Moral Disposition and Love for Natural Beauty

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, section 42:

Now I admit at once that the interest in the Beautiful of Art (under which I include the artificial use of natural beauties for adornment and so for vanity) furnishes no proof whatever of a disposition attached to the morally good or even inclined thereto. But on the other hand, I maintain that to take an immediate interest in the Beauty of Nature (not merely to have taste in judging it) is always a mark of a good soul; and that when this interest is habitual it at least indicates a frame of mind favourable to the moral feeling, if it is voluntarily bound up with the contemplation of nature. It is to be remembered, however, that I here speak strictly of the beautiful forms of Nature, and I set aside the charms, that she is wont to combine so abundantly with them; because, though the interest in the latter is indeed immediate, it is only empirical.

He who by himself (and without any design of communicating his observations to others) regards the beautiful figure of a wild flower, a bird, an insect, etc., with admiration and love—who would not willingly miss it in Nature, although it may bring him some hurt, who still less wants any advantage from it—he takes an immediate and also an intellectual interest in the beauty of Nature. I.e. it is not merely the form of the product of nature which pleases him, but its very presence pleases him, the charms of sense having no share in this pleasure and no purpose whatever being combined with it.

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Chapter 22;

Miss Crawford, untouched and inattentive, had nothing to say; and Fanny, perceiving it, brought back her own mind to what she thought must interest.

"It may seem impertinent in me to praise, but I must admire the taste Mrs. Grant has shewn in all this. There is such a quiet simplicity in the plan of the walk! Not too much attempted!"

"Yes," replied Miss Crawford carelessly, "it does very well for a place of this sort. One does not think of extent here; and between ourselves, till I came to Mansfield, I had not imagined a country parson ever aspired to a shrubbery, or anything of the kind."

"I am so glad to see the evergreens thrive!" said Fanny, in reply. "My uncle's gardener always says the soil here is better than his own, and so it appears from the growth of the laurels and evergreens in general. The evergreen! How beautiful, how welcome, how wonderful the evergreen! When one thinks of it, how astonishing a variety of nature! In some countries we know the tree that sheds its leaf is the variety, but that does not make it less amazing that the same soil and the same sun should nurture plants differing in the first rule and law of their existence. You will think me rhapsodising; but when I am out of doors, especially when I am sitting out of doors, I am very apt to get into this sort of wondering strain. One cannot fix one's eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy."

"To say the truth," replied Miss Crawford, "I am something like the famous Doge at the court of Lewis XIV.; and may declare that I see no wonder in this shrubbery equal to seeing myself in it. If anybody had told me a year ago that this place would be my home, that I should be spending month after month here, as I have done, I certainly should not have believed them. I have now been here nearly five months; and, moreover, the quietest five months I ever passed."

(The Doge of Genoa, asked what he thought most wonderful about Versailles after visiting in order to beg Louis XIV for peace, responded, "To see myself here." It was an answer that the French could hardly avoid celebrating, even in a humiliated enemy. Or, given that we are talking about early modern France, perhaps especially in a humiliated enemy.)

The liking for natural beauty is indeed related to a moral disposition in Austen; and liking for the beautiful in art is at least more ambiguous. We get something like this in MP, since Fanny's preference for the natural, contrasted with the preference for the artificial in some of the other characters (as seen in the earlier scene when everyone discusses 'improvements'), is an indication of character.

There is an old idea that the virtue of temperance involves a love for the beauty of restraint and proportion; so that it should have at least an analogy, and perhaps a shared foundation, with love for natural beauty makes a certain amount of sense. It's certainly the case that the link between the two comes up again and again in the history of the subject.

Immortal Truths to Earth's Mortality

To a Windflower
by Madison Cawein

Teach me the secret of thy loveliness,
That, being made wise, I may aspire to be
As beautiful in thought, and so express
Immortal truths to Earth's mortality;
Though to my soul ability be less
Than 'tis to thee, O sweet anemone.

