Justice week 1: wrong none

According to Franklin, injustice is achieved both actively and passively.  You can be unjust by hurting others.  But you can also be unjust by refraining from actions you should perform: "Wrong none, by doing Injuries, or omitting the Benefits that are your Duty."  Justice in this framework is related to Franklin's general theory of action and virtue, which is to be accountable for what you fail to do at every moment (Resolution – "Perform without fail what you resolve"; Industry – "Lose no Time"). 

As with Sincerity week, I didn't find it a particular challenge during Justice week not to do injuries, though it is always possible to feel as though we could "omit" less, do more for others.  What is the true scope of Duty?  

This question is hard for a regular person to answer responsibly but non-neurotically.  If the injuries we commit against others can be hard to assess in a global economy (under what conditions was the t-shirt I wore today made?), it can be even harder to know what benefits we might be obligated to confer and how.

Ben Franklin is not often invoked in this context.  Always a popular and populist figure, he is regularly named as a supporter of individual thrift and responsibility, of entrepreneurship, and even of modern free-market economics.  Not for nothing was he cited by economically conservative Congressman Aaron Schock in the interview with Men's Health I mentioned in last week's post.  Franklin can even be made to stand in opposition to policies seen as overly intrusive on individual liberty, as in this Cafepress t-shirt you can buy for a mere $35:

Here is Franklin as the hip anti-Obama.  He is neatly signified as opposing the federal imposition of health care or higher taxes on a polity that refuses to benefit from another's sense of Duty, or to be forced to perform that Duty themselves.

Similarly, as historian Jill Lepore notes in a recent op-ed in The New York Times, Paul Ryan's Medicare- and social-services-cutting budget plan is named "The Path to Prosperity," a subtle echo of Franklin's famous essay, "The Way to Wealth" (discussed in April 19's Resolution Week 1 entry below).*  Economic conservatives readily name Franklin as the patron saint of freedom from the burdens of collective endeavor which, they imply, Franklin knew would hobble the individual and thereby, in their view, the nation.

Lepore argues against this, describing the difficulties of Franklin's sister, Jane Mecom, to whom, of all his correspondents, Franklin wrote most frequently.  Uneducated, married young, bearing child after child (nearly all of whom died), Mecom becomes for Lepore an argument that the state alleviate such misery – and convert it to productivity a la Franklin – by making universal education, health care, family planning services and, we might add, suffrage, available.  Pace Ryan, Lepore believes Franklin would agree.  She notes he gave a generous bequest to Boston's public schools in his will.  (Her eloquent argument may be found here.)

Franklin's definition of Justice in his virtue system could certainly support Lepore's reading (as might the record of Franklin's substantial endeavors for the public good, which only begin with him founding libraries and fire companies, and creating paper currency for the Colonies, long before his more well-known participation in crafting the republic). 

To assess Franklin and his role in our own age is to accumulate numerous quirky and troubling data.  (The abs are only the beginning: more to come.)  It's nicer, in my opinion, to credit him for his advocacy that we not omit the Benefits we owe others.

Coming up: return of charts, courtesy of restored hard drive.


*Thanks to Eugene's Blogger of the Year, Culinaria Eugenius, for bringing this to my attention.

Sincerity Week 1: Political abs edition

Sincerity week was less of a challenge than industry week for me.  Franklin exhorts me to "Use no hurtful Deceit.  Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly."  I didn't find myself much tempted to deceive others hurtfully, and so this wasn't a terrible challenge. 

I am intrigued that this is the first of Franklin's categories to attempt to monitor thought – the activity he seems to locate as the source of fair dealing.  Franklin cuts insincerity off at the source.  His cautious "if you speak" follows from his Silence adages (week 2; entry below), which stressed engaging solely in purposeful and beneficial speech.  While I therefore assume that "think[ing] innocently and justly" is meant to characterize my own thought and speech patterns – no lying, no unfair agenda – these adverbs seem possibly transferable to one's interlocutor, with whom one is being sincere.  Does Franklin imagine that the more "innocently and justly" I think, the more I will think others innocent and just?  Presumably speech intended to bait or call others out on their own insincerity isn't Franklin-approved (it's unproductive). 

Diplomacy, in short, remained a question for me with this system.  Franklin only cautions me to avoid "hurtful Deceit" but says nothing about white lies, or about the small flatteries and compromises that can often grease the wheels of administrative or other collaborative work.  I assume that a practiced and accomplished diplomat such as Franklin was well-acquainted with these and other forms of productive, necessary insincerity.  I plan to research this a bit the next time "Sincerity" is up.

