Tag: virtue ethics

The moon and the weather – their effect on the shed door and me.

Exterior view of a potting shed with a wooden sign labeled 'POTTING SHED' in a window framed with wire mesh.

Our shed goes up and down – not in a major way but enough to make opening the door quite difficult at times. When we first put it up we’d seen enough tottering sheds to know that if you just stand them on the ground – sooner or later the footings will rot and they’ll fall over – and so our shed has foundations – a thick layer of gravel topped with sand and then capped with level paving stones. What we couldn’t have known is that our clay subsoil seems to rise and fall in harmony with the water table, thereby twisting the frame and jamming the door.

I share this entirely uninteresting fact because in my earlier reflections on the way in which gardening is the kind of practice that leads to flourishing, I left out some threads which can be woven into a bigger picture. The rising and falling of the shed always seemed to me to be down to the rising and falling of the water table. The allotment is close to the river and we have at least one small underground stream running below it. In flood conditions it occasionally breaks out from under the apple trees and runs across the surface. The piece of pipe that secures the polytunnel door is driven into the earth and you can see the water level at the bottom of it. There’s no serious hydrological kit involved at all, if the door is hard to open the foundations have dried out and QED the allotment will need watering.

I once visited a pottery factory in Wrecclesham near Farnham where they used the local clay to make traditional pots of all shapes and sizes. Their kiln, a large brick built bottle kiln had no obvious pyrometers to measure temperature and when I asked, our guide said that they didn’t use seger cones or any other indicator. They packed the kiln the same way as they’d always done, and when the pots at the top had shrunk to the same height as a corbel that you could see through a spyhole in the intense heat they knew – along with a great deal of practice – that the firing was done. It was a kind of organic knowledge rooted in history and experience.

Where’s this all going then? and what’s the moon got to do with it? Well the missing thread from the previous post was the concept of seasonality. We live in a world a world dominated by constant artificial light, supermarkets which (just for the moment) seem to be immune to the seasons and sell the same food the year round and fly it in, or drive it up from southern Spain in convoys of heavy lorries. If we want sunshine we can just travel towards it and with the benefit of air conditioning, warmth and cold only affect us on the walk from the car park.

The allotment necessarily puts us in the midst of a constantly changing seasonal world and we live in a subtly different seasonal timetable. The weather forecast becomes as important for us as it would to a farmer or a fisherman. Sunrise and sunset are as important once again to us as they were to our distant ancestors, spring, summer, autumn and winter aren’t just words any more, and anyone who reads books on gardening or farming will encounter the esoteric theories of Rudolph Steiner who wrote a great deal about horticulture and who thought that the moon emitted some sort of invisible and undetectable force that influenced the growth of plants. These days the Biodynamic method has crept in at the edges of the mainstream and the moon certainly has an effect on the tides. Our campervan is parked within 100 yards of the river Severn and we get flood warnings from the Government whenever winds, river level and tides combine to make a possible flood. As gardener I’ve always wondered whether the passing moon has any effect on groundwater and a little bit of research suggests that the moon has a greater effect on groundwater levels if you’re very close to the sea but that it also has a much lesser effect on groundwater – measured in a few millimeters at most and that the probable cause is the gravitational pull on the earth being sufficient to cause these tiny distortions.

So our understanding of the earth as an immutable lump of solid ground isn’t quite right. Times, tides, seasons, and weather systems are in constant motion around us whether or not we stop racing about and consider them in relation to our gardens and farms. When Copernicus used his mathematics to suggest the theory and later Galileo used his telescope to prove it, they risked their necks to describe the rhythmic motions of the solar system, because it upset the static view of of a universe with the earth at the centre, and bit by bit our view of the earth and our position in it began to change. Today just a few flat earthers tie their hopes to the idea of an immutable earth but all the signs point to its fragility. It’s a massively depressing thought unless we learn to live in this new dynamic which more closely resembles a complex dance or a multiverse orrery such as was invented by Phillip Pullman whose alethiometer discerns the truth in his novels. But that’s a beautiful fiction; a mythical object that tells the truth about mysteries.

