Second Sight

Have you ever heard of the Limited Image Performance Syndrome? Probably not, because it was I who invented the phrase many years ago. It boils down to the convenient acronym: LIPS. I have written about it in more than one book, and I have lectured on it at many business conferences.

Put simply, it means that we all have an internal image of the level at which we can perform various enterprises. We have a strong motivation to live up to our standard, and, by the same token, not to exceed it.

I first observed it when I had the responsibility of directing training for one of the largest and most skilled sales forces in the country. It was divided into about 50 local branches, which gave me an opportunity to study how each branch manager set about motivating his team. Rewards of various kinds were important, but they were not the key. The difference in performance was much more directly linked to whether the manager had inculcated a sense of pride and high self-image among his sales people.

Self-image is formed in different ways. A recent study has shown that there is a genetic element, and that this inherited attitude is a good predictor of future performance - at least as good as intelligence scores. A second factor enters in the first few years of a child’s life. At this stage the child is discovering what sort of person he or she is. If the child experiences consistent love and caring over this time of crucial plastic formation, a good self-image is likely to become hard-wired. Recent work suggests that peer group experience at school is also very important.

These factors are innate but we are also aware that the level of our self-image can wax and wane. A good experience gives us confidence, which we then express in confident behaviour; conversely, a failure or a setback can cause our confidence to leak away. If you were watching Wimbledon tennis this year you may have noticed how confidence levels frequently changed, and how these were reflected in dexterity of performance.

But we are equally uncomfortable when we exceed the level of our self-image. A recent study, carried out by Northwestern University, provides evidence that, if we are particularly virtuous in one area of our lives, we may compensate by behaving badly in another, or at least refraining from the good we would otherwise do. Thus, it suggests, we regain the comfort of our own LIPS level.

So a fraudulent investment manager may undertake great and good public works and thereby restore his appropriate moral level. His vice and virtue cancel out. But, more relevantly, it indicates how those of high religious standing, even members of the priesthood, can indulge in evil practices. They do not do so in spite of their high calling but because of it. They are restoring their LIPS level.

There is much to think about here. We immediately face an apparent contradiction. We are taught to be humble, that we are miserable sinners, that any good we may achieve must be attributed to the grace of God. Our LIPS level should be rock-bottom. Then we remember that Christ declared himself to be humble and that he received everything from his Father. Yet he spoke as one with authority and emphasised that no one could approach the Father except through him. The claim: “I and the Father are one” does not suggest a low LIPS level to me.

I would approach this first by remembering that we are called to be perfect. Thus there is no upper limit for, no matter what we do, we will fall short. Next, we have to remember that we are always worthwhile because, however unsatisfactory and sinful we may be, God loves us and continues to search us out. So that is the basis for high self-esteem.

Then I look at the paradox of grace. Every movement we make towards God is wholly achieved through grace, yet our choices are truly ours and we truly become holy people. Grace is not a whitewash; it works not from outside us but from within us. Solve that, if you can, or - like me - just accept it. Thus whatever spiritual progress we make should be a source of self-esteem. In this way we are able to achieve a high self-esteem, while remaining humble in our acknowledgement that it comes from God. And there in no upper limit.

How would such theological reflection express itself in practice? I maintain that the traditional daily examination of conscience (which does not appear to have been updated since the Middle Ages) is fundamentally flawed. Rightly, we search out our faults, are contrite, and resolve to do better. But we can omit reflection on the good things we have done, the small advances in virtue we have made.

This reflection is important because, although we must thank God for the grace we needed, we have actually become holier thereby. Our all important LIPS can rise to a higher level, inspiring us to live up to our higher standards. John Paul II taught that virtuous behaviour leads in turn to greater virtue, but surely this is more difficult if we do not reflect on such progress as we have made.

But care is needed. All examination of conscience must take place under the auspices of the Holy Spirit. Only then can we hope that our insights may be realistic and sincere. In testing them our ultimate criterion must be St Paul’s teaching that even the most extreme of good works are nothing unless they are sourced in love.

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Formal Confession on a regular basis is much rarer than it used to be. Why has this happened? Of course if the practice returned, our poor priests would have to spend their lives in the confessional. But none of this relieves the need for examination of conscience.

How do you react to my suggestion that we should look at the good as well as the bad things? Are you able to reconcile humility with a high self image?

General absolution is only offered nowadays for exceptional reasons. Good idea or bad idea?

Of course being people of perception we are careful not to judge those we meet by their personal appearance. Yet another study, this time from Australia, shows that there is a close correlation between earnings and height in men. Apparently an increase in stature of two inches is worth on average an extra £500 a year.

This is not exactly news. The first study of social acceptability and height I have encountered dates from 1915, and there have been a myriad of studies showing similar results since then. This response to height may be a primitive reaction learned in our evolutionary past when the largest male was the safest choice of leader. Perhaps the Equality Bill, currently working its way through Parliamentary procedures, should contain a clause about height discrimination.

