Virtuous thoughts on the occasion of a boil
A boil is an amusing thing isn’t it? When we hear about someone having a boil we tend to smile. I wonder where this notion comes from. From recent experience I can report that boils are a painful and misery-making business. The life of sufferers before the invention of pain-killers and antibiotics must have been truly awful. Boils were one of the plagues of Egypt, so we can tell that they have not always been seen as funny. The dictionary tells us that the word derives from Old West German, but the Germans’ sense of humour is said to be different from ours, so boils are not inherently funny.
Schadenfreude is a current German word. It means to take malicious pleasure in another’s misfortune. Our reaction to a boil is not so much to be amused as to take cruel pleasure. The Good Samaritan if he had embraced schadenfreude would not have helped the poor man beaten by robbers, but would have stood there laughing.
I confess that I am an old softy. Faced with misfortune I don’t want to laugh. I want to help and if I can’t I feel frustrated. When I was much younger public humour (on radio, TV, films) used to be witty. We could laugh at the cleverness of the joke. Of course there was pantomime and Mr Punch, but slapstick humour is not, in essence, cruel. Nowadays, unless it is just me, humour is either scatological or built round the enjoyment of another’s pain.
Is this a consequence of the steep rise in individualism or is just coincidentally connected? Is it, as Gordon Gecko said, “Greed is good”? Is it that the more we are encouraged to, “just be yourself”, or to, “follow your dream”, the less we are able to focus on the needs of others. I confess I find this modern self-centeredness repellent.
Tom Wright, the Anglican Bishop of Durham, has written and excellent book, “Virtue Reborn”. ‘Virtue’ sounds to us an old fashioned word and Tom Wright sets out to rescue it. He says that we need rules and regulations and we seem to have more and more of them as time goes on. What we lack is the disposition to do the right thing and not to go round the back of the rules and find a way to tweak them to our advantage.
He quotes an eminent banker on the subject of the financial crisis as telling him, “Keeping rules is all right as far as it goes, but the real problem in the last generation is that we’ve lost the sense that character matters, that integrity matters. The system is only really healthy when the people who are running it are people you can trust to do the right thing, not because there are rules but because that’s the sort of people they are.” Tom Wright calls this instinct to do the right thing ‘virtue’.
Virtue is not innate. Doing the right thing has to be learnt and practised so that it becomes an instinct. He gives as an example the training as a pilot of Captain Chesney Sullenberger. ‘Sully’ as he is known was the one who, taking off from La Guardia Airport, ran into a flock of Canada geese causing a loss of power in all engines. Sully and his co-pilot had only two or three minutes to go through a series of procedures which would save the lives of their passengers and crew. They did this by instinct born of training and practice and landed the plane on the Hudson River and all were saved.
As Christians we know what is the right thing, but we have to practice doing it in a society which thinks that there is no such thing because all values are relative. It is not easy is it?
