The Seven Deadly Virtues

by Jonathan V. Last

  Most of us will never have to run to the sound of guns. But let’s not, at least, run from the sound of cats. Instead of trying to banish adversity, we ought to welcome at least some of it. Because it can make us a more courageous—and better—people.

  CHAPTER 5

  Temperance

  The Deadliest Virtue

  Andrew Stiles

  WE’VE COME A LONG WAY since Prohibition, which, as everyone now knows, was the greatest blunder in American history not directly attributable to Jimmy Carter. Like so many other human miseries, the ban on alcohol is now mostly confined to pockets of the developing world, and is unlikely to make a comeback in industrialized societies anytime soon. That’s a good thing. If countries such as Libya, Sudan, and Yemen hope to one day reopen the debate by demonstrating the societal benefits of being high and dry, they have a long, hard slog ahead of them. And we shall fight them every step of the way.

  What’s so virtuous about temperance? The late Christopher Hitchens, whose atheism ran as deep as his love of the sauce, observed that Jesus’s transmutation of water into wine was “the only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament … a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judea.” Well? Is he wrong? As Tex Ritter—admittedly a lesser, more contemporary prophet—once sang:

  Beefsteak when I’m hungry

  Rye whiskey when I’m dry

  Greenbacks when I’m hard up

  Religion when I die

  Note the sequence. Because like it or not, that’s the world we’ve living in. Temperance almost always takes a back seat to more enjoyable proclivities. Those who preach it are written off as squares and scolds, doomed to inhabit that most deplorable station, on the “wrong side of history.”

  We’re living in an age where a high-functioning alcoholic (and recreational crack smoker) can become the mayor of the biggest city in Canada and, well, just keep on being mayor like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Rather than being cast off as a moral destitute, Toronto’s Rob Ford became a cartoonish antihero who could win the Internet just by showing up at McDonald’s at three in the morning and babbling in a Jamaican accent.

  Temperance took a back seat in Brazil, site of the 2014 World Cup, where a decades-old law prohibiting the consumption of alcohol at soccer stadiums—passed because the country led the world in stadium fatalities—was discarded under pressure from the sport’s governing body, FIFA, and the tournament’s chief sponsor, Budweiser. And why not? Better to go out in a drunken riot than to subject yourself to ninety scoreless minutes of “the beautiful game” while stone sober.

  In spite of all this, civilization is doing just fine, thanks. The demise of Prohibition has not, as the squares foretold, brought about the end times. Granted, it spawned three or four generations of degenerate buffoons. And yes, our universities are more likely to be fonts of binge drinking and underachievement than of scholarship and human flourishing. But there are plenty of celebrities who aren’t in rehab, and it’s not like all of our major cities are run by charismatic, quasi-functioning drunks. So sure, there have been some downsides to letting the booze flow. But all in all, it’s been a relatively small price to pay. Because the benefits of living in a less temperate society are splendiferous.

  In 1830 an Amherst professor named Edward Hitchcock penned an essay urging the “young men of America” to abstain from alcohol, which, in his assessment, tended to “weaken the memory, unfix the attention, and confuse all mental operations.” Which, of course, is very much the point of alcohol.

  We’ve all made the mistake, for example, of not cracking open a bottle of an intemperate substance before asking our aged uncle how his drive up from Florida was—and being forced to listen as he describes every lane change, rest stop, and highway exit in excruciating detail, including the various weather patterns he encountered on the way.

  Booze can help you deal with these sorts of crises. It is a great emancipator, freeing us from our obligation to suffer through tedious conversations with some of society’s most difficult personalities—not just relatives, but also hipsters, vegetarians, marathon buffs, and soccer fans. And more often than not, it also frees us of the burden of appearing interesting and charismatic. Simply laugh out loud at every joke, buy a round for the table, and people are bound to accept you as a normal human being. We drown life’s inanities in a sea of drink. It’s for our own good.

  Professor Hitchcock was particularly concerned that “intemperance seems to select the brightest intellects as her victims, that she may show her omnipotence by crushing them in her iron embrace.” It was imperative, he wrote, that abstinence be taken up by “literary men.” He wasn’t joking.

