Acrophobia

Mushroom writes,

Practicing virtue leads to knowledge. Knowledge enables us to live a life of self-control. We are no longer blown about by the winds of deception. Self-control allows us to be reliable, solid citizens of the kingdom. Our steadfast adherence to the Lord’s will gives us more of His nature which makes us more understanding, kind, and sympathetic to those around us. Affection develops into that self-sacrificing agape love that was shown in fullness by the Son.

Each rung on the ladder lets us reach the next one, and we will never reach the top standing on the bottom step. Hear the voice of the Lord calling, “Come up higher.”

I don’t know how far up I will get. Maybe I have a touch of acrophobia. But what else do I have to do in this life?

The miracle of habit

Roy Baumeister has some ideas about the importance of developing virtuous habits.

Doing what is right requires strenuous effort to resist the alluring temptations of vice.

Or is it? Could virtue become a habit — that is, a relatively effortless, automatic tendency to do what is morally right, with a minimum of inner struggle?

A recent study in which two hundred German citizens wore beepers for a week, and at random intervals reported on their desires at that moment, found that that people with good self-control avoid temptations and problem situations, rather than battling with them. Other research confirmed that self-control works most effectively by means of controlling habits, rather than by using willpower for direct control of one’s actions in the heat of the moment.

Willpower fluctuates, and you can’t count on always having enough.

Instead, if you use willpower to establish virtuous habits, the danger of succumbing to impulse or temptation is reduced.

Can you remember your initial struggles with a bicycle, a surfboard, a computer keyboard and mouse, a tennis racquet? Yet after enough repetitions, one uses those same items efficiently and effectively, with hardly a thought or error. The human mind’s ability to convert difficult action into easy deft habit is remarkable.

People with virtuous habits conserve their willpower for when they really need it.

Indeed, it is questionable whether resisting a strong temptation or impulse can ever become entirely habitual. Virtuous habits are much more successful at avoiding those temptations and impulses than trying to stifle them once they are felt.

It takes both a suitably inclined person and the compromising situation to create the maximum temptation. In such situations, habits may help some, but willpower will almost certainly be required. At that point it may be too late for habits to help much.

One can prevent inner inclinations and weaknesses from blossoming into full-blown cravings and desires by avoiding the external circumstances that trigger them.

By pulling together many small habits, especially for avoiding temptations and problems, one can live a more virtuous life.

Decadence: our passive, receptive, pleasure-seeking, self-indulgence

As Colorado again makes news, this time for free flowing marijuana, instead of school or theater shootings, I followed one of Gerard's links to this piece On Decadence by Charles Hill.

“Decline” we Americans and Westerners mope about daily; “fall” most of us still hope to postpone. Decadence, it would seem, is the mean between the two.

An explosion of dynamic individualism propels civilization forward toward a better future; but that same dynamic proves incapable of virtuous control, causing greed, violence and deepening self-indulgence to spiral society downward toward chaos.

The Puritans were consciousness personified, assiduous diary-keepers who were ever watchful for the slightest signs of grace or degeneracy.

George Washington's Farewell Address, commonly interpreted as a warning to avoid foreign entanglements, was more concerned with maintaining the character of the nation amid the temptations of freedom. As the world’s first-ever free people, the individual virtue vital to successful popular government could only be upheld, Washington believed, by respect for religion.

Social science is the new scholasticism, an intellectual paradigm in which participants are published, prized, tenured and made prominent for their contribution to one great required idea: to prove “scientifically” that human beings have nothing resembling what formerly was called “free will.” An avalanche of “studies” now unsurprisingly asserts that we hold prejudices seated in a level of our minds so deep as to be inaccessible to our conscious awareness.

The advent of “screen culture”—cellphones, iPads, as well as old-fashioned TV and film—now ubiquitous among the young in their formative years of education, has shrunk consciousness down in a different way. Students increasingly seem conditioned by the fact that much of their waking life is populated by mechanically mediated images in which they can see other beings on screens but those others cannot see them. As a result the viewer can become oblivious to others, having no need to interact or maintain a minimum of civil conduct with them. To think back on Herodotus again, this is the Gyges question: What do you do when no one is looking? The “screenie” has invisibility even without privacy. As consciousness has atrophied, obliviousness—and no little rudeness—replaces it.The “screenie” has invisibility even without privacy. As consciousness has atrophied, obliviousness—and no little rudeness—replaces it. This phenomenon adds a new dimension to the age-old definition of decadence.