The Seven Deadly Virtues
Page 1
Templeton Press
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© 2014 by Templeton Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Templeton Press.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The seven deadly virtues : eighteen conservative writers on why the virtuous life is funny as hell.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-59947-460-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) –
ISBN 978-1-59947-461-8 (ebook) 1. Conduct of life--Humor.
2. Virtues--Humor. I. Last, Jonathan V., 1974-
PN6231.C6142S48 2014
818’. 602080353--dc23
2014031580
Printed in the United States of America
14 15 16 17 18 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Cody, Cordelia, and Emma, who make me laugh
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: On Virtues, Past and Present
By Jonathan V. Last
PART I: THE CARDINAL VIRTUES
Chapter 1: The Seven Deadly Virtues
And the New York Times
By P. J. O’Rourke
Chapter 2: Prudence
Long Live the Queen
By Andrew Ferguson
Chapter 3: Justice
The One Virtue Nobody Really Wants
By Rob Long
Chapter 4: Courage
The Rise of “Shelter in Place” America
By Michael Graham
Chapter 5: Temperance
The Deadliest Virtue
By Andrew Stiles
Chapter 6: Hope
Chicago Is a Place Called Hope
By David Burge (aka Iowahawk)
Chapter 7: Charity
You Can’t Give This Stuff Away
By Mollie Hemingway
Chapter 8: Faith
The Eleventh Commandment
By Larry Miller
PART II: THE EVERYDAY VIRTUES
Chapter 9: Chastity
The Final Taboo
By Matt Labash
Chapter 10: Simplicity
Or, the Many-Splendored Virtues of Hoarding
By James Lileks
Chapter 11: Thrift
The Un-American Virtue
By Joe Queenan
Chapter 12: Honesty
It’s Absolutely the Best Policy (Sometimes)
By Rita Koganzon
Chapter 13: Fellowship
Reach Out and Touch Someone
By Christine Rosen
Chapter 14: Forbearance
Opting Out of the Politicized Life
By Sonny Bunch
Chapter 15: Integrity
Living by the Code of the Superman
By Jonah Goldberg
Chapter 16: Curiosity
Maybe the Cat Got What It Had Coming
By Christopher Caldwell
Chapter 17: Perseverance
All the Way to the End
By Christopher Buckley
Author Bios
Acknowledgments
WHEN I WAS fourteen years old, I read Christopher Buckley’s first novel, The White House Mess, while on vacation at the beach. Some boys watched Neil Armstrong and decided they wanted to become astronauts and go to the moon. I read Buckley and decided that I wanted to move to Washington and become a writer. It never occurred to me that I might become friends with him. It really, really never occurred to me that we might one day appear in a book together. Without being maudlin, it is difficult to convey how much it means to me to have Christopher as part of The Seven Deadly Virtues. I am deeply grateful.
Not that I’m playing favorites—there are no favorites in our little company. One of the many joys of editing this book was the opportunity to bring together so many of my favorite writers under one banner. Look through the table of contents and what you see is my own private all-star team, the writers whom I look for and admire most. Some of them, like P. J. O’Rourke, Larry Miller, Jonah Goldberg, Mollie Hemingway, and Christine Rosen, I’ve been friends with for years. Others, such as James Lileks, Rob Long, Joe Queenan, Iowahawk (not his real name), Rita Koganzon, and Michael Graham, I’ve admired only from afar. Three members of the crew—Andrew Ferguson, Matt Labash, and Christopher Caldwell—have been my colleagues at the Weekly Standard for seventeen years, since I was just a kid. They more or less taught me how to write. And then there’s Sonny Bunch and Andrew Stiles, whom I’ve watched grow up and develop into stud writers, too.
I’m thankful to all of them for coming on this joyride.
Mind you, the caper never would have happened if Susan Arellano at Templeton Press hadn’t given me the keys to the car and winked, as if to tell me that she probably wouldn’t ground us if we brought it back after curfew, even if it had a few scratches on the bumper. And there wouldn’t even be a car without the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation and Sir John Templeton. Many, many thanks to them for their forbearance.
Speaking of which, my wife, Shannon, is both my one true love and my editor of first and last resort—an amazing stroke of fortune (for me). I couldn’t have done this book—or anything else in life, really—without her.
And the final expression of my gratitude goes to our children, Cody, Cordelia, and Emma, who inspire virtue and vice in roughly equal measure. This book is dedicated to them because, in either mode, they make me laugh. Most of the time.
I love the three of you, all the way to the moon. And back.
—JVL
Introduction
On Virtues, Past and Present
Jonathan V. Last
A TRUE STORY: The day after I was born, my pediatrician came to the hospital in scenic Camden, New Jersey, to check on me. I was the first kid, and my mother and father were, like most new parents, a hot mess. Into the room strode Dr. Ludwig Schlitt, a German immigrant in his early forties. He was straight out of central casting: trim, ramrod-straight posture; short, clipped hair; and a long face—handsome, in a Teutonic way—that could have been chiseled from the Alps. He bore an uncanny resemblance to the young Christopher Plummer.
