So Marc Guerra (America’s leading theologian) and I are finalists for a big SCIENCE OF VIRTUE grant at the University of Chicago. Although I doubt we’ll win, we deserve to win. That’s because we alone are defending the one true “stuck with virtue” science of virtue. It’s the “stuck with virtue” approach that distinguishes postmodern conservatism from porcherism, neoconservatism, neoorthodoxy, anti-progressivist founderism, tea-party techno-libertarianism, evangelical worldviewism, paleoconservative traditionalism, and so forth. Here are our proposed opening comments (which can be changed, so please comment):
We don’t think we live “after virtue,” as Alasdair MacIntyre claims. We haven’t lost our ability to experience or to articulate our perception that the best way to feel good is to be good. People are still stuck with and ennobled by living morally demanding lives. Life is in some ways easier but in others harder than ever before. We live neither in some techo-utopia nor in some techno-wasteland. Virtue is alive in the tacky McMansions we find in sprawling exurbs. Even the sophisticated Europeans who talk sometimes as if they are living some postfamilial, postreligious, and postpolitical dream still can talk about what they know about the line between good and evil found in every human being’s heart.
In a time of unprecedented abundance and freedom that’s largely the product of the modern, technological approach to the world, we do find it harder than ever to know who we are. And so we find it harder than ever to know what to do. But we’re still stuck with answering those questions to live well—or nobly and happily—with what we’ve been given. There’s little that’s more hellish than my being stuck with the perception of “pure possibility,” the perception that every door is open to me with no guidance at all concerning which one to choose. That’s the lesson, for example, of the novels of our physician-philosopher WALKER PERCY, not to mention the philosophic film GROUNDHOG DAY. The pure democracy imagined by Socrates or communism as imagined by Marx or the realm of techno-freedom imagined by our libertarians (all of which amount to the same thing) are all descriptions of the hell we have mistaken for heaven when we misunderstand who we are.
The hopeful perception of pure possibility, of course, is the characteristic delusion of our exceedingly high-tech time. We really aren’t Nietzsche’s last men or living at Marx’s end of history. We don’t live unobsessively picking activities almost at random from a huge menu of choice. We still have display “bourgeois virtue”—the industrious, productive virtues—to flourish. We’re still moved, whatever Allan Bloom says, by love and death. And we’re anxious and disoriented because we’re more unclear than ever about how to live with the knowledge and longings that we can’t help but have. Both morally and economically, we in some ways experience ourselves as more on our own than ever. We too often, in the name of autonomy, reject as authoritative the guidance nature—our social natures– gives us, and we’re dogmatically skeptical about the possibility that our longings point us in the direction of God. But much of what we think we can reject or discard remains real or real enough.
So it’s obvious to us that the biotechnological promise to free us from the constraints of virtue for the happiness that accompanies pure freedom will never be kept. We’ll never achieve immortality—or some absolute transcendence of the limitations of embodiment. The best we might achieve is a kind of indefinite longevity, which would make death seem more accidental and so our beings more contingent and our moods more anxious than ever. And even if our moods become chemical silly putty in our hands, we still wouldn’t have what it takes to choose the moods that make us most happy with being who we really are.
We, in our pride, don’t want the zoned-out contentment we imagine cows have. We want to remain alienated enough to appreciate Johnny Cash, without going through the hell of being Johnny Cash. We want to be artistic and sensitive as we can be while being, unlike John, cheerful and productive members of our high-tech society. And anyway, if our moods got too good, we would stop obsessing enough to fend off the real threats to our very being—like terrorists, asteroids, and such. The search for the perfect mood inevitably leads us to realize that the good stuff (like love and pride) depends on the hard or bad stuff (like worthwhile work and death), and once we achieved that sort of wisdom, it seems to us, we wouldn’t want our moods chemically altered after all.
We have an inalienable right to our moods, in part, because they aren’t random collections of chemicals but natural clues to the truth about who each of us is. We also have a right to our moods because what we’ve been given by nature, if used well or virtuously, is good enough. Nature, Darwin was right to say, intends all the species to be happy by living according to nature. But Solzhenitsyn added, of course, that we weren’t born only to be happy, because we were also born to die.
So we’re stuck with virtue as human beings. There are natural reasons for that. We’re hardwired for virtue, so to speak, because we’re hardwired for a kind of language and or speech that opens us to the truth about ourselves and our world that no other animal can acquire. And we really can’t change our hardwiring in a way that will make us both human and happy—and we want both—without virtue.
