on cheating

Music: Shearwater: Palo Santo (2006)

This post is about dating, test scores, and some easily confused egos (the ideal-ego, the ego-ideal, and the superego, you know).

And my dog.

(My dog’s hopeful stare at around the time for dinner reminds me of my responsibility to others, and he’s giving me that stare right now---back in a moment).

Channeling Uncle Burke, I’m gunning for some perspective by way of a little incongruity. And incongruity is a nice banner for a dating story, because I have many to illustrate the ingenuous mismatch that yields insight (maybe). She was beautiful with piercing dark eyes. She could draw blood with her sharp wit. She had the uncanny ability to make a well-worn t-shirt appear as elegant as an expensive evening dress just by cracking a smile. One date began with the odd request to “borrow some deodorant,” which strangely charmed my pants off (literally).

A phone conversation, recalled and reconstructed from a summertime Thursday night:

“I don’t have a date on Tuesday.”

“But I thought you had dinner with the other guy.”

“I decided I don’t like him; I would rather you take me out.”

“Excellent! And so I shall. But what changed? Does this mean I’m the only one?”

“I guess I’m just not into him.”

“Well, I hope you let him down easy. You’re quite the catch and losing you can really bum a guy out.”

“Why do you care? You should be talkin’ shit about him. C’mon Josh. Bring your game.”

“Just because I want you to myself doesn’t mean I can’t be considerate of others. I’d hate to have others talkin’ shit about me, you know. My game is being a good person. Trying to be nice guy, at least.”

“You’re so bogus.”

That date happened---the seventh of seven---and it went very poorly. I should say it went “predictably poorly,” but love can render one pretty stupid. Still, what is to be learned?

If we think about courtship as a practice, then we might identify a number of codes, rules, and techniques central to that practice that I either observed or failed to observe in this situation. To borrow from the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, a practice is a form of cooperative human activity that strives to produce goods internal to the practice. The good internal to courtship seems to me to be a “healthy relationship” or “love between two people.” For me, that good is characterized by attraction, trust, emotional transparency, and mutual respect, buoyed by a good dose of lust and a bigger lump of caring. My understanding of courtship, and my former dating partner’s understanding, seemed to be at odds. In her world, courtship entailed a battle akin two jousting knights or fighting among rivals to “win” the honor of her person, and this may entail disrespecting a rival or dehumanizing him. “Don’t nice guys finish last?” she once quipped. “Apparently,” I responded. And apparent it was.

But then, I don’t see the practice as a game or race or joust. Why? The answer has to do with what I think is a kind of emotional cheating, or what we might term today as “manipulativeness.” Would I prefer to have a relationship with another that was achieved by characterizing other suitors as inhuman or unworthy of recognition? Does one “win” love, or cultivate it? And if the former, what does that make one’s lover? A prize, or a person? I recognize the competing models of courtship in our culture. One is sport; the other is less spectacular and perhaps best described as an evolving negotiation.

In his book on ethics titled After Virtue, MacIntyre uses the allegory of the game to explain the tension internal to all practices:

Consider the example of a highly intelligent seven-year-old child whom I wish to teach to play chess, although the child has no particular desire to learn the game. The child does however have a very strong desire for candy . . . . I therefore tell the child that if the child will play chess with me once a week I will give the child 50 cents worth of candy; moreover I tell the child that I will always play in such a way that it will be difficult, but not impossible, for the child to win and that, if the child wins, the child will receive an extra 50 cents worth of candy. Thus motivated the child plays and plays to win. Notice however that, so long as it is the candy alone which provides the child with a good reason for playing chess, the child has no reason not to cheat and every reason to cheat, provided he or she can do so successfully. But, so way may hope, there will come a time when the child will find in those goods specific to chess, in the achievement of a certain highly particular kind of analytical skill, strategic imagination and competitive intensity, a new set of reasons, reasons now not just for winning on a particular occasion, but for trying to excel in whatever way the game of chess demands. Not if the child cheats, he or she will be defeating not me, but himself or herself.