Dr. Schlitt poked and prodded and did what doctors do to newborns. When he was satisfied that everything was perfectly üblich, he turned to my parents and issued the following verdict/command: “Babies ah a joy. You vill enjoy zis baby.” And with that he turned and strode out of the room, heels clicking on the linoleum as he marched down the hospital hallway.
This is a funny book. You will have fun reading this book. Just not yet.
The Seven Deadly Virtues is filled with funny writers. If you want to flip ahead to P. J. O’Rourke or Matt Labash, by all means, go ahead. One of the joys of book reading is that no one makes you eat your spinach first. You can have the ice cream, the pecan pie, the funnel cake, and the chocolate decadence, one after another, and then circle back to the spinach whenever you like. Or even skip it altogether.
But we’re going to start with some spinach here, just the same. Because it’s good for you. And after all, that’s what “virtue” is about.
The Original Book of Virtues
In November 1993 an unlikely book appeared at the top of the best-seller lists. Bill Bennett’s Book of Virtues was a tome; 832 pages of moral instruction. People ate it up. Newsweek called it “just what this country needs,” and Time said it “ought to be distributed, like an owner’s manual, to new parents leaving the hosp
ital.” Looking at a copy of The Book of Virtues today is like examining a relic from some forgotten age. You pick it up, turn it over in your hand a couple times, and think, People were so different back then. How did they live like that?
The answer comes in a few different parts. First, it really was a different age. Think for a moment about two years—1971 and 1993. In 1971 America was still celebrating having landed a man on the moon. The Watergate break-in wouldn’t happen for another year. Vietnam was on a low boil. The Department of Education didn’t exist.
By 1993 the Department of Education was an entrenched part of the federal government, and it was the almighty Soviet Union that no longer existed. The Cold War was in the rearview mirror, and with it the space program had begun to wane; an entire generation had never seen a live moon walk, and no American would ever again leave low earth orbit. Instead of looking to the skies, we were looking into screens: The World Wide Web had migrated into common use with the creation of the web browser. The two Americas of 1971 and 1993 were quite different. And here’s the kicker: We’re as far away from 1993 today as they were from 1971 back then.
Yet some human longings seem innate. The success of The Book of Virtues suggested that there was a latent demand for virtue back then, which, at first glance, looks strange from where we sit now. Who would dare suggest today that parents be given a thick book of moral instruction for raising their children? But if you stare hard enough, the picture changes. If anything, we might be more puritanical and values-driven today than we were back then. We just adhere to different values. And boy, howdy, do we cling to them. People still believe in deep moral truths, you see. They simply apply those beliefs in the service of very different virtues.
By the time you read this, the world will have long forgotten Donald Sterling, but the historical record will show that for two straight weeks in April 2014 he was the most important story, and the most reviled man, in America. Sterling was the eighty-year-old owner of a professional basketball team, the Los Angeles Clippers. He had been married to the same woman, a lady named Rochelle, since 1955, but, beginning in 2003, he began carrying on with a series of younger women. And by “carrying on” I mean buying them real estate and cars and bringing them to sit with him, courtside, to watch basketball games featuring the team he co-owned with his wife.
In 2014 the most recent of those girlfriends secretly taped a conversation with Mr. Sterling in which he said some not-very-nice things about African Americans. He used no foul language or racial slurs, but was demeaning and nasty nonetheless. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being your garden-variety bigot and 10 being a KKK Grand Wizard, Sterling was probably a 4. But the tape of that conversation became public, and the great machine that is American society lurched into action, its gears screeching and grinding. Television and radio hosts condemned Sterling; the public convened protests. Corporations that did business with Sterling’s team cut ties. The president of the United States—the president of the United States—interrupted an overseas trip to castigate Sterling at a press conference. And then the NBA announced that it intended to forcibly terminate Sterling’s ownership.
None of this is meant as a defense of Sterling. He seems by all accounts an unpleasant fellow who, more or less, got what he had coming. No, the point is to highlight America’s shifting emphasis on different virtues. Sterling’s infidelity and the public humiliation of his wife—the woman to whom he had been married for almost sixty years, who had borne him three children—was literally unremarkable. It was mentioned nowhere as a defect of Sterling’s character. His private, whispered racist thoughts, however, were important enough to invoke the displeasure of the leader of the free world. They were enough to cause his associates to expel him from their business and deprive him of his property.
In short, think of the litany of shame and approbation heaped on Hester Prynne and then multiply it by a thousand. Except that it wasn’t adultery that did Sterling in; it was racism. The scarlet “A” doesn’t exist anymore, but the scarlet “R” is very real indeed.
Now, this may well be a positive development. Racism is terrible, and perhaps private racist thoughts are a graver sin than infidelity and the kind of romantic cruelty that causes the breakup of a family. (Rochelle Sterling filed for divorce with improbable quickness.) I’m not a professional philosopher, and this is a safe space. A tree of trust and understanding. A nest of nonjudgmentalism.