II

Teach me the secret of thy innocence,
That in simplicity I may grow wise;
Asking of Art no other recompense
Than the approval of her own just eyes;
So may I rise to some fair eminence,
Though less than thine, O cousin of the skies.

Ill

Teach me these things; through whose high knowledge,
I, — When Death hath poured oblivion through my veins,
And brought me home, as all are brought, to he
In that vast house, common to serfs and thanes, —
I shall not die, I shall not utterly die,
For beauty born of beauty — that remains.

Cawein is sometimes known as the 'Keats of Kentucky'. He was extraordinarily prolific, and popular enough that he did quite well in monetary terms writing poetry, although he lost the bulk of it in 1912 in a stock market crash at the very end of his life.

One of the more talked about questions to do with his work is the relation between his poem "Waste Land" and T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land. They are very different poems, but there are some thematic and some possible verbal echoes, and Cawein's poem was published in a magazine of which Ezra Pound was the editor, and in which Pound had contributed an article. Pound, of course, suggested a number of changes to Eliot's draft of his poem, and may have actually seen an even earlier version. Coincidence or connection?

No, No, No, No, No

Maleficent has always been Disney's best villain, in part because she was so intense. Other villains are villainous, but Maleficent claimed to be the Mistress of All Evil wielding all the powers of hell, enthusiastically aligning herself with the forces of evil, and it didn't seem to be an empty boast. So any major movie trying to depict her had better do a good job of it. It turns out that there is such a movie in the works; the trailer was just released:



That doesn't look awful, although it doesn't look particularly promising, either. However, this is the description:

From Disney comes "Maleficent"—the untold story of Disney's most iconic villain from the 1959 classic "Sleeping Beauty." A beautiful, pure-hearted young woman, Maleficent has an idyllic life growing up in a peaceable forest kingdom, until one day when an invading army threatens the harmony of the land. Maleficent rises to be the land's fiercest protector, but she ultimately suffers a ruthless betrayal—an act that begins to turn her pure heart to stone. Bent on revenge, Maleficent faces an epic battle with the invading king's successor and, as a result, places a curse upon his newborn infant Aurora. As the child grows, Maleficent realizes that Aurora holds the key to peace in the kingdom—and perhaps to Maleficent's true happiness as well.

Ack, no. What is that? That verges on abomination. The whole force of Maleficent's actions was that she cursed a girl to die and doomed a kingdom to the disaster of having no succession simply because she wasn't invited to a celebration, and then vanished laughing with delight. She was a fairy, in the old-school sense, in the sense that Susanna Clarke captured in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, in which the fairies have no sense of proportion and are ruthlessly logical in their massively disproportionate responses to everything (and also utterly delighted in the effects of the disproportion; it's notable that Maleficent is constantly laughing in delight at all the very bad things she is doing). Then, and this is in some ways just as evil, she locks Prince Phillip up, shows him the girl he's in love with and who loves him, and taunts him by telling him that she will keep him locked up until he is so old that he is about to die -- when he can finally go and see his true love, who will not have aged a day, and then laughs at him. (It's a remarkable scene: she shows that she knows she's in a fairy tale and she has decided to rewrite it as an anti-fairy-tale.) Then when he escapes, she raises the forest of thorns and, threatening Phillip with all the powers of hell, becomes a dragon like the devil she obviously is standing in for. And, indeed, she is so powerful that nothing can protect you from her except something called the Shield of Virtue, and she can't be killed except by something called the Sword of Truth. ("Sword of Truth, fly swift and sure, that evil die and good endure!")

Remaking that story as an attempt to get revenge as a result of a betrayal is like remaking Paradise Lost as a story about a young man who, protesting what he sees as the mismanagement of his powerful employer, leaves the company and starts his own business, getting involved in some shady dealings along the way. This might make an interesting story, but you don't try to tell it as a retelling of the Fall from Heaven.

And it's a difficult thing to do, already. Angelina Jolie apparently really likes both the original movie and the character, so she might salvage a lot, but it's difficult to see her pulling off the intelligent, gleeful, ruthless elegance with which the incomparable Eleanor Audley conveyed menace and smooth, smiling malice in almost every tone.

