Eristic Virtue

I have had a pathetically easy life.

A Marxist might retort, privileged. A bourgeois, fortunate.

In any case, it is true: there has been no more fortunate time, no more fortunate nation, and no more fortunate class than the ones I was born into. My birth coincied nearly exactly with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and for all of my childhood, with that brief blip on 9/11 and the following months as an exception, my country was reaping one of the greatest peace dividends in world history. I was born into an age of unparalelled technological progress and economic prosperity, in a nation so flush that it could afford to make charity compulsory and guarantee every man, woman, and child 3 meals a day and a roof over their heads. I was born into a prosperous enough family to not have a dollar of debt coming out of college, and was far enough up Maslow's heirarchy that I could spend it on an enormously personally fulfilling but ultimately comercially dubious degree focusing on philosophy. Perhaps most importantly, I had a stable family who softened the sharp edges of the world and never showed me anything but love.

This is not the kind of life one writes songs about.

Of course, there is little more inimical to the values of my homeland, or that of my Dutch ancestors, nations of shopkeepers both, than that lust for glory and eternity that most often lodges itself in hope of military success. I have no desire to be written about in a modern-day Iliad.

Yet even this burgher can admire their struggle. Not their courage, not their prowess in battle, certainly not their vainglorious attitude and posturing for position that seems at once simian, puerile, and a sad parody of masculinity. Their struggle. The fact that they were thrown into the fire and, at least some of them, emerged unscathed, or at least not broken.

I've been thinking about this in light of Orlando's posts about slumming and BDSM. We're coming at the same issue from two very different traditions, I think, and that produces some notable differences. Most importantly, I don't conceive of their life of struggle as any more real than the "sheltered" one that I've led. This isn't so much a quest for truth as it is a quest for virtue. It isn't knowledge I seek, but the ability to look myself in the mirror at the end of the day.

Of course, this competitive, eristic virtue can manifest itself even in completely safe settings. I imagine the philosophy Phd who triumphs over his interlocutors when defending his dissertation feels something of the triumph that Achilles did when dragging the body of Hector around Troy. So too does the loving parent who braves everything for the good of his or her child, or the service submissive devoting all to the care of their dom, if in very different ways.

The fact that such diverse manifestations of virtue are lumped together in my mind is illuminating. What unites them is not triumphing over a rival or the nobility of service, it's the fact that they had an obstacle to overcome, and they succeeded. This is somewhat troubling, since seeking obstacles for the sake of obstacles is self-destructive, masochistic in the legitimately negative sense. Moreover, struggle for its own sake, with no aim to speak of- is simply nihilism. And perhaps owing to my easy life, I haven't found something worth fighting for yet.

I should probably find it.

Seeking a third option

I have often heard it said that the asshole-doormat dichotomy is the male equivalent of the virgin-whore dichotomy. Condescending or altogether unattractive nice guys are fond of spouting the wisdom that women go for jerks; the few aggressive men who find that their strategy works are fond of mocking those who fall into the former ctegory. Both sides, in any case, seem to deny that there might be a middle ground between treating their partners poorly and refusing to stand up for themselves.

In ethics, too, this divide persists. All too often it seems that Christian love is at odds with Aristotelian virtue. Eristic Aristotelian virtue demands a purpose to life, one that it is capable to succeed or fail at. It gives one something to strive for, but it opens the possibility of failure- and since, whether it be in military ventures, commercial conquests, or something similar, that goal is most often satisfied in a competitive mileu, there are winners and losers.

And of course, it is impossible to love a loser. If one so buys the philosophy that one is unable to look onself in the mirror should one fail to live up to its tenets, one would be incapable of loving someone that also fails to live out that philosophy. Even in non-zero sum competition, where it is possible in theory for everyone to succeed, not everyone will.

Love, on the other hand, seems to urge esteem for everyone, no matter what their accomplishments or virtues. But if dignity is something that is given gratis, a reward for mere existence or the preciousness of human life, there does not seem to be much to strive for.

So I suppose my question is, is it impossible to hold myself to a high standard while still refusing to accept the lack of the divine spark in every person I meet?

Rant time

I'm tired of being an existential threat.

I'm tired of my life being used as a political football by people with privilege coming out of their ears.

I'm tired of having to read every work of political philosophy with a view to justifying my existence.

I'm tired of every halfway decent of political philosophy shouting from the mountaintops that my life is a subject unworthy of their attention.

I'm tired of constantly being on the defensive.

I'm tired of not being able to cross post this on facebook for fear of losing my anonymity.

Normally, it's water off a duck's back. Haters gonna hate. Aquinas had ideological blinders, Aristotle was a douche. None of them were cool enough to understand me. None could destroy my insistence that my life is my own, or shake my faith in the liberationist consensus of personal autonomy uber alles. My life was my own, firmly ensconced within the realm of self-regarding behavior. The haters could fuck off.

This year the curriculum presented a unique challenge, and a steadily growing discontent waiting to burst a dam with self doubt. Hobbes was a fascist prick, no bones about it, but Spinoza, Rousseau, hell, even Locke afforded a far too broad scope for social coercion. More than social coercion: a social unity that [i]must[/i] be preserved at all costs, whose malcontents pissed on the gift they were given in being delivered from the chaos of a state of nature, whose malefactors, selfishly asserting their right to defy the collective, committed the cardinal sin of undermining our incredibly fragile peace.

I, of course, instinctively knew that there was no place in such a world for me, doomed by my nature to forever exist on the fringe until some benefactor to the public weal ended my threat for good. Which is why my normally aloof inquiry began to be quite introspective, and my political became my personal.

So of course, when my vague apprehensions about the role of those who approach the world on a slant crystallized into something definite, when it ceased being an academic question and these defenders of the status quo made their prescriptions specific and personal, when, in short, Tocqueville decided to unmask his bigotry toward nonbelievers, I snapped.

My sophistry didn't skip a beat, of course, and I avoided the cardinal sins of bringing personal baggage into the discussion and excoriating ancient authors for retrograde mores. Yet I am sure my building rage and increasing skepticism was apparent every time I endeavored to defend de Tocqueville, that really, since for him it is necessary for religious consensus to exist in order to protect a commonwealth, it's not actually the tyranny of the majority he spent 5 chapters railing against, really, it's no more intrusive and tyrannical than prohibitions against theft, also necessary for stability, as I prostituted my identity and dignity within it in the interests of fairness and honest inquiry.

So I sprinted for 30 minutes to blow off some steam, unsuccessfully attempted to procure alcohol, spent two hours in bed seething and composing this post, and now that I've gotten this off my chest I'm gonna see if sleep is at all possible tonight.