Philosophy Universe

PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSE, EPISODE 9: DISCOVER YOUR SUPERPOWERS! TRAINING MONTAGES AND VIRTUE ETHICS
In our last episode we named a bunch of ethical theories. There are two that usually show up first in textbooks: Utilitarianism and Kantian ethics. They sit in opposite corners of the ring, and usually in scifi, when you have some weird ethical dilemma – like murdering one innocent person to save human civilization from a deadly disease – it is these two that duke it out. A bit unfairly, perhaps, they have eclipsed with their popularity – yes, ethical theories can be popular – a third heavyweight that could easily pick both of them up and throw them out of the ring. This theory did not have a name originally, it was just called ethics. We can look at Plato and Aristotle as the first Greek philosophers to speak systematically about it, but it’s probably much more ancient than them. It’s been the backbone of ethical thinking until maybe a couple centuries ago, when it was eclipsed, but continued to be developed under the shadow of the other two.
Modern authors call it “virtue ethics,” and I will tell you immediately that I don’t like the name at all. It takes one aspect – maybe an important one – but throws the most essential elements out the window. It is like saying “a Jedi is someone who trains to fight with lightsabers.” Sure, that’s part of what a Jedi is, but is that the essential part, or only the easiest to remember?
In actuality, ethics emerged, in those ancient times, as a philosophical reflection on the good life. Under Aristotle, it becomes clear that this ideal of the “good life” has three important elements. First, it is “wisdom,” it is intelligent living. It is developed by expanding our understanding of life, of our place in the universe, of our own selves. It is so closely connected that, to some extent, a good life is a life of understanding and wisdom.
Second, what is sought intelligently is what our nature demands, which is basically happiness. Yes, ancient ethics is not a list of what you should or should not do, but an attempt at developing an understanding of what is a happy life, what do we need to become in order to achieve it.
And notice that I did not say “what we need to do” in order to achieve happiness. Much less, what we need to “get” (that would be way off target!), but what we need to become. The third aspect of what I will call, well, ancient ethics, is that happiness goes hand in hand with, it practically overlaps with “seeking the perfection of our nature” – or, if you prefer, with becoming the best version of ourselves.
Oof! That’s a lot! I don’t want to scare you with all these high concepts. Let me tell you that you are most likely already living by these principles. It’s like, nobody needs a book on “how to walk,” and most people don’t need a singing coach; it is when you want perfection – to become better than average at signing or running – that you get some expert advice, a coach, a book on the principles of a specific activity. Ethics becomes handy, though, if you want to improve as a human being, to overcome those habits that drag you down, and to become, overall, a happier person.
Of course there’s a lot that we can talk about, so this is the plan. In this episode we will talk about the “becoming better” part: our habits, and how they work. In the next one, we’ll talk about the “seeking happiness” part, and how this ties up with knowing what and who we are. And in the one after, we’ll connect both things, the “becoming better” or “seeking perfection” with finding happiness. At least I’ll try.
So, welcome to PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSE, a podcast about science fiction, fantasy and philosophy, and everything in-between! This is Episode 9, and part of our ethics tutorial miniseries: DISCOVER YOUR SUPERPOWERS! TRAINING MONTAGES AND VIRTUE ETHICS.
Spoiler robot, do you have something to add before we jump in?
No. I predict this episode will be all over the place.
Okay then. So a lot of this is going to be highly familiar to you. To you reader (I’m not sure spoiler robots can develop habits). It is the fact that we can get better at things, and that we do this by repeating actions. It’s what we call practice, and it is grounded philosophically on a notion very dear to Aristotle, the notion of “potentiality” – something we have to look at in detail some other time. Every human being is familiar with this: If you learned to walk, it means that you had legs, but as a baby didn’t know what to do with them. Then you clumsily began trying to stand on them, falling every few steps. You did not give up and decided “no, walking’s not for me, I’ll just have people carry me around the rest of my life”. Babies are tenacious. You continued until you mastered this activity, and – unless you are under some ailment – you not only don’t need to think about it, but can carry stuff around, hike on difficult terrain, jog and run around like a pro.
If you stop to look at this, you’ll discover how good we are at developing habits. You develop them when you learn to ride a bike, read, type on your computer, play the guitar or the banjo, ice skate, shoot arrows, kick a ball, bake, draw, write, learn a new language, start a new job, tap dance… Every time you play a new game, and the first time it was difficult and confusing, but later you became quite adept and able to tackle higher levels, it was your human capacity to develop habits that allowed you to do this!
