Supernaturally Virtuous Litter Picking
Apparently when I pick up litter with muh grabber, to and from work, at church, where I'm a hireling to do the same, I'm being virtuous, with the implication that I couldn't do it without the Holy Spirit. Nothing to do with being an eccentric, self righteous old man whose self respect and interest is in seeing a quarter mile of clean street.
Comments
I believe you, but in order to convince others
you need to get rid of that T shirt that says Virtuous Litter Picker.
Has someone stated this to you? Or is it just an example of the belief that one needs God in one's life to act virtuously?
This is almost nietzschean.
Eek! I assume not--Nietzsche was dreadful.
I never heard that theory. It seems pretty unlikely to me. There is always more litter.
No risk there. I always thank the council workers and finish what they start, because they aren't resourced enough. And I'm not that kind of demarcationist.
Bloody clever tho'.
I was thinking of something like this, from The Antichrist...
But stupid with it.
Me too. You?
Wow. People really criticise you for picking up litter because you're "taking away someone's job"?
After all, someone threw it away - finders keepers! Why shouldn't you pick it up if you wish to? And why shouldn't you then put it in a litter bin if you have a mind to?
There are some strange people around.
The wave of silent approval from the rest of the queue was palpable.
I take it this is the view of some of those in the church you are - or were? - involved with?
In which case I'd say it's a simple sign of 'super-spirituality' on their part. They've 'spiritualised' what you, and plenty of other people, do irrespective of faith position.
But I suppose if 'all good things come from above' then anything good and virtuous must ultimately be seen to have its origins in God.
You may be of God's party without knowing it, just as Milton, according to Blake was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it.'
Guilty as charged!
Re Nietzsche, in 'A Fish called Wanda', Otto, who I think we can agree was not a nice person at all, is see to be reading (I think) 'Beyond Good and Evil'.
A philosopher best avoided, in my view.
It's nonsense, and always has been? It's the same argument made by the sort of scumbag who claims moral virtue in abandoning their supermarket trolley in random locations in the car park, because returning it to the appropriate location would be "doing someone out of a job".
You may as well argue that by not being drunk and disorderly in public on a regular basis, you're doing a policeman out of a job.
Nietzsche is I believe a complicated thinker who contradicted himself a lot and as far as I can tell every one of his readers takes away from him something in their own image.
My existentialism prof, much quoted by me on the Kierkegaard thread, advised us that Nietzsche's books need to be read cover to cover, not skimmed in a leering quest for his most outrageous jokes and metaphors.
And for the existentialists, the most important aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy was eternal return, which I could sum up as...
Which I think gets us into his notion that morality follows aesthetic criteria, but I won't get too far into that now, beyond to post a quote from Beyond Good And Evil that I just found today...
A woman can get away with that.
I volunteer at the local Community Library. We offer a free WiFi connection 24 hours a day and there are seats in the open courtyard so people are there at all times. I wander around picking up the litter before I start my shift. I once scored a pair of wine glasses, which I disinfected and kept.
I also ring up supermarkets and report trollies left in various places. because otherwise they end up in the river.
My brother says there's a river in his area so polluted that the trollies come out with bits eaten by chemicals.
Dear me. Not criterion?
Yeah, sorry. Off-base with the article-number thingamabob. "Morals have aesthetic criteria" seems to be the quote.
but shurely in German?
That would be my late father. I'll accept "misguided" on his behalf but you can fuck right off with "scumbag".
Well, I was going by the English translation that came up when I googled.
Yes, that is one of the big books that established Nietzsche as frankly vile. I believe that this quote is wrong, but it is one of the less horrific things in that thing.
Of course in this specific case Blake was terribly wrong – I recommend CS Lewis’ Preface to Paradise Lost.
Amen!
If butterflies were a pest that would get into your home and eat your food and leave droppings everywhere, I think we’d be eager to crush them no matter how pretty they were.
Yeah. I think everyone who reads The Antichrist gets that "WTF, asshole?!" jolt on the first page with "The weak and the botched shall perish, and one shall help them to do so."
Which I'm pretty sure is the intended effect. Personally, I'm partial to the section where he compares reading the New Testament unfavourably to reading the Law Book Of Manu, the latter of which dictates, among other things, that members of the lowest castes
Yeah, so the guy knew how to pick his examples. But there's a reason why I wrote "...he compares reading the New Testsment to reading the Law Book Of Manu...", rather than just "...he compares the Law Book Of Manu etc". Because Nietzsche is not endorsing applying the Law Book Of Manu to the current era, or even saying they were appropriate in their own era, he is describing the psychological effect that the book has on him, as the reader, contrasted with that of the gospels.
On a cutsier note, I also like Nietzsche's summation of his comparison of Christianity with its fellow "nihilistic" faith, Buddhism...
Yeah, it's possibly an inept comparison, since the arguments for killing a cockroach are related, at least partly, to physical well-being, whereas the arguments against killing a butterfly are related to visual beauty.
I haven't read much of BGAE, and don't know the context of that quote, but to pair it with my original example...
When I decide to help the old lady across the street rather than beat her up for beer money, I'm not doing it because Plato or Jesus or Kant tell me to do it, I do it for the same reason that I spare the butterfly: I simply want there to be more beauty in the world.
