Let’s give virtue a hand

Let’s give virtue a hand

In our high schools and colleges you will often find that the BMOC (Big Man on Campus) is a student engaged in the central attraction of that institution. On the campus where football is king the BMOC is a football player, on the campus where basketball is king the BMOC is a basketball player, on the campus where scholarship is king the BMOC—wait a minute, who ever heard of a campus where scholarship is king. This is, perhaps, a slight exaggeration, I am sure such a campus must exist, somewhere.

In the 1920s the campuses where “the most far-reaching revolution of the twentieth century was born in an idyll: a picturesque park in Copenhagen, a quiet side street in Berne, the shore of the island of Heligoland, the meadows and tree-shaded river at Cambridge, the…” In these European campuses the young geniuses of physics, the BMOCs of the century, gave birth to “the tremendous transformation of the scientific view of Nature could only be compared with the change of outlook brought about by Copernicus.” The age of the atom was midwifed by this small group of geniuses.

If a high school or college were to shift emphasis from football to basketball, over night the BMOC would change. I think that we Americans, and probably others, need to shift emphasis from what Kuhn identified as Normal Science to those domains of knowledge that are commonly called the Social Sciences. Physicists have been our BMOC but I claim that we need to develop a climate that fosters public concern upon matters that are identified as virtue.

Virtue, according to John Dewey, is “Every natural capacity, every talent or ability, whether of inquiring mind, of gentle affection, or of executive skill, becomes a virtue when it is turned to account in supporting or extending the fabric of social values”. In other words, the virtuous person is s/he who directs a personal talent toward the betterment of the community.

I am informed by Ernest Becker that many social scientists have accepted the notion that ‘value judgments’ or ‘moral questions’ are rationally undecidable. As such, most social theorists “simply assume that any agent, who acts on the basis of a moral principle, or a social norm, is not rationally justified in doing so. This is what underlies the widespread tendency among social theorists to assume that instrumental action is the only form of rational action, and that norm-governed action must have some kind of nonrational source, such as conditioning, socialization, or habit.”

I am not schooled in the social sciences but I have spent some time trying to learn these ideas about which the social sciences deal. I know enough about these matters to conclude that our society needs to put much greater emphasis in these domains of knowledge. Our focus seems to be entirely on the natural sciences and that emphasis is reveled in the success of these sciences. However I think we overemphasize the natural sciences at the expense of the social sciences.

I think that society needs to reevaluate our value systems in order to create a consensus about how to reevaluate our value systems, i.e. we need to make social scientists our new BMOCs. What do you think?

putting the cart before the horse always works…

let’s just destroy morality and laws all together and pay more taxes…

-Imp

Pussy is important. I think it is the non-rational source (evolutionarily rational, but somewhat subconscious) referenced above.

A long time ago I read Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac” wherein he discussed the need to “make a virtue of necessity.”

The idea was (I think; because he didn’t actually say any of this but it’s what I gleaned from it) that protecting our environment is an absolute necessity, but no market incentives or laws or regulations or any other method would ever get people to do the right thing, save one: Virtue.

People need to perceive something as virtuous in order to expend their time and energy trying to be that way. And, it’s a peer thing. People don’t want to be virtuous for virtues’ sake. They want to be virtuous because the virtue is seen by the peer group as admirable quality that others seek in us. In other words, we want to be liked. But when you get down to the nub, virtue is sexy. We don’t want to be liked nearly so much as we want to be fucked and loved by a beautiful chick. Whatever attracts beautiful women is virtuous.

So, if greed is good, then greed will be a virtue that people seek to embody. If being a foot ball jock, movie star, captain of industry, musician, sullen artist/poet, blah blah blah is seen as a virtue, then people will go for it. But NONE of those things are “necessary.” Saving the environment IS necessary, so how do you get saving the environment to be hip, cool, and virtuous?

Well, just like Corvettes, six pack abs, a mansion, or whatever; chicks have to want it in you. If all women started doling out the pussy based upon globally necessary (as opposed to biologically, procreativily necessary) traits in a man, then, overnight, the world would change.

What kind of chick would hang out with Skin Heads? Or Goths? Or whatever? What kind of chick would hang out with Donald Trump? Why are there even Republican women? Don’t they know better?

If there is a “female trait” of social concern and caring and non-aggression and non-war, and stewardship of Mother Earth, then why don’t they use it as a bargaining chip? Sure, some men of power think they can’t be bargained with, and some are in so much competition with other men that they forget to get laid when they get home at night, if they even get home, but social ostracizing will cure that quickly.

Well, in the end, female biology says power in a man is a good thing and they will compromise all their better values and marry a fat, round, weak, white, lazy, genetically inferior piece of crap like Rush Limbaugh because he’s got money and power, before they will marry a lean, mean, dreadlocked, Earth Daddy from Eugene who rages against the machine.

How do we get the women to do the right thing? Hell, even if we could convince them of the virtues of their innate “good” traits, it’s not like they would unite. After all, they are in competition with each other to a certain extent.

The answer is their kids.

Their kids do not yet face a dire enough threat to cause women to torque dicks out of necessity. Even the otherwise liberal, educated soccer mom ran to George Bush like a maiden in distress when he said Osama was after their children.

No, what we need is more asthma, more anti-biotic resistant super bugs, more cancer, more restless leg syndrome, more ADD, more bi-polar, more depression, more mad cow disease, more pollution, more dead children, and all kinds of shit like that. But even more than that, we need to educate women and the scientists need to start tying these physical ailments of children to the environmental degradation habits of man. We need them to show that the answer is not Zamtoprylozac or some other profit-making treatment of symptoms, instead of treatment of the disease. We need a wake up call.

We can’t merely get to the point that Al Gore has gotten with global warming; where people are almost convinced that you are an idiot if you still doubt it. No, we need to go further than that. We need to make action on the issue a virtue, including the action of ostracizing the idiots. And no, I’m not advocating the squelching of honest scientific or philosophical debate. I’m just saying that when push comes to shove, science can’t sit at the table and discuss Genesis with the bible thumpers.

So, women, start peddling your wares with secular environmental scientists. If you must hang with sugar daddy, then negotiate something good for the Earth. And don’t let your sisters feel unwelcome in your clique. Women of the world, unite! The men will follow.

Make saving the Earth a virtue. There are 6.5 billion people. We can worry about them later.

Taxes only exist by morality and laws…