  It’s a shame Chris Hitchens is no longer around to give us his thoughts on the subject while making his way through a bottle of Johnny Walker Black. Being the bright intellect and literary man he was, Hitchens understood as well as anyone that copious drinking was not only a “professional deformation” among the literary class, but in many cases a professional prerequisite.

  This is especially true of political writers, such as myself. Imagine having to start your day at a nine o’clock Congressional hearing on ermine subsidies without a flask, or, in dire situations, a CamelBak. Or sitting in front of your computer that afternoon, trying to write about the hearing and make it sound interesting without a tumbler in your desk drawer. Or worse: Imagine trying to endure the endless parade of Washington “networking” events—full of former class presidents, policy nerds, and sweaty interns handing out business cards—without an open bar. Oh, the humanity.

  The truth is, our nation’s capital would cease to function in the absence of free-flowing spirits, a fact not lost on the people who run this town. In February 2013, “investigators” from the District’s Office of Weights & Measures carried out a series of raids on bars and restaurants along the rapidly gentrifying H Street Corridor, a popular destination for the millennial hordes who swim in the slipstream of, and in many cases run, the great Leviathan. Armed with beakers and graduated cylinders, the crew of government employees spent “about an hour and a half measuring our drinks and pitchers,” an astonished restaurant owner told the Washington Post.

  Their objective was not to curtail the flow of hooch, but rather to enforce the legal requirements governing the appropriate volumes of beer, wine, and liquor in response to citizen complaints that they were “not receiving advertised amounts of alcohol.” Temperance be damned: The capital of the free world will not abide its citizens getting drunk at a rate slower than the law provides. A century ago, the jackboots came to pour your whiskey out in the street. These days, they top up your glass. That’s change we can believe in.

  It would be premature, however, to write temperance out of the history books just yet. Regrettably, the would-be prohibitionists have become increasingly emboldened. Modern-day temperance mongers are waging new, targeted offensives on more favorable ground—and occasionally winning. Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is their patron saint; the man rarely met something he didn’t want to ban in the name of the public good. While in office, the courageous billionaire successfully outlawed a variety of petty scourges such as trans fats, salty foods, large sodas, Styrofoam packaging, and overly loud headphones.

  Cigarettes, too, although that goes without saying. Mayor Bloomberg was hardly the only public official to crack down on cancer sticks. Smokers nationwide have been relegated to specially designated areas, forced to huddle like refugees in quarantine. (That’s not an entirely bad thing, insofar as getting drunk in New York bars is now slightly more enjoyable for nonsmokers.) Now, everyone agrees that cigarettes are bad for you. If you smoke, you shouldn’t. And there’s a whole industry designed to help people quit with products like the e-cigarette, which mimics the act of smoking by producing a nicotine-infused water vapor.

  You might be thinking: That sounds like a great idea with very little downside! Well, see, this is why you can’t be trusted. In one of his final
acts, Mayor Bloomberg banned these too, on the grounds that they might cause some people to start smoking real cigarettes. Was there any science behind this concern? No. But that never stops the temperance nannies. They know what’s good for you, and if you don’t like it you can go to the designated smoking area and light up your coffin nail with the other lepers. At least, until they bulldoze the designated smoking area and put in a bike share.

  Yet when you dig down deep, you find that the problem isn’t temperance, but our own misunderstanding of what the virtue really means. C. S. Lewis complained that our understanding of temperance, as a cardinal virtue, had been corrupted by its association with Prohibition and teetotalism. Temperance, he wrote, was never intended to refer “specially to drink, but to all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further.” Properly conceived, temperance is supposed to foster self-control. Each temptation is an opportunity to choose the temperate path, or not, and through these choices, we gain a deeper understanding of our individual shortcomings and strengthen our relationship with God. Instead, temperance is now exploited as a means to demand fealty to the whims of those who think they know better than everyone else.

  Lewis understood how obnoxious this can be. “One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up,” he wrote. The whole point “is that he is abstaining, for a good reason, from something which he does not condemn and which he likes to see other people enjoying.” Man is free to give up “all sorts of things for special reasons—marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.”