Meanwhile, this week we had the pleasure of seeing Franklin invoked by none other than Aaron Schock, the Congressman from Illinois's 18th district who flaunted his pecs and six-pack in a shirtless photoshoot for Men's Health magazine:  http://www.menshealth.com/fitness/aaron-schock-fitness .  Most of the way down the page, Schock names Franklin as his (improbable!) fitness inspiration:

"One of my favorite quotes is from Ben Franklin, who said, 'A good example is the best sermon,' " Schock says. "And I think if you want to start talking about healthy lifestyles and staying in shape, then you yourself should do your best to try to be a model, an example to people you're trying to convince to do the same."

It is...piquant to see the Founding Father known for his comforting, comfortable heft cited in this fashion.  I can't imagine Franklin taking the necessary time away from, of all things, the business of public service in order to manipulate his appearance in this way.  Nor would he conflate being a "model" of fiscal prudence and actions of simultaneously public and personal benefit (his sweet spot, and what he is referring to here) with other forms of modeling.  (Similarly, later in the article, Schock describes his work as a Congressman as a useful part of his exercise regime, rather than vice versa: "Exercise...keeps me in good physical shape, and it relieves stress. And when you're a representative of the public, there's never a shortage of things to do.") 

Do I deduce some Insincerity in Schock's tribute to Franklin (more on this soon in relation to "Justice," coming up)?  Poor Richard's adages are, of course, meant to be detachable and adaptable.  Even exemplarity itself seems to have two sides, since elsewhere, we have Franklin declaring, in a proto-Wildean voice, that "Setting too good an example is a kind of slander seldom forgiven."

But I digress. 

There has been an improvement this week in industry and resolution, since I take last week's industry low-point seriously.  Unfortunately, there will be a temporary hiatus in charts, due to the death of my hard drive.  It will be resurrected, I hope, this week, in time for Justice.  Stay tuned.

Industry week 1: assessment

Franklin's explanatory motto for Industry is: "Lose no time.  Be always employed in something useful.  Cut off all unnecessary actions."

Look at that.  With its three (count 'em) logical absolutes (no time; always employed; all unnecessaries), it's a thing of beauty to me: an inhuman, uncompromising ideal, sure, but a powerful fantasy also.  For me it evokes an optimistic vision of what I might be able to achieve if I could regularly access an idealized, machinelike version of myself. 

The truth is, there have been periods in my working life during which I have almost realized this vision.  They occurred under short- and long-term deadlines.  The less interesting of these involve me grading for 12 or 15 hours straight, say, well into the wee hours of the night, with the tv on mute (to make me feel less isolated), ideally stuck on a channel with patterned images (so as not to distract me) – maybe on the choppy graphs of the weather channel, or the more engaging palette and lighting of CSI: Miami marathons.  I wind up sleeping for a few hours and teaching the next day.  Such all-nighters offer satisfying completions, but they aren't sustainable.  More importantly, they aren't even valuable in the longer term. 

Writing deadlines have a slower approach and a much bigger payoff.  When finishing a large project (articles, dissertation, book), I adopt longer-term versions of what I imagine Franklin conceives of here.  I have evolved taxing, but productive, daily schedules: two, and eventually three, multiple-hour writing stints per day; a daily bout of exercise to keep myself from imploding; a day off once a week, with grocery shopping and the week's only socializing.  Brief periods of daily rest are built into the schedule, primarily to enable its continuation.  That is, virtually all my pleasure during such a work period exists to serve the work.

Such monastic routines are increasingly hard to bear.  After I finish, I look back on them with a mixture of pride, awe, and a recollection of the mounting, agonizing desire they produce to complete them and emerge into a freer life.  They have produced my largest-scale and most intricate work, the research which is at the heart of my professional identity.  It's the hardest thing I do, since the earliest stages of writing have always been difficult for me and the later ones grueling and draining.

I've never been able to keep to such schedules for more than a few months.  I have a large writing project afoot now, and the Virtue Project was largely undertaken to facilitate it.  Thus far – about halfway through my first 13-week cycle of Franklin's virtues – I don't think I've been very successful. 

Part of this has to do with a strangely busy administrative season.  Mostly teaching-free though I may be, I have found myself attending daily meetings.  Arriving at home after these, I have trouble switching gears into a writing mode. 

But looking at Franklin's industry adage, my current days seem crammed with inexcusable, excessive periods of goofing off and delay.  Would the week's chart with its few blots I deem memorable lapses even be an adequate response?  I don't mark every time I fail to cut off an unnecessary action, each moment I "lose time." The singleness of purpose evoked by that adage seems to me to be Franklin's signature quality, and I haven't lived up to it.

