The Future of Virtue

To write in Playboy about the future of virtue! What is the governing assumption? That the old virtues, having lost their virginity, are no longer useful? Well, let's walk daintily around the subject of what one of the old virtues called for. I am a guest here and Hugh Hefner opined on that subject in the May 1998 issue of Playboy: "President Clinton has become a sort of sexual Rorschach. I have been in a similar position for more than 40 years." The founder and principal exegete of the Playboy Philosophy declared his willingness to concelebrate the emancipation: "The sexually charged atmosphere of the White House has lit a thousand points of lust--around watercoolers, on the Internet, in bedrooms, on telephones--and a thousand points of tolerance." Does the future envision a revival of virtue between the sheets, the working, perhaps, of some moral Viagra? We won't speculate on that.

But to be fair, no restrictions were even suggested by the editor, who wonders whether there are cultural circumstances in sight that adumbrate the revival of fresh virtues or the repristination of old virtues. He reminded me that President Clinton was detected violating traditional standards that had nothing to do with what one used to call the sins of the flesh. He lied. He showed a lack of self-control, of loyalty and of concern for others. But then the salient deposit of the Lewinsky years (let's call them that) wasn't really Clinton's behavior, it was the toleration of it. True, the polls didn't tell us in so many words that the president's deportment was endorsed by the public. What the American people agreed to do was simply to turn their heads to one side, and to reaffirm Clinton's tenure in office.

So what of the future?

Most virtues are utilitarian (honoring thy father (concluded on page 256)Future of Virtue(continued from page 99) and mother reduces their reliance on public health care); some serve moral ends (incest is an ethical taboo). To steal a horse, back when your horse was critical to your livelihood, could get you hanged. They also hanged sailors disrespectful of the (necessarily) omnipotent captain of a ship. The varying severity of sanctions imposed reflected the cultural perspectives and moral temperature of the tablet-keepers of the day. Moses ordained capital punishment for a dozen offenses; the current Pope counsels an end to capital punishment for any offense.

Immanuel Kant taught that we could deduce most of the commonly accepted virtues from the operative needs of social life. If you permit the theft of other people's property, your own property is forfeit. If you don't enforce a contract, commercial activity becomes problematic. If you scorn minority rights, the majority has reason to fear for its own status, suddenly transient. An acknowledgment of the rights of John is a virtue. We do not covet his goods or his wife and we love him as ourselves.

Now, rights are protected by government, actively (the robber goes to jail) or passively (Congress shall pass no law abridging free speech). But entrusting to government the protection of rights is a dodgy business inasmuch as government is a primary aggressor. H.L. Mencken called government "the enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man." There is a lot of 100-proof Mencken in that reductionism--but also a heavy dose of historical prudence. The government is, year after year, century after century, the primary predator on human freedom. So isn't the containment of government a virtue? The Bill of Rights was an explicit containment of government. Wasn't it then a "virtuous" accomplishment?

Q: You've said that the defense of others' rights is a virtue. Are you now saying that freedom is a virtue?

A: No, because freedom can activate the good as well as the bad. And freedom is subject to limitations, because it can be abused. But what is an abuse of your freedom, this side of the John-Jane kindergarten level of abuse (don't kill or steal)? Isn't it sometimes an act of goodness--a practice of virtue--to exert social and political duress? It is likely the next generation(s) will tell us, however meanderingly, that the progressively intimate interactions of the modern age will require proportional limitations on individual choice. A hundred years ago you didn't need traffic lights.

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Ayn Rand wrote a book in the tradition of the utopian tract. In Anthem, people find themselves in isolation and devise, after a long period of experimentation, what is best for all and for one. They discover capitalism and freedom--the worship of which consumed much of Rand's life not devoted to self-worship. Her idea was interesting. She said that if people are left absolutely alone--cut off from patrimony or tradition--she knows which are the virtues that will crystallize. Aiding the orphan and visiting the infirm? No, no, such biblical virtues are in the discredited tradition of the Good Samaritan. Ms. Rand disdained "altruism." Altruism gets in the way of egoistic satisfactions (the pursuit of which is the primary end of life).

Altruism is what happens when one individual increases the welfare of another at the expense of his own.

Randism ("objectivism") bumps into a problem here because a gene complex can evidently pass through a population without requiring the survival of any one individual. As one analyst put it, "If you die to save ten close relatives, one carrier of the 'kin altruism' genetic message is lost, but a large number--those of your relatives--are saved."

This is nice, transpositivist news; but still we wonder. Would the genetically uninstructed society--gestated, born and raised without any tradition of virtuous behavior--intuit the point in going out of one's way to teach the neighbor's neglected child how to read or how to play baseball?

So, you have to ask real questions about real life. Unless we have a proper doomsday nuclear event, we won't be going through an Anthem-like social rebirth. We're going to depend on traditions. My guess is that the mightiest engine in promoting virtue will continue to be religion, the opposite of objectivism, inasmuch as it teaches not self-concern but self-sacrifice, and not indifference to others but a strenuous love of others. It teaches piety.

Never mind that we'll probably swim right over Y2K, maybe not even noticing more than a ripple or two. But the cyberworld looms, and life is closing in on us. That's OK. You don't need open spaces to practice virtue--you can practice virtue in a slave camp alongside an Ivan Denisovich.

But the more congested life is, the more traffic lights one has to expect. And the society is healthier that yields to traffic lights out of concern less for the law than for a genial concern for others.

These, then, are the antipodes ahead: the straitened confinement of man in modern society, hemmed in by the fruits (the computer) and the curses (the nuclear bomb) of technology--and the vindication of man through the emancipating pursuit of virtue. My generation was taught that the tightness of space in Japan induced the extraordinary courtesies associated with Asian culture. Tomorrow America will still be a land of vast uncrowded areas, but wherever we hide, the cybercloud will hover over us. We'll hear, then, the call for transcendent thought. The pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of virtue will fuse in the great meltdown of the next millennium.

So what of lying by the chief of state? Of suborning the confidence of the people? The culture that let that happen needs to be revitalized. It simply doesn't work if everybody lies and nobody cares. The old virtues are sitting around, and the challenge is to reaffirm their tenure, even as we did Clinton's in a thoughtless moment. And to remind ourselves of the high credentials of the virtues Clinton scorned.