The Pandemic as a Warning Shot

The last post ended with a suggestion that how we behave in a crisis is a mark of our character and that all of us should feel under a moral microscope in times of crisis. A post last autumn had made the point that

Nobody seems to want to talk any more about “character” – perhaps it has shades of “self-discipline” and “self-control” when the spirit of the age continues to encourage the self to flourish?So it took some courage for David Brooks to produce in 2015 a book entitled “The Road to Character” consisting of profiles of 8 people whose life demonstrates “character” including Dwight Eisenhower, Samuel Johnson (!), George Marshall (of Marshall Fund fame), St Augustine (!), the american woman behind Roosevelt’s New Deal (Francis Perkins), the charity worker behind “The Catholic Worker” (Dorothy Day) and George Eliot, the British writer.

I idly googled the Ngram user for "character" to discover that useage of the word "character" has fallen in the past decade to almost zero!
No wonder that I followed up that post by wondering whether our social DNA was changing

Some months back I referred to a vimeo encouraging us to use lockdown to conduct more meaningful conversations . It invited us to consider the following questions -
- what we found the most difficult thing about the lockdown?
- how we reacted to it eg fears and hopes?
- what we were ”bringing” to the experience? eg characteristics/strengths
- which of a range of ”spheres” (work, family, friends, personal development, health, finances, wider community) we actually spent time on?

This was part of what was called the Adventus Initiative  which went on to consider, coming out of Covid19,
- what sort of changes (if any) we might we want to make in our priorities?
- for example in the time we devote to each of those spheres?
- what our first action would be?
In many ways, however, this reflects the privileged world which global warming should have us questioning - with both Extinction Rebellion  and Bill McKibben upping the ante

The Canadian blogger Dave Pollard has a great post today which imagines that we are almost at the end of the 21st century - with "civilisation" as we know it today having completely broken down and our lives lived in small communities - generally in primitive form of wars with one another. His "retrospective" covers 11 points - and I have selected the last three to give you a sense of his argument

9 We have had our share of crises, of course. The Great Earthquakes devastated America’s west-coast cities, though by then the big cities were already starting to be depopulated. We’ve had six pandemics that killed about 400 million people between them, though that number is highly imprecise, since the most recent ones, after the production of vaccines ceased in the third decade of the Long Depression, were uncontrolled and our information systems could no longer gather much reliable data on their impact. The latest one was extremely virulent, but since long-distance travel has pretty much ceased, its effects were severe but localized. We figure it’s likely to be like that going forward. The loss of the great forests to fire and insects has caused a whole cascade of ecological crises, as has the death of the oceans that preceded it. That has caused the hot deserts of the tropics and the cold deserts of the boreal areas to expand enormously, and they’re largely uninhabitable now, as are the semi-arid areas of western North America, central and east Asia, and southern Europe that have grown unbearably hot and have long ago run out of water.

10 And water, always our most precious resource, is now probably the biggest factor driving our population down and our continuing migrations to areas where it is still available. It was the cause of the last great wars, in the northern parts of North America and Europe, and across Asia. When the Long Depression eliminated the capacity to create and maintain pipelines to transport water long distances, those wars ended in a whimper. But with the Long Migration, even that water is in danger of running out, especially as the climate collapse worsens.

11 You might be surprised to learn that, despite not having man-made pharmaceuticals, vaccines, or hospitals, our life expectancy is about the same as it was in 2020. We apparently eat much more nutritious food than people did then — less of it, almost entirely plants, and no processed food — and we of necessity exercise more, as we live without most of the electrically-powered equipment that made lives in 2020 dangerously physically inactive. And I’m not sure why, but we seem less obsessed about dying than people back then were. Maybe it’s because we see it when it happens, whereas in 2020 it was always hidden, in institutions, behind closed doors.

The pandemic tells us, surely, that the sort of modern life we had taken so easily for granted is now over....Some aspects of normality may return - but our easy reliance on air travel, mass tourism and imports will surely reduce significantly. 
If we are to be able properly to anticipate and prepare for our new future, we will all need a strong shot of imagination ...

Resource on global warming
What is wrong with us?
Facing Extinction

Building Character

Nobody seems to want to talk any more about “character” – perhaps it has shades of “self-discipline” and “self-control” when the spirit of the age continues to encourage the self to flourish?
So it took some courage for David Brooks to produce in 2015 a book entitled “The Road to Character” consisting of profiles of 8 people whose life demonstrates “character” including Dwight Eisenhower, Samuel Johnson (!), George Marshall (of Marshall Fund fame), St Augustine (!), the american woman behind Roosevelt’s New Deal (Francis Perkins), the charity worker behind “The Catholic Worker” (Dorothy Day) and George Eliot, the British writer.

It’s an interesting format – there’s something a bit forbidding about the 700 page full Biography, warts and all, which assails us these days…..There is, of course, a danger that you just get the highlights – what they call a “hagiography” – which happened in 2007 when Gordon Brown published his “Courage – eight portraits” profiling Mandela, Bonhoeffer, Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Cicely Saunders, Aung Ky, Edith Cavell and Raoul Wallenburg.

But Brooks’ book manages to give us rounded profiles. It starts by contrasting two sets of values –

-      what it calls “CV values”, the achievements with which we regale potential employers on our CVs

-      the “eulogy values”, the human qualities for which we would like to be remembered at our funeral (Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Really Effective People” makes a powerful start with this point.

Five of the individuals chosen by Brooks are from my parents’ generation to which I paid due tribute many posts ago

My generation, undoubtedly, had it too easy… Recent posts have recognised just how far we have fallen from decent moral standards… I have no real memory of Eisenhower but use these amazingly prescient words of his 1960 farewell Presidential address on the very first page of my Dispatches to the Next Generation

We . . . must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Brooks’ book includes this passage – as well as an important page in the Marshall section about the importance of institutions which took me back to a post of a couple of years ago about the importance of thinking institutionally. And about the wider issue of what I call “stewardship” ie the concept that we have a duty to hand anything, of which we have been asked to take care, back in the same condition as it was when we were entrusted with it…..Now there’s another idea we don’t hear much of these days!! 

All in all, it made me realise that Robert Greene’s otherwise excellent Laws of Human Nature focus exclusively on the negative aspects – and need to be rerun through a more positive lens….Wikipedia, for example, tells me that

“the Character Strengths and Virtues (CSV) handbook of human strengths and virtues by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, represents the first attempt on the part of the psychological research community to identify and classify the positive psychological traits of human beings. The CSV identifies six classes of virtue (i.e., “core virtues”), made up of twenty-four measurable character strengths.” 

The six core virtues are -

Strengths of Wisdom and Knowledge: Cognitive strengths that entail the acquisition and skilful use of knowledge

Strengths of Courage: Emotional strengths that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external and internal

Strengths of Humanity: interpersonal strengths that involve supporting and befriending others

Strengths of Justice:  that underlie healthy and harmonious community life

Strengths of Temperance: that protect against unhealthy excess and egotism

Strengths of Transcendence: that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning in life

https://demosuk.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/476_1505_characternation_web.pdf