The Seven Deadly Virtues

by Jonathan V. Last

  But The Confidence-Man is, in the end, a satire, even if it is a satire of a fallen world inhabited by the devil. The comic vacuity of the confidence-man’s “philanthropy” and his victims’ ridiculous pretensions to misanthropy show us the pettiness of both our desire to succeed through deceit and, just as importantly, our outrage at finding ourselves the victims of such tricks. Melville picks up the Hobbesian insight that nothing pricks our pride more, “nothing triggers a stronger impulse to hurt someone,” than to be made a fool.

  If occasionally misplaced trust is unavoidable in a porous, commercial society like ours, then we ought to be wary of both the Impostor Defenders and the Honesty Enforcers. Just as our first impulse when watching a confidence trick unfold is to envy the confidence man, our first impulse at being duped by him is to demand traps so pervasive and effective that no one can ever elude them. But the satisfaction of such impulses would require undermining the very openness and mobility that make our liberty possible, all for the sake of thwarting future George Psalmanazars and Adam Wheelers.

  The strongest argument against such folly is to realize how utterly absurd these charades are, how inveterately stupid we are to fall for them each time—and how frankly funny this fact is. Melville warns that indulging in illusory visions of moral progress weakens our defenses against fraud. Our evidently incurable susceptibility to even the most preposterous lies is his evidence that moral perfection is in fact illusory. Just as perfectly reasonable and even highly educated people mistook an obvious Frenchman for a Taiwanese refugee, so did equally reasonable and highly educated people believe that an obscure college junior had compiled the academic résumé of a senior Harvard professor.

  This is our comic lot, stuck as we are between perfect knowledge and perfect depravity. We must “suspect first and know next,” as one of Melville’s passengers confidently asserts, but we can’t suspect all the time, or know everything. Since we are for the most part too credulous and too sociable to either beat ’em or join ’em, our best hope is to expect them, and to moderate our outraged humiliation when they, predictably, appear. It’s safe to assume that our reason will reliably continue to fail us—our boss’s degree from the South Pacific University of Erehwon will prove to be fake, and our neighbor’s blood relationship to the crown prince of Denmark will turn out to be fractional descent from Danish peasants. It’s good to be wary. But it’s also good to consider that too much suspicion erodes honesty as effectively as too much trust. It is good, too, to remember that gullibility is the flip side of charity, and we are fortunate to have the luxury of credulousness.

  Fraudulent self-invention is an old road to success, but a narrower and more potholed one than many of those seeking to either direct traffic to it or close it off understand. Even those who avoid exposure along the way find that, at its end, there is no one with whom to share their success. Having duped everyone else, their reward is the esteem and exclusive company of fellow impostors. Those seeking a lonely life of endless evasion for a dinner date with those whose greatest achievement is claiming someone else’s achievement are unlikely to be diverted from their course by exhortations to virtue. But the high road is sunnier, wider, and better paved. And it draws the better travelers, among whom it’s easier to find someone who’ll lend you a buck after you’ve been bilked.

  CHAPTER 13

  Fellowship

  Reach Out and Touch Someone

  Christine Rosen

  IF YOU GREW UP among the Protestant faithful, as I did, your church probably had something called Fellowship Hall. A large meeting room separate from the main sanctuary, Fellowship Hall featured lots of worn vinyl chairs and a bad sound system and was used for everything from teen youth group meetings to senior aerobics. It carried the distinct smells of canned gravy and good feeling.

  But Fellowship Hall was also the physical embodiment of a misunderstood virtue. The Greek word for fellowship, koinonia, suggests camaraderie, commitment, and bonds with others. The word appears often in the Bible. In the Christian tradition, believers are encouraged to form fellowships with the likeminded faithful and to avoid fellowship with unbelievers. (And devils. Fraternization with them is looked down on, too.) Fellowship is valuable because it’s something to be carefully entered into, and then cultivated. We might choose our friends, but when you join a fellowship, you are signing on for something more than the mere pleasure of another’s company. You’re joining a group with obligations, responsibilities, and an implied duty to the other fellows.

  In this sense fellowship has always suggested a more serious commitment than friendship. It requires willingness to weather life’s challenges side by side with your comrades. Although the word itself is gender neutral, it has a distinctly masculine vibe—men create fellowships (Jesus and His apostles; the Bee Gees); women create covens. The word also conjures ragtag bands of people thrown together under less-than-ideal circumstances, say, the quest to throw a magic ring into a volcano while being pursued by marauding orcs. You know the sort of thing. Your fellows are the people who look out for you no matter the cost to their own safety and lives, and you do the same for them. Even when they’re hobbits.

  And yet fellowship has a desultory pedigree in America. Despite the frequency with which our presidents condescend to their “fellow Americans” in speeches, the word lacks any real civic power. Harding was the only president to mention fellowship in an inaugural address, and he did so with an obsequiousness more suited to a dating website than the leader of a great nation: “We sense the call of the human heart for fellowship, fraternity, and cooperation,” he said in 1921. “We crave friendship and harbor no hate.” Mencken likened this pap to “a string of wet sponges.”