Aristotle talks about habit as a “second nature”. It is a very useful way of picturing how it works. When you develop a habit, it ends up “feeling natural,” like a part of yourself – like breathing, if you like: no one has to remind you to breath, you don’t have to think “okay, it’s been about ten seconds since the last time, I should probably contract my diaphragm and let some air in.” (Although, I’m going to double back on that example and point out that we can even layer a habit over that basically autonomic activity: we can learn to breathe better!) But the point here is, habit is liberating. It liberates tons of mental energy. When you are writing a letter, you can think of your feelings, or the ideas you want to convey: you don’t need to think about the spelling of every word, and if the “d” is the one looking left or right. When you are driving, you can talk to friends, plan your next meal or listen to music or a story: you don’t need to think anymore which pedal does which. Habit allows us to reach new levels of activity, new levels of mastery, by building up on previous habits that now are basically second nature to us.
In fact – I’m going to sound a little like a motivational speaker here – habit is our real superpower! It will not allow us to do things that go against the laws of physics, chemistry or physiology – we won’t be able to fly unassisted, or shoot lasers from our eyes – but hey, when a man crosses the Niagara Falls walking on a tightrope, he doesn’t do it on willpower alone: he trained for this months, or years. The things people achieve through practice and training – sometimes very focused, sometimes extended through time – look pretty superhuman to me: swimming the English channel, surfing massive waves, improvising on the piano, ice skating backwards, playing blind five chess games at a time, making a crochet dinosaur, singing a three-hour concert, memorizing an entire play, there’s your daredevils, your aquamans, your web spinners, your Dr. Xaviers. How do you get to be that amazing? There is some natural inclination, probably, and very occasionally some extraordinary, innate talent. But for the most part this is achieved through perseverance in an activity, practicing, learning, challenging oneself, partially failing, picking up the pieces, going at it again, until you have made yourself extraordinary.
Next, Aristotle distinguishes between good and bad habits. “Good habits” are what we call “virtues”. What about bad habits? You got it: we call them “vices”. What makes a habit “bad”? Generally speaking, they are harmful, or destructive, or unintelligent. Mind you, we are not speaking yet of ethics: a bad habit can be chewing your nails, or brushing your teeth too hard, or lifting from your back. You are not a bad person because you run with poor form. It takes another layer of reflection to distinguish what habits can be identified as “moral” virtues and vices. In fact, by now you probably realize there are all sorts of habits; many of them are purely physical, or heavily neurological (like learning what to look for when about to throw a ball), and some bad habits may become anchored on physiological or psychological processes, what we call “addictions.” But Aristotle does produce a basic classification of morally-related habits, which medieval philosophers later expand into very detailed “trees” of related virtues and vices. We’ll get there, just not today. Patience is a virtue.
Aristotle loves talking about habits, and goes into even further depth. He notices, interestingly, that developing a habit not only helps us become better, more efficient, at doing that thing, but also that the activity itself often becomes more enjoyable! Habits are self-reinforcing in that sense, they enter into the fabric of how we choose what to do next. You may have noticed how, if you run regularly but stop for a few weeks, the first couple of times can be very difficult – we’ve “lost the habit.”
If this is true, this is very important for moral perfection and its opposite. Let’s say it’s difficult for you to be nice to your coworkers – your natural tendency is to be a gruff. But you decide to try, every day, to smile a bit more, to say a kind word, even if you don’t mean it. There’s a way in which habits transform us, even from the outside in, and if you stay consistent, you become that smiley, nice person, to the point that new coworkers will never suspect you were such a gruff to begin with! To be sure, the “gruff” you may still be dormant somewhere, so one needs to be vigilant, but it becomes less of a need as habit takes root.