So our choice is whether to retreat to the bunkers in bafflement or to see this immense mutability as a source of wonder – and here’s the link back to flourishing or if you prefer Aristotle’s word, eudaimonia . If human fulfilment can be found through the cultivation and practice of virtues until they become benign habits, then they need to be practiced in the real world, and not the wobbly stage set of “the good life”. Here’s another, longer list of the virtues:

Courage, Temperance, Generosity, Magnificence, Magnanimity, Proper Ambition, Patience, Truthfulness, Wittiness, Friendliness, Modesty, and Justice.

I hope to unpick some more threads from the delightful fleece in the coming weeks.

Two figures walking along a rocky beach with crashing waves and a misty landscape in the background.
Hell’s Mouth bay on Lleyn if you look carefully at that wave you can see how it got its English name

I really should stop writing about Cornwall.

The tin tabernacle in Cadgwith

Another wet day in Cornwall – in Camborne they’ve exceeded the biblical flood by exceeding 40 consecutive days of rain. It hasn’t been a huge problem for us down at the southernmost tip except for the lanes – there’s only one really main road and the rest are pretty much lanes anyway and they are running with water; some right across and others at both edges but all the puddles are sheltering murderous suspension wrecking potholes. If anyone’s got a spare billion pounds we could do with some of it down here.

Anyway, the upshot of the long days confined to our rented cottage on the top of a cliff is that Madame has been doing a lot of internet surfing, and today she typed in my name into Gemini and discovered that I am the landlord of a pub in Helston whose wife was once a police dog-handler but who has sadly died. In fact, according to the infallible AI, several pubs in the neighbourhood are claiming that I am their landlord – which prompted me to ask her whether it would be OK to pop down to the Five Pilchards to see my virtual wife. Madame was not amused. Much as I love Google Gemini, it makes more false connections than a village gossip, and bigamy is still a crime.

Sadly spring has not sprung nearly as much as we’d hoped so neither the plant hunting nor the moth trapping have taken up much of our time and among other things – like writing this blog – we’ve been binge watching the old DVD’s we brought down. John Schlesinger’s “Cold Comfort Farm” is one of the funniest films ever, and Ian McKellen’s sermon to the Quivering Brethren as Amos Starkadder is an act of sheer joy. I’ve even (naughtily) started sermons myself once or twice with the words “ye’re all damned”; not forgetting to grip the edge of the pulpit and stare at the congregation with sheer malevolence for fifteen seconds. But we also watched Alec Guinness’s superb performance as George Smiley in John Le Carré’s Karla trilogy. The two BBC series miss out the middle book. It was a treat, and an acting seminar, to watch Alec Guinness playing such a morally complex character. The very last words that Smiley speaks as Karla is led away, when someone says “George you’ve won” and he replies “I suppose I have” made me wish I could hug him. It was so brilliantly done; the way he managed to express the sadness and loss of winning his epic battle.

All that ambiguity sent me straight back to yesterday’s post with the thought that I’d missed an important aspect of flourishing even though I did say that it’s by no means a primrose path. When, back in the day, I talked to parents about christening, I would often find that they had an odd idea that we believed that babies are born bad and needed to be made good by baptism. Something about washing away sins had taken root in the collective understanding. Frankly I think that’s a horrible idea, but even horrible ideas deserve a bit of thought. I talked yesterday about cultivating virtuous habits – Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Courage; but I didn’t offer any idea of what the starting point might be. The idea that we’re born bad and need to be made good which I described as horrible would be one place (but totally wrong I think). On the other hand I’d find it difficult to say that we’re born perfect at the top of a greasy pole of corruption because that’s equally far fetched and nasty. So what about a working definition of what we might call the human condition which pitches us somewhere near the middle point that Aristotle was so keen for us to maintain. Then we say that we can move up or down the scale by way of good or bad habits.

