"ASCETIC FEASTING"

Eid al Fitr is a feast, a communal celebration to mark the end of  Ramadan. Mardi Gras is a feast, a communal celebration. It precedes 40 days of restrained eating.  Feasting is religious because it celebrates a great yea-saying to creation. Fasting is religious  because it acknowledges how the great yea-and-amen saying includes an important ethical dimension: a yea-saying to responsibility. Responsibility means, as the ancient Greeks recognized, responding in a way that finds the right path, a path that typically avoids extremes and seeks balance.  Embodying the right balance in behavior means developing appropriate habits. Developing appropriate habits involves training, exercise and effort. Here is where fasting fits in. Fasting offers a ritualized opportunity to engage in such training.  

Philosophers, sadly, have missed the significance of feasting and fasting. Mind-fixated, they have tended to downplay feasting since it is associated with bodily appetites.  At the same time, they have tended to distort the importance of fasting, describing it in terms of self-discipline as a way to promote the renunciation of bodily desires. The exaggerated positions that result: On one side, all feasting considered as gluttony;  on the other, a need to suppress appetites.

In all of this, a perfectly good word was ruined.  The term

“ascetic” originally meant someone well trained or skilled.  A good athlete would serve as a typical example. So would an accomplished musician. Askein meant to train, i.e. to take natural dispositions and bring them to their proper fruition.  

With regard to virtuous behavior, “asceticism” did not initially mean suppressing or eliminating naturally occurring desires and dispositions. Vice, as excess with regard to desires and appetites, did represent a problem.  The virtuous way to avoid excess was not to suppress the appetite. Rather excesses were avoided by shaping habits, by training, by undertaking an ascesis. Such a training encouraged the development of habits that did not dismiss but rather properly channeled appetites, desires, dispositions. 

For the older, original, meaning of “ascetic” to remain, a particular philosophical position had to be dominant.  Humans had to be understood as continuous wholes, not as bifurcated entities. Once the bifurcation (mind vs body) took hold, once ex-carnation rather than in-carnation became the default understanding, then “ascetic” began to change its meaning.  Ultimately, it became the term we know today, the one that connotes self-deprivation, self-abnegation, self-denial. It is hard for us even to imagine how it once meant something quite different, how it emphasized the need for practices that would help us carry out activities which  brought dispositions to their proper culminations, how athletes and musicians would be good examples of “ascetics.”. 

The shift began with the ancient Stoics as the center of gravity moved from Athens to Rome. For the Stoics, ascesis began its movement toward a particular kind of exercise, one that aimed, not to refine, but to expunge, appetites.  The Stoic understanding, first absorbed and then spread by the Roman empire, eventually became the default position in Europe. 

Swept aside by all this was the pre-Stoic, Aristotelian understanding that emphasized not free exercise vs suppression, but rather behavior that, depending on which habits were cultivated, would become  virtuous or vicious. Virtue and vice did not map simplistically onto suppression or free reign or appetite. Rather virtuous behavior was associated with the proper channelling of appetites, desires, dispositions.   Vice, on the other hand, arose when the proper target has been missed, either by excess or privation. 

To articulate, as best as he could, what it meant to achieve the right target, , Aristotle famously spoke of the “mean.”   We

might translate the “mean” as the right blend at the right time in the right way. Appetites, desires, dispositions are multiple

and a hodge podge of good and bad.  Virtue dominates vice when the better dispositions are cultivated and, via the proper ascesis, well-educated (in the literal sense of drawing out what is already there, making real what initially is present only in the status of possibility).

Food offers a good and prevalent example. Gluttony (nothing but feasting) and anorexia (nothing but fasting) stand as excesses to be avoided.  Eating can be unbounded, careless, sloppy, enslaved by immediate gratification. Overreaction to such excesses can lead to rigid, narrow, schemes of suppression. 

