Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

Free discussion of anything human or divine ~ Philosophy, Religion and Spirituality

Moderators: Xar, Fist and Faith

User avatar
StevieG
Andelanian
Posts: 5814
Joined: Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:47 pm
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 11 times
Been thanked: 14 times

Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

Post by StevieG »

I have been listening to this podcast on Spotify, and I thought it might be an interesting topic for the Close. Stephen Fry examines the traditional 7 Deadly Sins in order, and asks questions about their validity and relevance in our world today.

I found it entertaining and insightful, and I hope you do too. It might take me a little while to reproduce them, but I'll give it a go.

The podcast has 9 episodes, that I'll post here in two parts as follows:

- An Introduction
- Pride
- Avarice
- Lust
- Envy
- Gluttony
- Wrath
- Sloth
- Wrapping Up

A few notes that serve as preparation or warning for those who don't like challenging language or concepts :D

- This was written in 2019.
- Stephen Fry is very English, so some of the phrases may be a little unfamiliar to those across the pond. Think of TheFallen, and you should be right :D
- He loves his alliterations - there are plenty in here!
- He is frank about language, sexuality and other topics, so some people may find it uncomfortable. However, part of the point of this is questioning why we may be uncomfortable about these topics.
- He invents rebuttals of his arguments to himself (which are entertaining). I'll try and put these in italics as I see them.
- He is familiar with prejudice and mental illness, being gay, an atheist, and having a mild form of bipolar disorder. This may be relevant as you're reading.
- I can't think of anything else right now :D

I'll post the first part of An Introduction soon.
Last edited by StevieG on Sat Dec 03, 2022 5:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
Hugs and sh!t ~ lucimay

I think you're right ~ TheFallen
Image
User avatar
StevieG
Andelanian
Posts: 5814
Joined: Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:47 pm
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 11 times
Been thanked: 14 times

Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

Post by StevieG »

An introduction - Part 1

Hello my dears. I don’t know how much you listen to podcasts. Maybe this is your first ever, but I listen a lot. I try to go for a longish walk every day, you know, swinging those creaking hips and pointing those sagging, but ever hopeful nipples into the wind in my restless quest for peace, ease, fitness, and balm for the soul. In the countryside. bird song and day nature in her ever-changing collection of seasonal frocks are usually enough, but in the noxious burp and bump of the big city, I find audiobooks and podcasts are the happiest way to eat up the miles and earn the weirdly addictive health app rewards, badges and medals that are on offer these days, and generally, you know, keep myself motivated to stride on without getting bored and mentally restless. Perhaps you're the same, although you almost certainly have perkier nipples.

It's dispiriting - to me at least - to note how many of the most popular podcasts these days (especially the American ones it must be observed) keep picking at the scabs of what are called the “culture wars”, you know, and feasting on all the blood and pus that oozes from that terrible wound. By the wound of the culture wars, I mean, of course, the Grand Canyon, that great fissure, that has opened up in public discourse in the politics and all other aspects of life in the West especially - a seismic crack that grows wider every day.

And as it widens, the armies on each side shriek more and more incontinently at their perceived enemies on the other side across the divide. Their gestures and insults growing ever huger, cruder, and louder. Of course, as the chasm widens and the distance between the two sides increases, and the chance of either group hearing or interpreting the other even if they wanted to - which they don't - decreases daily. The hatred, the contempt, distrust, fear, and abhorrence each feels for the other is absolute, immovable, implacable, visceral, frightening.

I and millions like me do not have a place on either side. You can find us cowering down in the ravine below while the armies clash, clatter, and screech above. And what are these two mighty clashing forces? On the one side arrange the newly energised battalions of the populist right, or Alt-right, or nativist right for whom what they call political correctness, globalism, internationalism, and the ideals of social justice, are dragons to be slain by their fearless taboo busting white knights of the cross. They claim to stand for ordinary people, tired of the failures, the moral relativism and all the virtue signalling pieties of progressive politics, and to champion values that often magically combine Christianity or even Buddhism with anti-state libertarianism.

Against them, across this ever-widening fissure, amass the armies of a new ideological left, a generation of illiberal liberals, intolerantly fixated on identity politics, semi schooled in impenetrable academic jargon and prone to gabbling about things like “cultural appropriation” and the “heteronormative patriarchy” in comically sanctimonious and barely literate babble. Champions and orators on both sides take far more time, and derive far more pleasure, in riding out to mock the opposition's mouthpieces and spear their sacred cows than they do in making any real effort to explain a credible alternative agenda or present anything like a thought through manifesto, credo or, or philosophy.

It's not about what anyone stands for, so much as what they stand against. Not what enlivens them so much as what enrages them. Not what inspires their loyalty and trust, but what inflames their hatred and enmity. We're all like that - aside from anything else, it's so, sod-motheringly, arse-paralysingly easy. Which of us can't savage the dumbest loon from the other side, nail their fallacies and expose their hypocrisies? It's the contemporary version of the Circus Maximus. You know, instead of gladiatorial combat, we have shaming and railing, denouncing and disgracing, and the mob screaming for Caesar’s imperial thumbs down, which today means Emperor Zuckerberg cutting off their Facebook page or Pontifex Dorsey deleting their Twitter id, and similar contemporary modes of public execution and banishment. Give us enemies, give us hate weeks, put names to our pain. The liberal elite, it's their fault. White privilege, it's their fault. We don't need to engage with the coherent, decent people across the divide, for the modern world throws up easier targets. We look with gloating relish to the wilder shores of anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, white supremacists, denialists, fundamentalists, history re-writers, de-platformers, deranged gender and race identitarians and statue smashers obsessed by cultural appropriation and misplaced cisgender pronouning.

We look to such outlying fanatics to justify our contempt for the entirety of the foe. How much easier to do that than look at and listen to the more reasonable, sane, and cogent viewpoints. Nuance and complexity are so bloody hard. And worse than hard - time consuming and boring. We have machines and devices to wash our clothes and dirty dishes, to calculate and convert measurements, to print and transmit our words. The modern world also gives us automated ways of coming to conclusions without the bother and toil of thinking, reading, researching, reflecting, scrutinising, and wondering for ourselves.

Heaven knows I'm guilty too. Shortcuts and simplifications are as appealing to me as they are to anyone. So, you know what? Fuck all this posturing and snarling. Fuck all this fake outrage and real outrage. Fuck all this redacting people from history. Fuck all this year-zero zealotry. Fuck the boorish pelting of balls of shit at those in the pillory. Fuck all this second guessing of other people's motives. Fuck all this meanness, malice, and mendacity. It's time we understood whose fault it really is, and I am in a happy position to be able to let you know, absolutely. I have looked at this problem long and hard from every angle, I can now state with confident certainty that the fault lies entirely with me.

It is my fault, entirely my fault. I am the reason the world is going to hell. The madness and tumult can be laid at my door. I'm not the first to have noticed this. Maybe you've seen a copy somewhere of that poster they used to put up in London tube stations during the Second World War?
It's not you that's letting the country down, it's the person standing next to you.
They were right of course. G.K. Chesterton once wrote a letter to the Times newspaper along the same lines.
Sir, I can finally put your reader's minds to rest. There seems to be a general clamour to know why the country has gone to rack and ruin. I can happily reveal the answer. It is entirely due to me. I am surprised all your readers have not written in with letters of a similar nature.
Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”

If it is all my fault, I better explain why. The purpose of these podcasts is not to look outwards and expose all the malefactors and monstrous ogres stalking our world. It's to look confessionally inwards to the dark turbulent waters of the human soul.

Stephen, seriously. Have you any idea of how much of a dick you sound when you talk like that?