  In a nation that has towns with names such as Hell (Michigan), Squabbletown (California), and Comfort (Tennessee), as far as I know there is only one place named Fellowship. It’s a small, unincorporated town in central Florida. In stark contrast to the Walt Disney World Industrial Complex nearby, the town of Fellowship appears to embody the ideal of a small community, with a commons situated near the town’s Hog Pond and lots of churches. (It’s also number 79 out of the Top 101 U.S. cities in terms of highest average humidity, which is notable primarily because it means that on this list, Fellowship charmingly outranks Hell.) Perhaps some of that small-town fellowship in Fellowship will spread to its close neighbor, Ocala, a city whose motto—“God Be with Us”—suggests a peculiar municipal anxiety. Then again, Ocala, which is known for its bucolic horse farms, also happens to be home to “The Funking Conservatory,” a full-service professional wrestling school—no, I don’t know what that means, either. But conservatory graduates include a fellow named “Chris the Bambi Killer,” so how bad could the place be?

  If you don’t find fellowship in the names of many towns, you see it invoked all the time in the names of “senior living centers.” (This euphemism for nursing homes is a gift from the aging baby boom generation, which insists on the pretense that old age is merely a vigorous new life stage rather than a parade of horribles leading to the undiscovered country.)

  There’s something unnerving about the forced cheerfulness of retirement communities. Take the Fellowship Senior Living Center in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. On the center’s website, amid Photoshopped images of spry octogenarians cavorting on well-manicured lawns, is the reminder: “You’ll Value Our Wonderful Way of Life.” The unspoken part of the message is obviously: Or else. Although clearly meant to imply friendly camaraderie during one’s golden years, the use of the word “fellowship” in this context feels strained, like watching Brad Pitt trying to do Ibsen.

  Why is our view of fellowship so ambivalent? Probably because it’s a virtue that can be put to good uses, or ill. Sure, Bands of Brothers vanquished the Nazis. But Richard Nixon’s paranoid “palace guard” were all equally devoted to their cause. For every cuddly Von Trapp family singing their way out of danger, there’s a Kardashian clan scheming to marry off their daughters for the benefit of reality
television. These are all fellowships, of a sort.

  It’s time to restore fellowship to its rightful place among the virtues. In fact, it’s essential, because we need something to replace “friendship,” a word that has been so adulterated by social media that it makes the Real Housewives look like Vestal Virgins. Grumpy old people (that is, anyone over the age of thirty not currently pursuing a retrosexual relationship with an old high-school flame they found on Facebook) will remember those halcyon days when the word “friend” did not have scare quotes around it. When you weren’t expected to like. Or pin. Or retweet. Or +1 everything that everyone you have ever known regurgitated onto the Internet.

  Of course, much of social media’s appeal lies in its low barrier to entry for friendship. As my grandmother used to say about politicians, I have heels higher than their standards. Facebook, for instance, allows you to manage friendship the way you manage your bank account: Withdraw when you feel like it, deposit new people into the fund, or reconcile accounts by blocking people you really don’t want to hear from. This can be useful when an acquaintance wants to regale you with the details of his latest juice cleanse. But it encourages a corrosive form of multitasking that allows us to indulge in the sanctimonious feeling of having cared and tended to our friends when what we’ve really been doing is scanning our Facebook page while binge-watching Game of Thrones. As for Twitter, it dispenses with the pretense of sentiment entirely. Like Jim Jones with his Kool-Aid, you simply have “followers” who, if they know what’s good for them, retweet everything you say.

  As a result, social media encourages a kind of socialist view of friendship, both by the leveling effect it has on all of our relationships and by a diabolically efficient method of redistributing attention in the form of likes and retweets. And it never stops. Open your Facebook page after a brief hiatus and you feel like a goose experiencing gavage. The metrics are brutally transparent. You didn’t retweet your friend’s pithy observations on craft beer or like your acquaintance’s latest pictures of her adorable toddler? By the debased standards of the Internet, this is what makes you a horrible friend.

  The technology-enabled form of compulsory fellowship has taken a toll on society. After years of wading through status updates and Instagrammed meals and aspirational Pinterest collages, friendship now seems like a kind of virtual corporate retreat where we’re forced to do one trust-building exercise after another. Add to that the false sense of familiarity we cultivate about the lives of others—particularly public figures—and you’ve critically weakened the foundations for true friendship. The entertainment industry inundates us with so many details about celebrities’ (and would-be celebrities’) lives that it’s now possible to know more about the grooming habits of your favorite starlet than your best friend’s dream of opening an artisanal pickle shop (coincidentally, both involve elaborate brining rituals).

  What we need is a new kind of fellowship, not the vapid kinship suggested by President Harding or the shared senescence of the senior rest home. We need a fellowship based on something so simple and retrograde that it’s practically heretical: physical interaction. Think of it as a fellowship linked to sociality, which is only achieved when we are in close proximity to others (like the disciples packed in for a Last Supper, not the contestants locked away on the ranch on The Biggest Loser). Think of it this way: sociality is to social media as meditation is to crack cocaine. Or as actual sex is to pornography.