Missing in this wild pendulum swing is the understanding of virtue as the bringing of appetites to their proper consummations. The path of responsibility, of ascesis, of virtue, of getting blends and culminations right in actual practice, is not easy.  But constantly working at getting that blend right is a way to live out the yea-and-amen attitude to the world in which we find ourselves.

CALUMNY: OUTDATED WORD, EVER-PRESENT DEED

False stories abound. In the food world, it’s earthworms in fast food, and that old standby, cat and dog meat at Chinese restaurants.  In the political realm, it’s vicious blood sport. Victims include the late senator John McCain, accused of fathering an illegitimate child with a woman of color, and, in 2016,  Hillary Clinton. One particularly sordid story claimed that she ran a pizza restaurant child sex ring.

Internationally, one of the major fabrications owed its existence to the  well-oiled propaganda machine of the Soviet Union. The big lie: AIDS was really a biological weapon developed by the Pentagon.  Its aim: kill gays and blacks. The story even got a mention on the CBS evening news.  

The tactic of reputation-smearing has a clumsy, now little-used, name: calumny.  The term’s usage peaked in the mid-17th century. The more common synonym, “slander,” is also in decline.

We thus find ourselves in an ironic situation.  As calumny/slander become more and more prominent, the words are less and less invoked. As the act rises in prominence, the pejorative label drops away.

When contemporaries think of “vice” they tend to think of sexual peccadilloes. We are sort of like the judge in a

murder case who, faced with lascivious testimony, admonished the witness that “this is a trial about murder. It doesn’t have anything to do with morals.” Or we might think of how the term “virtue” has moved from indicating probity of character associated with the male (vir in Latin), to signifying chastity in the female.  

Given such a trajectory,  “calumny” was bound to be displaced as one of the great vices. Yes, surprising as it may be, calumny was once near,  or even at, the top of the vice heap, a bad heap, and nothing to be proud of, but at the top nonetheless.

Phrased as “bearing false witness” it’s in the decalogue (the 8th or 9th commandment, depending on the list used).   When Shakespeare wished to create a Satanic character he

depicted, not a murderer, not a thief, but Iago, whose tactic was calumny. Way before Shakespeare, Plato had his hero Socrates complain about the slanderers whose lies culminated in his trial.  After Shakespeare, in Tom Jones, Henry Fielding introduced the particularly nasty fellow, Blifil.  The evil perpetrated by Blifil? Slandering Tom Jones.

Lest readers not get the point, Fielding added this none too subtle editorial. ““Vice hath not, I believe, a more abject slave; society produces not a more odious vermin; nor can the devil receive a guest more worthy of him, nor possibly more welcome to him, than a slanderer. ... for slander is a more cruel weapon than a sword, as the wounds which the former gives are always incurable.”

A little known 17th century thinker, Marie Le Jars de Gournay, articulated an ethics in which calumny was identified as the worst of the vices. Why? Fielding provides one answer: the damage to one’s character is “incurable”.  Also, societies are held together by the invisible thread of trust. Trust and a healthy skepticism (seeking evidence and following its lead) can, and should, coexist. Slander, by contrast, slays trust.  

In the food realm, people seeking guidance face this trust-investigate tension all the time.  Reports and

studies conflict. The disinformation called advertising is rampant. Absolute certitude remains mostly out of reach.  Some trust, some commitment based on strong yet imperfect evidence will always be needed. Such an inevitable need for trust opens the door for calumny to do its dirty work.  

There’s no going back to the era of Marie Le Jars de Gournay.  In that era, personal honor (“I certainly won’t do anything that would dishonor me”) stood as the lodestar by which to guide lives.  Despite some advantages, this older setting, it’s worth remembering, had its own problems. Witness honor killings and duels.

There is no need to go backward.  We can, instead, mix and blend the best of past and present. We can rearrange our hierarchy of vices and virtues.  Maybe, in so doing, we can come to make slander less of a blood sport and more of a familiar term.

Virtues: A Lesson from the kitchen

Maya Angelou’s poem satirizing health food
purists starts this way:   

No sprouted wheat and soya shoots

And Brussels in a cake,

Carrot straw and spinach raw,

(Today, I need a steak).