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I know, I know. Yet you see, while almost everyone is keen on being right and exposing what is wrong with others, almost no one out there suggests that there can be anything wrong with themselves. Jesus and I don't agree on all matters - I can't, for instance, go along with Mr. Christ's idea that to think a crime is as bad as to commit it - but when he talked about first taking the great plank of wood out of our own eyes before presuming to criticise the tiny speck in other people's, he had a point. So perhaps it might be illuminating, instructive, or at the very least entertaining to look at something very inward and personal that almost no one ever looks at these days.

Usually when we look inwards, we're encouraged to congratulate ourselves on our beautiful, underappreciated and cruelly misunderstood personalities. But I want to kick away the jewel encrusted stone of our shining selves, and reveal the nasty, squirming, slimy creatures that crawl beneath: our Sins.

Sins, Stephen?? Sins?? Have you run mad, madder, or maddest? This is 2019, not 1219! We have crime, we have error. We have evil intent and evil actions. We have disorders and bad decisions. But you of all people - godless heathen atheist scum that you are - should know better than to use words like “sin.”

Yes, yes, yes. You're probably right again, but let's just remind ourselves how the world is going. Right now, there's an emergency in our political, cultural, and social lives and no measures to put it right are working. So, isn't it reasonable to look for answers in places that might have been overlooked? And I think we can agree that there is an emergency. I mean, look at the world - the withdrawal into nationalism and trade wars, the complete loss of faith in national and international institutions and governance, intolerance, shaming, isolation, bullying, hate crimes, nativism, de-platforming on campuses, alienated males, angry females, gender and transgender wars, an epidemic of self-harm in the young, a surge in suicide rates around the world, opioid epidemics here, knife crime there, world leaders demonstrating stunning levels of corruption, dishonesty, brutality, hypocrisy, deceit and ignorance. No grace, no authority, no consensus, no common cause. Who will be next to be shamed, silenced, redacted from history? Toxic social media, addictive gaming and unlimited porn, desensitising and corroding the sensibilities of the young, fascism on the march. Free speech has never been so expensive. With us or against us. No ifs, no buts - nuance, knowledge and quizzical doubt shouted down as liberal, elitist wank. No time for logic, no time for reason. Find your tribe and stay with them. Everyone else – they’re the enemy. Oh, and in 20 or 30 years’ time when you're middle-aged and still trying to repay your student loan - floods, droughts, depleted resources, antibiotic resistant disease and infection, unbreathable air, poisoned plastic throttle, rising and acidic seas, mass species extinction on a scale not seen since the great Permian extinction. Our fragile earth crying out in pain.

We live in dark and difficult times. Things getting worse, worse, worse, and worse than that, people getting worse and worse. Corruption, violence, cruelty, abuse, distrust, alienation. Cultural commentators, podcasters, essayists, and all of us in pubs, homes, schools and offices can bang up pint glasses on the bar, stab our fingers accusingly in every direction and explain why this is. How it is the fault of politicians, or corporations, or Facebook, or someone else, somewhere. Doubtless a proportion of such explanations holds a germ of truth or a whole packet of germs. But nonetheless, surely there's room for looking not outwards, but inwards.

The human project is failing. We - the humans - are failing. Every day we fail by the world's standards, but much, much more importantly by our own. And to make it worse, there is no one to turn to. The grownups left long ago. There is no locus of authority, not even a fake wizard of Oz behind the curtain. There's no referee, no umpire, no judge, no pilot, no teacher in charge, no appropriate adult, no designated driver, no board of directors, no fairy godmother, no prophet, no oracle, no supreme ruler, no Gandalf, no Merlin, no Dumbledore, no Churchill, no Mandela, no Einstein, no tribune of the people, no parent, no God, no mummy and no daddy.

It's game over, people. Sip the wine and take your pleasure where you may. It's Lord of the Flies, the conch is smashed, Piggy is dead, and the ululating tribes in the war paint are all that's left on the island. Best hide in the undergrowth and wait until they've destroyed each other.

But one thing hasn't changed, at least in any real measurable, provable way. And that is what we might as well call the human heart. We have always been, as W.H. Auden put it, “frightened children who have never been happy or good” - or at least we've always driven to be “happier and gooder,” usually without satisfactory success.

I'm not so much of a one for politics. Talking in the conceptual abstract about general masses of people and sweeping economic or social theories. Even worthy political aims and causes speak less to me than the drama of the individual human soul. Damn, that sounds portentous. Never mind.

(continued in part 2...)

EDITED to get rid of the artifacts of moving to a new forum...
Last edited by StevieG on Mon Apr 10, 2023 1:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Hugs and sh!t ~ lucimay

I think you're right ~ TheFallen
Image
User avatar
StevieG
Andelanian
Posts: 5814
Joined: Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:47 pm
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 11 times
Been thanked: 14 times

Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

Post by StevieG »

An Introduction - Part 2

Of course, in our age, sin has been safely medicalised into conditions, syndromes, and disorders. Wrath is an anger management disorder. Pride and vanity are narcissistic personality disorders, sloth an attention deficit disorder, gluttony an eating disorder, lust is sex addiction, and so on. Now, I hope I'm the last person to doubt the truth and gravity of mental illness, but I can't believe that it's helpful to reduce all human behaviours, instincts, and impulses to neurological, hormonal, or chemical dysfunction. Whether there is such a thing as "free will" or not - and most thinkers these days are agreed that there isn't - it doesn't follow that we should behave as if we are not to be held accountable for our actions, even if only to ourselves. Should it be that the most reductionist views of humanity are true, we still get fulfilment, satisfaction and dare one say happiness from a sense of agency, responsibility and charge over our own character and behaviour.

Well, like most people, I yearn to be better. Nothing very odd about that. When I say “better”, I mean it in as many ways I think as it can be meant. I'd like to be happier. Yes, who doesn't? I'd like to feel that I was, what, morally sounder, a better person to know, treating others better, having a better influence and a better effect, feeling better. All of that. I do, as don't we all, when trying to drift off to sleep wonder if I might have behaved better that day, responded better to circumstances, felt better about myself, and made others feel better about themselves.

So, at whom are these podcasts aimed? Well, at you, dear listener. And I'm going to have to make the leap of assuming that you are something like me in your inner sense of self. It's a hell of an assumption, I'm aware. Of course, we're likely to be different in all sorts of obvious ways. We have different tastes in music, wallpaper, pornography, and pizza toppings I expect. Different taste in people too. Different skin colour, perhaps. Different histories and different standards in all kinds of areas. We quite probably think differently about politics, society, gender, religion, and history.

But I'm assuming, all those differences aside, we might yet share a way of thinking about ourselves that is more important than all those differences. We are all, when it comes down to it, frightened children who want to be happier and better. We all, in one way or another, hunger and thirst after righteousness. We have erred and strayed from our ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have left undone those things we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.

There is no health in us. Now I'm no expert in the history of philosophy and if you are, then forgive me if what I'm about to say sounds simplistic or muddle-headed or even just plain wrong. There have always been, I think, alternative ways of thinking about our goodness or badness. One way is to compare our actions to a list laid down by authority in the form of scripture or law. All that is required there is faith and obedience. Another is to be a little more independent minded and judge for ourselves our conduct, perhaps on the basis of its effect on other people. You're probably familiar with the “greatest good for the greatest number.” That idea, the utilitarian ideal: do my actions ever hurt others, myself included, I might ask myself. Do they hurt those close to me or society or the wider world as a whole? Thinking this way, we judge ourselves by the effect of what we do and say and how we relate and interact and the effect those relations and interactions have. A commonly used word for this is consequentialism because it comes down not to the intrinsic nature of our actions, beliefs and behaviour, but to their consequences. It's easy to see the sense in this interpretation of morality and agree that it offers a reasonable and practical guide to behaviour.

But there is another way of judging ourselves and our actions that most of us can't deny – however complete and satisfactory a system consequentialism appears to be. Some thinkers - Emmanuel Kant in the 18th Century was a leading example - identified an inner law, a sense inborn, it seems, inside ourselves, not just of right and wrong, but of duty and honour too. Something between a Jiminy Cricket conscience and an inner voice of compulsion or obligation that guides us or judges us. Philosophers call this a deontic or deontological sense. It needn't be a religious voice, but try as we might, I think it's hard to deny its existence.