  Martin Amis may be less convinced than Lewis as to the merits of a virtuous lifestyle, but he has respect for temperance, too: “It all comes down to choices, doesn’t it? … Do you want to feel good at night or do you want to feel good in the morning? It’s the same with life. Do you want to feel good young or do you want to feel good old? One or the other, not both.”

  As long we’re free to make those choices, temperance is actually quite important. And if we’re going to try to sell temperance to modern America, we might make use of another idea that’s in short supply: shame.

  Shame might be the best way to nudge members of the millennial generation—whose everyday conservations are often a discourse on the question “How drunk was I last night?”—into embracing a more temperate lifestyle. The Department of Defense, for example, actually runs a sort of temperance program aimed at young members of the U.S. military, warning them not to develop a reputation as “That Guy.” The message is fairly straightforward: Make good choices, and don’t make an ass of yourself.

  Sound advice. Because in the digital age, our most intemperate acts can be easily recorded and uploaded to YouTube. A pulsing hangover can be the least of your problems after an overnight bender—just ask David Hasselhoff or Alec Baldwin. In a world where reputations can be scuttled in an evening, shame can, and should, help instill in us an understanding that not every story that begins with “This one time I was so drunk …” is a story worth telling.

  Because at some point, those stories become increasingly hard to top. If your night out doesn’t end with you waking up in a Russian mobster’s penthouse, chained to a radiator, while a midget wearing chaps pours champagne over your recently shaved head, then you’re just not down with YOLO, bro. Eventually, even Hitchens found virtue in temperance, warning us young folks that hangovers were a “bad sign,” that blacking out was “an even worse sign,” and that neither should be cause for celebration. And the older we get, the truer that becomes.

  The best case for temperance I’ll ever see was demonstrated by a fellow I knew in college named “Larry.” (Not his real name.) He quickly became known as “The Dude,” for his somewhat excessive efforts to imitate—in both personality and physical appearance—Jeff Bridges’s character in The Big Lebowski. Larry was uncoordinated, and suffered from poor balance whilst sober, which he rarely was. He carried an enormous key chain that would clank and chime like a set of prison cuffs everywhere he went. You could hear him coming a hundred yards away. You could hear him fall from twice that distance, like a felled bison exploding a jukebox. After a string of minor incidents, he wound up in the hospital one night after being bested by a set of stairs and a few too many pints of Jamesons.

  When he emerged several days later sporting a thick bandage on his forehead, he informed us that the injury was severe enough as to require a skin graft, which had been taken from a fleshy portion of his posterior. He had, quite literally, made an ass of himself.

  Temperance may not be the most popular of virtues. But it is also, occasionally, essential.

  CHAPTER 6

  Hope

  Chicago Is a Place Called Hope

  David Burge (aka Iowahawk)

  THERE’S A RAMSHACKLE STADIUM on the corner of Addison and Clark in Chicago that houses an (ostensibly) professional baseball team. As of this writing, that team has managed to complete 105 seasons of play without a World Series title to show for it. One hundred and five seasons. During that stretch, twenty-one other baseball franchises have celebrated a world championship. This list of winners includes multiple titles for every extant 1908 American and National League club (the Braves won championships in three different cities), not to mention the likes of the Florida Marlins, a franchise that is as ridiculous as it sounds and that, by the way, didn’t even exist until the Cubs’ drought was in its eighty-fifth year.

  The sheer statistical improbability of this streak is somewhat astonishing: My back-of-the-spreadsheet calculation says it’s about 0.004, or a 250-to-1 shot. Had you been a prescient gambler in 1908 and laid down cash on a big-league team rolling snake eyes for 105 straight seasons, today you’d be swimming in it, Scrooge McDuck-style. That is, if you were still alive. (The odds of that are approximately 250 million to 1.)

  If there is a gate on this earth deserving of Dante’s inscription Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate (Abandon hope, all ye who enter here) it’s Gate F at Wrigley Field. Yet, as they have every April since Wrigley opened in 1915, Cubs fans raise a collective middle finger to experience while they shuffle through it, their sense of hope firmly intact. “Come on, man,” the chorus goes, “they’re due!”