For a while I've thought I might try to ratchet up the intensity of performance of the next 13-week cycle of virtues, and perhaps I need to start doing that sooner.  The writing won't wait.  Maybe it's time to return to monastic routines and a more intensely Franklinesque degree of scrutiny, in the interest of a more faithfully Franklinesque productivity.  Next week is officially devoted to Sincerity (more soon), but Industry is going to remain front and center for me.

Frugality week 1

A few of Franklin's virtues come fairly naturally to me.  I am still driving the same 1990 Accord that I've owned for 15 years; likewise, my cellphone is so primitive as to make me the butt of domestic mockery.  I resist all forms of refurbishment and shopping (except for groceries and books).  I bring my lunch to work and it is habitually cheap and temperate (fruit and yogurt with an occasional pb & j on an English muffin). 

In short, I expected frugality to be pretty much a breeze.  I did have to turn down a wine-tasting class (a bit of a frugality cheat, since I'll sign up for a sequel later in the season).  For fun, T. and I went on a hike and watched movies at home. 

Unfortunately, in catching up with friends and colleagues, this became a restaurant-heavy week (4 meals), and two meals were my personal favorite, sushi, which I felt I had to mark as a definitionally un-Franklinesque expense.  You can see the blots on Wednesday and Saturday:

Sushi represents a category of virtue project question mark that I have.  How would Franklin have adapted his system in today's world?  I have friends who put my frugality to shame: one of them will eat sushi, his wife tells me, but he insists on the various frugal combos, which I avoid because I prefer different (read: more expensive) fishes.  So maybe sushi isn't such a grey area.

But take Saturday's trip to the farmer's market: it often annoys my frugal self that I can't find much produce there that isn't organic; in Eugene, the beautiful, local, seasonal offerings are always enticing, but they can add up (I got out this week with just spinach and Chinese broccoli and enough of it for the entire week – reasonably frugal at $6.50).  So: would Franklin buy organic?  Or would he be delighted by the ingeniousness of modern agribusiness, which makes produce generally inferior but remarkably affordable.  Remember, this is a man who never remembered even what he ate.

But Franklin was also a man who lived in a time before reliable information about nutrition and environmental degradation was available.  He cared passionately about the people on the bottom and about the public good.  He invested substantial capital in enterprises he thought would pay off in the long run and was tempted by fad diets with weighty philosophical underpinnings, as his adoption of vegetarianism after randomly coming across a book that endorsed it attests.  From this perspective, I can imagine him enthusiastically adopting the local and organic food movements that are our Franklinesque secular religion in Oregon.

The point is, sometimes it is hard to assess how a modern-day Franklin would calculate.  I like his system because it is reasonable, flexible, and relies on its adopters' common sense.  But this can easily lead to the kinds of rationalizations that drove Franklin away from a general will to be virtuous and towards a less flexible system in the first place.

What good shall I do this day?

As part of his precept of Order, with Humility, the virtue with which he said he had the most trouble, Franklin added an additional chart to the "little book" in which he recorded his progress in virtue.  This one sketched out an ideal workday, so that "each part of [his] Business" could "have its Time."  Here is the chart:

 

As always, I am struck by how reasonable Franklin's structures are.  A two-hour lunch break presumably allows for more focus and good will in an afternoon work session.  I love that he includes time for reading at this point.  The eight-hour day itself bears noting, since in Franklin's time much longer workdays were the norm (in most industrialized countries, the movement for an eight-hour work period got serious only in the 19th century).  Like me, Franklin seems to like long adjustment periods in and out of work – the three-hour stretch in the morning is particularly appealing to me, since I am inefficient in the morning (and I am not talking 5 a.m., either) and like to bounce between business email, news, and columns or blogs for quite a while before settling in to work.  Franklin also builds a decrescendo into the day, using the evening to converse, divert himself, reflect on his day.  Taking stock of plans and achievements at either end of the day keep him honest.  As always, Franklin's plans for a productive and industrious life are formed on a human scale.

I'll need to shift his start and end times quite a bit, however, since I've always been most productive in the afternoon, evening, and (unfortunately) night, and so I need to go later than he does.  (By the end of every large-scale writing project I've ever undertaken, I am getting up at 10 or 11 am and working until 2 or 3 in the morning.)  Cheap electric light will make this a frugal shift.  I need more sleep than Franklin seems to have, and since I live in the age of cars and labor-saving technologies (oh, how he would have loved our technologies), I need to build exercise for me and my beagle into the day as well.