“Two things awe me most” Kant wrote, “the starry sky above me, and the moral law within me.”

Some snort with Nietzschean derision, but most of us hear that famous saying and respond to it with at least some recognition. Me too. Whether that's healthy or the result of indoctrination is, for our purposes, neither he nor there. Many others, besides philosophers, have tried to explain our sense of guilt and sin, if we want to call it that. Guilt and shame, from the Garden of Eden and other creation myths onwards, have caused us to wonder at our uniqueness.

Animals don't appear to have it, any more than they have anything as weird as a sense of nudity or sexual shame. Just us. It seems to be an identifying part of our human brand of consciousness. Now, I'm not here to promote or dismantle religious or Freudian or any other explanations as to why we seem to have this deontological voice, this inbuilt feeling about right and wrong. Maybe it's to do with early infancy and its rewards and punishments with half-baked Sunday school and other indoctrinations. Maybe it's divine. Maybe it's part of an evolved behaviour code that bands us together and reinforces our bonding with like-directed members of our tribe, group and species. Maybe it doesn't exist, but we tell ourselves it ought to, in which case it does exist, for its essence lies precisely in that very sense of “ought”, of obligation.

Anyway, listen, we've all looked at a dog sleeping by the fire, haven't we, and envied them its freedom from homework deadlines, student loan repayments, family troubles and Brexit. But above all, dogs seemed to us relieved of the curse of not being able to sleep because of feeling guilty about how they behaved that afternoon, how greedy and unreasonable they were, how lustful or lazy. Oh, how we wish we could be as free as that. But will we really give up movies, music, books, travel, discussion, architecture, friendship, getting drunk or high from time to time, Christmas, learning a new technique like knitting, joinery or cryptic crosswords, just so to have the unclouded conscience and limited horizons of a dog? Yes, I know some will claim that because we can't know for sure what it is to be a dog, everything I've said is just contentious surmise, but be fair - you know it's true.

Every culture has a creation myth that tries to explain why it is that we instinctively know that

a) we are animals, yet
b) we are so radically different from all other species of animal around us.

We eat, feed, defecate and breed just like them, but we know that they didn't - as it were - taste the fruit in Eden. They didn't suddenly think they were naked and become ashamed. They don't have language; they don't have a sense of sin. This is deep and marshy terrain, and I don't want to get bogged down in it. These podcasts won't presume either to align themselves with, or take issue with, any philosophy, any intellectual, spiritual, religious, or academic doctrine or practice. I've said all this because to repeat, I'm making an assumption about you, the listener. However different we may be, you and I, in background, belief or experience, I take it that, like me, you do have that inner voice, whether we call it anything as grand as a “moral law” or not; that you sometimes lie awake, cross at yourself, wishing you were better than you are; annoyed that you've let yourself down, vowing to improve.

Of course, other people are total asshats, utter tit-wheels and unredeemed cock-fingers. They don't understand you. They take advantage of you, and they failed to see or appreciate you for what you are. All that is doubtless true, but in the steely watches of the night - or when ironing, rolling pastry, idling in traffic, weeding the garden or pounding the exercise bike - doesn't a part of you acknowledge that the problem is really not them, but us – silly, imperfect us? We are poor shivering creatures, striving to be nobler, kinder, and better than we are. We are frightened, lost children, striving to be happy and good.

I'm not qualified to teach anyone how to be happy and good. I've never trusted anyone who claimed they were. Nor am I qualified to give you a course in “self-care”, “rules for life”, “Mindfulness” or what I recently heard - I shit you not - described as “Wellfulness”. But I am raring to have a look at the obstacles to our individual happiness and fulfilment. And sin, trespass, wrong, transgression, error, all these words describe what you might call obstacles. They are the stumbling blocks and impediments to our happiness and fulfilment that come from within.

God knows enough shit comes from without. Society is of course screwed, politics is screwed. Many of the young hurt so much that they cut themselves with knives to distract from the pain. Many of the old hurt so much inside they numb themselves with booze and drugs to distract from the pain. There are, as we've seen, no authority figures in any case. The institutions they once ran are no longer trusted or respected. Parliament, Congress, the BBC, the New York Times, the intelligence services, the church, academics, experts. They're not held in any regard at all. But I'm not going to address that. I'm going to travel, as I said, inside into our troubled and confused hearts.

And this brings us to the flaws, deficits, traits, traps, obstacles, banana skins, that stop us from being happy and good. Traditionally, seven major or cardinal defects have been grouped as the seven Deadly Sins - the seven deadly banana skins. Anti-religionist as I may be, I actually rather favour the language of sin and demonology in its drama, glamour, and apocalyptic power over the sometimes anaemic, self-righteous, jargonistic languages of self-help, life coaching and armchair - or indeed office chair - psychology.

I think the language of sin speaks much more directly to us. Thinking of each sin as a demon might sound weird, especially coming from someone like me associated as I may be with rationalism and secular humanism and atheism and so on. But I've always been a believer in drama, ritual, ceremony, and story. The medieval picture of, for example, wrath and lust as creatures - slaves of the devil himself threatening our peace - such images dramatize and personalise human motives and drives that are still mysterious to us, whatever interpretation of the world we hold, whether we favour medical or scientific interpretations, or the discourse of morality or religion or the language of mindfulness - as well to call them a demon, as an impulse or a complex or a neurological misfire.

Or we can see sin as the Donald Duck hissing and quacking temptation into our left ear, while the angelic Mickey Mouse falsetto’s virtue into our right. To personify sins is a rather efficient way, not of managing them necessarily, but of giving shape, dimensions and character to the otherwise wild and unfathomable forces that control us, which might be the first step to managing them.

I'll tell you this: when I was trying to give up smoking years ago, I hit upon this very helpful technique, which you are free to use. I thought of a person whom I really despised at the time. Let's suppose he was called Barry Bastard. Now, I pictured Barry Bastard, not in his house in North London, but coiled up like a dragon right inside my stomach. And every time I was weak and had a cigarette, Barry would cheer and gloat and snigger and scoff at my weakness and susceptibility. “Hahaha, I knew you’d cave in” he'd say, which was of course unbearable and felt like a kick in the guts. So, every day that passed without me smoking saw Barry wince and shrink and lose more of his power, till in the end he was a weak, withered, dried up husk of a dragon that I could pass out of my system with a yell of triumph.

Giving more than a name, then, to one's pain. Giving shape, form, dimension, colour, smell, and character. So much more helpful than abstract talk of right and wrong, healthy and morbid, mindful and distracted, good and evil. Anyway, that is my starting point. I am constantly falling down. My moral health isn't as good as it could be. Ghastly creatures haunt and hinder me. The upcoming podcasts in the series then will look at these rude and wiggling seven Deadly Sins, these banana skins on the path to happiness.

According to tradition, the names of the beasts are:

Pride,
Avarice,
Lust,
Envy,
Gluttony,
Wrath, and
Sloth.

I've changed wrath to “anger”, because it's a more usual word, and because it allows me to remember the sins in a traditional order with the happy acronym Pale Gas, P A L E G A S.

I will take each one of the seven in turn, lay them out on the surgical table, and poke, prod, pry and provoke in an attempt to try to anatomise and understand them. I hope and believe it will be if nothing else, delicious fun, and something of a change from the usual run of podcastery.

I do hope you'll join me. Bring your sinful self and see you there.

