On Virtue

Let’s start this one with a few quotes: the Buddha once said, “Just as treasures are uncovered from the earth, so virtue appears from good deeds, and wisdom appears from a pure and peaceful mind. To walk safely through the maze of human life, one needs the light of wisdom and the guidance of virtue.” To which Camus, the bad boy of French existentialism, could have replied, “I know myself too well to believe in true virtue.” Shakespeare, in the end, may have punctuated this conversation in Measure for Measure: “Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.”
 
Virtue is commonly characterized by the standard boring dictionaries as goodness, righteousness, and upstanding moral creed. In a poststructuralist world, however, we know the definitions of what is “good” and what is “right” can vary widely. It is like saying a mirror is the same thing for every person that stands in front of it: it is and, as a result of its nature, it isn’t. Or, as Heraclitus’s oft-repeated maxim goes, “You could not step twice into the same river.” Both you have changed and the river has changed. Virtue is different for everyone.
 
So what is virtue? My goodness. That’s a box thinkers with more neural connections than this writer have been trying to unpack forever. It’s so easy for us to melodramatically talk about good and evil, but even the fiction that we ingest that follows those tropes never seems as satisfying as stories that wade into moral gray areas. Everyone thinks they’re the good guy; everyone thinks they’re right. So in this post I’m just going sidestep the irreconcilable conversation about the subjectivity of morality to make the point I want to make: maybe we can’t have a universal morality, but we should, at least, have an ongoing conversation about virtue.
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If only morality were this cut and dry...

Virtue, essentially, is a sum of values, and our national conversation is not usually discussing what is right and why. American culture doesn’t encourage people to measure themselves against the seven deadly sins or platonic ideals. We don’t speak about and define values in a national or global terms; we usually leave those conversations to religious institutions (the phrase “family values", now oft-used into obsolescence...), which makes sense because values and goodness have historically been thought of as God-given or divinely decreed. But we have many religions, and many nonreligious people, and because of that difference I think our culture should have more public conversations about what right is, what values are. About what values we cherish and how we express those values.
 
It’s so easy to throw around words like honesty and trust and respect and integrity that they can lose all meaning after a while. Brings to mind the phenomenon of saying a word over and over until it just feels like putty in your mouth: kitchen. Kitchen. Kitchen. Kitchen kitchen kitchen kitchen kitchen. Except that a kitchen is a real thing and values are intangible guides about how to live. Values like honor or leadership or service or generosity are more difficult to pin down. They don’t have refrigerators or ovens, so their interpretations are much more subjective, or at least more open to political manipulation. Leadership and honor and integrity are going to look much different from the perspectives of a banker, a fundamentalist, a gang leader, a senator, a teacher, a comic book scholar, a mother. Because values are abstract nouns, there are countless ways to interpret them and apply them, leaving them nearly devoid of meaning when, tragically, they should be infused with meaning—no, overflowing with meaning—in order to help guide people toward right action and good living.
 
A few years ago there were advertisements on public transportation for a nonprofit named The Foundation for A Better Life. Their mission, from their website, “is to offer inspirational messages to people everywhere as a contribution toward promoting good values, good role models and a better life.” Maybe there are other organizations like this out there, but this is the only one I’ve seen, and they’ve got a good marketing angle, with a URL of www.Values.com and a catchy slogan: Pass it on. Check out their list of values here: http://www.values.com/teaching-values. Most of their values have their own website. How cool is that? Here’s one of their commercials.

The thing about values though is that they have to be guides through different situations, ideas-as-tools implemented at times of need and to varying degrees. Every situation is a balancing act. Moral situations where characters need to negotiate one value against another precipitate drama. One person’s noble cause (for generosity, achievement, idealism, justice, honesty, etc.) might be righteous pretention to another. Or misguidedness. Or immaturity. Or doofistry. Let the situation dictate who’s right.
 
So sometimes we compromise our values depending on the situation. Unfortunate that they are so malleable. Some people prop up values in front of them like cardboard cutouts of soldiers and then go do whatever they want behind the curtain. We can hear words like charity and industry and appreciation and be swayed by them not knowing that they had no weight to the speaker. Too often, values are tools of political and financial manipulation. This denigration poisons the language we need in order to be the best versions of ourselves.
 
And in that vain, a task of the self-developing individual is to identify which values are most important to him or her. Faith and honesty? Service and loyalty? Friendship and empathy and self-improvement? For a good blueprint of how to do this, look no further than the idol of intellect himself.

“I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.” Albert Einstein, The World As I See It (This quote can be found in a couple different forms on the Internet. Fortunately consistency isn’t one of his core virtues.)

Or, instead of having a trio of virtues, those of the boldest disposition may prefer to name, define, and follow but one, as does this human being of towering character.

“Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.” –Maya Angelou, force of nature

So let’s talk about virtue. Let’s talk about values. Alongside the hard work of infrastructure building and community building and all the political policy debates and character wars on TV must be a discussion of the guiding principles that we actually use to pursue our goals, to judge our persons and our societies, to measure who we are. We can claim someone is dishonest or selfish or crazy, but what are honesty and selflessness and sanity? If these words are simply subjective markers, then the collective must come together, discuss them, unpack them, deepen our understanding of them, and then, after a thorough examination, redefine them. Until then, we’ll continue to be using deep words in superficial ways to describe enigmatic patterns of behavior. And guiding principles are more important than that. Heck, they’re worth more than that. That’s why their called values.
 
Virtue, as the purest ideal, is not an end that is attainable. Perhaps the Buddha, Camus, and Shakespeare would have agreed. But I think they would all like thinking of virtue as not an end, but a road you travel on your journey. Values are the road signs. Praise be to those who stay true to the path.