Character and Characins — Unbounded Seas

The five aquariums I currently have in my classroom would not be there save for a random example I chose one fateful day during my first year of teaching. I was teaching on the idea that truth can be known and matters, and used a thermos as my example, asking students what would happen if I thought my thermos was a fish. One response I received was, “If you think it’s a fish, then it is a fish to you.” My rejoinder was to ask what would happen if, firmly convinced that thermoses were fish, I attempted to live on nothing but thermoses; there was general agreement that I would die. Which would be an indicator that I was wrong (truth can be known), and also that the mistake was significant.

In one class, after my discussion of this matter, a young woman raised her hand and said, “Father Joe, we should get a fish for our classroom, and name it Thermos.” Out of that jesting idea came my first aquarium, and the rest is history. I am currently developing a 125 gallon tank to house archer fish and mudskippers.

The fortuitous origin of my classroom aquariums requires some ex post facto justification, and I have discovered more than one good reason for having them there. One is for my teaching on character, and the importance of forging it in particular ways. Possibly the most difficult challenge for teaching on character is the pervasive idea (mentioned above) that “if you think something is X, than it is indeed X to you.” This is notably present in any classroom discussion I have of morality or character: “perhaps you think grit is a good thing, but I prefer easily giving up, and who’s to say one is better than the other?” “If someone thinks cruelty is good, than cruelty is good for them.” And so on. I am not sure how many of my students really believe this sort of thing, for their moral systems tend to be blended out of several different sorts of moral thinking, and they are often understandably inconsistent. But the idea is in the background of any discussion of character, I believe, and makes it more difficult.

In this, I think my fish have their part to play. There is an awful lot that is just given in keeping fish. If you don’t put them in water, they (surprisingly) die. Beyond that, each particular sort of fish needs different conditions to flourish and to live long lives. Neon tetras (representatives, by the way, of the characin family referenced in the title) must be kept apart from larger fish that will eat them, and won’t effectively eat pellets that fall to the tank’s substrate. Yoyo loaches and plecos can live with larger fish than neons can, and need food that drops to the bottom. Mudskippers, though they need access to water, spend most of their time on land. Moreover, mudskippers and (many) archer fish are brackish water fish – they do best with saline water, though with less salt than sea water. Neon tetras and yoyo loaches would die almost immediately in this sort of water. Point of all this being: there are objective conditions for the flourishing of all animals, each according to their nature. Why would that be different for us, simply because we have reason and free will? If human beings want to flourish, there are conditions they need to meet. Grit, honesty, and what could be called ‘creative insight’ are, I’m convinced, among them.

Alasdair MacIntyre explores some of the conditions for flourishing as human beings in his work Dependent Rational Animals. The book builds up from what we share with dolphins and other higher animals to those things specific to human beings. One characteristic that we share with many other animals is that we are dependent on one another in order to survive and to flourish. This is true for every person, notably in infancy, in old age, and at any time in between when we experience one form or another of disability. An example of a virtue we need to live in this condition of mutual dependency well is creative insight on behalf of others in the community who are dealing with disability. If I may offer an extended quote:

It is and perhaps always has been a common assumption that blindness, deafness, deformed or injured limbs, and the like exclude the sufferer from more than a very, very limited set of possibilities. And this has often been treated as if it were a fact of nature. What is thereby obscured is the extent to which whether and how far the obstacles presented by those afflictions can be overcome or circumvented depends not only on the resources of the disabled - and these will vary a great deal from individual to individual - but also on what others contribute, others whose failures may be failures of imagination with respect to future possibilities. (MacIntyre, 75, emphasis added)

If persons are to flourish in society, they need creativity – their own and others – to be effectively applied to them in their particular disability in order not to artificially limit their continuing potential. This is not something that affects just one group of people, for each of us will face disability at some unpredictable time, even if we are relatively healthy now. A society that promotes this sort of creativity better fosters human flourishing than one that lacks it. This is something that reflects what we find ourselves to be, the condition that is a given; this virtue fosters our flourishing in a manner analogous to brackish water for mudskippers. And this is only one example. Grit, honesty, social intelligence, and many other virtues can be reasonably shown to be more beneficial for human flourishing than their opposites. (Character Strengths and Virtues by Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson sounds like a good example of showing just that, and it is a book I’d like to explore).

The fish can stay. They earn their keep.

Work Cited:

Alasdair MacIntyre. Dependent Rational Animals. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1999.