The Case of the Misplaced Virtue

I first noticed this phenomenon many decades ago when studying Plato's Republic. Plato holds that knowledge is the highest virtue. It followed therefore that society should reflect this fundamental truth. It followed from this that what was needed to assure that knowledge would remain society's defining virtue was a philosopher king. Hence a fundamental individual virtue, when applied to society, resulted in a dictatorship, albeit a dictatorship of wisdom. This is a case in which a private virtue, one properly ascribed to an individual, was made into a public virtue with, I suggest, the expected result. Indeed I. F. (Izzy) Stone the renowned investigative reporter, in his book, The Trial of Socrates, argues that Plato was part of a movement to overthrow the Athenian democracy.

For much of human history private virtues dominated the public arena. Government was viewed by the mass of people as good or bad on a personal scale, e.g. a good or bad monarch. The notion of the family was expanded to government as the monarch was viewed as the father of the country and the population as his children. Theoretically the state was his private domain. All others held their land in fief to him. Again this resulted in arbitrary rule as the father was viewed as the arbitrary ruler of this family.

Public virtues such as justice and equality came to the fore with the rise of democracy. Emanuel Kant saw this dichotomy and sought to reconcile these two kinds of virtue when he proposed that the private virtue of not lying was actually a public virtue because if everyone lied society could not function. While this effort to derive the private virtue of not lying from public necessity merits significant thought, it is interesting to note that not even the highest oath of office in our country, that of the President, makes no mention of not lying.

The problem is that private virtues are absolute for the individual who subscribes to them and thus become tyrannical when applied to public affairs. If honesty is a virtue for an individual then "more or less honest" will not do.

In our time this confusion of private and public virtue has become critical for the survival of our democracy. Conservatives, by passionately trumpeting individual virtues as replacements for public virtues such as equality and justice, have argued that charity should replace some major social services. You may remember President George H. W. Bush's call for a thousand points of light to solve glaring discrepancies in wealth. Thus the wealthy would decide when and if the poor were to receive the help they badly needed. This is not democracy! Again the current "debate" on health care pushes the conservative's private virtue of individual responsibility into the public arena where citizen rights and welfare should predominate and it does this with disastrous results for 46 million Americans, including 9 million children who have no health insurance.

One result of this relentless and deliberate insertion of private virtues into the public arena is that Americans have lost the sense of society and its importance. Democracy must accommodate a wide variety of private values of citizens; therefore its values, must in a sense, transcend those values in the interest of the society as a whole. This is not to say, for example, that we do not want personal honesty in government. It is to say that we do not require it as a condition of public office holding except in positions where it is critical, e.g. the town treasurer in the conduct of affairs related to that office. If honesty were rigorously required of politicians neither they nor this society could function for the simple reason politicians must say different things to different constituents if they are to be elected. We the citizens require this as we so frequently vote our private values rather than the public values of justice and equality.

There was a time when public virtues played a much stronger role in our public affairs. During Franklin Roosevelt's administration we actively sought and voted for the public good. We believed in the public good of public education as a right for children not a privilege of the wealthy. Public education was full of experimentation as we tried to understand what stimulated young people to learn. John Dewey fought to make the student the focus of education, not the institution. He understood Jefferson's view that education was the primary job of society and should focus on helping people realize their potential. Properly understood, society's goal was to produce an increasingly competent and curious citizenry. Conservatives have turned this on its head by declaring that they know the best things for students and education should be directed at instilling those values. Contemporary conservatism is at its heart dead. It is analogous to a hurricane or tornado; next to nothing at its center, but enormously destructive to everything around it. It does not want to inquire and base knowledge on the results of honest inquiry. Neither do corporations, and this is one of the roots of agreement between conservatives and the corporate world. It should never be forgotten that ignorance is deeply rooted in Christian culture. Knowledge of good and evil was a penalty God bestowed on Adam and Eve for their misbehavior. The Christian phrase " a little child shall lead them" implies that the ignorance of innocence is a virtue. These are the kinds of homilies out of which dictatorships are fashioned. Hitler's vision for the Nazi youth movement was purity of spirit. The image of Nietzsche's young eubemensch striding the Bavarian mountaintops captured the German imagination as "family values" and sexual purity threaten to distort our own public perceptions.

In short, be wary, very wary, of translating personal virtues into public virtues.

Bob Newhard