So we need, above all, a science of virtue that incorporates what we know through natural science, philosophy, theology, and the humanities generally. We need to get over the modern error that the best way to get ourselves happy is to free ourselves from our natures. And we need to get over the error that by nature we’re pretty much one species or one mechanism among many.
January 26th, 2010 | 12:03 pm
A cogent statement.
I, however, have great fear that we are reaching ever so quickly towards the abyss of Nietzsche and I am not sanguine that we can face it any better than he.
We should be “stuck with virtue” but that is not the trend of the modern project, must less that concomitant absurdity of postmodern desconstructionism, Foucaldian power relations or Sartrean “nausea.”
I hope you receive your grant, for a defense of that which is now becoming seemingly indefensible would be a corrective, even if small, step.
January 26th, 2010 | 12:52 pm
[...] Peter Augustine Lawler writing at First Things, Postmodern Conservative: “So it’s obvious to us that the biotechnological promise to free us from the constraints [...]
January 26th, 2010 | 4:52 pm
There is no angst like Domesticated Bovine Angst. Terror is never too far from them big brown bovinical eyes. That said, I must be suffering heat stroke in this 48 degree January Thaw because I find myself in almost complete agreement with everything you say above, even pausing reflexively over the last sentence. I’m a sucker for the feisty…. “Stuck with Virtue” a nice arch way of putting it for this era of sore winners. As one who came late to the wisdom of your paragraph on the “perfect mood”, I hope you get your grant…even if I might reserve the right to cluck from the infuriated porch
January 26th, 2010 | 10:17 pm
“We don’t think we live ‘after virtue,’ as Alasdair MacIntyre claims.”
What an interesting assessment of AFTER VIRTUE, inasmuch as MacIntyre is pretty clear about the centrality of virtue to human flourishing. But considering only the title, one might still consider it as a double entendre. See, on the one-hand we live in a post [after] virtue ethics culture; on the other we should be seeking [after] virtue.
My editorial suggestion? Re-write the first sentence. You’re ideas are not silly at all, but your first sentence makes you look silly to anyone who has actually read MacIntyre….
January 26th, 2010 | 10:29 pm
Dr. Stein reminds us that “Virtues” are angels.
The essence of our kind, of our specie, is that we are all, each and everyone of us, to become that which by our nature we are destined to become played out in an unfolding drama of humanity that is inclusive of the individual and the whole.
Voegelin tells us that Aristotle identified the interest groups in which the polity is required to maintain a balance: the rich, the poor, and the virtuous. But the modern condition expands the list to include those who possess the truth: prophets, apocalyptic seers, Gnostics, theologians, and ideologues.
The “Spoudaios aner” is Aristotle’s term for the mature and rational and ethical person; a person both intelligent and responsible. The virtuous Greek?
Virtue: righteousness, goodness.
Are we “hardwired” for goodness (virtue)? What of the libido dominandi, and, Original Sin?
And what about conscious? We are “hardwired” with a conscious that tells us “that’s bad” and “that’s good” and dispenses some moral regret if we’re lucky but are we “hardwired” to be virtuous, to do good? I don’t thinks so. I think we do good as the result of a choice, as actuality.
“So we’re stuck with virtue as human beings.” Yes, no one is totally evil.
“We need to get over the modern error that the best way to get ourselves happy is to free ourselves from our natures. And we need to get over the error that by nature we’re pretty much one species or one mechanism among many. “
Yes, but isn’t this “modern error” a redux of the enlightenment idea of the glorification of the self and the rejection of God, where man is nothing, devoid of reality, carried along in the process of the world?
January 27th, 2010 | 7:08 am
“We don’t think we live ‘after virtue,’ as Alasdair MacIntyre claims.”
What an interesting assessment of AFTER VIRTUE, inasmuch as MacIntyre is pretty clear about the centrality of virtue to human flourishing. But considering only the title, one might still consider it a double entendre. See, on the one-hand we live in a post [after] virtue ethics culture; on the other we should be seeking, promoting, and encouraging [i.e., after] virtue.
My editorial suggestion? Re-write the first sentence. You’re ideas are not silly at all, but your first sentence makes you look silly to anyone who has actually read MacIntyre….
January 27th, 2010 | 7:14 am
“We don’t think we live ‘after virtue,’ as Alasdair MacIntyre claims.”
What an interesting assessment of AFTER VIRTUE, inasmuch as MacIntyre is pretty clear about the centrality of virtue to human flourishing. But considering only the title, one might still consider it a double entendre. See, on the one-hand we live in a post [after] virtue ethics culture; on the other we should be seeking, promoting, and encouraging [i.e., after] virtue.
