Some thoughts on Virtue

     On my second re-watch of the brilliant HBO miniseries "John Adams" one can see many of the proto-arguments that dominate the politics of today, whether that be the debate on the role of the States vis a vis the Federal Government or the role of government censorship. It's a nostalgic continuity that grounds viewers in two points, first that the republic is an extremely young one, and secondly, that they and us are not so different, the show takes place after all in the time of the grandparents of our grandparents grandparents, which is a blink compared to any considerable stretch in history. But there was a certain scene which stuck out as utterly foreign to my modern ears, an exchange between Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and the titular John Adams in which Franklin argues that for the republic to survive it requires virtue and virtuous citizens.

    The concept of virtue was one in vogue in the time of the enlightenment, drawing from the ancient roman sources. Simply defined by Montesquieu “sensation, and not a consequence of acquired knowledge: a sensation that may be felt by the meanest as well as by the highest person in the state. When the common people adopt good maxims, they adhere to them more steadily than those whom we call gentlemen. It is very rarely that corruption commences with the former: nay, they frequently derive from their imperfect light a stronger attachment to the established laws and customs.”. Imagine a politician in 2022 exhorting that the people be virtuous, he would immediately be booed off the stage for politicians have long ceased to be any sort of moral guidance since the national trauma of Watergate, and the advent of a national 24/7 news media uncovering every moral fault of every politician that's too dumb to cover his tracks (and of those there are many). But barring the obvious difficulties of a politician advocating the national over sectarian interests, there exists ideological obstacles to any sort of promotion of virtue. And this is perpetuated by both sides of the debate today take the right for instance, which has inculcated itself in the libertarian ethos and prides itself on being the most accurate representation of the classical liberalism of the founding era, they have morphed the individualist nature of the enlightenment into a pathetic parody screeching for nothing more than to be left alone. The mainstream right talks of liberty and of men being islands unto themselves and freedom from government "coercion" and yet they expect their ideal small government republic to be ideal, but at the same time have no such requirement for the people to be ideal. On the left there is of course no talk of virtue, the great mass of people in their view are inherently good with only certain cabals in business or politics or religion interested in entrenching their power at the expense of the ones they subjugate. Both the left and right commit the same ideological crime they see virtue as both inherent and self-renewing but through different lenses. The right sees a God-fearing (White) Christian majority under threat from the media or Hollywood. And the left sees the vast majority as class comrades under threat from the rich and powerful with a humanist belief in the inborn goodness and well intentioned nature of humanity, there is no room for individual agency in a left concerned with structures of oppression. 

  Even accounting for the rose tinted depiction of the founding of America presented in John Adams, there is a real sense that you're witnessing a true birth of a country with all the youthful vigour that came from the founding. And now one can only contrast that with an overwhelming feeling of decay, an old order falling before the tides of progress and reaction. One can only think this is what those last few generations of roman philosophers thought when ancient calls to virtue fell on deaf ears and were replaced with bread and circuses. One is resigned to agree with those philosophers of old that a republic with no virtue is ripe to fall.

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