In the musical Camelot which first appeared on stage in 1960, Mordred — the antagonist, evil traitor and eventual deliverer of a mortal wound to King Arthur — appropriately lauds the antithesis of what good men are to pursue with his signature song titled “The Seven Deadly Virtues” the first line of which ends “those nasty little traps.”
The lyrics are clever. “Humility,” Mordred tells us, “means to be hurt. It’s not the earth the meek inherit but the dirt.” Hmmm. And the opposite of humility is — come on, all together — pride.
I had never heard of Harvard’s Professor Henry Lewis Gates Jr. until last week, but as with so many academics a quick click or two on an “.edu” web site, first to “Academics” then “Departments” and “Faculty” and voila, you’re opening up their cv online. That’s what I did this past week.
The nature of a resume or as they refer to them in academia and government work “curriculum vitae” — cv — can take lots of different forms. I’m used to seeing resumes from business people where you hope to find succinct goal/results stuff. Budgets are quoted to give the reader a sense of the scale and scope of the experiences; or growth of sales or start up schedules that paint a person who’s a can do, storm the barricades of commerce kind of guy/gal — if they’re there. I suggest resumes not exceed three pages.
Henry Gates’s cv is 27 pages long. While I’m sure there’s a condensed version somewhere you just have to skim through the document to note how he has spent his life. On the surface it’s been charmed and at variance with the titles of his articles. It’s all there, nothing it seems was deemed editable. But I focused on one thing in particular: Gates co-authoring of a book with Cornel West titled The Future of The Race. Who is Cornel West you ask? He’s the professor who left Harvard during the tenure of Larry Summers after having been asked to show up at his classes instead of sending in a grad student. After all Summers argued, Harvard was paying West nearly $400,000 and expected the man to be on site and not at lecture dates or book signings. I wonder what a faculty:student ratio at Harvard really means? In the end, West went to Princeton in a huff.
Now, back to the story.
You Are What You Eat; Play As You Practice; Your Friends Define You. These are phrases that once were needle pointed on course linen. These days they aren’t often repeated anywhere. Also neglected are the virtues they recall. The intellectual virtues are Art and Prudence and are characterized by an ordered approach toward the good. The moral virtues include Justice, Temperance and Fortitude. And the theological virtues are Faith, Hope and Charity. If you’re a math geek you’ve counted eight, not seven in this list. Correct! Mordred was focussing as do a number of us on the “moral” virtues. They include patience, meekness, modesty, piety, gratitude, affability, abstinence, sobriety, chastity, self restraint. He obviously cherry picked his list. Not alone in that, eh?
Now let’s look at the past week of national humiliation on You-Tube. A Maryland Senator blasts a constituent who was arguing that he is able to pay for his own medical expenses by suggesting that if the man gets a bill from a doctor or hospital he’ll ignore it. A junior Senator from California suggests that the President of the National Black Chamber of Commerce get in line with other black organizations and support the Obama energy plan.
Then President Obama in a hour long “news conference” suggests that doctors in the U.S. trump up ways to treat children in order to line their pockets with fees for service; and ends the week by suggesting — some might say profiling — that a police officer’s response to a suspected burglary was done stupidly.
All of this caused some to recall 2007 when the Obama campaign not wanting to be embarrassed, finally paid an assortment of parking tickets which had likely gone to “warrant” and dated back to the Presidential candidate’s student days at Harvard. Hmmm. What did that Maryland Senator accuse the constituent of?
My wife suggests that liberals often target behavior in others that they themselves are most guilty of. I’d say she’s on to something and it certainly includes ignoring the virtues. You pick which ones.