(And, yeah, it might work better if the two creatures were equal in hygienic terms.)
Nietzsche does have a reply for those who ask rhetorically: "But what if I DO think that beating up the elderly is beautiful?" As explained in my class, you should ask yourself if you really think it's beautiful to do that, or are you just doing it show everyone how evil you are(*). If it's the latter, then you're still stick within the false duality that Nietzsche wants you to transcend.
(*) The murderers in Rope were cited as an example of this in the lectures. They were, of course, patterned after Leopold and Loeb, who also claimed nietzschean justification for their crimes, and the writers of Rope apparently took this as an accurate representation of Nietzsche's supposedly baleful philosophy.
Oh, there’s a lot more in the Antichrist than that. But his other ideas of master morality and slave morality and the like… as Lewis said, there’s a difference between “You like your bread moderately fresh—Why not have it perfectly fresh?” and Nietzsche’s “Throw away that loaf and eat bricks and centipedes instead.”
All that said, I hope Nietzsche is doing better now than when he was on Earth. 🕯
Oh, I don’t doubt it—I just wholly disagree with it with every fiber of my being. 🙂
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is all that is wrong with the law in England and Wales.
In other news, I'm now entering the second week of my jury service. Which I'm not allowed to talk about except to say that there is a kettle, but no teabags.
For the picking group, we get bags from the council, with an arrangement that they're left next to council bins for uplift (in theory, council staff empty the bins at least once per week and will uplift bags left there at the same time). We have an app where we can record litter collection and the location of bags, and for larger number of bags that forwards those locations to the council so they can divert a truck to pick them up sooner. When we organise larger groups and collect very large number of bags (+trolleys and other larger items) we inform the council of the event in advance, and it's not been unheard of for the council to have uplifted the stuff within an hour of the end of the event - even when that has been on Sunday afternoon. It's useful for groups to find the right person in their council and form a good working relationship (in our case, that's Emma).
With small litter picks, bags go into individuals' wheelie bins. Big litter picks, which require a council pick up, see the black bags left in the local councillor's driveway. This is a location from which pick-up is fast and efficient.
We've got a volunteer resilience group too, which springs into action if the river bursts its banks and threatens to flood the village (in 2016 it actually did flood the village.)
At least some of this is done by local businesses for whom it is good publicity; certainly anything involving high-pressure hoses, welding tools, industrial pumps or motorised water bowsers is done by local businesses. Litter-picks might be Scouts, Guides, the Youth Group, etc etc. Again, it's all good publicity.
May I suggest, Martin, that your T-shirt should read: Martin, Volunteer Litter-picker, and then the logo of something which might be a sponsor. This will reduce the chances of anyone imputing virtuous motives to you, and suggest something vaguely business orientated and publicity-stunty instead.
@KoF- I did jury duty in April. We had a fancy coffee machine, a kettle AND teabags, plus an unlimited supply of rather dull biscuits. The lunches were nice, too.
These things vary. Our local authority is pretty supportive of voluntary litter picking groups.
@ChastMastr - yes, I've read C S Lewis and as you'd expect, perhaps, come down somewhere between his view and Blake's.
Milton had to work hard to make his Satan unattractive. But I agree that his contemporaries would have picked up the villainous cues more readily than Blake or us post-Enlightenment types.
Generally speaking, I'm suspicious of any commentary that asserts that Satan = Cromwell for instance, whilst being fully on board that 'Paradise Lost' can't but have been influenced by the politics of the Civil Wars and Commonwealth period.
Blake was quirky member of that particular tradition too, of course.
Hence his comment.
Also, the fact that Milton's Messiah is not God doesn't do God any favours. All the work of saving people is done by someone else.
Is there evidence that Milton was hostile enough to Cromwell that he woulda made him Satan?
(And, yes, I know Milton's portrayal of Satan is somewhat ambivalent, but I would have to think that, "all the best lines" notwithstanding, he came down on the side of think he's a bad dude.)
The argument runs that it's some kind of subconscious stress reaction on Milton's part as the glorious Puritan future had failed to materialise. A Republican England had not joined the Dutch and German Protestant states to overthrow the Papacy and usher in the Millenium and bring the light of the glorious Protestant Gospel to the world and hastened the return of Christ.
Something like that.
Whatever the case, as @Dafyd reminds us, his theology was pretty unorthodox. I've always thought of him as 'binitarian' rather than 'unitarian' but yes, to all intents and purposes Milton's God the Father is something of an aesthetic void. The Son is somewhat anaemic and the Holy Spirit a kind of draughty after-thought.
Milton would make a good minister in a mainstream liberal Protestant denomination ...
I'd agree - in terms of Milton's intention. As far as the actual execution of this idea goes, I don't think he entirely succeeds.
I think Blake over-stated his case. As he often did. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a case to be made.
But we are a long way from litter-picking, virtuous and godly or otherwise.
'They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow
Through Eden picked their solitary way.'
Well, at least in North America, the main direct descendants of Puritanism per se are the Congregationalists, Unitarians, and United Churches(via Congregationalism), so...yeah.
"But, Adam, aren't we taking jobs from the cherubim?"
ROTFL!!
Cool discussion on Milton, but yes, this is really about litter picking.
I’m dismayed that someone would get in trouble for it.