  Over the preceding century-and-change, the Cubs have sold approximately 150 million tickets to these hope-addled—or if you prefer, hope-sustained—dreamers. Among them were my grandparents, Iowa farmers whose 1934 honeymoon trip east to Chicago included a game at Wrigley. The Cubs were a hot ticket then, just two years out from a National League pennant and in the thick of another race. Grandpa was disappointed by the Cubs’ loss to the Cincinnati Reds, but he did return home with a souvenir ticket—as well as a souvenir sliver of wood he whittled from a phone pole outside the Biograph Theater, where John Dillinger had been shot just days before.

  Grandpa and Grandma’s next Cubs game was in 1945. This time they had two kids in tow. One of them was my eight-year-old dad. It was during that hopeful moment between VE Day and VJ Day. Wartime gasoline rationing had already ended, and Grandpa decided it was time for a celebratory trip to the Windy City. This time the Cubs won, beating the Pirates en route to another National League pennant. The Cubs would lose the ’45 World Series to the Detroit Tigers, four games to three. It was their seventh straight World Series loss. Some blame Chicago restaurateur and Cubs fan Billy Sianis, who cursed the team after he and his pet goat were tossed from Wrigley during Game 4. Superstition or not, the Cubs haven’t been to a World Series since.

  Their National League pennant from that (cursed?) year today hangs near the salad bar at Wrigley’s Stadium Club restaurant, a forlorn and barren senior citizen. I’ve had occasion to ponder the relic a few times since moving to Chicago. My first Cubs game was in 1969. I was an eight-year-old vacationing Iowa farm boy, just like my d
ad had been in 1945. Dad and Uncle Arlen treated me, my brother, and our cousins to a day at Wrigley. It was a glorious victory by the first-place Cubs over the Astros, the perfect introduction for a young boy to fandom. And educational, too. The next month the Cubs underwent the greatest collapse in Major League history and missed the playoffs.

  I eventually ended up living not far from Wrigley, and these days I occasionally take my own boy to Cubs games—the sins of the father being visited upon the son and all that. On his eighth birthday—the date was October 14, 2003, which you may recognize—the Cubs were about to close out a playoff series against that ridiculous baseball club from Florida. In the eighth inning, a well-meaning fan named Steve Bartman reached out for a souvenir foul ball. There is some comfort in knowing that my father, my son, and I learned the hard, eternal truth about the Cubs at identical ages. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.

  Despite all that, a lot of people in Chicago were stoked about the Cubs’ chances this year. Well, not this year, but maybe next. Although the rebuilding could take longer. But playoff contenders by the midcentury, tops. You know how this hope stuff goes.

  A straight-thinking fan base would have thrown their support behind a less depressing team fifty years ago. And by all conventional lights, the Cubs would then have packed up and moved to Orlando or Jacksonville or some other arriviste city in Florida to get a better stadium deal and a fresh start. Yet deep inside, no matter how grumpily and fatalistically he dismisses their chances, even the most hard-bitten Wrigley bleacher bum truly, truly believes that this might finally be the year.

  The question, then, is why would anyone consider this sort of historical, counterlogical, masochistic, Pollyanna belief a virtue? From any objective standpoint, the Cubs fans’ perennial, unshakeable hope really only benefits the team’s front office. Hope is a virtue? Hell, it’s a character flaw that leaves us prey to overpriced ball caps and eight-dollar cups of Old Style. If you’re going to be purely rational about it, hope is for the gullible. The self-deluded. The suckers. Wise up, boy-o, hope is for dopes. It’s nothing but a dressed-up, theologically approved version of the gambler’s fallacy. Want to see hope at work? Walk through a casino floor in Las Vegas at eight o’clock in the morning. You’ll see plenty of unshakeable hope in people’s bloodshot eyes—every one of them genuinely believing they’re just one lever pull, just one button push, just one dealer’s face card or river turn from sweet deliverance. With virtue like that, who needs vice?