America’s founding fathers talked a lot about virtue. Freedom requires it; there can be no liberty without virtue, they said.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” insisted John Adams. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
“No government can continue good but under the people’s control,” Thomas Jefferson explained, declaring that the citizens’ must “be informed by education what is right and wrong; to be encouraged in virtuous habits and deterred from vice.”
These were not isolated sentiments. But what did they mean?
It’s time to renew discussion, as rioting expands from Paris to Milan to . . . all over Europe. Here is one notion of a virtuous people: folks who, when they protest injustice or folly do not themselves foolishly commit injustice. Virtuous people do not run riot, wreak havoc, commit mayhem . . . just because they have grievances.
If they have complaints about farming regulation, or school funding, they do not burn down shops.
Or the Louvre.
Whatever “social justice” is, it too requires a virtuous population.
The fact that there is increased political violence suggests that some folks are not virtuous.
There’s this notion that in France, at least, violent protests are just a part of French culture. A culture warped by the disastrous French Revolution centuries ago? My bet is that, if we inquired deeper, we’d discover that this is not exactly so. That certain groups push violent protest every now and then for reasons of political goals that are not about either social justice or liberty.
We in America, who have been blessed with the freest society on the planet, are not quite as prone as Europeans to the vice of violent protest. But we are not immune, and we must start taking virtue — responsible self-government — seriously. Again.
Make America Responsible Again.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “What Is It?”
Virtue is recognition of the Good as such, and ability to foster it. Civic virtue is ability to foster some optimal social order, and recognition of that social order. Political virtue is that part of civic virtue concern with the use of violence.
Certainly, amongst a population that cannot recognize the Good or lacks ability to foster it, the Good will not obtain; and for any imagined extent to which a social order might be good, some corresponding share of the population must have some corresponding degree of virtue.
Right now, large shares of present populations lack the virtue of recognizing the Good.
Part of the problem is that string “social justice”. It does not correspond to something that requires virtue. It corresponds to what Locke called a “floating idea”, and Rand called a “floating concept”; Hayek rightly called it a “mirage”. This attempt at conception is incoherent and hence not instantiable. It is a distraction — indeed it is often invoked to distract — from actual justice.
As to the riots in France, a friend asked me if their timing were deliberately associated with the US midterm elections, and I rejected the idea, on the ground that the effects on the US midterms are plainly a cost for the left; the European left would not want to cast the American left in a bad light. But I’ve been pushed to have second thoughts about those grounds being sufficient for my previous conclusion.
Most of the polls presented to the public are exaggerating Democratic prospects. Possibly the Republicans will retain control of one or of both Chambers of Congress, though the Democratic rank-and-file have been told that capture is assured. In that case, those at the commanding heights of culture who previously insisted that US elections were perfectly secure will then insist that they were stolen, even as the European left will be rioting in the name of “social justice”. And the American activists and opportunists who participated in the “mostly peaceful” riots of 2016 and of 2020 will be encouraged by the international rioting to riot again in America.
A culture whose citizens are not willing to do violence to defend it, will eventually be subsumed by cultures whose members are perfectly willing to do violence to to take it over, and who will sleep well afterwards.
One must question the ‘culture’ of the rioters. The don’t look French, do they?