Each of the four or perhaps fifteen virtues which can, in combination lead us towards flourishing and fulfilment have their counterparts which can lead us in the opposite direction; unhappiness and suffering. As an example I could mention affairs. We’re all much of a muchness in the sexual attraction stakes; many of us have primary commitments but that doesn’t stop us from meeting others that we find attractive. In a very long career of helping people through crises of their own making, one factor comes to the surface almost every time. We rarely get ourselves into trouble in one giant act of folly. We do it step by tiny step and then one day it’s too late. The same goes for any kind of addiction; food, alcohol, drugs, erotic fantasies, fraud, thieving, field botany or hoarding rubbish. Thankfully I’m not a counsellor so you needn’t worry that I’m about to offer advice but I’ll just quote a line from an ee cummings poem –

where’s too far said he

where you are said she

Notice also that I haven’t mentioned any divine punishments or rewards. That’s because I don’t believe in them. None of the purported torments of hell can measure up to the guilt and shame brought upon us by our own perversity, although there are many occasions when I wish that Danté’s circles of hell which included special places for bishops, princes, corrupt politicians and not forgetting people who didn’t give a shit about anything or anyone. Occasionally I really wish that could be true. But there are always some wicked people who seem to get away with it. On the other hand I’ve sat with some horrible people who – as they lay dying – seemed to be suffering terrible agonies of remorse. Too late!

Conversely I think that the idea we should punish ourselves and live shadow lives in order to achieve the extremely notional rewards of heaven is also wicked. The way we live our lives can’t or shouldn’t be reduced to the spreadsheets and calculus of rulebooks. Is there anything wrong with muddling along and trying very hard to learn from your mistakes?

Looking out to sea in a gale from Kynance Cove café towards Lizard point. Hot chocolate – heaven; rocks – hell.

The glory that is Pen y Ffan

Liquid sunshine they call it here. We thought we’d make a brave dash for some decent weather but the weather didn’t read the forecast as usual, and instead of drifting over Swindon it hung about here for the sole purpose of testing our resilience; but if you listen very carefully you can hear the sheep … Continue reading “The glory that is Pen y Ffan”

It’s in there somewhere …..

Liquid sunshine they call it here. We thought we’d make a brave dash for some decent weather but the weather didn’t read the forecast as usual, and instead of drifting over Swindon it hung about here for the sole purpose of testing our resilience; but if you listen very carefully you can hear the sheep on the hill, coughing. We’re immediately alongside the Monmouth and Brecon canal, which is the first place I ever saw a kingfisher – like watching a jewel burst out of the bank. The canal is well known for its red colouration – I’ll take a photo later on the way to the pub. Today when we crossed at Talybont and the water was the colour of a robin’s breast. All due, apparently, to the puddling clay they used in construction.

The rain has been continuous here in the Bannau Brycheiniog (it gives me great pleasure to give the Brecon Beacons their proper Welsh name; all the more because it’s described as some kind of woke thing and Rishi Sunak doesn’t agree with it at all.) All together now – “Bannau, Bannau, Bannau” – doesn’t that feel good?

I’ve been wondering – being interested in words – what the fine line is between ‘Inhumane’; ‘Inhuman’ and ‘subhuman’. – I mean how many virtues would you have to lack to become subhuman or even non human? Or are virtues like the magnetic field of the earth’s core, flipping from time to time. I mean honesty and compassion – they’re so yesterday. Anyway the glory of Pen y Fan is concealed behind a curtain of cloud today so if someone reading this feels able to pop up to the top and bring the real ten commandments down, because the ones that Moses brought were obviously fake; all that woke leftist claptrap about loving your neighbour and not killing people – even lying through your teeth which is an artform gets banned. Good old Boris could break all ten commandments in half a day without breaking a sweat.

Tomorrow is going to be grey but dry, and Thursday is going to be hot. I’m hedging my bets by bringing plant and fungus books. The canal is a great place for wildlife and we decided to risk a high-season break at the last minute, but we had to buy time to come here by working overtime at the stove, preserving the fruits of the allotment.

