The Seven Deadly Virtues

by Jonathan V. Last

  Meanwhile, humans are like Hong Kong knockoffs of angels, in that we have a divine spark in us, but sometimes it goes dim when Cinemax After Dark is on. As Psalm 8 says, “For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor.” Free will means that we can fall short of doing the right thing. As James Madison put it, “If men were angels, we wouldn’t need the IRS criminal enforcement division.” (I’m paraphrasing.)

  Still below angels, but above normal men, are heroes. Traditionally these are people who do the right thing at great personal sacrifice. The Greek hērōs means protector or defender. Sometimes protectors must do bad things for the greater good. Knights, at least as a mythic ideal, strove to be as close to angels as humans could be. In the later Middle Ages, the angelic ideal of chivalry was democratized as the bourgeois sought to raise their children according to gentlemanly rules of honor, too. Even as the chivalric code evolved, the idea of heroism remained largely intact. Heroes make sacrifices for the greater good. Tom Doniphon, the man who actually shot Liberty Valance (spoiler alert!), cut some corners, but he did so for a higher good. The incorruptible Dirty Harry was dirty in a legalistic sense, but closer to the angels in his desire for divine justice. (Angels in the Hebrew Bible never read the wicked their Miranda rights and weren’t exactly above opening a can of whoop-ass when necessary.)

  But something in the culture has changed. Throughout virtually the entire history of Western civilization, heroes had the right-end-of-the-spectrum version of integrity. They did good out of a desire to do good—and that good was directed by some external ideal. Sure, it wasn’t always, strictly speaking, a biblical definition of good. You can’t blame Odysseus or Achilles for not following a book that hadn’t been published yet. But however “good” was defined, it existed in some sort of Platonic realm outside of the protagonist’s own Id. (Or ego? Or super ego? Or super-duper id? I can never keep that stuff straight.) The hero clung to a definition of good that was outside of himself, and therefore something he had to reach for. Not any more. Now everyone reaches inward for their own vision of integrity. Or, as Omar Little says in The Wire, “A man[’s] got to have a code.”

  In case you didn’t know, Omar was arguably the most popular character on the critically acclaimed HBO series about innercity Baltimore. As a gay murderer who stuck to robbing and murdering drug dealers, Omar was what passed for a man of integrity in the show. Ditto for Walter White, the main character in AMC’s wonderful series Breaking Bad. White was a chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin and mass murderer. The show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, explained that the idea for the show was to turn “Mr. Chips into Scarface.” Gilligan succeeded, but not before he seduced and corrupted the viewing audience, too: By the time the story ended, fans no longer minded that Walter White had become a homicidal drug dealer. They rooted for him anyway.

  While the audience could forgive White’s murdering and drug peddling, they couldn’t abide the fact that his (fictional) wife wasn’t more supportive of his (fictional) career choice. Facebook pages, blog posts, chat rooms, and other algae plumes of the digital ocean expressed outrage and hatred for White’s wife, who insisted, as best she could, that issues of right and wrong trumped her husband’s vanity. It got to the point where the actress (Anna Gunn) who portrayed the poor, beleaguered Mrs. White wrote an op-ed for the New York Times complaining about the tsunami of hate aimed at her character, which had spilled on to her in real life as well. In liberal pop culture this was the equivalent of yelling “I’m telling!” and running to the principal’s office.

  Gunn blamed the whole thing on sexism. Her complaint may have some marginal merit, but it’s also really, really, really boring. The more interesting explanation (i.e., my explanation) is that “purely formal” integrity is really the only kind of integrity our culture celebrates anymore. Superman—who always does the right thing—is blah. Batman, a vigilante who plays by his own rules, is sexy.