In short, I am becoming my own boss, setting my schedule and the tasks to be performed therein.  As Father Abraham advised in my last entry, I will work to avoid the shame of being caught idle – by myself.

My technical advisor has let me know we need an additional day for the chart: more to follow.

Bad employee

One of Franklin's most familiar writings from his popular miscellany, Poor Richard's Almanack, was a farewell essay of sorts, in which he collated many of the Almanack's adages and aphorisms encouraging readers to work hard in their own self-interest.*  The essay is popularly known as "The Way to Wealth," wealth being a goal Franklin assumed his readers would find powerful enough that they would allow it to govern their behavior, but also a goal he felt was elusive enough that he himself worked tirelessly to explain and promote it.

Franklin's adages are designed to make clear what is still evidently murky to hapless citizens who squander wealth and time they could better use otherwise, as though adding taxes to those they resent, those the (English) government levies, by effectively taxing their own idleness, pride, and folly.  What will get through to these people?  At one point Franklin's pseudonymous speaker, Father Abraham, attempts a change of perspective:

If you were a servant, would you not be ashamed that a good master should catch you idle?  Are you then your own master?  Be ashamed to catch yourself idle, as Poor Dick says.

I find this rather a profound insight. In a world of externalized authorities, a person may fear to be seen betraying a master – at least, a "good master"'s – trust.  The master is "good," and the master's objective witness of the servant's idleness is experienced as a searing attack on the self: shame.  Yet acting on her own behalf, this same servant may brazenly indulge in idleness aplenty.  The opinion of the servant about herself is apparently less vulnerable to her awareness (omniscient in this matter, if not objective) of her idleness.  She serves her master well, and herself poorly.

Note that Franklin-Abraham doesn't urge his hearer to correct her mistakes merely by thinking of herself as her own employee and master, however.  To do so would evidently not be enough to reduce idleness (though the premise that we are all our own masters is not asserted here with total confidence, but more coyly posed as a rhetorical question).  Franklin-Abraham has recourse not to his usual exhortation but to disincentive: he urges the listener to feel more shame, to duplicate her master-authorized shame in thinking of her failures of herself.  Shame is, for most of us, definitionally punishing to feel.  Implicitly, Franklin-Abraham argues, to avoid the shame, avoid failing your good-master self (or, perhaps, being caught by yourself).

Yes, it's been that kind of week**: 

The usual Wednesday pileup and more besides.***  Even in the week supposedly devoted to it, I can't say I've seen much improvement in resolution, at least on my own behalf.  It is always easier for me to complete the tasks set me by others, as in Franklin's analogy.  (Such tasks, which took up Tuesday and Thursday, are what save this week's chart from looking worse than it does.) 

I may have adopted the virtue project in order to amend my Resolution and Industry problems, but doing so hasn't changed my habitual failures of the will.  As Franklin himself noted with that initial surprise when he attempted moral perfection sans charts (see my first entry), merely knowing what you should do and wanting, at some level, to do it, isn't on its own automatically effective.

Does this call for another system within a system?  Tomorrow: becoming my own boss.



*In the essay Franklin performs a curious disappearing act, hiding his beliefs behind the form of the adages themselves, which purport to be a part of folk culture, emerging (rather effectively, as time has passed) as if without an author at all; Franklin also conceals himself behind a double persona, putting the adages in the mouth of "Father Abraham," a generic "plain clean old man, with white locks" who is overheard quoting Poor Richard's doctrine by "Poor Richard" himself , who re-records his own words in turn.  Franklin begins the essay in the person of Poor Richard by celebrating his own supposed obscurity as an author, an obscurity which permits him at times to advance his own doctrine "by quot[ing] myself with great gravity," as he proceeds to do at length while pretending merely to record a canny speech.

**N.B. By request, I am changing the chart so that the non-featured virtues are easier to identify.  Franklin just used initial letters, but that was for his own use.

***Another tranquility blot, to my surprise!  This one related to fleas, I'm afraid.  But they seem to be gone now, courtesy of aggressive laundering and diatomaceous earth.

Virtue and vice at a conference

"My scheme of Order," Franklin wrote, "gave me the most Trouble."  His theory of order was to assign times of the day to different purposes, and while that worked reasonably well for a man who could command his own schedule, for a man like Franklin himself, a printer catering to his clients, depending on their convenience, a man "who must mix with the World," there was more difficulty in consistent ordering of his schedule.  (And his possessions – more on this in a future post.)

