Wholesomeness

The Anne Rice Shit Test

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” - Simone Weil

In the movie “Interview With A Vampire” the vampires are former humans that reduced to a single drive. They are like mosquitos, driven beings of pure hunger. The full, varied realm of human motivations is reduced to something singular and pointed.

The shit test is whether the audience (or the audience stand-in, the journalist) sees past the superficial glamour to realize this. The journalist fails this test, and judging by the obsession the movie (and vampires in general) provoked in so many, a lot of other people failed it as well.

What is Wholesomeness?

“Wholesome” implies “wholeness.”

Things are wholesome when they exist in a proper, harmonious relationship with something greater. The ancients use the metaphor of the charioteer who must skillfully lead a team of willful horses. When we are wholesome, our inner drives, motivations, and habits work harmoniously together.

Unwholesomeness is a fragmentation or discordance. Parts clash and go in their own directions. They take on aims of their own. Cancer is unwholesome; your cells have engaged in a Luciferian rebellion, pursuing their own ends, and now threaten the larger body of which they are a part.

Most things are good when in their proper relationship to everything else. Darkness is not inherently unwholesome. Consider a well crafted ghost story or macabre tale told by a campfire. Fear is not inherently unwholesome; your fear has saved your life many times.

Things often look very different depending on the “zoom” or level of abstraction. A forest on a sunny day appears to be a very peaceful place. Look more closely, and it is full of high stakes life and death dramas as organisms compete with and devour each other. A larger or more “whole” view sees this violence and predation in the context of something which is also beautiful. Goodness emerges from things which may be meaningless or even malignant on their own. It doesn’t exist “out there” as some pure principle.

Wholesome pleasures are often those where our preferences and meta-preferences align - things we want that are also things we want to want.

Unwholesome pleasures are ones that we want but do not want to want. Frequently, it is the nature of unwholesome pleasures to take on a kind of obsessive quality. They overshadow other pleasures and aspects of our personality. By fixating on the wrong aspects of things, we can develop unwholesome relationships with them.

Zero Sum Sum Games

Zero sum games are an inevitable aspect of life. When they dominate our thinking, they become unwholesome. When we have an obsession with zero sum goods like status, we can fixate on the other players to the detriment of what is good. We stop playing to win and start playing to make others lose.

Consider various “red pills” - politically incorrect truths about human nature - and what they can do to those who take them. The classic “red pill” - that of treating human sexuality and courtship as a zero sum game - is based on a fear of being a dupe. The important thing is not to succeed - it is not to be so naive as to think winning could be accomplished without the detriment of the other party. It is for those who have seen hell but have no vision of heaven.

Of course zero sum games and even negative sum games are real and sometimes unavoidable. The “whole” or “holistic” view means being very careful about labelling anything as decisively worthless - it is the relationship to the larger context that matters. Altruistic punishment is a seemingly negative sum game - pursuing vengeance that does not benefit you but simply punishes a wrongdoer. But it can also uphold a larger moral order.

The kingdom of heaven is positive sum - our gains do not diminish others and those of others do not diminish us:

 And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, they received every man a shilling.  And when the first came, they supposed that they would receive more; and they likewise received every man a shilling. And when they received it, they murmured against the householder, saying, These last have spent but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat. But he answered and said to one of them, Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a shilling?

The Sickly Sweet Pleasure of Hatred

We have to focus on what we do not like sometimes. Focusing on the bad can be very pleasurable. Hatred is often pleasurable. Like everything unwholesome, this tendency can easily decide for itself to revolt against its ecological niche - its role in a larger system - and pursue its own ends, like an invasive weed or a cancer cell.

A great deal of online discourse can be explained by the pleasure of disliking someone and feeling morally superior to them. Cringe content, ragebait, doomscrolling - people do these things because they are pleasurable. But they are not wholesome. They take on an obsessive quality and are driven by zero-sum status dynamics.

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”

- CS Lewis

An unwholesome character.

The Temptation of Pure Opposition

It is often much easier to tell if a statement is wrong than to formulate a correct one. Truth seeking is often destructive - it relentlessly destroys what is unworthy.

Similarly - the silver rule - “do not do unto others what is hateful to yourself” - is a more robust principle than its golden counterpart. A great deal of morality is refraining from what is wrong or wicked.

Opposing things that are bad and wrong is a tempting starting point, because conceptually, it is very clear and easy. I myself strongly believe that wisdom is apophatic - consisting mostly of negations, a winnowing of wrong ideas.

But without a view of the good we are profoundly unbalanced. We can only look down, not up. The most obvious example of this is negative utilitarianism. When taken to its logical conclusion it is pessimistic - concluding that sentient life is a moral aberration, because suffering must always outweigh pleasure.

The Necessity of Goodness

“Goodness” is a more elusive value than “beauty” or “truth.” It is holistic - it relates to a larger frame. Something being true or beautiful isn’t decisive of whether it is good or not. Evaluating whether things are good or not requires context. Wrestling car keys from a drunk might be violent and upsetting - but in the appropriate context, we can see that it is the right thing to do. Goodness implies a relationship to a larger whole that isn’t reduceable to discrete bright line rules.

Without an ability to appreciate the good, we are left only with an opposition to the bad. Make this the core of our identities and we become disappointed that things aren’t worse.

Define your life’s mission as outing pedophiles or punching Nazis, and more and more people start to look like pedophiles and Nazis. Even more so if you are a keyboard warrior with very little skin in the game. You become like a member of the baying mobs of the French or Cultural Revolution, thinking that you are a heroic freedom fighter from behind the safety of your screen. The internet can be a very unwholesome place (although there are pockets of it that are quite wholesome).

Trying to be a better person by opposing the bad, in yourself or in others, is not a very good strategy. You must go towards the good. You must cultivate enjoyment of the good. Scrupulosity can be unwholesome. Some anti-nomian practices probably existed for the sole purpose of breaking people out of unwholesome scrupulosity.

The self identification of oneself as lowly, unworthy, or inclined to evil can be either wholesome or unwholesome.

It may mean that your inclinations to good are so reflexive and unconscious that you do not not notice them while your badness glares out at you. It may also mean your moral system is a vehicle for your narcissism, and despising yourself is just another way of making yourself the main character. Often despising oneself exists alongside despising others.