Marge and Aristotle

Remarks Delivered at Parents Weekend

Surrounded as we are by intelligent, interesting, and talented students and colleagues, one of the great, unheralded benefits of living and working in a boarding school is the opportunity for fascinating conversations. Sometimes these discussions emerge over a meal, other times they occur just in passing, but these conversations frequently lead on to other, even more interesting connections. For example, last week a colleague and I had a brief conversation regarding a point he’d made suggesting that from the perspective of Freudian psychology, the character of Stewie from the animated TV show “Family Guy” is an excellent personification of what Freud calls the ID—the part of us that demands instant satisfaction of our desires. In a kind of pop culture tennis match, his point in turn brought to my mind an essay I’d taught in an ethics class some years ago in which the authors argued that the character of Marge Simpson, the blue-haired matriarch of the TV show “The Simpsons,” was actually an excellent example of Aristotelian ethics. Surrounded as she is by the lunacy of the show’s other characters, Marge manages to steer a balanced course, using her reason and morals to find what Aristotle imagined as the proper path through life.

This notion of balance or moderation as the basis of a life well lived comes from the “Nicomachean Ethics,” one of Aristotle’s most widely read works. Among other points, in it Aristotle suggests that the human beings fundamentally desire to live happy, fully realized lives, and that to do so, we must cultivate certain virtues. In order to develop these virtues, Aristotle explains that we should seek in our behaviors what he calls the “mean” or the middle between two undesirable extremes. For example, with respect to the virtue of courage, Aristotle argues that too little results in weakness and vulnerability, while an excess of courage results in arrogance and catastrophic overconfidence. Neither extreme is desirable, and landing too far on either side of the equation is damaging to both the individual’s happiness and to the well-being of society. 

I think of Aristotle today, because it seems to me that our world is in need of him. Like summoning a philosophical superhero, I believe that we need to send out a call for greater reason, balance, and ethics in so many areas of our lives. We are surrounded by pundits, advisors, opinion makers, and institutions that each claim increasingly extreme and polar positions. They shriek and demand our attention, and suggest that anything short of complete agreement is a sign of cowardice or betrayal. This is a dangerous fallacy, the sort of thing that Aristotle cautions against. On the other hand, when I look at the work and the mission of St. George’s, I see great promise. Here we have chosen to consciously and deliberately cultivate balance. You see it in our programs, in our practices and in our philosophy. St. George’s students are required to participate in and urged to excel in academics and athletics alike; we work hard to challenge the mind, body, and spirit; and we expose our students to a wide range of issues, information and viewpoints. In all we do, we seek to develop and more specifically to model the sorts of reasoned, thoughtful, ethical behaviors that we believe the world requires, both now and in the future. I believe that Aristotle, himself a teacher, would be pleased.

Even so, challenges clearly abound. Thanks to the swirling cultural currents around us, there is a high degree of murkiness and uncertainty in our affairs, perhaps more than at any time in history. It seems that as the world has grown more complex, so too have the challenges to our character. This is in large part why St. George’s has in recent years worked so hard to cultivate and instill a greater awareness of honor and ethics in our community life, and it is why we continue to discuss openly the challenges that face us, as individuals and as a school. Since finding the mean is a difficult task, and given the great uncertainty that surrounds us despite our best efforts, I offer the following observations in an additional attempt to illuminate some of the Aristotelian landscape that lies hidden in the fog of modern society. 

First, hearing is not the same thing as listening. To hear something requires nothing more than the right equipment—it is a purely sensory response. Listening on the other hand requires much more than just sensory input. To really listen to a person or their perspective requires that we focus and engage them, taking in what is being said, considering its meaning, and then finally offering some measure of response. When this dynamic of engagement and connection is missing, so is any meaning in the exchange of ideas. Students, this is what your parents are getting at when they ask, “Are you listening to me?” We are not asking about your hearing, we want to know if you are absorbing the message in any meaningful way. The hard thing about listening is that it requires concentration, and in a world full of buzzing, chirping, tweeting, flashing distractions of innumerable sorts, it is increasingly hard to concentrate on anything. Nevertheless, if we are ever to have a chance to understand any issue at more than a superficial level, each of us needs to find ways to concentrate, to listen, and then finally to think. It is this final element, the application of reason, that Aristotle identifies as the critical step for each of us. Without thought, without reason, we become no different than the squalling, manipulative character of Stewie, constantly scheming to fulfill our immediate selfish desires. If on the other hand, we choose to listen and to think, not only will we better understand one another, we can better understand ourselves.