EDITED to get rid of the weird stuff in transferring to the new forum...
Last edited by StevieG on Mon Apr 10, 2023 1:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Hugs and sh!t ~ lucimay

I think you're right ~ TheFallen
Image
User avatar
Holsety
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 3422
Joined: Sun May 21, 2006 8:56 pm
Location: Principality of Sealand

Post by Holsety »

I'm not sure that animals are entirely immune to the concept of sin. If my dog pooped in the house (not often happened, but usually when she was sick), she would always go in the same place, a place in the house were where people didn't frequently go quite as much. And whenever someone came home on those days, she wouldn't come to the door to greet us, because she was worried she would be punished, at least yelled at. It's not a divine thing, but like the podcast guy said, she was probably frightened of being punished and wanted to be happier and better. In addition, I bet dogs who have been abandoned probably develop the fear of future abandonment. Now, I don't know if animals have a concept of an afterlife, but I know from googling just now that humans definitely want to know if animals have an afterlife.
User avatar
StevieG
Andelanian
Posts: 5814
Joined: Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:47 pm
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 11 times
Been thanked: 14 times

Post by StevieG »

I suspect it's a learned behaviour, but yeah, we can't really know for sure. As far as a dog afterlife, I like the idea of the film A Dog's Purpose where the dog is reborn into another dog for several lifetimes to continue their journey. Perhaps humans are the same, but have no consciousness of their previous incarnation? :D
Hugs and sh!t ~ lucimay

I think you're right ~ TheFallen
Image
User avatar
Holsety
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 3422
Joined: Sun May 21, 2006 8:56 pm
Location: Principality of Sealand

Post by Holsety »

StevieG wrote:I suspect it's a learned behaviour, but yeah, we can't really know for sure. As far as a dog afterlife, I like the idea of the film A Dog's Purpose where the dog is reborn into another dog for several lifetimes to continue their journey. Perhaps humans are the same, but have no consciousness of their previous incarnation? :D
I remember my dad said he thinks there's some book, story, something where a dog keeps living the same day over and over again, but he can't quite get a grasp on the repetition perfectly. I feel that way sometimes with deja vu.
User avatar
StevieG
Andelanian
Posts: 5814
Joined: Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:47 pm
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 11 times
Been thanked: 14 times

Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

Post by StevieG »

Pride - Part 1

I'm Proud to welcome you to deadly sin number one: Pride. Proud: words we hear more than a little.

I'm Proud to say…
It gives me great Pride to welcome...
I'm Proud of my country
Show a little Pride in your work
The Pride of the Clyde
Black Pride
I'm house Proud
I’ll see you on the Pride March
My Pride and joy takes Pride of place
London Pride
Stand Proud
The Pride of the Yankees
He takes no Pride in his appearance
Have you no Pride?
A Pride of lions
Civic Pride
We're playing for Pride now
Make me Proud of you, my darling, make me Proud

And Pride is a sin? Not just any sin, but for 2000 years Pride has stood at the very top of the list of the 7 deadly sins; held to be the worst and most dangerous of them all. Christian apologist C.S. Lewis claimed that next to Pride:
Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that are mere flea bites in comparison. It was through Pride that the Devil became the Devil. Pride leads to every other vice.
The great Benjamin Franklin had a characteristically wittier and more amiable approach in the introduction to his autobiography.
In reality, there is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as Pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then, peep out and show itself. Even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be Proud of my humility.
Nothing wrong with a little humility, if that is the opposing or complimentary Cardinal virtue. But is Pride so great a sin? In our age, we're told that one of the most destructive failings that can hold us back is actually a lack of self-esteem. Surely Pride is a healthy harbinger of self-belief, self-worth, self-confidence; not in fact a dangerous monster thrashing inside you and threatening to bring you down, but at worst a stern Sergeant Major barking at you to smarten yourself up and straighten your back. And at best that good friend who pours you a glass of wine and tells you that you’re terrific and wonderful and marvellous.

Pride bolsters faith in one's identity, one's value, at one's future, one's whole self. Surely, we can disqualify Pride from any list of deadly sins that are of relevance to us in this 21st century? Maybe the opposite of Pride isn't humility - a good thing - but shame, something very bad.

It used, for example, it to be a matter of shame to be a homosexual. But the very word we now use to describe annual demonstrations of the happy fact that we gay people are no longer ashamed is, of course, Pride, which has become a metaphor - or more pedantically, I think and accurately, a metonym - for annual displays of the whole un-shaming of same-sex and queer relations. “We met during Pride!” “What are you doing this Pride?” “Does Vienna have a Pride?” That sort of thing.

[Distracting sidebar] Talking of metonyms, I remember that during the first four or five years of presenting the BAFTA film awards, the phenomenon of the arrivals and interviews on the red carpet began to grow and grow every year until it threatened to be more important than the ceremony itself. That element, as everyone arrived, ended up having its own producer and separate presenters covering celebrity and fashion. The “red carpet” became not a scarlet-coloured tapestry floor covering that you trod on, but a slot, you know, a scheduled section: content. This was borne in on me when I looked at the actual carpet that snaked along Leicester Square to the front of the Odeon and asked the show's director, “how long is the red carpet, in fact.” And she replied without thinking, “Oh, it's about 50 minutes this year.” Metonym! You see? No longer a real carpet whose length could be expressed in feet and inches, but a phrase standing for a whole procedure and event whose length was now properly expressed in minutes. A Metonym! [/Distracting sidebar]

And why did I mention that? Oh yes. The same way the word Pride is, for many, a metonym for annual demonstrations of LGBTQ solidarity and self-belief. But not just that particular grouping: “say it loud, I'm black and I'm Proud” sang James Brown. When previously disenfranchised, disempowered, or marginalised minorities or special interest groups of one kind or another find their voice, they're happy to say that they're Proud. And who are we to call this “sinful” or “wrong” or detrimental to fulfilment and success? For we should remind ourselves that when I talk of Sins here, I don't mean in the religious sense - a moral transgression that imperils the immortal soul and leads to an afterlife of torment and damnation - I mean an obstacle, a stumbling block, a banana skin, a fiend that fouls up the self and society. In such a reading, Pride seems to be more angel than demon.

Perhaps we can say that it was in the older days of hierarchy and order that Pride, like ambition, was considered a “monster to be slain”. A peasant, a worker, a serf, even a respectable tradesman, or bourgeois, exhibiting Pride - why, that was challenging the God-given order of things. Do you remember the hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful”? Specifically written for children, its third verse goes:
The rich man in his castle
The poor man at his gate
God made them high and lowly
And ordered their estate
Hard to believe that those lines are still being sung in school assemblies every morning. Or maybe they've been rewritten or that verse dropped. It certainly wasn't dropped when I were a lad. “Your reward”, we were told, “will be in heaven, so long as you are docile, submissive, humble, modest, pious, obedient, and keep your place. In this light, the 7 deadly sins were not so much threats to the individual soul and its destiny in the afterlife as threats to the established order of things down on earth in the present life. The uppity worker, the uppity slave, they had to be kept down, and tables of sins and commandments painted up on the church walls would keep them there, fortified by hymns and sermons warning against the dangers of Pride.

“Blessed are the meek”
“Pride goeth before a fall”

And perhaps even the commandment “honour thy father and mother” is connected, since it’s all part of the insistence that we look up. To our parents, our Lord, our Bishop, our King, our God. They're all above us - never a hint of a suggestion that maybe parents should honour their children. The dishonouring of elders is, of course, terrible, but most of us might think that the dishonouring of children - their abuse, neglect, and abandonment - is a far, far greater problem in our world and a far, far greater sin. But old-time commandments and sins seem to have been much more about protecting authority, order, and property, than the rights of the weak or helpless. Pride, like education and free speech, gives underlings ideas and must be squashed. Otherwise, as Dickens’ Leicester Dedlock in Bleak House was fond of gloomily remarking “We would see the obliteration of landmarks and opening of flood gates, and cracking of the framework of society.”

