Friday's Guest: "Virtue on the Cheap"

There can be no monopoly on morality and virtue, yet the left and right use these concepts every day to harness American people to their conflicting causes as they battle for control of the moral high ground.

In this week's "Friday's Guest" column, About.com guest writer Jack Kerwick takes a look at how the left and right sell virtue and morality and create the illusion of "progress" or "tradition" in order to accomplish their political goals. Just like talk, this kind of virtue comes cheap; it provides a grand platform for its proponents to tout, yet requires nothing of them beyond the proselytizing of their individual rhetoric. In this, each side has a commonality with the other. They urge Americans to nurture the morality of their country, yet neglect to instruct them on how to nurture the virtue in their homes.

From the article:

There is certainly no incompatibility between being a virtuous human being and supporting a grand cause of the sort championed by the Left and Right. The problem with identifying virtue almost exclusively in terms of one’s willingness to promote such causes is that it ignores and thus undermines the need for and cultivation of virtue in the mundane matters of human life. This is a huge problem, for most of life consists of routine engagements. Furthermore, most of us haven’t the resources, either in time, money, or energy, to invest in saving the world, for we are too busy trying to make ourselves into better parents, spouses, friends and neighbors.

Conservatives have always recognized that genuine virtue begins at home, that morality is essentially a local affair. The family, church, neighborhood, and local community -- those character-building institutions that stand between the naked individual and government--are the places where real virtue is able to flesh itself out.