But then it would have to contain a good deal more. It has been demonstrated over and over again that physical beauty is associated with better temperament, greater virtue and greater trustworthiness. Similarly accent is important. A Birmingham accent is likely to mark you down as having greater criminal tendencies than a “BBC” accent – at least as BBC accents used to be.

Like most of us, I have had personal experience of this. For some time I favoured a black leather cap, purchased, with some chic, I thought, in Florence. But I lost faith when a passenger on Basingstoke station asked me the time of the next London train. Preferring me not to be mistaken for a porter, my wife bought me an elegant, dark green, fedora from Bates the Hatters in Jermyn Street. The effect was instantaneous. I was suddenly being treated with respect, even by porters. Occasionally I was addressed as “sir”, a habit I had assumed was long forgotten.

My beard was a different matter. I valued it because when it was grown, in middle life, I asked my wife if she approved. She said “It’s like committing adultery, without all the hassle.” I took that as approval. In fact the general female reaction was interesting. I found that about half my female friends hugged me less, and half hugged me more. Why was that, I wonder?

It was certainly a disadvantage in business. I worked for a respectable and large international financial company – and a beard hardly fitted the image. No paranoia on my part, for I was explicitly told on more than one occasion that its existence held back my promotion. But I saw its removal as one surrender too far. I was not prepared to “sell my beard to the company store”. I might have been a highly bonused banker by now, but it was worth it.

In fact, not being tall, my only advantage was wearing glasses. Apparently those who do so are credited with 12 additional points on their IQ score.

I mention these things because, despite my opening sentence, we do quite unconsciously stereotype people by their appearance, and are thus often unwittingly unjust. Today, height has no relationship to leadership ability. Beauty and virtue by no means always go together. I deserved as much respect in my cap as in my fedora. A man (or indeed a woman, I suppose) should be judged on ability rather than facial hair. And my twelve extra IQ points would disappear if I took to contact lenses.

Surely as Christians we should be accepting people as they really are, and not irrationally cataloguing them by their external trappings. But to do that we have first to recognise how much we instinctively measure people by their appearance. And we will find the habit difficult to drop.

I wonder whether you have had any personal experience of this. It might be useful to explore the ways in which you categorise people by irrational criteria. (If you think that you never do, then I simply don’t believe you.) And is there anything one can do to correct it?

So many mind-boggling stories leap out of the newspapers every day that I had thought I was immune to surprises. But in this case, before reading it to my wife, I had to make her promise to accept that I was not actually making it up, or was not repeating some complicated joke.

Its headline was “NHS tells children daily sex will keep them healthy.” Yes, the NHS in Hull compares genital sexual activity with the regime of eating five portions of fruit and veg a day, as a recipe for cardiovascular health. Mr Slack (whose name is the only amusing thing in the article) is the director of the Centre for HIV and Sexual Health in Hull. He is distributing a pamphlet to parents, teachers and youth workers. It carries the slogan “an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away”. You and I are of course paying for it through our taxes. After all “they (children) have an equal right as an adult to an enjoyable sex life.” And we, presumably, have an equal right, indeed obligation, to pick up the pieces.

In case you should still suspect that I am making this up, you can read the story here.

Just to give a balance from the other end of the spectrum, Dr M B Foote MD covers some pages on the perils of solitary vice in the young. There are many. Amongst them he specifies as most common “consumption, medical depression and insanity”.  On a later page he boasts of having recognised a woman as a nun (dressed in mufti) from her pallid countenance. “I instinctively diagnosed her case as one of sexual starvation.” His book, titled Plain Home Talk, was last revised in 1896.

What would we do without the experts?

In my previous columns on how moral decisions might be made (deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics) I have made no mention of proportionalism because it carries an ecclesiastical health warning. In his encyclical Veritatis Splendor John Paul II condemns proportionalism by declaring that certain acts are intrinsically wrong by virtue of their object, irrespective of the circumstances and intentions surrounding their performance (paragraphs 75-83). Nevertheless it merits, as he himself suggests, our critical examination.

Let’s take an example. Mutilation (the removal of an organ such as a kidney or a womb), except for the benefit of its owner, is gravely wrong, since it offends against the integrity of the body. But in fact the use of kidney transplants is accepted as good and virtuous. The argument would be that the donor is not substantially impaired if his remaining kidney is healthy, but the recipient’s life may be saved through the gift. When the act is taken as a whole, we judge that the act of charity outweighs the basic principle. There is proportionate reason. Needless to say, there was hot dispute among theologians when this issue first became live, but now we take the outcome for granted.

