On Virtue
“We are ready to despair too soon, we are ready to say, ‘What’s the good of doing anything?’ Hope is the virtue we should cultivate most in this present day and age.” Agatha Christie
Before Twitter was renamed, and I still participated in that particular circus, one thing the epigrammatic nature of the medium seemed to encourage was the proscriptive—“if you believe x, you are x,” or “you must do x, or you are x.” A reductive framework to be sure, and well I certainly don’t wish to be proscriptive, perhaps allow me be mildly exhortative?
Do insincerity, cruelty and unchecked ego really need to be in such common currency as they are these days? Must we feel compelled to offer the world at large our opinions on things we have no actual real or deep knowledge of? Must we feel so consistently called to perform our lives for a disembodied audience, and simultaneously comprise a similarly credulous audience for the social media-produced simulacrum that is all we actually know of the lives of others outside our actual circle? Did the isolation and extreme temporary societal reorganization of the still recent quarantine actually serve to make us even more badly behaved towards each other?
The very concept of “virtue” has, of course, been weaponized by the worst people in our society. Attempting to practice empathy, take the perspectives of others into consideration or otherwise act like a civilized adult, gets labeled as a mere performance—so called “virtue signaling,” and the very notion of this actually non-existent category of behavior seems to rile up the reactionary in our country, because it models some other way of being than extreme narcissistic selfishness— which certain currently rather loud factions in our society apparently consider their birthright, along with the presumptive freedom to do whatever they want, while simultaneously hating the very notion of freedom for those who have the temerity to exist beyond the bounds of their cultishly occluded worldviews.
So perhaps now would not be the worst time to aspire towards “virtue,” as a means of motivating ourselves towards doing hard things in service of the greater good.
First, let’s consider “modesty.” And not “modesty” in dress—enforcement of that dictate has never been anything but a lever of patriarchal social control, but rather let’s consider the benefit of embracing modesty about one’s self, and one’s perceived status in this life.
We were having lunch at the public golf course a few years ago, and a wise woman who we don’t know named Diane, seated a couple of tables away, was told about some rather minor achievement someone had attained and responded by saying “Well, someone’s got to do it.” We all put on our pants one leg at a time, and would always do well to remember we all come out helpless and screaming, and may not even remember who or where we are by the time we approach the end of this road.
There was a great line in the TV adaption of “Little Fires Everywhere” when Kerry Washington’s character Mia tells Reese Witherspoon’s character Elena: “You didn’t make good choices. You had good choices.” If you are lucky enough to have had “good choices,” gratitude is more befitting than smugness.
Related to modesty is humility. As the character Mia points out, there are not separate categories of people in this world, but different levels of opportunity. Working in restaurants and hotels, I am lucky enough to have worked with all sorts of people, and some of the most extraordinary folks I’ve met along the way might not have finished high school. Mastery of certain categories of knowledge does not equal wisdom. My Aunt wrote a book called “You Are My Brother: Lessons Learned Embracing a Homeless Community” (available on Amazon) and the meat of what she writes about in a wonderful series of essays is encapsulated in the title: we are all siblings, all more similar than not, and that recognition should be a call to acts of active solidarity.
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Then there is gratitude and generosity. About a solid year into Covid lockdown, our friend C. sent a box of St. Patrick’s Day swag to us completely out of the blue. Mail traffic had increased substantially during that time, as the days pooled into each other, but receiving a dress up box with a plush can of spam included was quite out of the ordinary for us, and an absolutely exceptional surprise.
We took that as a prompt to do the same for others we care about from time to time, compromising nothing too fancy or expensive, but just a little box of recognition, with a few books, some chocolate, or even some fuzzy dice for a friend’s new car, and that has become a very salutary practice.
Gift giving on holidays becomes fraught with expectations, but gift giving out of the blue is the Wild West—there are no expectations and thus an enviable freedom. You get to move outside yourself, and think about what someone else might enjoy as a surprise, and then you collect those things for a certain period of time until the box is sent, and thus spend some time considering the subjectivity and interests of a loved one, moving beyond merely satiating your own needs in the present moment.
The fragility of any “present moment” came strongly into focus for us in the aftermath of 2020, and gestures of love and fellowship became a way to reframe our anxiety into a constructive practice of gratitude.
The notion of fellowship has religious connotations that are outside my experience, but the idea that we are all siblings in this experience of embodiment is something we all need to acknowledge, and given the kind of psychological isolation we collectively experienced in lockdown, any opportunity to acknowledge our common state, as social beings who need each other not just on a material level, but on an emotional level, is a gift in itself. The folks we still had the opportunity to interact with in person during lockdown, who work at various stores in the neighborhood we still visited masked up to get essentials (and some non-essentials), became a lifeline during that time, and returning to society, I had a much stronger understanding of how vital our day to day interactions with other people are. We have strong relationships with family and friends all over the country, but our everyday interactions are the fabric of our social life, and I’m grateful for every warm interaction I enjoy with everyone from the folks at my chiropractor’s office, to my folks at work, and of course, cherished friends here in Chicago as well.
“Constancy,” which seems a virtue belonging more to the ethos of a Bronte novel, is not particularly supported by a consumerist society saturated with artificial notions of choice and surfeit, and there are those who do not deserve our constancy at all, but I have been lucky enough to experience a constancy of concern, engagement and care over the long term with my partner and a number of close friends and members of both my and S’s family. In the crucible of troubles that partially comprised 2023, that circle of constancy was not just comforting but absolutely necessary. In “Marcel The Shell With Shoes On,” Marcel explains to his interviewer that it takes twenty shells to constitute a community. I am grateful for every “shell” that constitutes mine.
Then there is forbearance. Forbearance as a practice is particularly inimical to the the panacean promises of the sirens of advertising. Every advertisement that we wearily process for everything from Advil to a Buick, promises to ward off suffering (Buddhism would like a word), simplify a human experience that is not simple, or even more insidiously, insulate a person in luxury from the exigencies of human life (the list of what the gate to the gated community cannot keep out is longer than what it can.) The paradoxical allure of advertising is its promise to deliver the undeliverable.
Whether it is profound disappointment in a loved one, early onset dementia, or the untimely death of a child or parent, the brutal aspects of our embodiment will always have their word as well, and if forbearance and staunchness are surely absolutely necessary in this life, it’s wise to begin the practice of this virtue in some rather emotionally less-freighted arenas—with a number in the deli line, in the DMV, in our day to day interactions, before road testing them in the more difficult and inevitable circumstances sure to come round sooner or later.
Traditionally, forbearance has demanded a modest silence, which I think modern life would have us break—it is unsettling to discuss money and health woes, including mental health issues, and marginalized communities have often had to perform their pain to have it even remotely acknowledged, but operating outside that oppressive framework I think the more we are open, not just about the little victories in life, but about the ways in which being alive can break us to pieces, the more we can achieve solidarity within our communities as individuals.
Patience and Courage may develop like a muscle, but they are founded on a series of choices. I’ve always thought about the “Es muß sein,” (it must be) that Beethoven answered himself with after asking “Muß es sein?” (Must it be?) while writing Opus 135. Milan Kundera makes this tension a centerpiece of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” and one of the two lead characters, Tomas, muses on this duality throughout the novel. While this sort of “categorical imperative” has its limits based on the randomness of “fate,” as the character understands it, it has an arresting pull that causes him to return to it, again and again, as he tries to make sense of his own life.
There are difficult situations in this existence, which we simply “must be” available for, and whether we think we have the resources and fortitude to meet the moment or not, it still must be met.
This is where courage comes in. As said by Franklin Roosevelt, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” That something else is often “duty,” and while perhaps that notion can feel fusty, if we have received care and consideration from another person over time, we are bound to them, and need to make ourselves available to them in times of trouble, not because it’s enjoyable on the face of things, but because it’s necessary (Es muß sein).
The most important, and naturally the most difficult virtue in practice, is of course compassion. My life has been full of matriarchs, and the practices of modesty, humility, constancy and patience were taught to me at their knees. While it is not the bedrock of my own sense of ethics, the activist Christianity of many of these matriarchs in particular has always offered me many lessons in quiet and diligent virtue, particularly around compassion.
And compassion is easy until it is not. I was brought up by both my parents to think of other human beings as siblings in solidarity, but extending grace in our heart to the kind and struggling is faint preparation for extending it to the unpleasant and ethically wretched. The best food for thought on this matter I found was in this banquet of an interview with French monk Matthieu Ricard,
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/13/magazine/matthieu-ricard-interview.html?smid=url-share
when he quoted the Dalai Lama:
“I remember I came out of this one-year retreat to take care of my father.
At the same time I was interpreting for the Dalai Lama in Brussels. So I told him: “I’m going back to the retreat. What is your advice?” He said, “In the beginning, meditate on compassion; in the middle, meditate on compassion; in the end, meditate on compassion.”
While the natural world and the world of imagination lend themselves to our wonder, and we as human animals tend to invite a scrutiny that requires a stronger stomach—we are not just called to love the easily lovable, and if Madison Avenue can successfully try to sell us the impossible, we can strive towards the near impossible of what Einstein exhorted us to do in a letter sent in the fifties to a grieving Father who had just lost his son to polio:
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
We cannot shirk from the hard things. There is no life so gilded as to be free from troubles, and the imperfect practice of virtue, however difficult it can be at times, acknowledges the big truths about life: it is difficult, we are all going to die sooner or later, and we plainly need each other as we proceed on this path to our certain, yet uncertain end.
However we can push ourselves to be kinder in our assessments of ourselves and others, humbler in our daily lives, and more grateful for what we have, even when that might not be much in any given moment, we are imperfectly reaching towards a better order of things—more gentleness, more consideration, and more sincerity and actively repudiating the black holes of cruelty, jealousy, and hate.
The point isn’t that this is easy. The point is, “Es muß sein.” If we wish for a better world, it has to start with our own thoughts and actions. Especially when no one else is looking.