I spent most of Order week preparing for a conference and attending it.  While the conference itself assigned mostly clear purposes to different times, purposes I by and large fulfilled, the week in general bore little relation to the discipline I intended the entire virtue system to inculcate.

Conferences, it turns out, offer numerous opportunities to commit "blots."  Let's take a look at the week:

You can see the pileup.  An overindulgence in the remarkable Sichuan food of Bellevue, WA (where I participated in a dinner involving the best-ever jellyfish, tiny cubes of rabbit and peanuts swimming in fruity chili oil, pork kidneys, and duck smoked in camphor wood, though I skipped the kidneys).  On Friday, I chose sleep and breakfast over the 9 am session, in a minor Resolution failure.  I spent more money than Franklin, quite possibly, could imagine (at the ballpark, for instance, where I chose better beer for nearly double the price).  My tranquility suffered when I heard my work misquoted and misunderstood by a hostile reader ("be not disturbed at Trifles, or at Accidents common or unavoidable"), an experience which in retrospect seems almost exciting.  And my humility suffered when my favorite critic made a date with me for a nightcap – even though he later forgot it after an attack of arthritis in the chilly, humid land of Microsoft.  (He bought me a beer the next day, so humility's comeuppance was short-lived.)

Not a good week for Franklin!

This week is Resolution: "Resolve to perform what you ought; Perform without fail what you resolve."  One of my resolutions is to follow more closely a Franklin-like system of scheduling the day – a system that properly should have been developed in a conference-free Order week.  As a result, I will continue working intensely on Order this week also.

I suspect Franklin was an extrovert, a person who is energized in company.*  Unlike me, he might not have been exhausted by even very pleasurable demands of catching up with new work in my field and with friends.  But such networking inevitably interrupts the leisurely solitary rhythms necessary for the writer – even Franklin would have had to make the five-hour drive down I-5 back to Eugene (stopping in Portland at Powell's to buy a couple of books – used, of course, per a return to Franklin normality).  There are few opportunities for betterment on the interstate.  But sometimes our profit necessitates mixing in the world, a pleasant displacement of order.



*Extroversion: I suppose this is debatable – Franklin seems so relieved, for instance, when he gets out of family dinners at his brother's printshop, preferring the oatmeal and raisins and private study.  Work as a printer was not solitary, but Franklin typically barely represents his co-workers except when criticizing their economy and efficiency (as when both are compromised by the alcohol consumption of English printers) or their competency.  Always a systems analyst, he comes off as a mind evaluating others rather than primarily interacting with them in fellowship.  Still, his few gestures at relaxation are typically social – the Junto, frolicking with fellow Boston youths by the seaside and on boats.  Alone, he is merely driven.  Maybe he is outside the categories of introvert and extrovert – someone recharged by industry and achievement itself.

Silence week 1

I know.  The pursuer of the virtue of silence who doesn't post all week on her blog is a startlingly earnest joke, which is to say a bad joke. 

What Franklin wished to avoid in courting silence / avoiding the trifling was in fact confusing to me at first, even if my long solo work hours tended to moot it for much of the week.  My only opportunities for conversation were when T. came home from work, and truth be told, we both enjoy conversation that jumps abruptly (and sometimes with little explanation, so he tells me) from the serious to the trifling and back again.  From my point of view, the two injunctions – "Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself"; "Avoid trifling Conversation" – were thus, in the light of happy cohabitation, partly at odds.  Some of those trifles are beneficial!  Franklin had a happy marriage, and I expect that he may have exempted his domestic world from some of the more onerous of the virtue requirements. 

But perhaps not.  Throughout his Autobiography, Franklin reminisces about social engagements that he tended to want to turn to rhetorically and philosophically improving activities.  A boyhood friend and he communed by arguing about "the Propriety of educating the Female Sex in learning, & their Abilities for Study."  They enjoyed attempting to confute one another, exchanging written arguments on the subject, writings which stirred Franklin to perform extensive private exercises to improve his style and rhetoric, since the other boy was at first a better writer and had the upper hand.

Or there is the social club Franklin formed in Philadelphia, a secret society called the "Junto," formed for "mutual Improvement."  Franklin's rules for the club had each member posing questions on morality, science, and politics, and writing an essay to present to the group every three months.  Not a hedonistic bunch!  To prevent attempts at social domination and to ensure that egos would not be put at risk, another rule forbade "all Expressions of Positiveness [certainty] in Opinion, or of direct Contradiction."  Assert your position too strongly in the Junto, and you would be subject to a fine.

It is a little tiring even contemplating extending such efforts at improvement into every corner of one's waking life.  And yet Franklin's drive to better himself was extremely powerful; to him, ideal social relations would be those that could participate in the programme.