  Speaking of Superman, Jerry Siegel, the cocreator of the character, first used the term “Superman” to describe the villain in his 1933 short story, “The Reign of the Superman.” The character was based on Nietzsche’s übermensch, the man who breaks from the herd to create his own set of values independent from an (allegedly) dead God. To Nietzsche, reason and traditional morality were for squares. Siegel and his partner, Joe Shuster, quickly abandoned the evil, übermensch-y, Superman idea and instead turned the character into a classic hero—a protector who personified the highest form of substantive integrity. They repackaged the make-your-own rules übermensch a few issues later as the villain Lex Luthor.

  And that might be where they went wrong—because Nietzsche has clearly won the popular culture. I get that talking about Nietzsche and the popular culture—or really Nietzsche and anything—is like reading Proust during the time-outs at a Packers game in Green Bay; it assaults the nostrils with the scent of the poseur.

  So, as Joe Biden’s intelligence briefers like to say, let me simplify the point (albeit without the use of the VPOTUS hand puppets). When I talk of the triumph of Nietzsche, all I mean is that do-it-yourself morality, informed by personal passion rather than old-fogey morality, is the new norm.

  One of my favorite guilty TV pleasures is the series Banshee. The show’s premise isn’t particularly important for the purposes of our discussion, but suffice it to say my inner twelve-year-old boy finds all of the nudity and violence totally integral to the plot. In one episode there’s an Eastern Orthodox priest—who is also a Ukrainian mob boss, naturally—who explains that ultimately every man is beholden to a code he creates for himself. (This was shortly before he took out a machine gun and sprayed bullets at his own niece, in his own church.) Now, contrary to popular misconception, I am not an expert on the theology of Byzantine Christianity and its flowering in Ukraine. But I’m pretty sure this not an accurate treatment of church dogma.

  I bring up the Ukrainian priest/capo not so much because it’s a good example of what I am getting at—in this case, at least the character was a villain—but rather to note that once you become aware of the movement to define integrity as a commitment to self-made principles (no matter how evil), you see it everywhere you look in the popular culture. We’ve already touched on Breaking Bad. There’s also the TV series Dexter, in which an avowed psychopath/serial killer adheres to an ethical code that he actually labels “The Code.” It’s his own personal rulebook, which says that it’s okay to murder—with psychosexual delight, even—so long as the people you are murdering are also murderers. That might sound like a modern adaptation of old-school morality, except it doesn’t take long for Dexter to cut himself some slack and start killing innocent, but inconvenient, people as well.

  Remember the heroes of The Sopranos? They were all murderers and thieves who justified and rationalized their crimes on the fly, too. In one episode, Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri and Christopher Moltisanti killed an angry waiter they had stiffed on the tip. And afterward they learned an important lesson: not to let work interfere with their friendship. Who is Mad Men’s Don Draper? He’s a narcissist raised in a brothel who treats his personal vanity as if it were the chivalric code. Then of course there is Frank Underwood, the protagonist of Netflix’s remake of House of Cards. Underwood has no code to speak of, save that everything and anything is justified if it increases his political power. It’s hard to exaggerate either the popularity of the show inside the Beltway or how little Washingtonians care that the show’s hero is irredeemably evil.

  Admittedly, many of these examples come from high-middle-brow fare and pay cable. But teenagers and kids are getting the same messages, too; they just need to have the idea pounded into them a bit more directly. Take the wholesome-sounding movie The Girl Next Door, which plays on basic cable channels with a constancy normally reserved for documentaries about Kim Jong-un on North Korean TV. Matthew Kidman, the nerdy protagonist, is a teenage boy who falls in love with a porn star who’s moved, well, next door. All his life po
or Matthew’s been a do-gooder who does what is expected of him. He’s a substantive-integrity kind of guy. In a speech contest for a college scholarship, he’s expected to talk about “Moral Fiber.” But that was before he fell in love with his neighbor, who has—through a series of fortunate events—helped him discover his talent as a porn mogul. With his eyes now opened, he gives his speech:

  Moral fiber. So what is moral fiber? I mean, it’s funny. I used to think it was always telling the truth, doing good deeds … you know, basically being a f***ing Boy Scout. [The audience gasps.] But lately I’ve been seeing it differently. Now I think that moral fiber is about finding that one thing you really care about. That one special thing that means more to you than anything else in the world. [That one special thing in this case being the super-hot porn star/neighbor.]