“But are you going to talk at all about training montages or not?” I guess I should, especially since it’s in the title. And here I should say, there is something both adequate and misleading in the images of training montages. For one thing, they show us a reality. We see the hero or heroine trying to do something. It’s usually something sports-related or fight-related: run an obstacle course, throw knives and such. We see the trainee being really clumsy at first, wiping out over and over in the course, nearly killing their teacher with a bad throw. With a background of cheerful music, we watch their progress: they nearly get to the end of the course, only to be beaten by one last, impossible obstacle; they stick a bunch of knives close to the target, and suddenly they reach relative mastery: The trainee now twist, turns and jumps through the impossible obstacle, landing with a smug face; the knife-thrower throws knives without looking and all of them hit the target. Their performance is flawless and made to look easy. Of course this projects the idea that working hard and constantly, under the guidance of a clever master, will quickly help you reach mastery.
The danger here, of course, is in the word “quickly”. Training montages don’t help picture the time this takes, the frustration, the distractions, and sometimes the plain boredom of constant repetition. Life gets in the way too: it’s easy to practice ten minutes of guitar during vacations, but when you’ve begun working before the sun’s up, and come home late and burnt out, those ten minutes may feel like climbing Mount Everest. Training montages don’t have the time for that: the hero is in a moment of his or her life where the only thing to do is practice fighting techniques, and they can do this in a matter of days or weeks. That’s not how it works. One thing I’ve heard a couple of times is that you have to learn to love the journey, how much you have improved compared to yourself, and not to what others are doing. I’ve actually felt this when training for long runs. The first couple time you can run, say, three miles and end up exhausted: “the most I can run,” you think, “is maybe double this, and I’d end up puking all my insides. How could I ever run a half marathon? That’s like more than four times my limit!” An actual marathon feels like an impossibility. But after a few weeks those three miles have become your warmup. You wonder why it felt so difficult.
Another sort of good image /[slash] red herring is the stat system in role playing games. Again, it’s a nice illustration, that our original “stats” can improve with practice: we can get stronger, faster, tougher, wiser – even, yes, more intelligent and more charismatic. “Character stats” and leveling up are ways of mathematically simulating the power of habit and growth. Of course, game systems are usually a bit limited in their simulations: how does killing a bunch of orcs make me better at tracking or picking pockets? But fighting is usually the most fun thing to do in games, and a good game master will not have you tracking things for an entire session.
Still, again, there’s a way in which leveling up can make us see habits in the wrong light, and this is more problematic with videogames I think. You see, games like Dungeons and Dragons don’t speed up the process: you usually have to go on long adventures to gain a level or two. The dynamic of videogames, though, requires that you level up every few minutes. If you look at in-game time, most videogame characters go from complete incompetents to forces of nature in the course of a day or a night: you start throwing rocks at innocent blobs and by the end of the adventure – which takes place in just a few hours – you’ve mastered all four elements and are shooting lightning from your –BLEEP- Hey! I was going to say from your fingertips and fighting four dragons at once. There are very few videogames that make you feel a significant amount of time has passed.
And I think that’s fine for videogames – it is, so to speak, the conventions of the genre. But I feel that this has bled into other narratives. This may be just me, but for me it was very, very cool to see Luke Skywalker very slowly, and with great effort, get a grip on the Force. By the beginning of the second movie he has to concentrate really hard just to get his lightsaber out of the ice. After what’s probably a few days of training he can move his X-wing a few inches, but that’s about it. By Return of the Jedi, though, he’s more skilled, of course, but he’s also acquired a great sense of calm and self-control; he’s a different person. That sense of effort, of gravitas, though, is completely missing in the prequels: the Force powers feel as easy as pushing X in your controller. And don’t get me started on the sequels, though: they feel like a poorly designed game, that needs to throw in a new power every five minutes to keep you interested. “You’ve unlocked worm healing!” “You’ve unlocked blowing up spaceships with force lightning!” “You’ve unlocked, er, inventory teleporting, press right shift to send someone a lightsaber!”
Okay, I totally digress. But my point is, not many games and movies grasp the real pace of habit-forming, and it would be cool if they did. That’s why I think “character arcs” are a better image. Character arcs have a character be, say, self-involved, self-doubting, or somewhat of a coward at the beginning of the story. By the end of the story they’ve come to grips with their own imperfections, and they’ve struggled, with some measure of success, to overcome them. They are still who they were, but they have grown.
So, what’s your character arc? Have you planned it?
That’s what ethics (“ancient ethics”, if you will) is about: it is not about party trick to amuse your friends; ethics (“ancient ethics,” if you will) is about becoming a better person altogether, and leading a good life.
But what’s a good life, then? Let’s talk about it, in our next episode of Philosophy Universe.