The Education of Desire
I wrote these short passages in response to a perceptive tweet on Twitter from an ecologist. This was the tweet:
“Will the good memes beat the bad memes? No, there’s a strong preference for kind of simplistic and visceral material to be replicated. It just takes too long to appeal to their real thinking, to their heart, to their bonding emotions. That’s not where people act the fastest.”
I well remember the words of a scientist friend of mine: "nature's way is quick and dirty." He bases his ethics and politics on nature and evolution and dismisses everything else as ‘made up.’ I told him that that ‘made up’ part is called culture and that human beings are immersed in it. I think the view he expressed, however, is a common one in biology. I can remember some such view being expressed by the likes of Christian de Duve and many others in more or less the same terms. Species find niches and make for them as quickly as human beings grab opportunities.
Richard Dawkins is worth quoting here:
“Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.” (Dawkins The Selfish Gene 2006 ch 1).
Such view explain precisely why I argue for a 'rational freedom' which proceeds at some ethical remove from sensuous immediacy. Whilst there is an innate goodness and rationality in human beings, a common moral reason, its expression requires the creation and maintenance of appropriate structures, characters, and modes of behaviour. That view relates to relations between nature and culture, individual and collective, short- and long-term. And always mediation. Through immediacy of response, people can love to excess or love the wrong things. Human response has to be mediated by virtuous mentalities and modalities.
It is significant that the meaning and profundity of Dante’s point is reduced and distorted by a popular meme which says only “Beauty awakens the soul to act.” Simplified thus, Dante comes to be identified with the very view he is concerned to qualify.
Dante writes:
“The mind/soul, which is created quick to love, responds to everything that pleases, just as soon as beauty wakens it to act.” (Com Purg 18: 19-21).
The fact that human beings are made quick to respond to love’s call has the potential to embroil us in the pathos of an enslavement through freedom, a misery through pleasure, all as a result of our own choices impelled by desire.
To counter this, Dante emphasises the proper ordering of love and the education of desire. His view embodies an old wisdom that the moderns came to overthrow in the name of liberation, a liberation from the transcendent divine as well as inner inhibition. Against this, Dante emphasises the creation of a habitus in which the moral and intellectual virtues can be known, acquired, and exercised, to attain a real and deeper freedom as against liberty. But be clear: freedom is licentiousness if it lacks an overarching and authoritative moral framework and structure. That framework and structure throughout history has been founded on the transcendent divine, the ground of our being. The notion of a transcendent ground is a paradoxical one – frankly self-contradictory – but it is one that recognizes that God has set eternity in our hearts and in our souls, impelling us on a journey to the Greatest Love. But bear in mind, there is no opposition between transcendent and immanence, God and Nature here. As St. Thomas Aquinas argued: Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit, which translates as 'Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it,' (or 'grace does not remove nature but fulfills it.' There is no opposition between immanence and transcendence and no antagonism towards nature as such in the transcendent view of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. This is a mere modernist prejudice, confining the cosmic longing for meaning on the part of human beings within finite terms. The moderns keep getting nowhere except in trouble on this. There are two concepts of God in the Hewbrew Bible, Elohim and Hashem, denoting the two aspects of the one God - the God of physical Creation, the physical universe and its processes, and the God of Love and personal relationships. Einstein's God, the God which doesn't concern itself with human affairs, is the God/Nature of the natural philosophers and scientists; it is only half a god and hence no god at all. Grace heals the incomplete natural notion of God.
St. Thomas' view establishes Nature and God on a continuum. It is this view which sustains the virtue tradition in ethics, an ethics that possesses a substance and practicality that contrasts markedly with the emptiness of modern moral theories (theories which reduce invariably to subjectivism, emotivism, nihilism, solipsism). Alasdair MacIntyre analyzed the causes and consequences in After Virtue (1981). He writes:
Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues.