Civility

With London burning and some of your friends gloating over it, I couldn't but help return to the wonderful online series of articles titled 'Citizen Ethics'. From that collection there's Vernon's very interesting piece on friendship:

Ethics is a form of practical intelligence. Like friendship, we nurture virtues best by our engagement with others and the world. Such skills must be learnt afresh in every generation – another reason why a fixed, codified system never inspires: it contains little conception that life is to be lived. But that also means there's hope, because ethics can be remade. That will come about by recognising the nature of our dependency and independence. We'll sense it's right because it'll speak to our humanity, thereby enlarging it. Who would want to live without friends? Who could? It'll be good because it offers us the resources to flourish.

Huizinga, John of Salisbury:

'Every soil is a fatherland for the strong'

'It makes no difference whether a soldier serves one of the faithful or an infidel, so long as he serves without impairing or violating his own faith.'

Huizinga: '...an optimism based entirely on faith, nevertheless permits a full acceptance of earthly life..he had all the virtues of a humanist, and none of his vices..[a] sense of the real and the detail, the catholicity of knowledge and interest.'

'The opening of his Life of Saint Thomas is like a stained-glass window of his cathedral, bathed in sanguine red.'