Character. To Be, or Not. . .

This pizza is being baked in a wood fired pizza oven that a colleague and her husband have in their backyard. The husband, Ed, and I have talked much about its construction and capabilities. I desire to build one of these.

The book I'm wading through, Lila by Robert Pirsig, has got me thinking about our culture. The subtitle is An Inquiry Into Morals. That is what caught my eye after the author's name. I've been wondering about why some people do what they do and how they justify their actions. The last chapter I finished, 21, was about the Victorian philosophy of intellect being subordinate to society. According to Pirsig, the question the Victorians asked was, "Would society approve?" The Victorians had a definite idea of right and wrong. Their idea of God is one of a gracious gentleman. So their pursuit was to be the same, strive to be a gracious gentleman. Strive to become what a human would and could achieve, gentle and gracious. Anything else is inferior. Poverty, Native Americans, the Wild West, sex, anything that didn't fit within the social value of society first. That created a static society that was resistant to change and tried to force everyone into the same box. That view also led to the first World War and sent millions of young men to their death. While the Victorians wanted to remain static, someone else was dynamically figuring how to kill people faster. Peter Weir made a movie about Gallipoli with Mel Gibson that showed part of the horror of WWI.

After WWI people realized that the Victorian ideal of society wasn't working. While the robber barons lived well, many did not. People used their intellect to question why we do things the way we do and they started changing society to fit their new intellectual ideal. There was no Victorian sense of right or wrong. Things were judged on if they worked or didn't work. Think of the Lost Generation, Communism, Socialism. But my question, and Pirsig hasn't answered it yet, if we question why and how we do something and are dynamically changing to fit in the new, where do we stop questioning and changing? Don't we reach a point that we are changing just to change? Do we just keep changing until we find something that feels correct and good? How do standards, morals, ethics, and ideals fit into a value system that thinks change is the ideal? Where does human character fit into this mix?

Seems to me that both groups had/have it wrong. The Victorians took something like the Bible and made it so strictly interpreted and enforced, that no one could follow the rules. The Intellectualists looked at the Bible as a Victorian construct that should be thrown out because "I will continue to look for what makes sense to me" is the new ideal. Anything goes. In Every arena. We have been living more than 80 years in this new ideal of, "if it feels good, do it." Do whatever you want, and to the degree you want to do it. The phrase was coined in the Sixties, but the feeling has been with humanity forever and became prominent in the 1920's. Human-given license to do what we want.

Aren't we all looking for the ideal that will allow for the most beneficial experience for humans? Maybe the Bible isn't something that should be used to beat humans over the head with, nor something to be avoided as antiquated and obsolete. Maybe the Bible is a guidebook given to us by a Superior being, God, that show humans how to live in the most beneficial way, down the most beneficial path. Maybe living this life, following this guidebook is living a life of character. Maybe living a life of character is what is most beneficial for humans.

No maybe.