[A Society for Savage Gentlemen & Feral
Ladies offering.]
A Society or Association of any sort, be it a Monday
Morning Book Club, an “in-the trenches” Band of Brothers, or a 1%er motorcycle
club works best when there are clear boundaries that set limits for behavior
and visible goals that allows the group to coalesce around or toward.
Boundaries are there to define the affiliation. If our
Monday Morning Book club has decided that we will read nothing but the elegant
and well-researched Regency Romances of Georgette Heyer, but Caroline keeps
suggesting Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” series, well, Caroline is in the wrong
club.
Visible goals are there to ensure that action/doings
are integral. If there is no goal and no action towards a goal, then the association
is meaningless.
A book club that does not read is not a book club, a
chapter of the Mongols that does not plan a ride is just a buncha guys sitting around
in a bar.
Boundaries define the group as it is now, and goaled
doings define the group going forward.
Criteria for Canon
Boundaries and goals can be applied to groups and to individuals.
We define our acceptable or desired limits and set actionable goals to pursue.
Defining no boundary and working toward nothing is a
bit of an ephemeral mess.
With that in mind, it is wise to apply boundaries and goals
to matters as fundamental as reading material.
I offer a few loose boundaries subject to your own
taste-dictates to guide a reading program for character development. These are the
same boundaries and goals I use for my own personal library and study. By all
means, I do not insist that these are the correct dictates and goals, merely
that they seem to serve me and those I discuss them deeply with rather well.
One: First-Person
Over Spectator
I suggest reading “I was there…” accounts over overview
history.
The diaries, journals, tomes by soldiers, sailors,
mountaineers, survivors, explorers, scouts, frontiersmen etc. tell us more than
the eye from above and distant in time.
Norbert Casteret’s 1954 journey into a deep cave to recover
the corpse of a fellow caver teaches one more about how to handle fear than any
Gavin DeBecker volume or academic non-skin-in-the-game advice found in a “Conquer
Your Fears” text.
Trite accounts of how to overcome one’s fears of public
speaking sway the committed far less than the real-deal struggles by men and
women such as Casteret.
To make the “First-Person Over Spectator” rule more personal.
Who knows more about your marriage or life—you or your friends?
Who would write the more accurate account of your marriage?
You or your Mother-in-Law?
Now imagine how many more errors, misinterpretations and
loss of passion if our marriage history was written by a historian or academic
who merely studied your marriage via artifacts and never met you.
Two: Skip Theory
Theories are tools for testing not rules to live by.
The proof of a life philosophy, a creed for character,
the rules of the road is how closely behavior hews to the professed ideal.
No matter how gorgeous, lovely and logical an intellectually
constructed utopia may be, if it fails in execution, or sets up a cascade of
unintended consequences it is of no value.
Schopenhauer may sing when he writes clearly on the value
of being invulnerable to opinion, but his actual behavior of being incessantly rankled
by colleague’s criticism seems to belie that perhaps the advice, no matter how wise
it sounds, is not all that helpful or realistic.
Theories are meant to be taken for walks to shake the
bugs out.
If the theory walks the talk, she’s good to go.
In no…
Scrap it no matter how gorgeously constructed or
colorful the meme.
The longer wisdom has been around the greater the
chances are that the information within has been tried and true and tested by
many and found up to snuff enough to pass down.
That is, it may have survived because it has some
value.
This is not a hard fast rule.
Some things survive by fashion or accident or quirk of
history but if we begin with long survivorship, we are likely panning in better
gold streams than newly minted canals.
It is for this reason that Seneca’s Letters seem far
more relevant to me and all those who preserved them with far more difficult to
produce media than all the modern re-iterations of old ideas composed for
screens.
How many “thoughtful” posts, tweets, hot takes [this
one included] will be read a thousand years from now?
When choosing between a tome of classical wisdom or
the newest book of “How to Be Awesome” bet the old horse, this new horse will
likely not be remembered [even by you the reader] in 90 days.
Four: Skip Received Wisdom
This rule is more for me, than likely Y-O-U.
When I offer gleanings from my own character combatives
readings I steer away from religious texts.
For two reasons…
One-Often wisdom is evaluated
according to source. If I quote, say the Book of Mormon, no matter how chewy the
advice or observation may be—if you are not a Mormon [and I am not either] we
have the hurdle of an immediate tangible discount to some degree simply by dint
of the source of advice.
Theis holds true for all received wisdom, be it the
King James Bible, the Koran, the Vedas etc.
If the source is not your cultivated source of choice,
no matter how open we are there is often a bit of a cognitive shrugging.
We want our training [and make no mistake, reading is training—the
mind and character] to be effective, we should make all “exercise” maximally
effective.
This does not hold merely for standard religious texts.
I quote often from Icelandic Sagas and have found much to cogitate here, but I
steer clear of and, personally, turn off to those Sagas heavy on recived wisdom
from the Gods or stories of the Norns etc.
This skipping recived wisdom rule holds with Rule One,
First Person Over Spectator. The Saga may be sincere in the lesson and encounter
with Thor, but having never sailed with a thunder god the advice simply does
not sing to me the way Joshua Slocum’s every sentence does from his around the
world sailing journey.
I may not have sailed around the world like Mr. Slocum,
but I have sailed, I can follow, learn, and extrapolate from his experience.
Having never sailed with Thor or supped with a demigod,
I am made no richer by reading Thor’s accounts.
“But Mark, aren’t you violating Rule Three:
Survivability Bias? These texts have survived, so, what gives?”
Mark’s Wiggly Answer
Religions by definition are associational endeavors.
There are organized churches and directed societies that have a vested interest
in seeing that the doctrine survives. They have put money, time and effort into
seeing that their chosen way makes it to the next receiver of good news, whatever
it may be.
There is no cult of Marcus Aurelius, or Church of
Plutarch, or Vested Order of William Bligh’s Account of Sailing the South
Pacific. These non-dogma accounts survive, I wager, by sheer dint of their vital
force.
Surviving in spite of not having vested interests dedicated
to preservation is a good tell for a good bet.
There you have it, boundaries [loose in this case] and
goals, also loose but all focused on building character and robust spirits.
Likely an unneeded look into how the Society for Savage
Gentlemen & Feral Ladies will limn itself, but there you have it all the
same.
For more on the Vital Impact of Directed Reading to
Your Training see…
Warrior Poets & Ethical Rhymers
Recreational Reading as A Laboratory for Honor
And for more physical combative yakking…
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