Tag Archives: virtue

A Fraying Republic and its Broken Bonds, Dr. Robert Zuber

11 May

Quotations Courtesy of Robert Bellah

This society is a cruel and bitter one, very far, in fact, from its own higher aspirations.

The only remaining category for the analysis and evaluation of human motives is interest, which has replaced both virtue and conscience in our moral vocabulary.

Chosen-ness that slips away from the controlling obligations of the covenant is a signpost to hell. 

The energy of creation and the energy of aggression are often only a hair’s breadth apart.

If we allow the external covenant to be subverted utterly, then our task is infinitely greater: not to renew a republic but to throw off a despotism.

There are enormous concentrations of economic, political and technological power that will react harshly to any challenge.

We have plunged into the thickets of this world so vigorously that we have lost the vision of the good.

No one has changed a great nation without appealing to its soul, without stimulating a national idealism.

We are not innocent, we are not the saviors of mankind, and it is well for us to grow up enough to know that.

It has been one of the hallmarks of the current US administration that it is constantly referencing a history about which it (and especially its leader) seems to know shockingly little.  Over and over, we hear that so and so is the worst president “in history;”  that no one has been persecuted like the current office holder “in the country’s history;” that no one has done more for “the blacks than I have in history.”  There are so many more examples of the current president, his loyalists and even at times his dissenters making slanted or even outrageous claims about a “history” which they have done virtually nothing to investigate and which they are using primarily as a tool to whip up political support, much like a preacher who enthusiastically misquotes the bible in order to send his/her parishioners into a frenzy right before the collection plates come out.

I am no historian but have studied enough of our history to know how complex that history has been, a strange brew of idealism and brutality, devotion and indifference, caring for neighbor and foreclosing on neighbors, piety and hypocrisy, opening our doors to others and then punishing them when they arrive, affirming the dignity of all humans while consigning some to be treated like cattle or violently displacing others from their ancestral homes.  

These contradictions are part and parcel of all nations to some degree, but not all nations have had to traverse the wide gap we have had to navigate between our myths and our practices. As I have been reminded while revisiting texts from my graduate school past, including Richard Hofstadter’s “Social Darwinism in American Thought” and the text from which today’s quotations have been mined, Robert Bellah’s “The Broken Covenant,” from the beginning of our national experiment, we have over-assessed our national uniqueness, our erstwhile special relationship to divinity, the abundance of our piety and virtue.  Indeed, and certainly in recent times, we have turned “virtue-signaling” into an art form, and not at all to our credit. At the same time, we have sought to cover or ignore our bursts of utter brutality, our preoccupations with money and the power it can coerce, our sometimes harshly restrictive notions of “neighbor” than our alleged covenantal relationship with any deity would ever endorse, our willing acceptance of a faith which stresses personal conversion to the virtual exclusion of social obligation. 

Indeed, as Bellah points out, those who formed our nation began to erode the covenant almost as soon as it took effect, setting ourselves on a path at times divine and at other times ruthless in  pursuit of national conquest and fortune.  As a country we have consistently talked a good game – indeed at times inspiring other nations to rethink their own oppressive preoccupations – but have surely not always played one.  In practical terms we have sewn together self-interest and idealism in a way which consigns the latter too often to rhetoric while providing a kind of plenary indulgence to the former, a license to accumulate and then lord worldly “success” over others within and outside our own nation with little restraining force or friction.

Bellah noted with sadness our long, national pathway to what was for him a present moment where  “once born” people have taken advantage of a covenant that they themselves no longer abide by or otherwise take seriously, people who have decided that owning neighbors’ properties is preferable to having neighborly obligations and that religion to the extent it is practiced at all is confined to personal rather than social consequence, all about the maximizing of self-interest rather than the practical, virtuous intensification of a wider ministry to others.  

Bellah wrote this book in the 70st and we must confess that much of what he identified, both past and in his present, now stalks our own present a half century later.  We have steamrolled much of our national complexity and allowed partisan rooting interests to replace thoughtfulness about ourselves and our place in the world.  We are all-too-willing to parrot unverified assumptions and positions if they suit our increasingly narrow frameworks.  Even 50 years ago, it was clear that “we are not innocent, we are not the saviors of mankind,”  and even more clear that we stubbornly refuse to own up to that reality. Other peoples and other countries, even those who rightly admire us in a variety of ways, figured that out some time ago.