But it’s clear that the problem isn’t that we no longer live in an age concerned with virtue. The problem is that we have organized ourselves around the wrong virtues.
The Modern Virtues
Did I say “wrong”? Sorry. That’s so judgmental. We’re supposed to be in the nest. So let’s call them, instead, the “modern” virtues. There are, by my count, seven cardinal modern virtues:
Freedom
Convenience
Progress
Equality
Authenticity
Health
Nonjudgmentalism
If you’re going to be one of those uptight philosophical types, some of these virtues are more like values, but I’d argue that this is largely a distinction without much of a difference. These are the characteristics modern society most prizes and has begun to organize its strictures around. Often with nonsensical results.
For example, the writer Mary Eberstadt notes that we live at a bizarre moment when it is nearly impossible to speak with any moral judgment about sexual practices—but a great deal of moral and philosophical energy is spent on the subject of food. You wouldn’t dare say that someone ought not put this part there with that person. And you wouldn’t say it because (a) your peers would think you a troglodyte and (b) you don’t really think it’s wrong. It’s just a lifestyle choice. Maybe it’s not for you, but who are you to judge? Food, on the other hand, is different. It’s morally elevated to eat organic grains and eggs that come from cage-free hens. You’re a better person if you only eat locally grown produce. A better person, still, if you don’t eat meat. And the best people eat with one eye always—always!—on “sustainability.” Whatever that is. On the subject of food, some lifestyle choices are better than others. And we’re not afraid to say so.
Actually, there is one—and pretty much only one—judgment that you can make about sex, and it is this: Imagine that you’re in college and one Saturday morning your roommate comes home and proclaims that she just slept with some guy she’d never met and whom she never intended to see again. Could you suggest to her that this might be a suboptimal life choice? Why no, no you could not.
However, imagine that your roommate came home and confessed that she slept with some guy she’d never met and that they had not used “protection.” Well, that’s a different story. You could lecture her. You could shame her. You could gather your friends and stage an intervention, explaining that this is a terrible, awful thing to do. Downright irresponsible. Something that just isn’t done, because you could get a disease. Sexual morality is now a function of health outcomes.
And not just sexual morality. Consider smoking. Over the last thirty years, an overwhelming moral consensus has emerged concerning smoking. Where people once smoked on airplanes and in movie theaters and in bars and at home during dinner, today smokers are treated as if they have a terrible and highly contagious disease. They can’t smoke in public buildings or often even in public spaces. Smokers are the new lepers, except that no one would look down on a leper as being morally repugnant. Why the reversal? Because it is now universally agreed that smoking is disastrously unhealthy. And healthy living is a cardinal virtue, something to be pursued at all costs, not merely because it is prudent, but because it is good and right.
Yet, at the same time that smoking tobacco has become verboten, smoking marijuana has been gaining wider acceptance. How could this be? It’s not like getting stoned is good for you. No, the emerging moral acceptance of marijuana comes when health is trumped by another of the modern virtues—freedom. Because today we tend to be
lieve that people ought to be able to live however they like, and that societal norms should have little claim on them.
You can see the tensions inherent here. Why should freedom be a virtue when it comes to reefer but not to Lucky Strikes? For that matter, why should health trump freedom in one context but not another? But these tensions aren’t unique to the modern virtues. Certainly, the classical virtues are often in tension, too. It can be devilishly hard discerning, for instance, when prudence should override perseverance. Or vice versa.
So, the real problem with the modern virtues isn’t that they’re contradictory—the classical virtues can be just as confused. And it isn’t that they’re somehow “wrong” as virtues. Equality, authenticity, a devotion to physical health, and even nonjudgmentalism can be fine things, taken in right measure. No, the modern virtues fail because, for the most part, they concern the outer self, the human façade, the part of ourselves that the world sees most readily—while the classical virtues form an organizing framework for our inner selves … for our souls, if you believe in that sort of thing. And it turns out that when you scale people out to the societal level, the superficial moral framework of the modern virtues turns out to be an insufficient organizing principle. When it comes to virtue, the old ways are still the best ways.
The Perils of Virtue
If you’re looking for a good explanation of the old ways, you could do worse than Alasdair MacIntyre’s summation of Aristotle. Here’s MacIntyre explaining what virtue really is:
The virtues are precisely those qualities the possession of which will enable an individual to achieve eudaimonia and the lack of which will frustrate his movement toward that telos…. For what constitutes the good for man is a complete human life lived at its best, and the exercise of the virtues is a necessary and central part of such a life, not a mere preparatory exercise to secure such a life…. Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways.
There’s a lot to unpack in those ninety-four words, even if you remembered what eudaimonia is. (Don’t worry, I didn’t either.) But overall, it’s a fine working definition of virtue: Virtues are the internal qualities that allow us to be our best selves and enable us to lead complete and fulfilling lives. When you think about virtue in that sense, you really understand why the modern virtues are so inadequate. Being your authentic self and living a physically healthy life are clearly second-order goods. To be your best self and live the most fulfilling life, it’s far more important to exhibit, say, charity and courage.