The proportionalist would argue that such abstract principles only become morally relevant when they are applied to a human act. And a human act can only be judged as a whole: that is, taking into account circumstances and intentions. Thus we subscribe to the principle that abortion is gravely wrong. But we accept that, in the case of a pregnancy which develops in a fallopian tube, it is legitimate to remove the diseased tube although that leads immediately to the death of the baby as a regrettable, but proportionate, side effect.

This principle of “double effect” is well established. But it would not cover the circumstances where it is medically possible to remove the baby from the tube, leaving the woman with an intact tube - in some cases her only one. Again the baby dies. We correctly class this as abortion, but is it justifiable when the baby is destined to die in either case and the alternative procedure preserves the mother’s fertility? I leave you to think about that.

“You shall not murder,” as the NRSV translates the commandment, provides an example of a moral principle expressed in terms of its context and intentions. That is, it allows that killing may be justified for proportionate reasons - for example self-defence, even when the aggressor - say, a schizophrenic who has omitted his medication - is innocent.

The orthodox (Catechism) view of lying is that it is always wrong, but it permits the use of economic language with the intention of deceiving, when there is commensurate reason. Lying is condemned on the grounds that God gave us speech in order to communicate truth: to use it to communicate a direct untruth is to defy its God-given purpose or “object”, in the sense that John Paul II uses the word. A proportionalist would argue that the real moral issue is whether, in a particular case, deceit is justified. The method of achieving it, through a lie or through economic language, is a secondary issue.

The area where the concept of object has understandably received the most attention is sex. So we find Aquinas telling us that an act against nature (which would include artificial contraception) is intrinsically more wicked than incest, rape, adultery or fornication because it is contrary to the fundamental object of the act. The other sins are misapplications of the act but they are lesser because they do not offend against its intrinsic nature. Proportionalists maintain that he is starting at the wrong point. They would say that it is necessary to take the principle and to put it into the context of circumstances and intentions of an actual human decision before judging morally whether there are commensurate reasons which could justify a different view. At the very least we can understand the horns of the dilemma responsible for the delay in the Vatican in deciding the question on condoms and Aids for infected married couples. The traditional understanding is that the evil lies in the contraceptive nature of the act. The intention, however good, is irrelevant.

Indeed, opponents have argued that proportionalism has only been developed as a counter to the formal rulings on the abuse of marriage. They would claim that it is situation ethics -  in which there are no objective moral wrongs, but only circumstances and intentions. An acceptance of its principles would be to enter on a slippery slope which would gradually lead to the disappearance of moral principles altogether. They would argue that, in certain quarters, abortion, divorce and even paedophilia may have been judged as potentially permissible through this approach.

A proportionalist might defend his position by pointing out that the great majority of moral decisions which we make do not involve unconditional moral principles, and here circumstances and intentions are the only criteria available. Far from leading to laxity it obliges us to undertake the demanding process of personal moral judgment.

Next, he would deny that he has abandoned moral principles. Indeed, these are so important that all the relevant ones should be assessed, and their proportionate value measured, so that an informed decision may be made. He would even accept that many values, for instance the protection of the young from sexual abuse, are so high, that he could not in practice conceive of any other value justifying it. So there are conflicting arguments here. But your comments may elucidate them.

Is proportionalism just situation ethics in disguise – and so highly dangerous in a society where all moral principle seems to be relative and subjective? Or is it a sensible approach to true moral awareness where we give priority to love rather than to the dead hand of law?  Come and tell us your views, and put some flesh on the skeletal overview I have given.

I suppose it must be a quarter of a century ago that I last wrote in The Catholic Herald about my antipathy towards the charismatic and pentecostal movement – with particular reference to my scepticism about “speaking in tongues”. I received my largest postbag ever and, almost to a correspondent, I stood condemned for my lack of faith.

On Sunday I watched on Channel 4, as some of you may have done, a programme which featured an Alpha course, as developed by the Holy Trinity, Brompton. I cannot criticise the movement for its lack of success: to get groups of agnostics discussing Christianity seriously – with the real possibility that some of them will seek conversion must be applauded. So my sense that it was over-simplistic, formulaic and highly dependent on the powerful psychology of small groups must be put down to sheer prejudice.

My greatest dislike was the attempt to summon the Holy Spirit and the encouragement to “speak in tongues”. I am of course familiar with what St Paul had to say on the subject but, even if I accept his somewhat cautious views, I can see no warrant for extending the use of public and meaningless utterances, attributed to the action of the Holy Spirit, as in any way part of the Christian tradition of prayer. Most certainly it has no place in an introductory course.

I have not attended an Alpha course, either in its root Protestant form or in any modified Catholic version, so perhaps I have no right to extend an opinion – although I am fairly well read in the topic.

Some of you may have had direct or indirect experience of Alpha, or other aspects of charismatic Christianity, so don’t hesitate to come back and show me why I am wrong. Or, if you are sympathetic to my views, I would be grateful to know that I am not alone.