This week I exempted conversations at home from such stringent requirements for even casual talking for the reasons above – domestic intimacy engendered by them seems a valuable end in itself.  I can't justify the cost to congeniality and communion and, since I am less exhilarated than Franklin by the prospect of such focused conversational efforts, I predicted more deficit than benefit.  Perhaps at the next iteration of Silence week I will be more experimental and ambitious.

*  *  *

One of the week's work responsibilities proved a provocative test case.  With the other members of my department, I hosted visiting students who might wish to join our graduate program.  Various events encouraged us to mingle and chat, as well as to expound the resources we offered more rigorously in more formal settings.  An introvert, I find the less scripted of these events (receptions, group dinners, and the smalltalk therein) draining, if not exactly because the conversation in them is "trivial" – indeed the conversation has gotten steadily easier for me to improvise, even in large unfamiliar groups (afterward I inevitably collapse).  I was amused watching Franklin's principles collide.  Promotion of one's office, business, or community is a highly valorized activity for him.  Here it was achieved in part through being diverting, that is, through diverting our attention from our work and "mutual Improvement" proper.  Yet one expects this diplomat and politician was skilled at offering such easy entertainments to those he wished to persuade.  Maybe sober talk at home was his respite.

Here the scorecard of the week: 

Barring the little blot against sincerity, inevitably incurred during one of those recruitment events, it wasn't a bad week for the outlier virtues.  Still, I had more difficulty in what I am thinking of as the the 3 central categories.  This means days where I have a work plan I can't stick to (though often I wind up compensating for a slow start by working until late at night).  The current week is Order week, however ("Let all your Things have their Places.  Let each Part of your Business have its Time").  In theory this would be the most crucial week to date, though my agenda will be challenged by business travel (a conference).  Off to Seattle with the Virtue Project, where my business will have its time.

Temperance Week 1: Chart

The lure of northern European cuisine notwithstanding, Temperance wasn't a bad week for me.  I think the time I spend thinking about food instead of working – issues of Resolution, Order, and Industry more than Temperance – would be more upsetting to Franklin than any trouble I have avoiding eating to dullness and drinking to elevation.  Here's my first scorecard:

This is a little deceptive, since I was crazed finishing grades on Monday, and on vacation during the weekend, more or less hewing to my vacation plans.  But looking at the pooling of faults midweek, we can see what I expected and what partly motivated me to begin with – at once the particular difficulties of this system for me and its potential benefits.  I am challenged in Order, Industry, and Resolution, especially when I work on my own schedule, as I will be doing for a few months, writing my book in precious time I earned by teaching overloads earlier in the year.  I won't get this time back, and I want a little bit of Franklin's signature virtues to help me use it well. 

This week is Silence: "Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling conversation." It is also likely to be relatively easy, since I am working from home and not prone to trifle with my beagle, the only one around to talk to during the day.  I'll use the time to develop more disciplined work habits in preparation for Order.  I hope.

Temperance versus Portland

Franklin begins his cycle of Virtues with Temperance, ostensibly because it lays a foundation for the others, "as it tends to procure the Coolness and Clearness of Head...so necessary where constant Vigilance was to be kept up...against the unremitting Attraction of ancient Habits, and...perpetual Temptations."  Stay temperate and Justice, Chastity, and Industry will be a snap to keep up.

But Franklin's reasons for this ordering are a little over-determined since, as he regularly brags, Temperance comes easily to him.  This is a man who advises that to save money, those in the career-building phase might imitate him in regularly eating oatmeal or cornmeal mush for supper, or else "a Slice of Bread, a Handful of Raisins...and a Glass of Water."  With such a diet, Franklin exempted himself from meals with his family (he was working for his brother), using the time he saved to learn mathematics.  He credited his rapid progress in the subject to the clear-headedness produced by his Temperate eating. 

Similarly, just a few pages into the Autobiography, Franklin notes that, like his father,

I was brought up in such a perfect Inattention to those Matters as to be quite Indifferent what kind of Food was set before me; and so unobservant of it, that to this Day, if I am ask'd I can scarce tell, a few Hours after Dinner, what I din'd upon.  This has been a Convenience to me in traveling...

By "those Matters" Franklin refers to his father's disinterest in the type of food he ate at any given meal, "whether it was well or ill drest, in or out of season," its flavor, and its quality in relation to other possible foods.

Now, I live in the Pacific Northwest, a region where issues of seasonality, flavor, and preparation are essentially the local religion.  Long before I moved here, I cared about food.  Far from considering an indifference to food an advantage when traveling, I regularly plan trips around the restaurants to be visited and available cuisines to be sampled. 

