[Vision2020] Virtues Project Again

[Nicholas Gier]

Greetings Visionaries:

What a stimulating debate I’ve started about virtues. Here are a few answers to Joan and Melynda’s objections as well as Roger Falen’s comments.

Joan, it’s interesting that you mention Foucault and not Derrida in your defense of French philosophy.  I’ve learned a lot from the former and nothing from the latter.  Foucault’s writings make sense because he does not undermine logic or rules of scholarly evidence, whereas Derrida has.

I agree with your mother’s distinction between common sense and book learning and so would have Aristotle.  There is nothing highly intellectual about finding a personal mean between extremes.  The Down Syndrome people that I know have more virtues than many intellectuals I know, and they don’t have very high IQs. Is the fact that kids quickly learn not to touch a hot stove socially constructed?  (I don’t think so.)

I used the example of gluttony to demonstrate the truth of a personal mean not to debate body size, which is something altogether different.  I’m now sitting in the Incheon International Airport in South Korea and I’ve observed very small people, medium size people, and not too many large people—most of which I hope have found their own personal mean between eating too little and eating too much.  I’m still hungry after a $15 breakfast and a $12 lunch because the North Asian mean for eating is not my own personal mean.

And, I almost forgot: those cultures that admire obesity.  I remember seeing a movie called Mondo Cane (Dog World if I’ve spelled the Italian right), and there was one vignette about Polynesians locking women in cages and feeding them until they got huge.  Recently I learned that 200 years ago Easter Islanders shut virgins up in a cave so that they could be thin and beautifully pale for the winners of the Bird Man competition.  It would be absurd to call these virtues, and no reasonable person would dispute the fact that this is really bad for female health, although not as bad as female genital mutilation.

Melynda raises the question of methodology and how the Moscow Virtues Project will choose its virtues.  The answer is easy: it will be done through a process of consensus building from a broad representation of our community.  The results of the Popovs’ project have mainly been with youth and a significant decline in discipline problems in the schools.  My own personal focus will be the schools and the earlier the better.

Finally, in response to Roger, I completely reject financial shenanigans of Bill Bennett’s Virtual Academy, but that does not mean that I then have to totally reject his Book of Virtues.

Nick Gier