And in this reading, Pride can be seen as the fire that starts the social revolution, the splendid shining hero that breaks the shackles and hastens the new dawn of liberation and equality. Pride lets us believe that we're all endowed with the same rights and dignities from birth; that we are each is entitled as the other to enjoy the riches, knowledge and bounty of the planet. Pride is the steadily burning flame of self that won't be told to sit down, shut up, know its place, and do as it’s told. Didn't we fall in love with all those heroines and heroes of fiction, precisely because they stood up for themselves? And didn't we loathe the villainous school masters, governesses, and step-parents because they tried to keep them down?

“Why, this child has ideas! They must be taught a lesson!” and down comes the cane with a thwack. Punished for their Pride, their refusal to submit and be broken into the bit and bridle of convention. Far from being the primary vice, Pride now it might seem to us to be the primary virtue.

Has the world turned upside down so far, so fast? Maybe every deadly sin has now become a virtue - we shall see.

Of course, stiff-necked Pride, Pride that can't discriminate, self-congratulatory Pride, smug, complacent self-regarding Pride - these manifestations of Pride might reasonably be regarded as destructive, foolish, and wrong. And what about those three slimy demons that are always looking down: snobbery, disdain and hauteur, as the French say - hauteur? Can they be fitted on the Pride spectrum? And their ugly siblings: vanity, narcissism, arrogance, hubris, and conceit. These are clearly unattractive beasts and are surely close relations of Pride. When self-possession, self-esteem, self-belief, and self-confidence are overblown and into selfishness, self-importance, and self-regard, we can call them sinful according to our contemporary interpretation of the word. They harm, they distress, they uglify, and they pollute.

But since there are other names for such errors, perhaps they don't really come under the heading of the word Pride. Is a “my country, right or wrong” jingoist nationalism, chauvinism? Is that reasonable patriotic Pride, or tribal loyalty amplified into something unattractive and bad for the world? And what about the attitude that the Italians call “Fare figura” - cutting a figure - saving face - a cultural phenomenon along with machismo, that is mostly male, it seems, but which is far from confined to the Mediterranean. We hear it in “respect” and “dissing” and in the knife-wielding cry of “you disrespecting me?” And at its utter worst in the spates of so-called “honour killings.” Stories of these interfamilial and intercommunity horrors crop up at regular intervals, don't they? Honour: such an old-fashioned word, yet still such a prevalent and dangerous idea in the world. It seems to have an antique charm, doesn't it: the right honourable; honourable intentions; my honourable friend; Scout's honour. Yet an entrenched sense of family honour, gang honour, group-, clan-, tribe- or national honour can, when inflamed and threatened, cause broken bones, blood on the pavement, and wholly tragic and dishonourable outcomes. Hmm.

Well let's go further back for illumination. An ancient Greek word for Pride was Megalopsychia, - mega lo psyche. In other words, “greatness of soul” which Aristotle counted as amongst the greatest of virtues, as opposed to overweening hubris. You'll be thinking already way ahead of me, I'm sure, that it is the language we use to describe a so-called sin like Pride, that lies behind much of our confusion here.

Pride is not just any word after all: it's an English word. It doesn't mean quite the same as for example, the French words Orgueil and Fierte, nor the German Stolz. And I can't tell you what the real meanings, connotations, and nuances of the Russian Gordynya or the Arabic Fakhar might be. The words for what we might call negative Pride from which the Christian 7 deadly sins derived, were the Greek Yperifaneia and the Latin Superbia, both the hyper and the super meaning “above” - for getting above your station, above yourself, was the dangerous threat to good order.

(Continued in part 2...)
Last edited by StevieG on Mon Apr 10, 2023 11:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Hugs and sh!t ~ lucimay

I think you're right ~ TheFallen
Image
User avatar
StevieG
Andelanian
Posts: 5814
Joined: Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:47 pm
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 11 times
Been thanked: 14 times

Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

Post by StevieG »

Pride - Part 2

Once there was only religion and those in clerical orders to tell us what was right or wrong. They were the only gatekeepers; the only definers of what was useful or harmful, constructive or destructive to the public or personal good. Having freed ourselves from the manacles of ecclesiasticism when it comes to morality, we now seem to have found ourselves shackled to the new medicalised languages of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience. We talk, not so much of demons and trespasses, sins, or moral failings, as of pathologies, complexes, syndromes, fixations, neuroses, disorders, and dysfunctions.

Or we can use the increasingly popular language of evolutionary psychology. Pride in these readings, like everything else, evolved for some biological or social purpose, some evolutionary good. We evolved to show loyalty to our home and band, our kith and our kin. Such an impulse was necessary for a social species as mankind, which depends upon bonds and ties. In this way, Pride can be looked on as less a moral failing, and more as a necessary social pheromone. As individuals, we evolved to fight for the teat, to fight for attention, to fight for the family and clan.

We found that aggressive self-assertion, display and gestures of superiority helped us - as it does other mammals - in the race for life, food, shelter, and the transmission of our genes. And in the social sphere, collective Pride cemented important status and rank. Over time, different skin colours, different languages, different gods, different ways of prospering, called upon the kind of adherence, loyalty and belonging that Pride activates. Along came crests, colours, armorial bearings, banners, national songs - all cemented by Pride. Pride bound and banded us together. Pride gave us the right to despise the outsiders, to believe ourselves better.

But over further time, empires and religions absorbed the smaller clusters and collectives, and new homogenous standards of established morality were handed down to the subjected majority. The priests and priestesses, emperors and popes, warrior chiefs and their functionaries, used and exploited national, racial, cultural, religious, and sectarian Pride as a means of uniting their people and keeping them loyal, while outlawing personal individual Pride, so as to keep each ant in the colony: committed, unquestioning, and obedient. “By all means to be proud of your King and country, but don't you dare be proud of yourself.”

We can see that Pride has its uses and its dangers. As does everything, of course, from motorcars to salt, from cutlery to cricket balls: there is nothing of substance, after all, does not cast a shadow; nothing so benign that it cannot be used for malign purposes. The softest, plumpest pillow can be - and it has been - used as a murder weapon.

A word that keeps repeating itself, again and again, when talking of Pride - weather as a necessary quality or a vicious sin - is self. When we moved away from being a society of hierarchy, order, and established processes, we moved into an age of self. Cultural historians might say this started with romanticism and the “egotistical sublime” or the post-Freudian modernist ages of anxiety, fragmentation, and neurosis. In between was Samuel Smiles, the Victorian who started what was known as the self-help movement. Away from generations of living in small villages with large families in the same dwelling, people were suddenly more likely to be on their own.

The age of the individual had begun. The old order was King, church, country, county, city, market town, village, home, family, and then self. Over the past 150 years, self has pushed itself up that list until it's now at the very top. In our age, every year, the section of the bookshop given over to self-help goes larger, its real estate encroaching on and swamping the fiction, biography, and cookery shelves. Make yourself rich, fit, sexy, successful, slim, happy, motivated. Self is the prefix of our age.

Self-help
Self-confidence
Self-assurance
Self-publishing
Self-searching
Self-determination
Self-deprecation
Self-control
Self-esteem
Self-improvement
Self-satisfaction
Self-service
Self-awareness
Self-discipline
Self-knowledge
Self-seeking
Self-worth
Self-belief
Self-possession
Self-sacrifice
Self-image
Self-reliance
Self-expression
Self-denial
Self-assertion

But then, too, on the darker side:

Self-consciousness
Self-regard
Self-absorption
Self-obsession
Self-satisfaction
Self-righteousness
Self-centred
Self-loathing
Self-pity
Self-harm
Self-destruction

Not to mention - selfies.

We're all aware, and have probably tried to think hard about what this self, self, self-obsession is doing to our psyches, especially in the light of social media. We read of children taking their own lives because an Instagram they've posted has been mocked, or their number of followers is the lowest amongst their friends. We notice - or at least I do - that people are much more sensitive to being disagreed with than my memory says they used to be. The fracture in our society that used to be a political “left” and “right” is now so deep a cultural and social scar, that it makes it very difficult to find points of connection.

We'd rather be individually right than at peace with each other. The more some apparently lucky few seen to have it all - millions of dollars and followers - the less we feel ourselves are reckoned of account or meaning, and the more our Pride is stung by a sense of powerless invisibility. The more it is likely to make us angry, addicted, envious, Oh, some other Deadly Sins are having a look in there! Is that what C.S. Lewis meant by “Pride leads to every other vice.” And stung, I said our Pride can be stung. That's a point worth considering. Pride, of all the Deadly Sins, is the only one which can be stung, hurt, or wounded. You can't wound someone's gluttony or envy, for example, but you can certainly wound their Pride. For Pride, I think, is the only sin that is actually a part of oneself. It’s the only one that can't be pictured as an external monster or dragon. Pride is oneself. Gluttony is a beast, a drive, an impulse that one either can or can't control or subdue. Pride is not in me. It is me.

Maybe that too is why medieval theologians and others gave it a special status as first and worst of the Sins. It is perhaps the banana skinniest of all the deadly banana skins, for as the Old Testament famously puts it:
Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.


Proverbs 16:18 - as if I have to remind you!

It's a rule of comedy that a clown skidding on a banana skin isn't funny, but a solid, important figure in a pinstriped suit skidding on one, is. In a very famous interview, the then elderly film star James Cagney - who, well into his eighties, painted and drew every day, sailed boats, played musical instruments, read, danced, did woodwork, taught himself languages, and lived as full, rich, and contented a life as can be imagined - he said “absorption in things other than self is the secret of a happy life.” How does this square with the Socratic cry “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

Can they both be true? Well, perhaps Socratic examination of the self: pitiless, objective scrutiny is not the same as absorption. Selfishness in English can be egoism or egotism. The “t” makes a real difference. An egotist is the narcissistic bore who never stops talking about themselves. Whereas an egoist has a kind of philosophy, or a worldview at least, that suggests it is one's duty to act for oneself, not others. At its most extreme, I can express it as libertarian individualism that denies society or collective good. At the milder end, egoism is perhaps more akin to Adam Smith's ideas of enlightened self-interest.

[Distracting sidebar #2] When I was young, the British English always said ego (eggo, eggo-ism), and egotism (eggo-tism). Now we've succumbed to American long vowels and say ego (eego), the same with patriotic (pay-triotic) and homosexual. But it's not always American vowels long, British short though. We say lever (lee-ver) and they say lever (levver). They say Oedipus (Ed-ipus), we say Oedipus (Ee-dipus). Not that it matters, but there you are! Vive la difference. [/Distracting sidebar #2]

But still, talking of American-British differences, a Britain in America soon learns that what we wistfully might've believed was our charming self-deprecation and modesty, is at best misunderstood, and at worst, tedious and irritating to Americans. We tend to be so terrified of appearing cocky, full of, and pleased with ourselves, that we writhe with awkward embarrassment, disavowing any skill, talent, or ability, rather than be thought boastful - hoping that what will come across is an endearing Hugh Grant charm, but actually failing to understand that it is read as a different kind of vanity and conceit. From our point of view, we are rather puzzled by how often Americans begin a sentence with “I need” - “I need this door open right now” instead of “might someone open this door” or “I need you to listen carefully” as opposed to “listen carefully.”

What does all of this is add up to? Well, I shall rename Pride for our age, and call it, not egotism- I think we should stay Anglo-Saxon - but selfishness. Not the selfishness of a child who won't share their toys, but the absorption in, and tortured obsession with self that is so powerful an agent of destruction in our age. What do we do about it? By “we” I don't mean society or the world. You and I can't change society or the world - they're to hell and screwed and farkakteh - but we can change ourselves. Just you and me. The two of us. No one else need be involved.

Let's undertake simply to reduce number of times we begin a sentence with the word “I”, and the number of times “me” and “mine” crop up in our talk. No more than that. A simple thing, but indicative of something good and important. There are convincing reasons to believe in just that small ritual, rehearsed as we drop off to sleep.

As I close my eyes by night, so I'll remember to close my “I’s” by day.

More of thee and thine, and less of me and mine.


Something like that can be our mantra. Look I'm not a life coach or a hypnotist, nor a neuro-linguistic programmer, but do try it. Between now and when we meet again for a tour around sin number two - Avarice - try it. Now you've listened to all the way through. You made it to the end. Be Proud. Be very Proud. See you next time for Avarice.

EDITED to remove the weird characters from the transition to the new forum...
Last edited by StevieG on Tue Apr 11, 2023 12:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
Hugs and sh!t ~ lucimay

I think you're right ~ TheFallen
Image
User avatar
Avatar
Immanentizing The Eschaton
Posts: 61651
Joined: Mon Aug 02, 2004 9:17 am
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
Has thanked: 13 times
Been thanked: 19 times

Post by Avatar »

a) Have always loved Stephen Fry.
b) Rarely listen to podcasts at all.
c) No need to listen since you're...transcribing them? :D
d) Excuse me while I go and read these so far.

(Also, yes...I doubt very much that the dog thinks it's sinning...it may be aware that you will be displeased, but I don't think it's more than that.)

(Edit: However, I disagree with him above in that "egotist" is not synonymous with "narcissist." )

--A
Last edited by Avatar on Fri Dec 23, 2022 10:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
StevieG
Andelanian
Posts: 5814
Joined: Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:47 pm
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 11 times
Been thanked: 14 times

Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

Post by StevieG »

Yes I'm transcribing them :D

Thanks for reading.
Last edited by StevieG on Tue Apr 11, 2023 1:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
Hugs and sh!t ~ lucimay

I think you're right ~ TheFallen
Image
User avatar
Avatar
Immanentizing The Eschaton
Posts: 61651
Joined: Mon Aug 02, 2004 9:17 am
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
Has thanked: 13 times
Been thanked: 19 times

Post by Avatar »

Haha, I think I cross-posted my edit with your reply. (Really transcribing them? Are you at least using software? :D Or just practising your touch-typing?)

--A
User avatar
StevieG
Andelanian
Posts: 5814
Joined: Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:47 pm
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 11 times
Been thanked: 14 times

Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

Post by StevieG »

I've downloaded a transcript this is riddled with errors and am correcting it :D
Last edited by StevieG on Tue Apr 11, 2023 1:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
Hugs and sh!t ~ lucimay

I think you're right ~ TheFallen
Image
User avatar
Avatar
Immanentizing The Eschaton
Posts: 61651
Joined: Mon Aug 02, 2004 9:17 am
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
Has thanked: 13 times
Been thanked: 19 times

Post by Avatar »

Haha, ok, that's not that bad. :D

I got sent a word doc copy of Knife of Dreams (before I bought it) (by Edge as it happens) and couldn't stop myself from correcting it as I read...was less fun than it sounds... :D

--A
User avatar
StevieG
Andelanian
Posts: 5814
Joined: Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:47 pm
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 11 times
Been thanked: 14 times

Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

Post by StevieG »

Avarice - Part 1

Avarice, or Greed, as we would call it today. Now there's a proper vice; one we can all surely identify with, claim, and confess to. I was all ready to dive into Greed, own it and rub it all over me like sun cream, when the thought flashed across my mind that another of the seven Deadly Sins is rather similar. Perhaps in my excitement to acknowledge and engage with Greed, I'd really been thinking all along of Gluttony. For when I hear the word greedy, I think first of food and drink. I think of "greedy guts" and "greedy pig" whose eyes are bigger than their tummies. But all those surely belong more to the fat warthog Gluttony than to hard-eyed Avarice and Greed.

Gluttony, after all, is a physical desire, seen not just in gourmandizing, but in all kinds of addictive behaviours. Whereas Greed comes not from the body, but from the mind. Avarice is, therefore, I think, a better word to describe our altogether darker, meaner, owning, hoarding, grabbing, collecting, acquiring, winning impulse.