  A fellowship grounded in sociality means enjoying the company of those with whom you actually share physical space rather than those with whom you regularly and enthusiastically exchange cat videos. Proximity defines many of the enduring friendships we find in myth, literature, and history: Achilles and Patroclus, the above-mentioned apostles, Jeeves and Wooster.

  And this kind of fellowship is a reassertion of an older form of group behavior—the fellowship of those who met regularly at the café or pub, or the fellowship of the knitting circle. Today we have followers, flash mobs, and supposedly wise crowds, all of which are said to be an improvement on the old days. But the “fellowship” we have with other people in the digital world is of an overly involved and emotionally volatile type. It’s the manic camaraderie of the pop-star fan-page message board, or the trending hashtag, or the flame war. And it’s an ultimately weak attachment precisely because it never manifests in the physical world.

  Of course social media isn’t entirely to blame for debasing friendship. Long before Facebook and Twitter, frenemies reveled in each other’s weaknesses and mistakes. (By the by, why hasn’t someone created an antisocial networking site called SchadenfreudeBook? I’m just saying.) As Bertrand Russell once observed, “Nobody ever gossips about other people’s secret virtues.” Even people who belong to a fellowship of shared interests and passions can’t always resist the basest human impulses. Consider writers. When an aspiring poet sent “Ode to Posterity” to Voltaire, the old Jacobin is said to have replied, “I do not think this poem will reach its destination.” William Faulkner once said that Henry James was “one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.” After listening to Oscar Wilde charm an otherwise adoring American audience, Ambrose Bierce peevishly declared him a “dunghill he-hen” prone to an “opulence of twaddle.”

  But if the weaknesses of fellowship are a permanent part of the human condition, technology has exacerbated the problem. And soon our technologies will know more about us than we would ever be willing to admit to someone else. Big Data knows your secret passion for the German power ballads of David Hasselhoff and the extent of your narcissistic self-Googling habit. How many of us would be honest enough to confess this to our friends? And how many of our friendships in turn rely on the little white lies we feed our friends? “We’d love for your toddler triplets to join us for the wine tasting!” “No, no—go ahead and text during lunch. I’m sure it’s important.” “Of course a woman your age can wear that dress!” I prefer the honesty of a friend who once sent me an e-card that read, “You’re the friend I’d feel the worst about killing in a postapocalyptic death match for food.”

  What to do? Let’s return to Fellowship Hall—or at least the ideal of Fellowship Hall. (What the world needs now is not another staging of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.)

  Fellowship requires the real presence of others, not an audience of untold millions. Technology has offered opportunities for connection we have never had before—though we somehow survived in the days before we were able to talk to random (often naked) strangers on Chat Roulette. It has probably also helped us avoid dealing directly with acquaintances whose views we don’t share. It’s easier to ignore annoying tweets and status updates than it is to sit across a table listening to the inanity of someone we know. But it is the challenge of in-person fellowship that is also its strength, and real fellowship is not the same thing as membership in the compulsory mutual admiration society often fostered by social media.

  Sometimes we need to show up for the people who need us. And we need to know when to stop performing our friendships online. (Unlike the Hoff, who once told an interviewer, “The problem with me is that nothing embarrasses me.”) Fellowship, like old-fashioned friendship, involves risk, and not just the risk of having an embarrassing photo uploaded to a friend’s Facebook page. It is the risk of revealing ourselves to another human being and having that person reject us, or laugh at us, or simply ignore our efforts to connect. But without risk there is no reward—the possibility of finding a kindred spirit, an intellectual sparring partner, or an ally during that postapocalyptic death match for food.

  We increasingly live amid the ether of the cloud and the pixelations of the screen, forgetting that our greatest tools for communicating with each other as human beings are not our sleek smartphones and laptop computers, but our less-than-perfect faces, gestures, and voices, even when we are at our most annoying. (What do you mean you don’t want to learn more about my farm-to-table, zero-carbon, raw-food vegan lifestyle?) It is only when we are fa
ce-to-face and physically present with one another that we can experience the kind of genuine fellowship that has been the hallmark of civilization. In a world of digitally debased “friendship,” that is a virtue worth prizing and practicing rather than merely retweeting.

  CHAPTER 14

  Forbearance

  Opting Out of the Politicized Life

  Sonny Bunch

  NOT SO LONG AGO, in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, a woman by the name of Madeline Janis spent 751 words of precious editorial-page real estate bemoaning the fact that she didn’t like her dying father’s politics. Miss Janis, a progressive lioness, wrote that her dad routinely refused to engage her in arguments. Instead, he preferred enjoying her company and talking about less contentious topics. Yet while moving him into an assisted-living facility, she came across his dark secret. The villain owned a collection of Rush Limbaugh hats. Janis told her father he should throw them out.

  “Rush Limbaugh is nasty and mean-spirited,” she hectored. “Can’t you at least stop wearing these caps?” When he said no—after all, why should his daughter care which ball cap he wore?—the two went to their separate corners. Some time later, Janis’s father came to her and said that his love for her eclipsed even his partiality for Limbaugh. Since the hats were causing her so much distress, he tossed them. The truly odd part of the story is that to Janis, her badgering of an old man represented, somehow, a lesson in tolerance.