Fifty years on from Bellah’s contributions, we face another “time of trial,” another period of straying further and further still from a covenant the non-fulfillment of which has become less our collective measure of success and more akin to a “signpost to hell.”  We have allowed the external covenant, the means for keeping our nation on some semblance of course, to crumble thus risking what Bellah posited as “an infinitely greater task,” not to renew a republic so much as to “throw off a despotism.” 

That degree of difficulty is defining our current moment.  However, this moment is not entirely an aberration but a continuation of a pervasive national trend.  We are living now through the implications of a long brokenness, a long period of lying to ourselves about our values and our virtue, a long habit of affirming an exceptionalism that, despite our considerable national achievements, many around the world no longer see as fundamentally exceptional. At official level and beyond, we have embraced what has become a recognizably cruel form of social Darwinism – the notion that “godliness is in league with riches” and that those who can play in that league deserve a free pass to improve their positions at the expense of those less exceptionally endowed.  To those who have much, even more will be given.  To those who have not?  That’s their problem. 

What is true of this current iteration of our broken covenant is not only its utter contempt for those who suffer but its phobia towards any effort to diversify and/or balance society and unlock the potential of all who reside within its confines.  On this Mothers’ Day, while this posting is not exactly a Kay Jewelers moment, it seems relevant to point out the desire of current officialdom to roll back much of what women have gained in large measure through their own talents and efforts.  From restricting voting rights, childcare options and reproductive and other health access to the thuggery of deportations violently separating mothers and children, and the obsessive scrubbing of women’s contributions and leadership from government websites, the options and images of an entitled, smug patriarchy have sought to relegate many women, many mothers, to places they never thought they would visit again in their lifetimes. Happy Mother’s Day indeed.

For Bellah, for many others, this is just one consequence of a covenant which is now little more than a “broken shell,” taking down with it the care and solidarity for one another which was once recognized as our covenantal obligation, but which has long  been buried under an avalanche of greed, projection, indifference and exclusion.  As brokenness gives way to more despotic influences we will need to summon larger quantities of energy, courage and mindfulness to restore bonds of liberty and solidarity that we surely should have done more to protect in the first place.

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Logic Choppers: Ancient and Contemporary Threats to Civic Virtue, Dr. Robert Zuber

15 Dec

Euripides

You become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.  Aristotle

You can fake virtue for an audience. You can’t fake it in your own eyes.  Ayn Rand

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as ‘moral indignation,’ which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.  Erich Fromm

When the rare chance comes, seize it, to do the rare deed.  Tiruvalluvar

Discourse on virtue and they pass by in droves. Whistle and dance and shimmy, and you’ve got an audience!  Diogenes

Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so. Cicero

May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal; that deformed monstrosity — a virtuous woman.  Mary MacLane

To be in Athens is evocative at so many levels, getting in touch with the ways in which we have far transcended the culture of Socrates, the Sophists and later Aristotle, but also the ways in which we have culturally digressed – failing both to learn some of their hard human lessons and to commit to walking a more virtuous path ourselves.

Such lessons (literally and figuratively) washed over me this week in places like the Ancient Agora, where persons of high intellect once debated profound matters but also (in the case of numerous Sophists) put their “wisdom” up for sale to the highest bidder, apparently after having become quite comfortable with the notion that one could make a handsome living by teaching matters of the heart and mind without having to commit much of oneself to such matters. 

For some of these thinkers (both Socrates and Euripides comes to mind) there was something seriously wrong with making money off ideas that the teachers themselves had largely kept at arm’s length. Thus the pursuit of wisdom, and the pursuit of civic virtue through which wisdom is made incarnate, made way to what James Jarrett referred to as “logic choppers,” people who seemed to love the sound of their own voices more than they actually sought to impact a world that had in some sense ossified into “accepted ways” that served only a sub-section of the public for which they were ostensibly intended.

