Baron Wormser: Prisoners of Virtue

   Virtue, concerned as it is with some notion of rectitude, wants to make itself known. A “cloistered” virtue, to use John Milton’s famous adjective, will not do. Aunt Polly and Sid (to cite a very different literary vein) in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are a good example of how virtue can assert itself in whatever homely context is available. Polly is a good Christian woman, which is to say well-meaning according to her notions of propriety, characterized by her “improving” lectures, that are, as Tom’s delinquent behavior attests, ineffectual. Her religion is a socialized masque, albeit a very simple, small-town one. Sid, on the other hand, has figured out how to make virtue work to his egotistical satisfaction. Tom nails Sid late in the book: “You can’t do any but mean things, and you can’t bear to see anyone praised for doing good ones.” “Mean” is a word that particularly resonates. Sid’s virtuousness is rooted in selfishness, pettiness, and manipulation. In another era, he could have had a career as the leader of a political party devoted to promoting meanness in the name of greatness. 

    Virtue, as practiced by the likes of Sid, is inevitably connected with blame. The inference of such virtue is that you are doing something wrong because you aren’t who I am and you deserve to be called out and to suffer in whatever ways you can be made to suffer. The motto is simple: I am more virtuous and am not going to let you forget it. A species of psychic armor, virtue creates a mildly sanctified security. Mark Twain was not amused by the human race but resorted instinctively to humor to leaven the unhappy proceedings. The world he witnessed was the world before the twentieth century’s enormous vindictive talent for mass murder (not that the twenty-first century is lagging behind). Various religious sects practiced this homicidal virtue for centuries but in modern times the nation-states, beneficiaries of bureaucracy and technology, have gone one better. Any humor that tried to meet this organized butchery has been understandably dark. It wasn’t that the world Twain depicted didn’t lack for evil, but rather that humor and the goodness that humor represented might, to some degree, redeem the world, since comedy admits and accepts our fallibility. Sid, of course, was humorless, again pointing to his potential to be a leader who relentlessly pushes a greatness that comes at no cost. Twain, who portrayed more than one flimflam artist, knew something about hollow, deceitful, boastful words. Like Tom and Huck, Twain detested humbug, particularly humbug that announced itself as virtue.    

   The United States has been the prisoner of virtue for a long time. The mantle of “last best hope” and “shining city on a hill” is a heavy one. When one considers the soul-grinding authoritarianism that has passed for government on the planet—and still does in many places—a certain sympathy for American hyperbole seems allowable. It has been hard, however, for Americans to keep their virtue in check, since it has shown time and again a desire to suborn, if not ruin, some retrograde individual, group or nation. Are you free? Are you a democracy? Are you saved? Are you monogamous? Are you pure in mind and deed? Are you possessed of a flourishing bank account that testifies to your industrious labors yet eager to take on debt? Are you pleased to clutch whatever straws we tell you to clutch? (Ask the Indians about our treaties.) Are you grateful to endorse our messianic impulses? Are you able to resist every temptation? Are you glad to believe that the best dispensation on Earth is free-market capitalism? Are you happy, happy, happy? Yes, yes, yes, virtue answers. One blessing of being virtuous is that neither frailty nor hypocrisy ever rears its ungainly head. (Christ, who spoke keen words about frailty and hypocrisy, was not virtuous.) Although the less-than-virtuous, the Toms and Hucks of this world, are constant threats—and thus the grounds for unremitting vigilance, if not outright alarmism—the posse of the virtuous remains snug and smug. Inwardly, they are rigid as dress parade soldiers standing at dutiful attention. Goodness is theirs. 

   Clanking along in the background like Frankenstein’s monster, frothing and moaning, is something called “reality.” All the little and not-so-little flaws go into this monster who is indifferent to every pose of rectitude while seeking to satisfy every wanton appetite. The helter-skelter world-at-large, the domain of money, sex, power, violence, mania, and desire was made for this monster. It’s not surprising then that virtue nods, however unconsciously, in the monster’s direction. Human beings can be hard to keep in a straight, sanctimonious line, hence the importance of a narrative, a party line, an unassailable identity. Understandably, the narrative often dwells on some terrible incursion: innocence subverted or rights and principles trampled upon—the work of the monster. And, indeed, each day’s murderous news testifies to how nightmares occur with frightening regularity. Behind virtue lurk paranoia and loathing. Too often, they do more than lurk. All it takes is a gun—of which there are many in the United States. Mark Twain had a remarkable imagination but the notion of someone entering a public space and randomly shooting people was beyond the pale. Today, there is no pale. 

   Faced by opposition, virtue may retreat into itself and sacrifice the group’s humanity. An unfortunate irony of virtue is how often it promotes intolerance, as if virtue could only be virtue by exclusion rather than inclusion, by keeping out rather than letting in. Those in the virtuous circle are automatically good because they are in the circle. Character, the work of trying to be an aware human being, does not matter. The climate of blame fostered by Donald Trump shows how potent blame can be, for blame corroborates virtue. The blamer pretends to be responsible but blame, since it proposes nothing helpful, is thoroughly irresponsible. In a climate of blame, anything—as shown by the events of January 6, 2021—can happen. Meanwhile, his political party, such as it is, can claim the mantles of virtue assailed and virtue justified. For some, this has been the best of all worlds.  

   It is a world that, among other things, leaves out empathy as a motive force. The civility that must underlie any democracy must nod however cursorily in the direction of empathy. Others are others but they are human beings. Humanity is something people share, not something given to one side and not the other. Yet politics, as we know it, prides itself on either taking humanity for granted or, worse, dismissing humanity as a meaningless category. The latter approach yields ethnic cleansing, mass disappearances, and outright genocide; the former indulges in endless verbal condemnations. Given the grave environmental situation the human race faces as the putative stewards of this planet, politics seems a very idle, narrow endeavor, almost ludicrous if the consequences weren’t so disastrous. To be sure, politics has never lacked for disastrous outcomes. Seeing beyond the abrupt horizon of nationalism has been, heretofore, an almost impossible political endeavor since it would signal weakness in the face of other nations’ interests. No one has considered the Earth’s interests in a political light because politics has no serious spiritual dimension. (I should point out that virtue as a quasi-moral bludgeon has nothing to do with spirit.) That lack does not matter in maintaining basic governmental services. However, as far as admitting what humankind now faces, it is pathetic—people preening for cameras while they argue about who is the most virtuous. And that is in democracies. In dictatorships only one person preens.  “Dismal” is a mild word for the situation. 

   We can do better than that. Perhaps but the other creatures in this world have the right to say, “Show me.” All the virtuous posturing remains just that—posturing while The Economy devoted to the accretion of wealth runs the planetary show. To move beyond virtue sounds like a Nietzschean task but what is called for is not a Superman but, rather, the will to live simply during our brief time here—for our well-being and for our children’s and grandchildren’s and for the sake of the Earth.  Such a will would need a very different dispensation than the politics of virtue. The grievances of the right and the left feel very real to their respective camps but they aren’t water or soil or air. Politics, as we know it, with its relentless focus on human wants, however ill-considered, to say nothing of the obsession with power, is inherently alienated from the sustaining story of the Earth. 

Copyright 2024 Baron Wormser

Baron Wormser’s many books include The History Hotel (CavenKerry, 2023). He currently resides in Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife.