Yes, we should cultivate virtue, but on the other hand . . .

. . . we must run like hell away from the notion that human beings are perfectible

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Two posts ago, I did one of those periodic explorations of the essence of conservatism. I knew better than to try to lay out something comprehensive:

just what makes the NST solid enough that, despite its narrowness, I feel confident planting my feet on it?

I’ve made stabs at it for years. In the early years of my old-school blog, Late in the Day,I set great store by my personal formulation of the three-pillar fusionism of Frank S. Meyer that was politically mainstreamed by Ronald Reagan. (In the above FNL piece, Connelly succinctly and effectively characterizes fusionism’s components as national security hawkishness, free market economics, and traditional virtue.) I kept trying to refine it, asking myself if I was properly taking into account everything about fusionist conservatism, such as the emphasis of Richard M. Weaver and Russell Kirk on hierarchy and tradition.

I don’t intend to trot out some latest version of my bullet-point summation of what conservatism is here. But as I think about the matter, the word virtue keeps coming to mind.

I then look at how virtue might be defined, what the types pf virtue are, and how they might be classified. As I say in the piece, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is indispensable for such a project.

In March 2023, I brought the apostle Paul into the quest to understand virtue:

why does it seem that fewer people than ever are interested in what St. Paul exhorts us to do in his letter to the church at Philippi, which, sharp cat that he was, knew applied to us as well as those addressees?

You know, this:

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

I’m spitballing here, but I think fear may be a factor. Let me unpack.

Any and each of us, especially in this present moment of accelerated information flow, form our notions of what is right and true from incomplete inputs. We come to our conclusions on the run and hand off the work of making sure we’re being thorough to others who are as busy - and as fallen - as ourselves. When they are proven to come up short as champions of what we hold - or know we ought to hold - dear, we stick with them anyway, because the threats to what is dear seem so great that we conclude that this is no time to abandon those champions.

We’re afraid to explore options other than digging in our heels.

But you can’t embrace the pure and lovely with dug-in heels.

And then we lose sight of even the ability to recognize the pure, lovely, right, etc.

Were we to recognize it, would we be willing to make the tradeoff necessary to embrace it?

⁴⁴ “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.

⁴⁵ “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. ⁴⁶ When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.

That’s a level of vulnerability that most of us are inclined to take a pass on.

But why is that? Why does the silly armor of our pride have greater appeal than unsullied goodness?

That question immediately above merits a closer look. But maybe we’re seeing a case of first things first. Before answering the “why” we ought to make the basic observation that we do it all the time.

We’d better accept that as our premise as we investigate the question of collective happiness.

I don’t set much store by comparative arguments about whether our society was flourishing or not at a given moment. There are ample arguments for both basic positions - that we’ve never had it so good, with the level of comfort, convenience and safety we enjoy, or, on the other hand, that our bedrock institutions have never been so eroded, nor our society so atomized.

I tend toward the latter assessment, but the Civil War, the Depression, and 1968 do loom large.

But consider this summer of 2024 from a political standpoint. Both parties are scrambling to put duct tape on their myriad problems. The Democrats have been in everybody’s-on-to-our-attempt-to-prop-Biden-up-we’d-better-elevate-Harris mode. That’s a move that comes with its own attendant problems: Harris’s dismal performance in the primaries of the last election cycle, her reputation for running a chaotic office, with lots of turnover and low morale, the dud rollout of her price controls policy, and the tawdry circumstances of how her political career was launched. The Republicans are, as they have been for eight years, in Trump-just-needs-to-stick-to-a-policy-message- mode, hoping against hope that there is more to the man-child from Mar-a-Lago than what he has consistently shown the world all his sleazy life.

But history shows us that no culture anywhere has ever been free of palace intrigue, disingenuous defenses of obviously bad policies, dysfunction in the most influential families, reckless handling of resources, and outright advocating of oppression.

This brings us to the towering wisdom of James Madison, who was driven to find a workable way for the factions, based on interests, already present in a nation that would inevitably grow and produce more factions, to coexist peaceably.

The Madisonian vision took a big hit as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. The original progressive thinkers - Richard T. Ely, Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson - saw a vasty expanded role for government as necessary to address the complexity of an urbanizing and industrializing America.

Madison would respond that that is asking way too much of government, that all government can provide, without encroaching on human freedom, is a set of impartial rules for people and organizations to be protected in the agreements they reach with each other.

The twentieth century gave us ample opportunity to see how collectivist visions for a problem-proof society fail time and again. What the progressives have imposed on our country, along with more draconian experiments in places like the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, have not delivered on this promise.

Thinking about this stuff has been what has convinced me of Christianity’s basic premise: we are fallen creatures - always have been, always gonna be.

Which is why the faith is so essential to any way out of our predicament that might be devised. Governmental and civic institutions can only guarantee an imperfect stability in which we as citizen maneuver. It’s up to each of us as individuals to understand our need for grace and to recognize where that grace comes from and accept it.

Even that imperfect stability depends on a society interested in virtue, and, if I may be so presumptive, a society that understands that the greatest virtue is in acknowledging our imperfection and allowing ourselves to be perfected by the blood that answers our deepest questions.