 Second, information is not the same thing as knowledge. With the advent of the Internet, measureless amounts of information became available to us, all reachable easily and quickly. Decades ago, when futurists looked ahead to the 21st century, they got it all wrong. They imagined technology like flying cars, jetpacks, and meals in a pill, but instead we got iPods, DirecTV, and most significantly, a quantum revolution in networked information. The resulting expansion of electronically stored and accessed information has transformed the world in more ways and in less time than any of us could have imagined. Where once upon a time it took days or weeks to gather enough information to research an issue or a question, today the same task can be accomplished in a few keystrokes while sitting on the beach or in a coffee shop. What has not kept pace with the information explosion is our ability to harness it. We try, but every one of us is increasingly challenged to sift through mountains of data, comments, emails, and websites in a vain effort to collect all of the information coursing at us. Faced with this onslaught of data, we have an even harder time trying to pull anything meaningful out of the mass of information. Once again, Aristotle’s model offers us a solution. Despite the fact that he was not much for computers, Aristotle’s work suggests that our ability to reason, to think, can save us. We can, and we must affirmatively choose to find the time and the space to go beyond skimming from data nugget to factoid to bullet point. We have to choose to think long enough, to study hard enough to distill some real knowledge from the broth of data in which we are cooking. This is why at St. George’s we choose to focus our students’ work on close reading, on research, on discussion and synthesis of information rather than merely the accumulation and regurgitation of data. Put another way, what we are teaching is the practice of applied reason, or even more simply how to think meaningfully.

Finally, opinion is not the same thing as wisdom. This ought to be entirely evident to all of us, given the sheer volume of published opinions available today, seemingly on every issue on Earth. As was the case in every communications revolution from the ancient world forward, the development of a new technology shifts the landscape. From the dawn of written language, through the printing press, to the Internet, as our ability to communicate more broadly has grown, so too has our ability to disseminate our views and opinions. While in many ways this is a very good thing—the free exchange of ideas being deadly to all sorts of oppression and evil—it also demands of each of us much greater skill in determining which views are worthy of our attention and which are not. At the risk of sounding undemocratic, this is because not all opinions are created equal. For example, your doctor’s opinion of your neck pain matters a great deal more than that of your next-door neighbor, and the government’s opinion of a creative tax deduction matters much more than your own. In a world where every action can be blogged about, commented on, forwarded, and rehashed, it is essential that each of us approach an issue with Aristotle’s principles in mind. Once again, we need to think. Only with a considered application of independent thought are we able understand which opinions are informed and learned ones, and which are superficial or biased or just the noisy babble of fools. Even more dangerous than mere ignorance, if we fail to find wisdom in the trackless forest of foolish opinion, we become easy prey for manipulation and outright villainy and evil. It is our job as a school, and individually as citizens, to equip our students and ourselves with the skills and experience to seek wisdom, to think deeply, and to thus contribute to the world in a meaningful way.

 In closing, I acknowledge that it’s a long way from Newport to ancient Athens, and it’s an even longer way from Marge Simpson to Aristotle, and yet I cannot help noticing that even over those great distances of time and space and culture, there are threads that connect us. If we are able to do as Aristotle bids and as the character of Marge perhaps illustrates, if we develop and cultivate our ability to listen, to think, to know, then we can find the ethical mean, the path to lives of satisfaction, fulfillment and contribution. In the end, it is this final element that I hope will continue to distinguish the graduates and members of this school. Real wisdom, real fulfillment even in an Aristotelian manner requires action. The point of our lives is not just to know, but to do—to contribute. We must use reason to think, yes, but above all, we must act. We must find the mean, and follow it. It is this application of knowledge that defines us as humans, and ultimately demonstrates the measure of our wisdom. I was reminded of this principle in a humorous way by an observation sent to me recently by a good friend. “Knowledge,” it reads, “is knowing that a tomato is actually a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” I think Aristotle would agree.

Copyright 2010-2022, Eric F. Peterson, All Rights Reserved