My editorial suggestion? Re-write the first sentence. Your ideas are not silly at all, but your first sentence makes you look silly to anyone who has actually read MacIntyre….
[apologies for the multiple drafts and bad grammar; I'm stopping now, and going for my coffee....]
January 27th, 2010 | 8:17 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by jamespoulos and antiteze, aleah james. aleah james said: The One True Science of Virtue » Postmodern Conservative | A First …: The search for the perfect mood inevitably… http://bit.ly/d5vKx7 [...]
January 27th, 2010 | 4:48 pm
The only thing I would suggest is that in the last sentence of the first paragraph, there’s an extra ‘postfamilial.’
January 27th, 2010 | 5:28 pm
[...] a comment » From Postmodern Conservative, this really good piece on Virtue. Excerpted here, but read the whole thing. In a time of unprecedented abundance and freedom [...]
January 28th, 2010 | 10:33 am
Philip, Peter has read McIntyre–you’re missing the point. His criticism is that AI”s account of the inhospitability of our modern circumstances to virtue is exaggerated because he doesn’t quite understand those circumstances properly or human virtue. But I’m sure he appreciates the reassurance that his ideas aren’t silly
January 28th, 2010 | 10:51 am
You know I love all of this except, I guess, it’s raison d’etre:
“So we need, above all, a science of virtue that incorporates what we know through natural science, philosophy, theology, and the humanities generally.”
For Christians, what we need above all is to follow Christ. There’s plenty of disagreement about what Christ wants from us, but there can be no disagreement that truly following Christ is first.
In the end this science of virtue is either completely about following Christ, or it’s about something else all together, which is to say it’s about not following Christ.
Now if I were to pass this around at one of my scotch and cigar gatherings it would get a lot of approval. And then I’d say what I just said above and everyone would give me that look wondering where the hell I come up with this stuff. “Lawler wasn’t even talking about that!”
Or maybe that’s exactly what he’s talking about, but in order to talk about these things we have to dance around and avoid the absolutes. But then where are we?
P.S. D.W. Sabin should write more comments.
January 28th, 2010 | 2:17 pm
Good job. You say a lot in this essay clearly more than Douglas comprehended. Obviously if it were as easy as “following Christ” then we wouldn’t need to be stuck with virtue. Clearly there is more going on here than a mere dichotomy between following Christ or being “Nietzsche’s last men or living at Marx’s end of history.” this essay is clearly a work of genious that needs a conclusion that highlights what the future of individuals in a nihilistic world look like being stuck with virtue… Are they christs followers through and through or is there a moderate point which I deduce from this essay a mean in which man being aware of his meaninglessness chooses virtue? that’s the real persuasive point I think of this essay.
January 28th, 2010 | 6:32 pm
Peter, What a wonderful approach to grant writing! I mean this seriously, in that the grant writing I’ve been involved with (at a university) always involved placing independence of thought in terms of the code presented by the granters. We would worry about inevitable “deviations” later–to be explained after the fact as the result of good research. Instead, you present your position clearly, and with a good deal of frank humor (if that makes any sense)
If only you could give a precis of the various forms of virtue concern in the transformed world of biotechnological transformation that you mention. I know what you mean, and I suppose I could do the leg work myself by reading ISI’s Dictionary of Conservatism or reading some social science primmer on “ideologies”, but insofar as your position is distinctive from these others I would like to see an account.
Regardless, your position (and Mr. Guerra’s) looks good to me.
January 29th, 2010 | 2:34 am
Ivan:
I would have assumed most folks here—especially Peter Lawler—have read MacIntyre, who certainly doesn’t need me to defend his work. And, sincerely, I wish Peter well with his grant proposal, the aesthetic of which is worthy of the audacity of Peter’s (mostly) sane point of view. My point, take it or leave it, is simply that the first sentence, if serious, is both indefensible on its merits and unflatteringly aggressive; and if a joke, not a very good one. It grabs the reader’s attention in much the same way as would the suggestion that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn didn’t really know anything about Soviet prison camps; or Philip Rieff anything about Sigmund Freud; or G.K. Chesterton anything about making analogies.
January 29th, 2010 | 10:19 am
Ben:
Can you clarify this comment?
