Please Do Not Flourish
A philosopher’s goof
I almost committed a typical philosopher’s goof. I arrived in Prague on a Tuesday. My hotel was reserved by the conference organizers for four nights, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. So, I started wondering why I had arrived on what seemed a day early. Academic conferences tend to span two days. Why was there an empty day on Wednesday? Sure, it’s good to spend a day getting over jet lag, but a full empty day seemed like too much. Good thing I checked the conference schedule once again and discovered that it began bright and early on Wednesday morning at 9 am. So there went my full “empty” day.
Only a philosopher can discover the night before that the conference he thought was beginning in two days was in fact starting the next day.
And then I realized that I was the reason this conference spanned three days. The conference organizer (Jakub Jirsa, at the Charles University), consulted with me early in planning, and (having in mind my good experience of Liberty Fund conferences) I advised that he schedule only three meetings per day, 9-10:30, 11-12:30, and 2-3:30. I said that discussions among participants in “down time” and over meals would be at least as valuable as the actual sessions. And so, that’s what he did, and that’s why the conference (on Nic Eth X, chapters 6-9) takes three days not two.
In the evening, I went to the State Opera to hear Dvorak’s Rusalka. I had no idea it drew on the same legend as the Little Mermaid. It does not have a happy ending. Rusalka is the mermaid, and from her poor choices she gets condemned to a kind of limbo existence, and the prince, who regrets having rejected her, dies after he kisses her. It’s only a little less sad than tomorrow’s opera, Dialogues des Carmelites.
My ticket six rows back in the center of the orchestra cost $60. I was not allowed to take a picture of the production, but this is how the curtain looked from where I was.
Harvard faculty voted to limit the percentage of straight As in a course to 20%. This graph amused me:
I was graduated from Harvard (note the passive voice—graduation is an act of the institution not the student) several decades prior to 2006 and was in the top 10 students in my class with a GPA of about 3.7. Wow, things have changed.
What effect will the cap have? Currently A or A- grades constitute over 70% of the grades in the average Harvard course. Expect that number to stay the same or grow. The sole effect of the measure is to aid in the identifying of truly superior students.
You will admire the restraint of a colleague and me, when we rendez-vous’d at a beer hall after the opera. This same colleague remembered a similar conference in Prague in September 2016 when, with a group of colleagues gathered around a big table, at that very same beer hall, I predicted that Trump would win in a landslide. They were dumbfounded and could not believe that it was possible.
My essay today is a critique of the fad of centers of “human flourishing.” It begins:
The only time Our Lord came upon something merely flourishing, he cursed it: “In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he was hungry. And seeing a fig tree by the wayside he went to it, and found nothing on it but leaves only. And he said to it, May no fruit ever come from you again!’ And the fig tree withered at once,” Matthew 21:18–19.
Plants flower in order to bear fruit. Jesus always says that he desires fruit, not flowering. And fruitfulness, not flourishing, requires death. As he put it:
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life,
In my essay, I put these teachings together with Justice Clarence Thomas’s observation, when he spoke recently at UT Austin, that the last lines of the Declaration are as important as the first:
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
The old definition of courage was a stubborn willingness to die if necessary to stand firm in what is right. Justice Thomas pointed out that unless we foster or acquire that sort of courage, our country will not survive.
But I point out in my essay that the aspiration to flourish is not compatible with courage so understood. The “greatest generation” did not depart for Normandy intending to flourish. “Flourishing,” I say, is a quintessentially boomer term and concept.
It’s also false as an attempt to render Aristotelian eudaimonia. The main reason is that flourishing is species-relative. A dog flourishes in one way, a horse in another, presumably a human being in a third, analogous way. But for Aristotle, eudaimonia is a sharing in, and imitation of, that being who truly has eudaimonia in the fullest sense, God. I take it that it is absurd to say that God is flourishing.
Anyway, a lot more can be said along these lines, but that’s enough for now. Read the essay and comment below if you wish.
Ciao!
When I was Literary Editor at National Review, reader mail suggested to me that parents were anxious about finding colleges for their kids that weren't just spiffy camps for Marxist indoctrination, so I decided we should do The National Review College Guide (1991), which I wrote with Charles Sykes. We wrote about grade inflation at Harvard then. I'm not surprised the faculty have decided to resist such pressures as have previously "compelled" their generosity. But . . . a lot of smart young men and women get into Harvard--kids who got good grades in high school. I don't suppose getting a B or a C in a course at Harvard is a crushing blow, and I don't care. But will there now be pressure on professors not to award a worth term paper an A for fear that will force them to award the same grade at term's end? Will there be an A quota? - Brad
Great insights in your article in today's The Catholic Thing The leaves without fruit passage per Matthew 21:18–19 is also a powerful description of our present material wealth that rejects real human "fruitification" and the curse of demographic collapse. Many elements of these "happiness projects" treat religion as just another self help program where the evils of suffering, moral failure and death are obstacles to happiness, rather than opportunities for surrendering our wounded and often rebellious wills to the mystery of the cross so we can receive the "fruit basket" of graces for virtue that would not have been present otherwise. Life is “painfully imperfect” for most of us, real happiness here is only a foretaste of what can be but it is not lasting, not stable, and not free from evils. Only heaven is free of evil. Well done, Michael!