One can argue (and these rhetoricians did endlessly) about matters that we modern sophisticates have largely abandoned – notions of “universal” truth untainted by culture and power (they surely are) as well as the ways in which our senses can deceive us on a regular basis  (they surely do).  But what some of the more sophisticated Sophists also understood is that, our need for permanence notwithstanding, the world is spinning in and out of acceptability.  And thus we have a duty to question what some would prefer to hold aloof from dialogue or critique – “certainties” revolving around their own needs and aspirations in so many instances. 

I was also able to revisit the responsibility, firmly understood by Aristotle and others, to invest part of ourselves in civic space as an indispensable element of civilized living.  Ours is hardly the first age which has largely abandoned civic virtue for ubiquitous distractions or mercenary applications of inherited wisdom.  But the pace of distraction has certainly intensified in our time as has the “value” that nothing matters except what can be bought and sold, what can be counted and commoditized.

What has clearly suffered in too many instances is the time and/or inclination to influence the civic culture that, in our collective absence, has become less thoughtful and more vulgar, and less “user-friendly” than some might have thought possible.  This is not mostly about people like me who have been granted the privileges of time to reflect with virtually-assured policy access on a regular basis. Indeed, this time in Athens has only strengthened my appreciation for other actors; especially for archeologists and art historians, for curators and translators, without whom none of the takeaways from this trip – even my half-baked ones – would have been even remotely possible.  That people such as these have not been properly honored or enabled in civic space is, indeed, a symptom of a greater alienation, a genuine civic malfunction. 

No, the enabling of access to public space, the striving for public effectiveness, isn’t about (or shouldn’t be about) competition for attention or status or “followers.”  It should be more about the willingness to engage and share beyond our zones of comfort, to force ourselves to “weigh in” on the most important social and political matters of our time with all of our cognitive and emotional skill, not just the matters that weigh more privately on our minds and hearts, on our careers and pay stubs.

And those matters are surely related to virtue, a term once deemed so high-minded that it caused some logicians around the Agora to wonder aloud if it could even be taught, a term now largely discredited due to the ways it has been “worn” by the unscrupulous and the mercenary, the vain and the self-righteous.  We all know of too many people who can “whistle and dance” for an audience but can’t reach them in some deeper place than the one that merely desires to be entertained. We also know people for whom virtue is merely a convenient gateway to envy or hate, an excuse to belittle or humiliate, a rationale for some version of “might makes right,” even (certainly in the case of still-too-many women) a means of holding people in place with no commitment to releasing their power.

The lessons to be learned for me from this Athens sojourn are that virtue, to the extent that it is still relevant in modern terms, must be practiced and made visible in public spaces.  It is not, it cannot be reduced to some private possession.  It is neither a jewel to protect nor a club with which to beat others over the head. In this context we must recognize that there are times in every life where we are called upon to repurpose at least part of our precious virtue for the sake of a greater good, to embrace the murkiness of leadership, to be willing to make the difficult decisions knowing that all the relevant facts are not in, while understanding that the decision might cause harm to some in the hope of possibly freeing many others from a worse fate. Such times as these are perhaps rare for most; but they are also emblematic of our still-potent ability to blend successfully the virtue we have cultivated with real-time solutions to real-world crises as they are made known to us. 

The other lesson is one which we have spoken of often in this space: that we are not who we proclaim ourselves to be as much as what we choose to practice in the world.  As Aristotle and others recognized, the path to bravery lies in brave acts; likewise the path to justice lies in just acts.   If there is a path back from the brink of lofty rhetoric that so-often in our time (and in times past) masks paper-thin commitments, it is through a thoughtful and resolute engagement with civic space. This invitation must be directed less at the professional class of do-gooders such as me, but at all who seek it, all who can contribute to making our civic life more civil, all who can still be tempted to join this party that might turn out to be key to keeping our very civilization civil.  

What the great thinkers and logic dissemblers around the Agora apparently could not recognize clearly enough is that the circle of civic concern essential to grow and sustain their vibrant culture was simply too small, certainly too male, and likely too addicted to the “rush” of rhetorical flourish.  We do indeed have the responsibility to teach as some of the ancients made crystal clear; teaching not only the things that will lead to “secure employment,” but the things that will lead to attentive and thoughtful lives, lives of purpose and intentionality, lives that can puncture the veil of civic space and demand a place for themselves.

And perhaps most of all, lives that resonate with those of their teachers who, in every sense of the word, seek to practice what they preach.

 

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