That is, there is a good internal to chess playing that can motivate learning the game, and there is a good external to chess that can motivate learning the game. One would “hope” that those who engage in chess playing do so because of the joy of the game and the skills it helps to develop. The good external to chess playing---social or gustatory---is not specific to chess. The analogy to courtship should be, at this point, obvious: does one want a relationship or a trophy? The game in-and-of itself or the candy? If the former, then the reward is for oneself. If the latter, then the reward is for others to see and for “me” to enjoy. Of course, the latter reward is ultimately about oneself too, but it is once-removed, or abstracted, to a measure that is only tangentially related to courtship, which is to say, the reward is about something else.

Since I was introduced to MacIntyre’s theory of “virtue ethics” as an undergraduate, I have always come back to it. I find it compelling as frame for thinking through moral dilemmas and trying to live what Aristotle called “the good life.” Virtue ethics also resonates for me as a good description for how we actually behave in the world.

If one does not believe in moral universals, comporting oneself as an ethical person can tempt relativism. Go with God, or you have to behave in a less certain way. MacIntyre’s “solution” without deity is to trace common threads in Western thought about “virtues,” pulling them together into a coherent framework. Masculine connotations notwithstanding, virtues are qualities of character or behavior that are cultivated in “practices.” From various traditions (including the teachings of the New Testament) MacIntyre develops a description and a prescription for moral behavior based on the cultivation of valued qualities and behaviors. He says that we learn to be good people by embodying the virtues that we see role modeled by others in practices that we also practice (or want to practice). The most obvious examples of practices are crafts or professions, but MacIntyre also means things like sport, or courtship, or raising a family. The benefit of thinking about ethics in terms of virtues is that there are no absolute rules for right and wrong, just guidelines, or rather, behaviors and character traits we see in others we admire. And because ethical comportment is based on role modeling, one is absolved of perfection (for example, even Christ was “tempted”---he was not perfect either), but rather strives toward “being good at what one does.”

With the benefits, of course, come the risks (living well is dynamic and never “achieved” until death). The thing about just about any practice is that they need resources, and consequently, are necessarily tethered to institutions. Institutions provide material (and sometimes affective) support to practices. MacIntyre argues there is a tendency toward contradiction when practices are concerned: practices work toward the cultivation of goods internal to their activity, but require the resources of the institutions that support them. Institutions by definition pursue goods external to the practice. Consequently, the pursuit of goods between practices and institutions can be at odds. Again, the obvious examples here are professions, such as medicine. The goods internal to medicine include healing, and the virtues cultivated toward that end are care and hospitality. The goods external to medicine are prestige and profit. In the current “health care debate,” for example, the story of beleaguered doctors bemoaning the pursuits of the pharmaceutical or health insurance industry are so commonplace they are cliché: medical doctors cannot practice healing and hospitality because of massively complex bureaucracy based on profit-making pursuits. The pursuit of goods external to the practice of medicine are killing the goods internal to medicine and warping the virtues embodied by the Hippocratic oath.

And so with courtship. Although the actual statistics are complicated, 40 to 50% of marriages in the United States end in divorce. Why? The answers are also complicated. I would not generalize my personal experience to this national number, nor any viewing of Bridezillas, but there’s something to MacIntyre’s theory of competing goods: some people are not getting married for the goods internal to the practice (love, a healthy relationship, and so on); some are getting married for the goods external to the practice, the institutional pursuit of social (and legal) recognition. How many of us have had a friend get married for the sake of marriage, when the spouse would seem more or less interchangeable with another?

In fact, those who have studied the history of the institution of marriage often note it started as an economic arrangement; marriage is an odd institution in the sense that practice it supposedly houses came after it. Build it and they will come? (double entendre intended)

The tension between the pursuits internal and external to the practice of committed relationships is also at the heart of the same-sex marriage debate. Those who advocate for same-sex unions argue for external goods---and these are not bad: health care rights, tax-related issues, all sorts of things are wrapped into the need for institutional status recognition. Many of us caution, however, that the pursuit of external recognition is somewhat compulsory and in a way that may in fact threaten the “under the radar,” long-term relationships forged by queer couples for centuries . . . .

