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.