The Science of Virtue?

Is there a way to predict courage --or cowardice-- in the face of danger? A new science of stress may be close to answering the age-old question.

An article by Jeff Wise in the August 2008 issue of Popular Mechanics purports to introduce the "science of courage", highlighting the research of Lilianne Mujica-Parodi, director of the Laboratory for the Study of Emotion and Cognition at Stony Brook University.

She believes that if she can understand the dynamics of the amygdala, she will have found the holy grail of stress research: a way to predict how a person will perform under alarming conditions by examining him beforehand in the calm of a laboratory.

Now the science is interesting enough in its own right. But what jumped out at me is how--at least as described by the columnist-- it represents a materialist world view in which courage is not an act of the will, but merely the result of a certain configuration of brain chemistry. This is completely the opposite of a traditional Aristotelian idea of virtue. By this rationale there is nothing heroic about the courageous man and nothing despicable about the cowardly man, each is acting out the programming of his neural chemistry and has no real say in the matter of whether he stand or flees in the face of danger.

Of course all men wonder if when it comes to the point, they will have the courage to stand. But the question is important to the individual (as opposed to an organization such as the military) precisely because we believe the answer tells us something about the character of the man.

The brain works as a control-system circuit, like a thermostat in your home, with a negative feedback loop....in a tightly coupled home-heating system, the furnace quickly drops below an optimal level and turns off again when the house is warm enough. In a loosely coupled system, the house gets much too cold before the furnace kicks in and then it runs at full blast until the house is sweltering.

C.S. Lewis famously argued that there has never been a culture in which cowardice is a virtue. But it seems we may well be in danger of becoming a culture in which cowardice is not seen as a vice. Who can blame the coward if he is merely the victim of his "loosely coupled feedback loop"?

And who will bother to labor at the difficult task of training our children in the habits of virtue when we believe that there is no such thing?

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Saving a Seat for Baby Elijah

Dinner frequently is a battle ground of late. Bella doesn't want to sit down to eat but wanders at wil and grazes.

"I think it's the booster seat," I told Dom. She doesn't sit in a booster at the kitchen table and while she does have a tendency to wander at times, it doesn't seem to be as big a deal.

So we decided to remove the seat and just let her kneel on the dining room chair as she does in the kitchen. Big mistake. Oh the drama, the fireworks! We replaced it. And then she still refused to sit down.

"I wonder," I murmured as we began to eat, "What would happen if we pulled up another chair next to the one with the booster seat, where she can reach her food." Dom groaned and sighed and got up to pull up a chair. Sure enough, as soon as the chair was in place she climbed up and started eating.

Dom looked over at the chair with the empty booster seat. "I guess we're saving a seat for baby Elijah," he quipped.

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We're on a Roll

Tonight, as I do most nights recently, I put Sophia down on a blanket near my feet while we were eating dinner. It's awfully hard to eat tacos with a baby in your lap and she tends to be much happier rolling from side to side on the floor than strapped into a baby chair. The only danger is her getting trampled by Bella.

Anyway Sophie's been getting much more mobile of late and has frequently managed to turn herself 180 degrees, getting her head pointing towards where I'd put her feet. And she frequently maneuvers herself right off the blanket and onto the floor. And she's getting pretty good at the rolling from side to side while holding onto her toes. She manages to get almost all the way onto her belly, just the one shoulder stopping her.

And so on one level I've been looking for her to make the leap to actually rolling over. But it was still a bit of a shock when I looked down tonight and saw that she was on her belly. "'Phia! You rolled over!!!!" I exclaimed.

She was content to stay that way for a little bit, bonking her forehead occasionally on the ground. Then she got a bit fussy so I put her back onto her back. And then a minute later she was on her belly again.

Now we just have to teach her to get from her belly to her back and there'll be no stopping her. Our little girl's about to get mobile.

Funny side note: Isabella was a leettle bit jealous of all the attention her little sister was getting. Soon she was down on the ground rolling from side to side: "I rolled over!" she boasted. "Yes, dear you did." I tried to sound as proud of her, but really I was laughing too hard.

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