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From the General Secretary: Virtues and Vices: The Lists
By Mary Burgan
One of the perverse talents I had in childhood was an ability to memorize the multifarious lists of virtues and vices from my catechism. The fact that every realm of human action had its grade gave me some sense of order in a world where messy behavior was ornamented with sentimental regret or melodramatic resolution to do better. Even now, my consciousness is a pot in which words like faith, hope, fortitude, justice, temperance, prudence, long suffering, and fear-of-the-Lord simmer along with temperamental attributes like charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, and kindness.
My tradition was wise to season such virtues with an equal selection of vices. I go over these to give teeth to my anger in times of stress. I’m writing the day before the national elections, in which claims to too much virtue have made me feel "sick and wicked," emotions Jane Austen feared as reactions to one of her most virtuous heroines. The cardinal sins are good, everyday vices—pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth. But I reserve the grittier gradations of other, more specialized lists for politicians. The Sins That Cry to Heaven for Vengeance play well in my internal negative campaigning. Robbing the laborer of his wages, and robbing the widow and orphan truly identify political wickedness. As a child, I didn’t have the power to commit the "vengeance" sins, and so I felt free to be outraged by them. There were parallel corporal works of mercy, however, and I liked to imagine myself doing them all—visiting the sick, comforting the prisoner, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and burying the dead.
I’ve looked for vices and virtues on the Web, and I’ve found that the responses thrown up by search engines can yield wonderful combinations of the uplifting and the nasty. You can buy a Seven Deadly Sins T-shirt for $12.95. Or you can download a presentation by an entrepreneurial lecturer on the Cardinal Virtues of Business. The "Seven Deadly Sins of Web Pages" are outlined (one is "under construction"). There is a wonderful bibliography on Aristotle’s ethics from a professor at the University of San Diego, and an annotated list of National Public Radio interviews on a variety of modern virtues—all with an air-brushed softness of definition. They include respect, civility, parental responsibility, forgiveness, and modesty. And there is always the brooding image of Brad Pitt advertising Seven, a particularly gruesome thriller about a serial killer.
Perhaps the most astonishing entry I found was on the PBS Web site: an animated series based on Bill Bennett’s Book of Virtues. His list includes a Scout’s Honor flourish of manly strivings—perseverance, friendship, loyalty, faith, responsibility, work, self-_discipline, compassion, honesty, and courage. As a way of presenting these to children, the creator of the series worked with Bennett to devise a pantheon of talking animals. These are Plato, a buffalo (derived from Bennett’s nickname, Buffalo Bill); Sock (Socrates), a bobcat; Ari (Aristotle), a prairie dog; and Aurora, a somewhat feminine red-tailed hawk (no Greek genealogy despite the obvious possibility of Sappho). There are model quotations from each of the characters: Plato, for example, states, "The higher the climb, the tougher the trail." (It turns out that Bennett chose the series producer on account of his having been a hike master in the Rockies.)
Bill Bennett’s notion of education has always been that it should teach the virtues. Professors should be Platonic Buffalo Bills, herding students onward and upward. It would be far too self-serving for more liberal professors to imagine their own practice differently; whether it’s teaching the virtues from a bully pulpit or adjusting attitudes through small-group discussions, our profession is prone to the didactic mode.
Seeing the intermixture of virtues and vices on the Web, however, I am inclined to conclude that vice tends to outsell virtue. We read The Inferno, not The Paradiso; Paradise Lost, not Regained. Blake said that Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it. Simplistic didacticism always forgets that the energies of behaving badly are more attractive than the passivity of being good. That’s why Bennett ought to include another figure in his didactic pantheon to represent those virtuous vices that we all depend on to moderate our zeal—mockery, skepticism, argumentativeness, and neurosis. I suggest a rattlesnake named "Stoph" to remind us of Aristophanes, that other great moralist from Athens.
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