Tomas Dadford, who built the canal, took the cheapest route, following the River Usk and reducing locks to a minimum. So there’s the main road, the river and the canal, all following the same contour at different heights. There are places along the towpath where you can get lovely views over the Usk valley, and when we camped here a couple of winters ago there were also stupendous views of Pen y Fan. All very elemental.

When the going gets tough …..

The endlessly adaptable Mexican Fleabane – Erigeron karvinskianus spreading along our street year by year
Phew what a scorcher! – says the sub editor for the 10,000th time

The Met Office defines a heatwave as a period of three days or more when the temperature rises above the expected. So no argument then! we’re in a heatwave; something I guess most of us in the UK would have known without the benefit of the definition. However, definitions sometimes throw up potential problems such as this one. In a time of global heating what’s expected? Upon what form of statistical calculation is that decision made. Is it the average temperature? the mean temperature? – and what happens when the temperature is rising year on year? Even if the mean June temperature is calculated over the past five, ten or even fifty years, it will surely rise; and at what point will the media be dutifully reporting a cold snap because the mean June temperature falls below a level that we’ve become wearily accustomed to. Maybe we need an alternative way of expressing the impact of temperature rises – for example excess deaths; the effect on crops; the price and availability of food; the water levels in the reservoirs; pollution in rivers as the reduced dilution effect of dry weather gives the game away ?

Of course, what we usually do in the real world is lament the idiocy of politicians who are too cowardly to address the crisis, and get on with it as best we can. Here at the Potwell Inn we’re getting up early and going to the allotment soon after seven o’clock so we can get three or four hours in before it’s too hot to work any more. Some jobs are much harder – for instance setting out young plants when temperatures are likely to rise to 30 C (86 F). They need intensive care from day one. The simplest manual jobs like tilling a bed or raking in compost or fertilizer can be exhausting, and watering becomes a test of stamina. At its worst I can walk 10000 steps between the water troughs and the allotment.

But there’s an upside too. After a seemingly endless winter in our flat we both felt thoroughly seedy and out of condition, but now we’re suntanned and as fit as fleas. Allotmenteering is both a physical and also an intellectual challenge – trying to predict what might happen next. I suppose you could say it resembles sailing, inasmuch as reading the weather almost becomes an obsession. We look to see where the wind is coming from. South westerlies can be warm but they also bring rain in from the Atlantic. A cold easterly can decimate fruit blossom and kill tender plants – we lost our Tarragon and Rosemary as well as an established Clematis during the winter and any heavy rain or snow can be destructive of plants or netting. It’s no use thinking “I’m not going out in this” because staying in might cost you your crop or your nets.

So we don’t feel in the least downhearted about this heatwave because, like the Mexican Fleabane in the photo, we can – if we work at it – adapt to all manner of changes. Don’t for a minute imagine that I’m saying we can adapt ourselves out of catastrophic climate change without changing our whole lifestyle. What I am saying is that being hard-up for most of our lives, being prepared to keep the household just about going by earning a living wherever it’s possible is a great training in resilience – I’ve washed up in a hotel, driven buses, been a rather poor welder, a groundsman, a night cleaner in a factory, worked nights on my own in a rat infested factory sawing large blocks of polystyrene foam into sheets, and worked in a prison and a couple of old style mental hospitals. I can cook, clean and grow stuff and of course I worked as a parish priest for 30 years and I think I learned a great deal about being human or how not to be human. Madame has a very similar skill set and so we muddle along contentedly together, knowing that a good life doesn’t depend on having a Range Rover.

I’ve been reading a short article by Prof Massimo Pigliucci in “Philosophy Now” which I picked up from a newspaper stand before I looked at the price. Anyway the article lists six ethical ideals shared by almost all the world’s faiths. This is a long way from religion in the commonly understood sense. These values are:

  • Practical wisdom
  • Justice / morality
  • temperance / moderation
  • fortitude / courage
  • Humanity
  • Transcendence (gratitude, hope, spirituality

This group of dispositions broadly represents what’s usually called Virtue Ethics. To risk simplifying the idea so much it becomes a parody, these kind of dispositions, when internalised and lived out in everyday life, are the most effective guidance we have for flourishing – not for getting rich, or amassing honours and power but simply flourishing, being / becoming human. When you think about it it would be hard to express a better wish list for gardeners, nurses, or so-called captains of industry.

