Republican Virtue
If it is true, as the Founders believed, that republican government rests on individual self-government, we have a lot to worry about
Our founders took it for granted that the survival of democracy ultimately depended on the virtuousness of its citizens. That is the meaning behind the (probably apocryphal) crack of Franklin’s from which I draw the title of this newsletter: “A republic, ma’am, if you can keep it.” The Framers, that is, could design the best model of a republic, but only a wise citizenry could ensure its persistence. George Washington’s Farewell Address may be read in its entirety as an incitement to virtue as against “the fury of party spirit,” “the mischiefs of foreign intrigue” and “the impostures of pretended patriotism.”
That language feels impossibly remote at a time when our self-professed party of moral probity has been reduced to a personality cult in thrall to an avaricious, mendacious serial philanderer. Even the most deeply pious voters--especially the most deeply pious voters–dismiss Donald Trump’s personal evil as a minor distraction, for he has channeled their passions, their hatred and frustration, with consummate mastery. Surely the Founders would regard us as a corrupt nation in dire need of moral regeneration.
In The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired The Lives of The Founders and Defined America, Jeffrey Rosen, formerly a wonderful legal journalist and now the director of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, reminds us how deeply the Founders drew from classical moral philosophy–above all, from Aristotle, Plato and Xenophon, Cicero, Seneca and Epictetus. It’s a charming and erudite guided tour through the libraries and the writings of Franklin, Jefferson, Adams and the rest. But as I read it, I thought: what about today? In what way, if at all, are we to promote prudence, temperance, justice and courage–Cicero’s four classical virtues? Is the very idea of the cultivation of virtue anathema to a liberal society?
Rosen continually notes how very different was the moral world of the Enlightenment from our own. When we encounter Jefferson’s phrase “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, we assume that he meant that in a free society people can do as they wish and be whatever they want to be. But liberty, for these eighteenth-century men, did not mean license, but rather the freedom from passion and appetite that allows each of us to live according to the dictates of reason, and thus to fully flourish. Temperance and prudence–the subject of so many of Franklin’s famous mottoes–do not obstruct happiness but rather enable it. Individual self-government, in turn, makes collective self-government possible. “Only by governing their selfish emotions as individuals,” Rosen writes, very much in the spirit of the Farewell Address, “could citizens avoid degenerating into selfish factions that threatened the common good.”
Of course we no longer accept eighteenth-century psychology. Wordsworth and Goethe everlastingly forged the connection between passion and creativity. Freud dethroned “reason,” which we see today not as our moral core but rather as our “superego,” or as internalized convention, obstructing our path to the ultimate goal of self-realization. We understand that resonant expression, “the pursuit of happiness,” the way we do because the freedom to be and do really does lie at the heart of liberal secular culture. Human nature today is not what it was then.
What’s more, liberals do not believe that you change society by changing individual selves but rather the other way around, by changing the material incentives for good behavior. Provide good jobs in impoverished areas, and crime will go down and marriage rates will go up. The idea that personal behavior matters, and is not simply a dependent variable of material circumstances, has virtually dropped out of the policy debate in recent years.
That is why we hear virtue language chiefly from conservative critics of secular liberalism. In Why Liberalism Failed, the political theorist Patrick Deneen argued that both the free-market liberalism of the right and the statist liberalism of the left produce an immense moral void at the heart of modern society; Deneen would fill that void with explicit instruction in virtue, as well as with conscious efforts to revitalize the traditional family and small-scale communities. I have heard that language from the cultural conservatives at what are known as “classical schools,” public charter schools that seek to reproduce the kind of education in virtue that Aristotle writes of in The Nicomachean Ethics, and that virtually every one of the Founders explicitly endorsed. At one such school in Texas, Kevin Gillett, a teacher of logic, told me that from the time of Rousseau’s Emile, educators have been “trained to free the student from the supposed bonds of society,” whether moral or economic. “Once all of that is gone, you’re free to choose who you are.” His view, he said, was, “Well, no, you don’t get to choose who you are in certain ways. There’s capital T truth, there’s capital G good.” Gillett said that he would never tell his students what was true or good. “It’s not that I want them to do what I want them to do,” he said. “I want them to flourish.”
Jeff Rosen is a liberal; I don’t know whether he believes in capital letters. But he does believe that we are suffering from a crisis of character. He quotes Christopher Lasch as arguing in his 1978 Culture of Narcissism that our relentless individualism had reduced “the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.” And 1978 looks like the Age of Pericles compared to our own Trump-fueled, social media-enabled cockpit. A culture entirely unhinged from notions of self-government no doubt unleashes the animal spirits that allow brilliant college students to invent wonderful gizmos and become instant tech billionaires, but also washes away all restraints against self-gratification. (You need look for evidence no further than a stomach-turning exposé in the Times about parents turning their nine-year-old girl into Internet nymphets in order to become successful influencers.)
It is not only among right-wing evangelicals that the language of virtue has lost its force; all of us are implicated. Are we prepared to say, with the nonchalance of the Trump acolyte, that it doesn’t matter? Rosen offers an answer through the voice of Louis Brandeis (about whom he also wrote a terrific book). Since democracy “substitutes self-restraint for external restraint,” Brandeis observed, “it is possible only where the process of perfecting the individual is pursued.” We cannot, that is, expect people to become angels, but we can arrange society in such a way that they can at least seek to become more prudent, temperate and just.
How? The obvious answer is: church. But recommending piety is not in my line, and in any case the fraction of Americans who attend the mainline churches that have long laid down the line on personal virtue is steadily diminishing. We cannot reproduce the world of 1950; nor should we want to. The next answer is, of course, school, our designated answer for everything. Some states now incorporate “character education” as a unit of Civics class. But this is as feeble as imagining that a class on “Business Ethics” will make business school students more ethical. The one classical school where I have spent a great deal of time, Founders Classical Academy of Lewisville, Texas, treats personal virtue as both the heart of its culture and the essence of its curriculum. Perhaps that’s incompatible with the secular progressivism of public school culture. If so, I wonder if we lose thereby more than we gain.
I don’t know exactly which levers we would pull if we truly believed that self-government is essential to collective government. Perhaps Jeff Rosen doesn’t either. But it bears thinking about.