Lone and Frigid Tryst

Stars Wheel in Purple
by H. D.

Stars wheel in purple, yours is not so rare
as Hesperus, nor yet so great a star
as bright Aldeboran or Sirius,
nor yet the stained and brilliant one of War;

stars turn in purple, glorious to the sight;
yours is not gracious as the Pleiads are
nor as Orion's sapphires, luminous;

yet disenchanted, cold, imperious face,
when all the others blighted, reel and fall,
your star, steel-set, keeps lone and frigid tryst
to freighted ships, baffled in wind and blast.

Reason First, then Draw Conclusions

Sometimes people just start parodying themselves. Under the headline, "Liquidate the Catholic Church" an author at Gawker says:

Last year, The Economist calculated that the Catholic church in America alone had a $170 billion annual operating budget. Globally, the figure is much larger. When you add up the value of the church's worldwide holdings—land, buildings, and treasures—it's reasonable to imagine a huge, huge number.

Is the Catholic church using its wealth in the best way possible? That is, is it using its resources in the way that most effectively embodies the Christian ideals that the church purportedly stand for? Leaving aside some of the church's odious political positions, is it even spreading the good kind of Christian Love For They Neighbor as Thyself very well? The Economist's estimates found only about $5 billion in annual charity spending out of that $170 billion total— less than 3%. Even if the actual charitable spending were triple that amount, it would still mean that the American Catholic church spends less than 10% of its budget on direct good works.

Setting aside the point that was noted when the Economist article originally came out, that the Catholic Church in America doesn't have an annual operating budget but many different annual operating budgets, since it is not a single institution but literally hundreds of them, if the author had actually read the article rather than just referring to it, he would have seem immediately that nearly $150 billion of that 'operating budget' is the combined operating budgets of hospitals and schools that are officially recognized as Catholic.

So when the author absurdly goes on to say,

And if you sold off all of the Catholic church's holdings, you could do even more for the world's poorest people.

he is seriously trying to claim that if you sold off all Catholic charitable
organizations in America, and all of the American hospitals it officially recognizes as Catholic, and all of the American schools it officially recognizes as Catholic, it would somehow magically be doing more for the world's poorest people. Of course, Catholic institutions in America aren't the only Catholic institutions in the world; many of the world's poorest people are being actively helped by their own more local Catholic institutions, which not uncommonly receive extensive donations, the fund-raising for which is furthered by parishes and the like, whose operating budgets are counted by the Economist numbers but whose consciousness-raising work is not.

I also suspect that the author, drawing conclusions without actually establishing the character of his premises first, might not fully grasp the implications of eliminating twelve percent of America's hospitals (serving fifteen percent of patients); it might be a useful idea before liquidating the nation's largest non-profit hospital system in order to give the money away to determine first whether it might not be a somewhat imprudent means of raising funds, and whether it might end up being more harmful in the long run.

I don't expect Gawker to be any shining beacon of intellectual thought. But I think it exemplifies nicely a common problem. If you're in my profession, which is college teaching, you notice a curious paradox: students have vastly more research material directly available to them than their predecessors, but end up not using it, with the result that, having vastly more research opportunity, they do poorer research. The reason, of course, is that the habits of reasoning aren't there. Before you can draw conclusions, you have to know how to reason about it; and it is the reasoning, not the conclusions, that determine what information you need and what you can do with it. All the points above were practically at the author's fingertips -- the point about hospitals and schools is in the very article to which he linked, and how many of the nation's hospitals or schools are Catholic is the sort of question that would obviously occur to someone who read it -- if they reasoned about it all. Numbers like dollar figures don't equal understanding; they are things that have to be understood properly themselves before they are of any use at all.

Representation and Geography

Vikram Bath has an interesting post up in which he argues that the only reason we elect representatives based on geography is custom. He argues for the following claim:

Claim: Populations should be segmented into relatively more homogenous groups before conducting elections. Avoid segmenting them into relatively diverse groups.

