course between the utterly bland and the offensive truth is a skill that not everyone learns. I became an authority on tasteless best-man speeches and woefully incompetent attempts at funeral addresses as well as attempts to deceive me. I developed a nose for fibs. The churchyard was full of saints and the prison was full of innocent men.
So how on earth can we be expected to elect virtuous politicians in a society that’s wedded to dishonesty and even applauds when they appear to get results? Or perhaps to add some nuance to the question – is it even important to elect virtuous politicians? and further to that question how is it that we have fallen into the habit of electing quite so many crooks and hopeless incompetents? Is it because we’ve convinced ourselves that they’re better at getting things done because they make difficult problems look easy by not overthinking. Aristotle had something to say about that too. For him the highest virtue of all was widom; sophia; contemplation. So however decisive and quick to act a politician aspires to be, if they’ve got a mind like a collapsed souffle they’ll be no good. But mostly the old adage that if it looks like a turd and smells like a turd it’s probably a turd, applies in spades to those seeking positions of power. Sheer cleverness isn’t enough. Prudence, justice, temperance and courage are an interwoven set of human dispositions that are not the same as stature or hair colour or whether you drive a Lamborghini. They’re learned habits that, with practice, infuse our lives and help us to flourish – and a flourishing human is easy to spot in the flesh; harder to expose when all we’ve got to go on is a social media profile; but equally you can’t describe yourself as virtuous if a five minute search on the same social media will contradict that claim with solid evidence that you’ve been downright wicked, thoughtless. mendacious and cruel. “Useful” doesn’t count among the virtues.
As we go through the polytunnel and tend our tomato plants in the summer, we can decide, with a high level of confidence, which plants are flourishing and which are not. Any farmer worth their salt will be able to run their hands along a sheep’s back and know if they’re good. So why is it that we’re so rubbish at detecting the same things in humans? Or am I just a hopeless romantic??