There’s a kind of grim satisfaction in knowing that when the climate catastrophe finally strikes us, the wealthy can only hope to buy a few more years of absolution from the bletted fruits of their behaviour before they realise they’ve got no talent for being human and no skills to change themselves. The snake oil salesmen and the invisible Seventh Technological Cavalry will have fled, and their last moments will be spent howling at a blackened sky like Violet Elizabeth Bot “I’ll thcweam and I’ll thcweam and I’ll make mythelf thick!”

At last! I’ve changed the blog tagline

The tin tabernacle in Cadgwith; Lizard, Cornwall last winter.

The penny dropped very suddenly today – hardly a Damascus Road conversion but a sudden realization that the original tagline “A sceptic’s take on being human”, which I’ve put up with for over three years, was not right. After a wonderful day catching up with old friends yesterday – almost entirely by accident – something moved in what passes for an operating system in my head, and the thought emerged that what this blog is about is not so much being human as being virtuous. I must immediately qualify that statement because there have been many people in my life who thought that being virtuous was a matter of obeying rules; but what I’m about to argue here is that being virtuous (perhaps being a moral grown-up) is more useful state of being than trying to do virtuous things. We can hardly avoid being human – after all every single member of our present lamentable government is human and see where that’s got us!

This isn’t some brave new philosophical world – virtue is fundamental to Aristotle’s ethics and it’s centred on the idea of flourishing – eudaemonia in the original Greek. There are several ways to try to steer a moral course through the ethical challenges that being human always presents us with. We can choose what to do in response to a challenge by asking “What would be the consequences of this response?” We could look up the appropriate response in a trusted book, like the Bible or the Koran (harder than you’d think), or we could trust the instincts formed over time in our character by living virtuously. Right habits have a vital role in this system; we figure out how to do the morally right thing since we are formed by our way of life because it is shaped by Aristotle’s four cardinal virtues prudence, temperance, courage, and justice. Other virtues like compassion are often slipped into the mix.

That was a bit chunky I know but the takeaway point is that in a situation such as we have at the moment with a sequence of climate, economic, ecological and political disasters advancing on us; relying on a set of rules from the past that have demonstrably failed us, is not enough. As Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Rule bound ethics (and economics) aren’t up to the job. Neither are consequential ethics because it’s almost impossible to judge what the outcome of an action might be – as Dostoyevski famously put it in “The Brothers Karamazov” speaking of a cruelly treated child whose mother thought that the concept of good and evil could be beaten into her – “The whole world of knowledge is not worth the tears of that little child to ‘dear God.'” 

The question I ask myself over and over – especially during sleepless nights – is “why?” – “Why do people/politicians make such dreadful decisions. Who designed the Flechette – the weapon packed with sharp plastic arrows that slice and rend the flesh but are invisible to x rays? Who concealed the evidence that glyphosate was killing people and destroying the environment? Who taught the philosophy that extractive chemical based farming is more efficient than the many alternatives we know about? Why is it OK that we have so many people living in poverty? The answer can’t be that such people are not really human because they’re as human as you or me. What they lack is virtue.

It may be that our crisis is so great that for a while we will have to become temporary consequentialists in the sense that the consequences of doing nothing are so terrible that we must insist and prevent that outcome. But ultimately any workable vision for the future must depend on teaching and leading our children in the practice of virtue, of flourishing, and living lives in which moral decisions are approached thoughtfully and on the basis of lived experience. That amounts to nothing less than changing our culture.

The consequences of magical thinking have never been clearer or more dangerous than they are at the moment and yet we still cling to the sinking life raft believing that something’s bound to turn up – a new invention, a better leader, an invasion of unexpectedly helpful extra terrestrials …… ? Meanwhile we are taking refuge in anger, shouting and threatening and lobbying for ever more draconian punishments to inflict on our enemies. But we have seen the enemy ……. it is us”