“Are they christs followers through and through or is there a moderate point which I deduce from this essay a mean in which man being aware of his meaninglessness chooses virtue? ”
If a man is not a follower of Christ but chooses virtue despite this and despite an awareness of “meaninglessness” isn’t that nothing more than an act of aesthetic creation comparable to the Nietzschean concept of the “Ubermensch?” In turn isn’t the “Ubermensch” really a Human transcending his humanity to achieve a form of divinity for himself in the abscence of an ethereal transcendence?
January 29th, 2010 | 12:38 pm
I’m not sure what the requirements of the grant are, and I know this is just an opening statement, but this series of powerful insights seems more about what makes for a fulfilling life or about the permanent features of the human nature or the structure of the soul than they are directly about what virtue is (qualities of heart and mind required for living well?). Of course, spelling out the necessary character of a good life, or trying to specifying the ultimate end of human activity, could very well be the first step toward understanding virtue (as the relation between Books I and II of Aristotle’s Ethics might show). But is there some unnecessary vagueness about virtue here? It’s not clear, for example, if “the good stuff” (pride and love) is what virtue is or if virtue is “the bad stuff” (work and death), or both, or neither. Perhaps part of the idea is that a general defense of any and all virtue (“bourgeois virtue,” pride, knowing the difference between good and evil) is in advance over the dream of dispensing with virtue altogether.
And the reflections don’t seem to promise a science along the lines of the definition of science in Ethics VI. But perhaps they are appropriately “rough,” “in outline,” with the precision appropriate to the subject matter. More in the esprit de finesse than that of geometrie. On the whole, the remarks seem less an introduction to a “science of virtue” and more “thoughts on happiness.”
January 29th, 2010 | 3:40 pm
I agree with Philip about the first sentence. I picked up the book because I thought I understood he was going talk about our current society’s lack of virtue. When done with the book it was apparent that we must seek after virtue or be stuck with life after virtue.
January 30th, 2010 | 8:09 pm
That’s sounds like an interesting proposition. I feel what is implied by the propersion is that while it is good it is also rare or at least uncommon. However, an interesting argument that I have begun to find suitable is that to exist as lawler asserts “stuck with virtue” it best be done out of our own self-interest. I find that place to be a necessitynon order to live well what — if we don’t already know — will know… That is both a freighteninh but empowering concept that so far I endorse. As to whether Nietzsche would agree me… I think he would see technology and the direction were heading in — with or without virtue — is the real ubermench. Just saying we virtuous individuals are nothing compared to the awesome power of mans collective technological effort.
February 2nd, 2010 | 12:45 am
“The pure democracy imagined by Socrates or communism as imagined by Marx or the realm of techno-freedom imagined by our libertarians (all of which amount to the same thing) are all descriptions of the hell we have mistaken for heaven when we misunderstand who we are.”
Plato, writing about and through his fictional recreation, Socrates, did not defend democracy. No, that, for him, was, one of the worst forms. So to perjure and mix Plato’s Socrates in with Marx serves the democratic, even multicultural nihilist, inverts, the totalitarians who think they are better if not best in their tolerance [non-virtue], better known as backsliding, evasion, and spiritual, if not philosophical emasculation.
Best regime for Plato: read The Laws, The Statesmen, The Republic. It would the rule of the best for the benefit of all concerned. That best was then known as Aristos; aristocracy is the transliteration of Plato’s choice of the best regime. Its form might be democratic-republican but he thought he might involve some form of qualification and testing, and that even a Monarchy or Kingship might become the rule of the best. That is, if the candidates are chosen and carefully educated, and then tested for Virtue and virtuous application of philosophy. Adoptive succession of the best for the good of all. As for proclaiming the one true science and sounding off, even as I have here, well, that is, only a poor start, even a base imitation of what is necessary to create the conditions for the best of men to be and to rise to rule.
February 11th, 2010 | 10:35 am
Agree with Philip, disagree with Ivan – change that first sentence! No matter Ivan thinks you meant, it SOUNDS like you haven’t read After Virtue, which would just be embarrassing.
February 13th, 2010 | 1:13 pm
The trend in these comments is that the reference to MacIntyre is confusing in its present form. I agree. The second paragraph more or less recapitulates Goethe’s Faust. Depending on your estimate of your audience, it might do to made that reference explicit.
It’s an excellent piece. Too bad grants are not given according to the merit of the ideas behind the proposals.
May 23rd, 2010 | 4:21 pm
[...] is a very interesting discussion going on at Postmodern Conservative concerning Porcher Localism, The One True Science of Virtue, The Founders, Progressives, and the Teaching of American Politics, Porcher Localism and the [...]
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