A later stanza addresses the main theme:

Health-food folks around the world

Are thinned by anxious zeal,

They look for help in seafood kelp

(I count on breaded veal).

“Anxious zeal” carries an important
warning. Avoid monolithic fixation.
The ancient Greek temple at Delphi offered
a similar maxim:  “nothing in excess.”

Socrates and Aristotle approached the
issue from a different perspective. They
insisted on the “unity of the virtues.”  In
one way the “unity” was definitional. All
virtuous behavior ashared one trait:
knowledge. People who acted virtuously
knew what do do in challenging situations.
In another way the unity was practical.
They believed that living a good life, in the
fullest sense, required the conjunction of
virtues, ideally a unity that included all the
virtues. Being brave, for example, or loyal
did not, by itself, qualify an individual to be
recognized as admirable.  Isolating any
single factor, even if initially benign, would
lead to its metastasizing. In the end, the aim
of living a good life would be frustrated
rather than served. Without the unity of
virtues, a life could not be described, on
the whole, and unqualifiedly, as
praiseworthy.

Still, the word “unity” in “unity of virtues”
is problematic. It’s not possible to combine
all virtues in a single unified synthesis. This
is especially so since some virtues clash
with each other. Loyalty is good. So is
honesty. Sometimes, loyalty and honesty
clash.  This is even more the case with the
mercy/justice pair. Maximize one and, by
necessity, the other is minimized. Bottom
line: the phrase “unity of virtues” is getting
at something important, but the exact
phrasing is problematic.

Here is where Angelou’s warning about
“anxious zeal” in the context of food
can help. Blends and combinations
underpin good cooking. When we think of
food, we are set in a context where
multiplicity is the rule. (1) There is
multiplicity in terms of ingredients: many
vegetables,,fruits, spices, herbs, meats.
 (2) The sought-after dish is also typically
multiple: taste is important, so is
presentation, and, of course so is health.
(3) Some combinations work better than
others. Some blends just work against
good taste.

Since multiplicity is pervasive with regard to

food, a term like “unity” is problematic.  It
can be understood as encouraging the

focus on a single factor, e.g. health isolated
from taste.  It can also be understood as
encouraging an all-encompassing
combination which forces them into a
unity of all possible factors. Such a unity,
as with “unity of the virtues” is impossible
in practice, if only because some of the
elements are incompatible. Neither unity as
isolation of a single factor, nor unity as the
conjunction of factors, offers a helpful
approach. Instead of unity, it is better to
speak of “harmony.”  Besides allowing
more flexibility as regards blends, harmony
allows for a more graduated scale than the
all-or-nothing connotation that accompanies
“unity.”

“Anxious zeal” revolves in the intellectual
solar system whose sun is “unity.”  It
isolates a single factor at the expense of
others. Thinking in more ancient terms, it
also violates the the Delphic advice to do
“Nothing in excess.” How to avoid “anxious
zeal,” and respect “nothing in excess”?
Update the philosophical advice about the
“unity of the virtues.” In particular,
substitute “harmony” for “unity.”

Harmony’s advantages: (a) It takes account
of what is inevitable, the tug of multiple
virtues. (b) It says “do not isolate one
element,” especially “do not isolate one
element to the degree that the others are
occluded.” (c) It recognizes natural and
inevitable incompatibilities. (d) It replaces
an absolutist scale for one which makes
room for more-or-less, better-and-worse.  

In a sense, going back to Angelou,  it’s like
better-and-worse as regards a meal.  If the
food is healthy, that is a good thing. If it is
healthy, but tastes bad, that is not good.  
Healthy and tasty, is better. If it is healthy,
tasty, and shared with good company, that
is better still.  The food/virtue overlap
allows for important updating of “anxious
zeal,” “nothing in excess,” and the “unity
of the virtues.”  Rephrased, these would
read: either “zeal for harmony,” “everything
in balance,” or “optimal combinations.”