Virtues

David Fleming
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(1) Christian: faith, hope and charity.V4

(2) Greek: fortitude, godliness, prudence.V5

(3) Cardinal: fortitude, justice, temperance, prudence.V6

(4) Lean: fortitude, encounter, prudence.

 

A recognised aim of education, in the recent past, has been to teach and cultivate collective virtue, embodied in the individual. For John Henry Newman, for instance, the aim of education was that . . .

. . . people should be taught a wisdom, safe from the excesses and vagaries of individuals, embodied in the institutions which have stood the trial and received the sanction of ages.

The person thus educated . . .

. . . is mainly occupied in merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and unembarrassed action of those about him.

Here we have the lean and communitarian virtues of courtesy and encounter. The educated man has . . .

. . . candour, consideration, indulgence: he throws himself into the minds of his opponents.

Newman has a word for the person thus educated: education’s great object, he writes, is . . .

. . . to make its students “gentlemen”.V7

 

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David Fleming
Dr David Fleming (2 January 1940 – 29 November 2010) was a cultural historian and economist, based in London, England. He was among the first to reveal the possibility of peak oil's approach and invented the influential TEQs scheme, designed to address this and climate change. He was also a pioneer of post-growth economics, and a significant figure in the development of the UK Green Party, the Transition Towns movement and the New Economics Foundation, as well as a Chairman of the Soil Association. His wide-ranging independent analysis culminated in two critically acclaimed books, 'Lean Logic' and 'Surviving the Future', published posthumously in 2016. These in turn inspired the 2020 launches of both BAFTA-winning director Peter Armstrong's feature film about Fleming's perspective and legacy - 'The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilisation?' - and Sterling College's unique 'Surviving the Future: Conversations for Our Time' online courses. For more information on all of the above, including Lean Logic, click the little globe below!

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