The Power of Softness

In his 1950 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, Bertrand Russell stated that humans are motivated by four primary desires: acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power. Of these four, power may be the least understood.

Many of us associate power with strength and hardness. However, that’s a severe misunderstanding. Power can also be soft. According to the Tao Te Ching, “Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life.” (Yes, I’m aware of the irony of combining the Tao Te Ching with Russell’s four desires.) 

The Grand Canyon

One can see soft power in action by looking at nature. The blade of grass breaks up the sidewalk. The river eats away at the land forming massive canyons out of solid rock. 

Soft power isn’t fast. It takes time to work. Yet, in my opinion, it’s worth it.

To learn more about the soft power of Taoism, I highly recommend the YouTube video Softness: The Underestimated Power on the Einzelgänger channel.

2023 Year of the Black Rabbit

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” - John Steinbeck

The New Year is celebrated differently in different cultures. According to the Lunar calendar, the first day of the new year begins on the second new moon after the winter solstice. In 2023, this new moon lands on January 22nd. Countries such as China, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, celebrate the New Year based on this calendar. 

This New Year’s festival traditionally honors deities and ancestors. While there are different customs, a common theme is for Chinese families to gather for dinner. Families also traditionally use this time for house cleaning to sweep away misfortune and make way for good luck. 

The Chinese zodiac also designates an animal and one of the five elements yearly on a rotating cycle. In addition, each element has its own color designation. For 2023, the element is water, making the color black and the animal (except for Vietnamese and Malay zodiac) is the rabbit. 

Hence, 2023 is the year of the Black Rabbit.

The rabbit isn’t as lucky as some animals in the Chinese zodiac. However, years with the rabbit can represent prosperity (think about how fast rabbits multiply) and hope.

Decency Ethics

“When the norm is decency, other virtues can thrive: integrity, honesty, compassion, kindness, and trust.” - Raja Krishnamoorthi, US House of Representatives

Most people don’t sit around dwelling on the various schools of ethics. That is unless you’re a philosophy nut like me. However, I think that we owe it to ourselves and society to ponder ethics and how to make ethical decisions.

I’ve always liked situational ethics. It’s practical. The right tool for the right job. However, the problem with situational ethics is that it lacks a guide to help us determine the right tool.

In his book A Decent Life: Morality for the Rest of Us, the philosopher Todd May proposes a framework for ethical behavior. His proposal fills in the gap needed to make situational ethics work. He calls this framework “decency ethics.”

According to May, the goal should be to live a “decent life.” A decent life acknowledges and acts upon the fact that all of us have lives we’re trying to live. I have my life, and you have yours. It strikes a balance between the needs of others and oneself.

I highly recommend A Decent Life: Morality for the Rest of Us by Todd May. You can also learn more about decency ethics and the others schools of thought in my book, The Philosophy of Dark Paganism.

Gods and Virtue

“In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason.” - Mary Wollstonecraft

André Comte-Sponville, in his fantastic book A Small Treatise on The Great Virtues, explains that “virtue” means excellence. Everything has the potential to be virtuous. A knife’s virtue would be to cut well, for example. For humans, virtue or excellence includes the classic virtues of honesty, compassion, mercy, prudence, etc. 

Are the gods always virtuous? Some people that I highly respect think so. However, on this point, I disagree. 

To begin, I’m a hard polytheist. I hold that the gods share the characteristic of being autonomous beings with their own personalities. They make their own choices, just as we do, in keeping with their values.

This ability to make choices leads to my next point, virtue and vice result from reason. An unconscious act might be good, but it’s not virtuous. Virtue is a conscious choice. It might be due to years of practice to the point that it becomes a reflex, but it’s still the product of reason, for we can choose vice over virtue.

Another point is that most Pagans don’t see the gods as perfect. They’re more powerful and more knowledgeable than humans. They also create a sense of awe. However, perfection isn’t part of their nature, for nothing is perfect. 

The gods cannot always be virtuous when one adds all this up. Autonomy means they must have the freedom to decide whether to act virtuously. If they don’t have freedom, then they aren’t autonomous. And since the gods have the capacity for reason and the freedom to choose, they can choose whether to act with virtue or vice. Finally, since the gods, like everything, aren’t perfect, this also means that they may make a choice of vice rather than virtue.

Are some gods consistently virtuous in the human sense? I believe that some are. Some humans choose virtue more often than vice, so we should expect that some gods do the same. However, it’s equally likely that some gods choose vice over virtue.