The obvious problem is that gerrymandering does exactly this. But Bath argues that there is an alternative way of doing it that avoids the standard gerrymandering problems, by parties. This seems like a good way to guarantee constant party free-for-all and demagoguery, but perhaps this would be regarded as an appropriate trade.

There are, in fact, reasons why we tend to do things by geography (one of the commenters notes that even tiny Lichtenstein divides itself into two regions for these purposes), and some of them are things that Bath seems to regard as weaknesses: for instance, we make use of geography in this kind of context because it is not as ideological as a party system and thus guarantees that we aren't merely chopped up into opposing ideological blocks, and because we often do not like tying elections to mere political identity rather than a broader shared identity, and because we often want something that guarantees at least the occasional relevance of geographical concerns even when they don't make it into national policies. With none of these is it so very obvious that we're dealing with a weakness in the system rather than exactly the sort of thing a good political system will involve.

There are other issues, less obvious but also important. Bath suggests that representation based on geography is "[s]omething you never would have thought of yourself" that we do just because it's the way we've always done it. This is certainly false. The primary reason we have representation based on geography is that we are already organized by geography for lots and lots of other things; it's not that geography is important because it is used to determine representation but that it is used to determine representation because it is already important. The colonies pre-existed their own legislatures; the states pre-existed Congress; European countries pre-existed the European Union.

A second issue, sometimes closely related, is that people are culturally, morally, and sometimes religiously invested in geography far more than Bath suggests. People in Austin differ quite a bit from people in El Paso, both of whom differ quite a bit from people in Amarillo or Llano, but it's not hard to find people in all of these places who are heavily invested in the culture of Texas, which incorporates, and is not independent of, its geography. It is quite natural in such a context to elect representatives qua residents of this geographical unit called 'Texas'. (And it is worth noting that it is already as much a political and cultural unit when so identified as it is a geographical one; this is quite clear with Texas, which has a geography so diverse that it includes five different climate regions, each of which is itself sufficiently large to exhibit a significant variation in geography. And while there are geographical borders, there are also purely artificial borders arising out of a mix of culture, politics, and historical accident.) This is not a purely Texan thing, although Texans take it to the level of both an art and a national sport; this appears to be true in every U.S. state, in every Mexican state, and in every Canadian province, and is probably the norm everywhere; it has certainly been true of every place I've stayed long enough or under such circumstances as to get some sense of the culture.

It's also the case the geography is a handy political mnemonic; we tend to think in terms of geography for lots of things, anyway, even if it's just a matter of deciding where to vacation. It's second nature. One of the often overlooked advantages of the Electoral College is that it makes the Presidential election extraordinarily easy to follow. I mean, think about it -- here is an election system that requires that people engage in a lot of basic math and arbitrary numbers, and people still can usually follow it very well if you just give them a map. And what is more, people love the maps. And we see analogous things in other election systems, with parliamentary ridings and the like. (I'm actually pretty certain that one reason, also often overlooked, that people tend to hate gerrymandering so much more than many other kinds of political manipulation is that it makes the maps ugly and unstable.) When we look at smaller scale issues, the kinds of political arguments people have close to home, we find that they don't just think in ideological terms but in terms of variations across geography, partly because there are important geography-tied political issues, almost everywhere, things like water rights, but also because it helps with things like organizing campaigns, which often have to take geography into account. Thinking about politics geographically is already virtually universal; this doesn't require that we have to think of representation, particularly, in geographical terms, but it does make clear that it's a fairly natural way to think.

A Poem Draft

Dalriada

In Dalriada
Kenneth MacAlpin
was felled by Pictish sword;
evil the day!
He, rarest of kind,
will not be likened soon.

In Dalriada
Donald MacAlpin
four years did reign and die,
mighty soldier.
Loch Awe his cold tomb
will guard until judgment.

In Dalriada
by Viking was killed
Constantine MacKenneth,
troubled ruler;
the black cave witnessed
that most terrible defeat.

In Dalriada
Edus MacKenneth
for one year ruled the land;
Nrurim witnessed
allies betray him;
small was his legacy.