So, when we talk of Greed, we'll forget food and wine and concentrate on avaricious Greed. This Greed is the grasping of the money-grubbing miser; the skinflint, cold heartedness of a scrooge; the unquenchable territorial ambition of an empire builder; the venal rapacity of the corrupt official; and a voracious TV evangelist; the limitless need for more and more and more that drives the rapine and monopolistic instincts of the acquisitive hedge funder, and predatory asset-stripping financier. All that seems a world away from a gourmand, a glutton, a drunk, a pot head, a Homer Simpson style doughnut-scoffer, or Monty Python's Mr Creosote and that one last wafer-thin after dinner mint. Gluttony and I are old adversaries, old friends even. But Avarice, Greed; can I acquit myself of that? The craving for power and possessions? I don't feel it's something I need worry about - do I?

There can't be much question that Greed is very allied to selfishness, which if you listened last time, you will know I chose to be my Deadly Sin number one, deposing the canonical original Pride. Just as Pride at first glance appeared to be closer to a virtue than a vice - we thought about pride as a booster of self-esteem and a builder of self-belief - so there are those who think of Greed in the same positive terms.

One of the defining quotations of the materialistic 1980s came from the fictional character Gordon Gecko, the junk-bond pirate played by Michael Douglas in the Oliver Stone film Wall Street. "Greed" he tells a dinner of fellow financiers, "for lack of a better word, is good."
Gordon Gecko wrote:Greed is right, Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of its forms. Greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind.
It's easy to dismiss this. Your instinct might be to shake your head sadly, or scoff angrily, or snort derisively when anyone defends Greed, and especially dares to present it as a moral good. We are all surely aware that the gap between rich and poor is wider than it ever has been, and that the rhythm of capitalism still rules the world willy-nilly. Disruptive rebel newcomers evolving with bewildering speed into tax dodging corporate titans; jeans and sneaker mavericks morphing into collar and tie moguls; rebellion innovation - initially branded as "for all"- producing monopolistic strangle holds; cool start-ups, becoming bloated corporate fortresses for stockholder benefit only. The same rhythm that turned Henry Ford from an oily rag engineer into a terrifyingly merciless and aggressive corporate tyrant. And Mark Zuckerberg from shiny faced student with high hopes to a loathed symbol of everything that's wrong with the new surveillance economy and its insidious reach into every aspect of our lives.

But let's for the moment think about whether perhaps there may really be a moral virtue to self-interested self-enrichment; a justification for rejecting altruism, self-listness, and all the other social justice warrior desiderata.

So, for a while I'm going to play devil's avocado and argue for Greed, or at least put the argument for Greed as best I can. “Greed is good” says the Wall Street predator. “Wealth creation is good” says the corporate titan. Well, they would say that, you might reply. All rapacious billionaires will claim that they are enriching the world; that when they generate wealth for themselves, they generate it for others. That, to quote their favourite aphorism, a rising tide lifts all boats. That they are, if anything, philanthropic. Their Greed - one might say - is part of a virtuous and effective human instinct that burns to know what's over the hill; that labours ceaselessly to find out, for example, how to feed the whole tribe over winter by devising silos and barns for grain storage; that comes up with newer, smarter, and more efficient ways of growing the economy and fattening us all.

If they get a few private jets and tropical islands out of it, well, why not? Do you honestly believe communism would deliver greater riches for all? Forget comparisons of equality - look at the reality. Today, more people in the world are dying of obesity than of malnutrition. Greed has brought largess for all. If we relate riches to height, it's as if we were all once four foot high, but now the Greed of the “achievers” has raised the average height to nearly six foot. So how dare you, if you're now six foot, moan about the billionaires who are eight foot? You are better nourished with more access to knowledge and the world's bounty than the generation that came before. That's what counts. It's not the gap between the rich and the poor that matters, it's the gap between what people were and what they are now.

We've all heard this argument and variations of it, not just from Rightists and Laissez-faire libertarian free market zealots, but from those on the Left too, like the Harvard psychologist and linguist, Stephen Pinker, anxious to show how the world has advanced thanks to the values of enlightenment, classical liberal economics and scientific thinking.

Alexander the Great, and all conquerors who came after, may have been pathologically greedy in their conquests - all empire builders, and usually their grateful countrymen - exhibit Greed. But from Julius Caesar to Jeff Bezos, the benefits that accrue; the economies of scale; the trading advantages; the spreading of technologies, skills, languages and cultural capital; the guaranteed security that comes with increasing size, scope, and power; these have advantaged the majority. That is the argument. Until Communism came along to offer another way of doing things, the drive to grow, the Greed to expand, these were all accepted. Glorified even. Communism's short-lived attempt to offer an alternative has since only strengthened the grip of Capitalism. Communism's failure has given Capitalism new courage to be even greedier, and even less apologetic or diluted by social justice regulation and constraint.

We're all aware of it and there seem to be two responses. One is to shrug and endorse - to echo Gecko and believe in the ability of our species eternally to invent new paths to prosperity and growth. The other is to question and challenge the Greed; to repudiate the idea that it is beneficial; to point to how it creates not just inequality, but how it exhausts resources, depletes the soil and threatens the long-term future of the planet.

Fine! say the capitalists. Do by all means present an alternative that doesn't shackle individual and social liberty and impoverish the many whom you seem so anxious to serve. But if it's revolutionary socialism or communism you're offering, excuse us while we vomit with laughter.

The individual writer and thinker, above all others, who might be regarded as the inspiration for this unapologetic Gordon Gecko point of view; the individual who stands as a heroic intellectual champion to all those who believe that rational self-interest, Greed, the drive to grow, expand, seize, conquer, and devour is desirable ““ good - even essential; that individual was born to a prosperous middle class Jewish family in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1895. She died in New York City in 1982, and her name - yes, she was a woman - was Ayn Rand.

At the sound of that name, you might have groaned, or your breath might have quickened, and your ears pricked up like a warhorse at the sound of the bugle. To this day, she inspires levels of devotion and detestation that seem equally intemperate. But perhaps the name is unfamiliar to you.

Ayn Rand left Lenin's now Bolshevik communist Russia, or Soviet Union as it called itself, in 1925 and made her way to the United States of America, where she set about making her name as a screenwriter, novelist, and philosopher. To most lovers of literature, she is - to put it very kindly - very far from what you might call a literary talent. Her hectoring, long-winded, bombastic style is not suited to everyone, yet her two major novels are still very much in print, adding new fanatical followers amongst the young every year. I travel a fair deal by Tube in London, and rarely a week goes by without me spotting someone reading one of the two major novels. Discounting her very first novel, We the living, a condemnation of the Soviet Russia she had left, her first success was The Fountainhead, which was made into a rather good, if peculiar, film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal.

Rand wrote the screenplay but disavowed the end product. The story revolves around Howard Roark, a dedicated modernist architect who refuses to compromise his vision. Her next novel, Atlas Shrugged remains her most popular today, a totemic touchstone for her fans. It most clearly - through the mouth of its hero, John Galt - articulates her credo of individualism. To the majority of critics and reviewers - both contemporary to her and to us - calling The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged “novels” is akin to calling Hallmark greeting card ditties “poems,” but that isn't really the point. The books served her purpose, which was to dramatise her philosophy, a form of libertarianism or rational egotism that she called objectivism. The enemy of this line of thinking is anything to do with collectivism, statism, dirigisme, government interventionism, call it what you will. Even the mildest form of social democracy, any hint of state subsidy, control or interference. Altruism, sympathy, compassion, and selflistness are contemptuously dismissed. Greed, in other words, is good.

You might see her as coming from a long line of what are known as “classical liberals” - confusing, but that's what they're called. A line that goes, if you like, names from Hobbes and Locke through Adam Smith all the way to Popper and Hayek. In some sense she could trace her heritage back to those who first express the idea that the rights and freedoms of individuals are more important than those of groups, countries, religions, or any other ideologies or collectives.