Moreover this, my first week as a Virtue Projector, was also my first chance for R&R in months: Spring Break, with my grades in and no new teaching upcoming.  I was headed to Portland with T. for the weekend and uneasy about how this would jibe with Temperance Week.  For instance, I felt reasonably certain that Franklin wouldn't have spent the night before a trip surfing the web looking at menus, and trying to figure out whether he should leave early enough on Friday to allow for three brunches in the weekend. 

But what exactly would exceed Franklin's definitions of Temperance, assuming that the locally foraged nettles and the well-mixed, innovative cocktails featured on nearly every one of those internet menus couldn't penetrate his indifference?  Despite his endorsement of cornmeal mush and his intermittent vegetarianism, Franklin's instructions for Temperance are reasonably open, dwelling not on the content of the menu (since he barely noticed it), but the mental impact of the food consumed: "Eat not to Dullness; Drink not to Elevation."

I wasn't sure I wanted to stay within the bounds of even this latitude.  I had been looking forward to the food on this trip for a long time.  But...it was Virtue Project Week 1.  Now or never?

At first it wasn't too bad.  We didn't brunch on Friday, and with dullness and elevation in mind at lunch, I settled for a thin sandwich (lox and cream cheese on rye) and had broccolini with chili flakes with it, instead of a pastry, at Elephants Deli.  Was I dull?  Would a pastry have made me dull?  I wasn't even sure I was full.

By dinner I was starved.  Blackened catfish on cheese grits, fried okra and (since I'm a lightweight, and a pint would definitely have elevated me) just a little bit of black ale at Delta Cafe still felt within the bounds of responsible non-dullness.

Saturday brunch was indulgent and delicious, but hardly dullness-inducing, cinnamon french toast and a scrambled egg at the preciously-named "Bijou, cafe" in the Pearl.  Coffee, that classic of mental acuity, the nectar of the Protestant work ethic itself, preserved my sharpness.  Not bad.

But dinner...we had an early reservation at Grüner.  After a dense, chewy pretzel, a jenga-like tower of endive, apple, fourme d'ambert and hazelnuts with hazelnut oil vinaigrette made me forget the unhappy couple seated next to us who arrived separately and sniped at each other through dinner. And finally I got to sample the spring nettles, combined with ricotta in dumplings, and covered with butter, parmesan, and a generous helping of trumpet mushrooms.  Portland battled with Franklin and insisted that I drink the entire large glass of Grüner Veltliner.  As a lightweight, I was beyond elevated, happily planning future trips with T. and talking at random about learning foreign languages to do so.  Afterward, it only made sense to ignore the endless chilly rain and stop for a healthy portion of mocha and cinnamon gelato, returning to the hotel to continue the northern European theme by watching a Swedish film in a dull, elevated blur. 

Next: the first week's scorecard.

But first...procedures

How does Franklin monitor his progress toward moral Perfection?  A printer by trade, Franklin roots his procedure in the technology of the day planner:

I made a little Book in which I allotted a Page for each of the Virtues.  I rul'd each Page with red Ink so as to have seven Columns, one for each Day of the Week...I cross'd these Columns with thirteen red Lines...

Franklin produces a labeled grid on which, at night, he can mark each "Fault" of the day in its proper place.  He attempts above all not to stray in performing that week's governing virtue, "leaving the other Virtues to their ordinary Chance."  Here is an example of one of his own Temperance worksheets, which he provides in his Autobiography for the reader's use:

It was a bad week for Silence and Order (I know the feeling), but Franklin met his primary goal and was temperate, in control of his appetites.  He seems to take some care in the placement of his blots, using that to note the time of day of each mistake.  As I live through the virtue-weeks, I will do the same.

Franklin's insight is one shared by other printers and writers: the permanence of writing offers a special form of pleasurable focus on the self.  It prolongs the week indefinitely, mapped onto the page.  The neat grid, the red lines – they will compensate for the loss of behavioral freedom, the ability to commit one's blots, and leave them behind.
 

The Virtue Project

Late in the second part of his Autobiography, writing of the events in his life around 1730, Benjamin Franklin notes with typical aplomb, irony, and almost mad optimism:

It was about this time that I conceiv'd the bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection.  I wish'd to live without committing any Fault at anytime; I would conquer all that either Natural Inclination, Custom, or Company might lead me into.  As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other.  But I soon found I had undertaken a Task of more Difficulty than I had imagined...

