Cobert's Alpha Dog on Habits

One of my favorite shows is the Colbert Report on Comedy Central, and I was watching old Alpha Dog of the Week clips when I came upon this. Colbert talked about Domino's being the Alpha Dog of the Week because Domino's decided to change change up their recipe and not apologize for their terrible product. While Colbert focused on the fact that Domino's did not apologize, I would instead like to focus on Domino's change in recipe and how it relates to habit.

What Domino's did requires an enormous amount of self-awareness. To make that change could not have been a purely internal thing. The pizza chain would have needed to see the reaction of the customers before it could have changed. In the same way, we must first recognize that our actions are wrong, according to Aristotle, before we can change. Having that self-awareness is much harder for us than it is for a corporation. Whereas the corporation can simply take a poll on customer satisfaction, people do not have that luxury. In the first place, the virtuous are in the minority. Finding a person who can help you work towards virtue is indeed rare, much rarer than finding a customer that has a relatively normal sense of taste. But on top of that, it is much easier to change for Domino's than it is for any of us.

This is not to discourage any of us that we may very well need change, but more of an analogy to how we may do it. We first need to find the virtuous person who can point us towards the virtuous life who can encourage change within us. Change may not be as easy for us as it was for Domino's, but we can still change for the better.

Virtue and the Flourishing Life

Contemplating Plato’s account of virtue, I wondered whether it would be more virtuous to overcome desire, or to simply not have the desire at all. We all consider the man who has overcome desire more admirable than the man without desire. In fact, most would even find the man without desire blander than the other. Is this the way it should be though? If the latter person is indeed more virtuous, is he not more laudable?

This all builds up to my biweekly meeting with my spiritual director: he is what I consider to be one of the wisest people on Loyola’s campus, and a man of exceedingly great virtue, not just in my opinion, but from anyone who I have met that knows him well. He is a man of little desire. There is no desire to overcome. I, on the other hand, come in to him and talk about how hard it can sometimes be making the best decision. Who is more laudable? It is my opinion that He is, but what I find is that he is content with or without the praise.

Perhaps we praise those who actually deliberate because they are the ones that need the praise. An already virtuous person does not need to be reminded that the decisions made are virtuous. On the other hand, the person striving towards virtue does need to be reminded that the virtuous decision is good, because the goods from that decision are not immediately recognized. A happy life, not in the modern sense, but in the sense that it a flourishing lifestyle, does not arise immediately from our decision. It arises from the continual striving for the flourishing life.