Such an idea seems obvious to us because almost all of us will have grown up more or less taking the primacy of individual liberty for granted. But such ideas were initiated in the teeth of outraged ecclesiasticism and monarchical absolutism. These days, Classical Liberalism as a phrase is mostly used when thinking of economics and the idea that without free markets there can be no free people. Ayn Rand took it all much further though, damning even Friedrich Hayek - he was the Austrian Nobel laureate and free market hero of Margaret Thatcher and Reagan. She damned him for his weakness and shilly-shallying in daring mildly to suggest that maybe transport could be provided as a public service. She accused him of all people of being “saturated with the bromides of collectivism” and cursed him even further for his daring to suggest that individual morality might need to be considered to have defined limits.
Oh god damn the total, complete, vicious bastard
she wrote,
This means that man does exist for others.
The idea of man existing for others was the great abomination to her and ran counter to everything she stood for.

Now, incidentally, woman or not, she always referred to humankind as man and glowed with pleasure when someone referred to her as “the most courageous man in America.” You can see why Ayn Rand - individualist, anti-statist, apostle of the virtues of Greed and self-interest - appeals not just to financiers and corporate bigwigs, but to the general run of conservatives and libertarians for whom big government, the nanny state, and any suggestion of regulatory breaks, checks and balances are anathema. Her biographer, Jennifer Burns, calls her the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right.

Listen to this from Rand:
Government help to business is just as disastrous as government persecution. The only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.
That could have come from Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, couldn't it? Just as the Iron Ladies' famous pronouncement “there is no such thing as society” might easily have emerged from the mouth or pen of Rand. To this day, Rand's adherents are out and proud in the Republican party and in Britain's conservative party too - outer and prouder than ever in fact.

Alan Greenspan - for 20 years head of the American Federal Reserve Bank - counted himself amongst Ayn Rand’s friends and disciples. Many Silicon Valley billionaires quote her with fervent admiration. Since 2008, sales of her books have tripled, which you might think peculiar at just the time of the economic crash when the world surely had most cause to question the value of unfettered markets and call for some kind of regulation - the apostle of non interference, the high priestess of unbridled self-interest began to appeal to more and more people.

The name of Atlas Shrugged’s hero, John Galt, was seen on banners at tea party rallies and all over America. Baffled tutors and professors were asking each other why their students were suddenly electing to do dissertations on Ayn Rand - a voice that most had believed died with its possessor in 1982. The explanation for this - at first glance - counterintuitive resurgence of interest in Rand can perhaps be found in the plot of Atlas Shrugged.

In the book, a group of capitalists and industrialists - “achievers” and “producers” as Rand calls them - are growing increasingly alarmed by the way government is encroaching on them; as they see it inhibiting, over-taxing and shackling them, and even daring to redistribute the wealth that they created. Led by the charismatic John Galt, they go on strike; withholding their apparently indispensable genius of enterprise, entrepreneurial daring and wealth creation, and withdrawing to a hidden valley – Galt’s Gulch - from where it is assumed they will build their own untrammelled capitalist paradise.

EDITED to remove the weird characters...
Last edited by StevieG on Tue Apr 11, 2023 1:37 am, edited 2 times in total.
Hugs and sh!t ~ lucimay

I think you're right ~ TheFallen
Image
User avatar
Skyweir
Lord of Light
Posts: 25188
Joined: Sat Mar 16, 2002 6:27 am
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 2 times
Been thanked: 18 times

Post by Skyweir »

wow loving these transcribed podcasts ~ and personally prefer to read than try to listen.

So thanks for going to the effort to provide them.

So many thoughts …

I’m not sure I agree from my frame of reference anyway about the evolution of the illiberal liberal ~ unless libertarianism is the next evolutionary step along the political evolutionary spectrum.

I don’t think animals possess a concept of “sin� as that is demonstrably within the realm of religiosity: the fall of man and the characteristics defined as the antithesis of “godliness�.

I mean animals might possess beliefs/supernal insight? But I doubt it. Be interesting to be able to fluidly communicate with the entire gamut of species.

He’s spot on with human focus on self ~ we just need to look around but as he demonstrates it’s not evil to be self-focussed but perhaps the degree of self with which we invest in ourselves. The lesser focus on I or the self is a positive I think.

Again my frame of reference relates to a different socio-economic reality ~ to a world that has not gone to the dogs lol 😂 but to a world of amazing possibilities.

A world that is not insular or socially siloed but to community & family.

I love Stephen Fry and love his insights which are far more a reflection of his UK reality ~ loving these transcripts ~ keep them coming.

I will read that last one and return and report lol 😂
ImageImageImageImage
keep smiling 😊 :D 😊

'Smoke me a kipper .. I'll be back for breakfast!'
Image

EZBoard SURVIVOR
User avatar
Skyweir
Lord of Light
Posts: 25188
Joined: Sat Mar 16, 2002 6:27 am
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 2 times
Been thanked: 18 times

Post by Skyweir »

What an excellent discussion of greed/avarice … I completely agree with his description of Rand … the mother of libertarianism ~ or at least a claim to her connection is claimed despite her distancing herself from libertarianism.

You can see the take-up among adherents and the pursuit of not just small government but that any government reach is overreach.

It’s interesting as I see a number of different movements that resemble anarchism more than a more moderate libertarianism.

Again the supremacy of the individual ~ to the degree I question how such an approach can be sustained.

Interesting stuff ~ plenty of issues for discussion.

So avarice/greed = good vs avarice/greed = socially fragmenting 🤷�♀�

An ideal perspective presumably is one that involves a balance between competing perspectives or doubling down on one or the other side of the socio-economic political spectrum.
ImageImageImageImage
keep smiling 😊 :D 😊

'Smoke me a kipper .. I'll be back for breakfast!'
Image

EZBoard SURVIVOR
User avatar
StevieG
Andelanian
Posts: 5814
Joined: Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:47 pm
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 11 times
Been thanked: 14 times

Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

Post by StevieG »

I will hopefully post part 2 of Avarice soon - been smashed at work.

Looks like the “new” forum is fucking up my formatting, or it could just be the inverted commas or something. I might try and fix it at some stage.
Hugs and sh!t ~ lucimay

I think you're right ~ TheFallen
Image
User avatar
Skyweir
Lord of Light
Posts: 25188
Joined: Sat Mar 16, 2002 6:27 am
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 2 times
Been thanked: 18 times

Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

Post by Skyweir »

Yeah it’s a funny little formatting thing ~ it looks like it has inconsistent issue with the use of apostrophes lol 😂

I mean some apostrophes it ignores and others not so much

Could run it through a diacritic remover and see if that helps cuz seems to be carrying across some subliminal background codey stuff

I don’t know OBVIOUSLY lol 😂 just a random thought
ImageImageImageImage
keep smiling 😊 :D 😊

'Smoke me a kipper .. I'll be back for breakfast!'
Image

EZBoard SURVIVOR
User avatar
Wosbald
A Brainwashed Religious Flunkie
Posts: 6084
Joined: Sat Feb 07, 2015 1:35 am
Been thanked: 2 times

Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

Post by Wosbald »

+JMJ+
StevieG wrote: […]

Looks like the “new” forum is fucking up my formatting, or it could just be the inverted commas or something. I might try and fix it at some stage.
I don't think it's the New Forum per se, but rather, simply an artifact from the transfer. Just as the transfer is over & done, so is that particular problem.

After making allowances for minor differences in tags, New Posts should format just like before. So yes, you can, TTBOMK, "fix it" simply by editing the posts and re-pasting the original text.

Image


Image
User avatar
StevieG
Andelanian
Posts: 5814
Joined: Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:47 pm
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 11 times
Been thanked: 14 times

Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins

Post by StevieG »

Thanks Wos, I’ll give it a go!
Hugs and sh!t ~ lucimay

I think you're right ~ TheFallen
Image
Post Reply

Return to “The Close”