Still, if once adopts a virtue ethics approach to being-in-the-world, the mundane “bad thing” of the outlook becomes cheating. In this way of thinking, cheating is the thing to be avoided. “Evil” is a rupture in practices, ultimately the irrational x-factor; psychotic eruptions are, in the last measure, unthinkable in this moral perspective. And so we have a place for rupture, a seat of chance (and the reason for grounding ethical being in something like autonomy in the sense that nothing is sewed-up in advance). Cheating, broadly construed as deliberate dishonesty to secure advantage, is the antithesis of a given practice’s virtues. This is to say, dishonestly is the “sin” of the virtue ethics approach (and “evil” is the rupture of chance). Notably and importantly, in MacIntyre’s example of teaching the child chess, cheating is placed on the side of the pursuit of external goods. Cheating represents a short-circuit, of sorts, a deliberate violation of the virtues of a practice in pursuit of external goods. And it’s not that the pursuit of external goods is bad; rather, cheating represents the pursuit of external goods in a way that violates or negates the goods internal to a practice. Cheating is a mask: cheating says that it is in the name of virtue when it actually erodes or submerges this-or-that virtue.

Dating. Chess. Standardized tests. I started thinking about making this post because of the SAT test-taking scandal that broke this week. Rich kids were hiring smart kids to take the college entrance exam for them. In the mainstream media, the motive for doing so was couched in the pursuit of external goods: rich kids needed to get into this-or-that prestigious school because prestige is . . . well, everything. The story mirrors: numerous teachers in the Atlanta public school system were changing test answers for a decade to secure recognition. External goods. The goods internal to the practice---learning, knowledge---were eclipsed by the need for external recognition (funding). And those of us who are educators are very well aware of common practice of hiring a ghost writer for term papers. External goods. Secure the grade, get a job. To hell with the virtue of understanding, or scholarship, or learning for its own stake. Education has always been a means to an end; I’m not so foolish as to believe it has been anything other than this for the century or two that public education was made a coherent pursuit. But I think only recently has the candy emerged as the motive; this is, I think, the slight of hand so central to neoliberal thought. I want to think that educators are like MacIntyre’s wanting to teach a child chess: candy is promised, but by learning the “game” the child comes to recognize that playing is the thing, and that the candy is only a spin-off benefit---and a necessary one, of course, but a spin-off benefit that makes the playing possible. The playing is the thing.

What I’m struggling with here is the permissibility of of cheating as an emerging cultural virtue, or worse, as an accepted means to an end. Culturally, it would seem that cheating has been accepted or even embraced as a norm. Ask any teacher about cheating, and s/he will tell you that increasingly this is a norm that is embraced, however cynically, by younger generations without discomfort. Cheating is role modeled increasingly as a route to success (Wall Street comes to mind). As a culture, we seem obsessed with evil, the irrational ruptures---often violent---that puncture our screens night after night on the evening news. But evil is in the register of contingency; psychosis is psychosis. Cheating seems the more insidious problem of our time, the calculated and overly rational deceiving of others for advantage or gain; the legitimacy of cheating may well be the grounding structure of evil. Well, I think it is; cheating is the foundation.

And so, here is my dog, Jesús. I’m on my patio, enjoying the cool weather. I’m barefoot, in a t-shirt and lounging shorts, plopped on a couch pillow placed on a bench and smoking a cigar. He’s sitting on the pillow with me, at my back. He growls when the sound of sirens waft in (I live next to the busiest fire station in Austin; sirens blaring is a common sound). I’ve switched from listening to Shearwater on my headphones to listening to the local radio station, KUT, on a portable radio. I’m drinking Topo Chico. The dog isn’t wondering about whether I have “game,” or if I’m making lots of money. Well, I really can’t say what he is or isn’t wondering about. But he’s here passing the time with me. He could care less that I’m writing on my blog.