Peter RuddFiled under: brave new world, departure lounge | Tags: Listen Liberal, Thomas Frank, virtue, virtue offsets
The Good Samaritan
In the age of neoliberalism and market fundamentalism, even virtue is put to work for the marketplace. In the same way that a big polluter can buy carbon offsets to assuage his guilt – and avoid paying for his great big pile of toxic externalities – he can donate to a charity. He can even donate to his own charity!
But there’s an even more effective way of offsetting your financial and environmental sins. Lo a great host of uber virtuous now circles the globe and deigns occasionally to descend among us mortals to hear confession, be the balm, assuage the guilt, and offer redemption for massive sins perpetrated against the earth and her people.
It’s a good deal. It doesn’t cost anything and it results in the preservation of an unsustainable status quo.
Here is an excerpt from Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal:
What I concluded from observing all this is that there is a global commerce in compassion, an international virtue- circuit featuring people of unquestionable moral achievement, like Bono, Malala, Sting, Yunus, Angelina Jolie, and Bishop Tutu; figures who travel the world, collecting and radiating goodness. They come into contact with the other participants in this market: the politicians and billionaires and bankers who warm themselves at the incandescent virtue of the world-traveling moral superstars.
What drives this market are the buyers. Like Wal-Mart and Goldman Sachs “partnering” with the State Department, what these virtue-consumers are doing is purchasing liberalism offsets, an ideological version of the carbon offsets that are sometimes bought by polluters in order to compensate for the smog they churn out.
At the apex of all this idealism stands the Clinton Foundation, a veritable market-maker in the world’s vast, swirling virtue-trade. The former president who stands at its head is “the world’s leading philanthropic dealmaker,” according to a book on the subject. Under his watchful eye all the concerned parties are brought together: the moral superstars, the billionaires, and of course the professionals, who organize, intone, and advise. Virtue changes hands. Good causes are funded. Compassion is radiated and absorbed.
This is modern liberalism in action: an unregulated virtue-exchange in which representatives of one class of humanity ritually forgive the sins of another class, all of it convened and facilitated by a vast army of well-graduated American professionals, their reassuring expertise propped up by bogus social science, while the unfortunate objects of their high and noble compassion sink slowly back into a preindustrial state.
Thomas Frank, Listen Liberal
So, why is evil so sexy? And good so profoundly unglamorous? Why does virtue seem so boring?
[2:42] Regarding virtue: the ancients believed the opposite to what we do. They saw virtue as being very very good at the very very difficult task of living well. We, on the other hand see virtue as having patience and honour and other hard to define, if not entirely wishy washy qualities. Regarding evil: the ancients believed the wicked were particularly bad at the art of living. We, on the other hand, see evil as a triumphant quality:
“I don’t think its virtue that’s boring, so much as a particular conception of it … Being a virtuous human being for Aristotle is a practice, like being a skilled diver or an accomplished tennis player. And those who are really brilliant at being human, what Christians call the Saints, are the virtuosi of the moral sphere. They’re the Pavarotti’s and George Best’s of virtue … In this very ancient Aristotelian view, virtue is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human. A prospering, if Sigmund Freud is to be believed, among others, none of us manages particularly well. The wicked are those who haven’t developed the knack of fine living. Those who botch the business as we all do to some degree. Christians know this as original sin … We all botch the business, but the wicked do it in a spectacular dramatic sort of way.
[4:38] The wicked are cripples; the virtuous are full of life:
So the wicked on this view, which later is elaborated by I suppose the greatest theologian who ever lived, Thomas Aquinas, the wicked are inept and crippled and deficient and really rather tedious people who never get the hang of human existence. People who in a sense stay toddlers all the time. They are like poor artists who can never really knock themselves into shape. Whereas the virtuous, on this theory, are those who are like good artists … who realize their powers and energies and capacities to the full … The virtuous are those who are able to do this in as diverse and rich a way as possible, in this particular theory of morality. And because of this they are brimming with life and high spirits.
[6:16] God moral? Nonsense! Rather the very essence of delight and life, not to mention a good sense of humour:
Virtue is here a kind of energy or fullness of life, abundance of life … It’s a sort of exuberance which is why it’s thought sometimes, by some people to have something to do with God. Because to say that God is good, traditionally, theologically, is not to say that he’s remarkably well behaved, that he eats his greens, polishes his shoes … But, in fact, most theologians these days wouldn’t think the term moral is applicable to God at all. But rather to say he’s good is to say that he is an infinite abyss of self delighting life. Which no doubt, I suppose must entail that he also has a boundless sense of humor. He sure needs one.
[10:30] defining evil
On this theory evil is not something positive. It’s a kind of lack or defectiveness. It’s a sort of nothingness or negativity. It’s an inability to be truly alive. It may look lively and sexy and seductive and flamboyant, but this is a flashy show it puts on to cover up the hollowness at its heart. It’s the paper thinness of evil, it’s bitter unreality, its poor, botched parody of reality which is most striking about it.
[12:20] the redefinition of virtue: no wonder people prefer vampires
As the middle classes came to exert their clammy grip on western civilization, one thing that happened was a gradual redefinition of virtue. So virtue now came to mean not exuberance and self realization and self fulfillment as in the long tradition from Aristotle to Aquinas to Hegel to Marx in a so called virtue ethics tradition. But it came to mean things like prudence, thrift, meekness, chastity, temperance, longheadedness, longsuffering, industriousness and so on. No wonder people prefer vampires.
Terry Eagleton – On Evil from The School of Life on Vimeo.
Our image of virtue is the Amish girl selling organic vegetables, the helper suburban wife, the social worker who cares, the religiously convicted, the saint who runs orphanages, the hardworking labourer, the dutiful husband, the family that saves, the company man, the disciplined mortgagor.
However, if you look in the dictionary, virtue is described quite differently. It is a learned moral excellence, an exceptional person who has developed essential qualities needed to live an excellent life. There’s an enormous difference between this definition and our own milquetoast, passive, whiny vision.
In this excerpt from T. Eagleton’s essay Ideas for modern living: virtue, the author describes this difference. He says the proper definition of virtue is energy, exhuberance, prospering, exhiliration, and excitement.
coromandal 