The "Difficulty" took many forms.  Franklin observes that while thinking of correcting one "Fault," he would find he had committed another one.  Bad habits tripped him up.  Unruly desires overcame his ability to pursue virtuous actions according to the guide of reason.  All in all, moral perfection was not at all as readily achievable as he had imagined.  Characteristically, he decided that what he needed...was a system.

Franklin identified twelve virtues that he thought would, possessed together, produce perfection.  Each was explained according to a pithy motto or instruction (on this, more soon).  These virtues were: Temperance; Silence; Order; Resolution; Frugality; Industry; Sincerity; Justice; Moderation; Cleanliness; Tranquility; and Chastity.  His general idea was to focus completely on one at a time, while monitoring his progress simultaneously in all.

When he showed the list of virtues to a Quaker friend with some self-satisfaction, Franklin found he had one to add.  The Quaker "kindly" let him know that people thought him proud, "overbearing and rather insolent."  When arguing, he was told, he wasn't satisfied just with being right, but tried to dominate his interlocutors.  As we will see, Franklin liked to think of himself rather differently, and so he decided to cure himself of this vice, and added "Humility" to cap his list.

He was, I am guessing, pleased to do so, for with thirteen virtues, he might focus on one each for a week, and run through the entire list four times in a year – precisely.  Franklin liked thoroughness and neat results, and now each season would be a thorough virtue program, a self-improvement project.  Who knew what might be possible in a year?  Day by day, Franklin kept records as he went, noting blots and successes.

*  *  *

I first read Franklin's autobiography when teaching it as the final text in a course designed to help new English majors learn to read and write better, and to be familiar with the entire range of literature in English.  My course is the middle one of three linked classes, and includes literature from the 1530s through the 1780s.  The course is large, generally enrolling 200 students, give or take, and is often a battle in which I stake my enthusiasm against my students' willingness to be distracted, my jokes or striking remarks against the constant onslaught of their texting, my presentation of ideas which repay focus and thought against their desires to flit among stimuli and memes.

Still, I do like the rapid pace of a crowded survey class.  Often enough, when rereading the poems and novellas I assign and preparing my thoughts on their importance and achievements, I am delighted and impressed anew, charmed with each writer's originality and talents in his or her turn.  Such pleasures are available to me in the form of 2-4 authors a week.  But Franklin's Autobiography, one of the few texts I hadn't read before, provoked a more sustained fascination, outlasting my lecture preparation, my lecture.  I was thinking about him, talking about him, for days on end.

Was it just that I was longing for students to adopt Ben Franklin's earnestness about labor and virtue, and his single-minded pursuit of what would improve, but also remunerate and credential him?  After all, Franklin embodies many of the goals I have for how my course might light the way for my students – many of them of humble backgrounds, the first in their families to attend university; many of them paying their own way.

Or was it that I wanted to be Franklin, the charismatic populist sharing a system with the power to do more good more quickly and directly for the students than the necessarily slow processes of learning to think critically and write analytically could deliver?  In the preface to this same second part of the Autobiography, Franklin prints letters from contemporaries who had heard of his having begun his memoirs and begged him to continue, just to inspire the young.  "School and other education," noted Benjamin Vaughan, a merchant and doctor who had helped Franklin negotiate peace with England after the War of Independence, "constantly proceed upon false principles, and show a clumsy apparatus pointed at a false mark; but your apparatus is simple, and the mark a true one..."  Couldn't Franklin, now as then, help me give my students what they lacked, the work ethic and drive I was too imperfect to persuade them to embrace?

The truth was that, once more, I was responding more intensely to the reading than many of my students, and not only with altruistic, teacherly solicitude and ambitions on their behalf.  The truth was that, like Franklin, I am romanced by systems, rules, and enumerations, and was, similarly a little priggishly, buzzed by the prospect of what such a virtue "Method" could achieve.  I immediately wanted to run through Franklin's virtue Project myself.

In fact, that, I told my friends, was exactly what I planned to do.  Like Franklin, I'd spend a year on building skills in thirteen virtues, one week for each, cycling through them four times.  I'd keep records and assess my progress in an ongoing and cumulative fashion.  A convenient time to begin was just after the course ended, on the vernal equinox, March 21. 

Except I didn't.  In the rush of grading and preparing for more teaching, in the freedom from daily accountability temporarily granted by the break between terms, my plans for ordered self-improvement lapsed and faded.  My characteristic vices and virtues held their ground.

Three-quarters of a year passed, and I taught the class again.

This blog will be the record of a 21st-century teacher and writer undergoing Franklin's Virtue Project for a year.  We begin, this week, with Temperance.