Virtue on the Cheap

Ironically, and in the midst of one warning after another that American society is “slouching” ever closer toward “Gomorrah,” so to speak, there are undoubtedly as many “prophets of virtue” today as there have ever been. “Moralism” abounds in politics, the media, and academia, and neither the Left nor the Right can claim to have a monopoly on it.

The Left incessantly implores us to combat “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” and “classism.” This last involves “rolling back tax cuts for the rich,” and bringing pharmaceutical, energy, banking and other industries under greater and greater government regulation. From the Left’s perspective, the virtuous person is one who enthusiastically supports such policies as “affirmative action” for “historically disadvantaged” racial minorities and women, “reproductive rights” (abortion), “gay marriage,” and higher taxes for “the rich.”

The establishment Right is no less moralistic than the Left, and it attributes all opposition that it encounters to a lack of “moral clarity” on the part of its opponents. Whether it is “the War on Terror,” the War in Iraq, the criminalization of drugs, a Constitutional Amendment in effect proscribing “gay marriage,” or American military adventurism, whoever takes exception to the Right’s stances on these issues is accused of lacking “moral clarity.”

Both Leftists and Rightists tend to garner support for their favored causes by appealing to “human rights.”

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.

To put it simply, it is much more difficult to remain committed to a marriage that is suffering hard times than it is to, say, decry racism and sexism. It is much harder to work two jobs (or, for that matter, one job) so that your children can have more than you had as a child than it is to demand that America bring its military power to bear upon some foreign nation that is oppressing the human rights of its citizens, or that is otherwise threatening liberty.

Those on the Left and Right who insist that morality requires us to sacrifice more for our country by not begrudging politicians more of our hard earned money to subsidize their grand crusades, are dead wrong. These self-styled merchants of morality are the contemporary counterparts of the Catholic priests of old who sold indulgences. Just as these priests peddled “cheap grace,” (to borrow Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s expression), so today’s Leftist and Rightist moralists try to sell us “cheap virtue.”