  And when you find her, you fight for her. You risk it all. You put her in front of everything … your future, your life … all of it. And maybe the stuff you do to help her isn’t so clean. You know what? It doesn’t matter. Because, in your heart, you know that the juice is worth the squeeze.

  Capra-esque, no? (You’ll be delighted to know that, in the end, young porn-mogul Matthew gets into Georgetown. Which isn’t much of a stretch, actually.)

  The truth is, it’s hard to find a children’s cartoon or movie that doesn’t tell kids that they need to look inside themselves for moral guidance. Indeed, there’s a riot of Rousseauian claptrap out there that says children are born with rightly ordered consciences. And why not? As Mr. Rogers told us, “You are the most important person in the whole wide world and you hardly even know you.” Hillary Clinton is even worse. In her book It Takes a Village, she claims that some of the best theologians she’s ever met have been five-year-olds (which might be true when compared to a certain homicidal Ukrainian priest).

  Such saccharine codswallop overturns millennia of moral teaching. It takes the idea that we must apply reason to nature and our consciences in order to discover what is moral and replaces it with the idea that if it feels right, just do it, baby. Which, by the by, is exactly how Lex Luthor sees the world. Übermensch-y passion is now everyone’s lodestar. Or as Reese Witherspoon says in Legally Blonde 2, “On our very first day at Harvard, a very wise professor quoted Aristotle: ‘The law is reason free from passion.’ Well, no offense to Aristotle, but in my three years at Harvard I have come to find that passion is a key ingredient to the study and practice of law—and of life.”

  Well that solves that. Nietzsche-Witherspoon 1, Aristotle 0.

  According to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the death of God and the coming of the übermensch was going to require the new kind of inner-directed hero to become his own god. As a result, anything society did to inconvenience the heroic individual was morally suspect, a backdoor attempt by The Man to impose conformity. This is pretty much exactly what Robin Williams teaches in Dead Poets Society. But that ethos has traveled a long way from Mork. When Barack Obama was asked by a minister to define “sin,” he confidently answered that “sin” just means being “out of alignment with my values.” Taken literally, this would mean that Hannibal Lecter is being sinful when he abstains from human flesh in favor of a Waldorf salad. As you can see, when you take the modern definition of integrity all the way to the horizon, suddenly “integrity” can only be understood as a firm commitment to one’s own principles—because one’s own principles are the only legitimate principles. Heck, if you are a god, then doing what you want is God’s will.

  How’s this new morality going to work out for us all? I’m reminded of the time when some entrepreneur announced he was going to release a new line of beer laced with Viagra. Some wag immediately quipped, “What could possibly go wrong?” Which is pretty much where we are today. It’s impossible to predict what Integrity 2.0 will yield—because no society in the history of Western civilization has so energetically and deliberately torn down its classical ideal and replaced it with do-it-yourself morality. But a betting man would probably wager that this won’t end well.

  I suspect that before long we’ll be pining for the good old days, when, no matter how often people failed to uphold the standards of integrity, those standards actually meant something.

  CHAPTER 16

  Curiosity

  Maybe the Cat Got What It Had Coming

  Christopher Caldwell

  A FEW YEARS AGO I was on a British radio show that featured a panel of authors describing their new books. I was having a hard time making the case for mine in the fifteen-second turns we were allotted. A fellow panelist—let’s call him Nigel—had no such trouble. Asked by the host what relevance his book might have to current debates, he replied, “Well, Brian, a better question might be: What article of Princess Diana’s underclothing was Harrod’s magnate Dodi Fayed clutching in his teeth when their Mercedes W140 exploded in a fiery wreck in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel after a night of love and champagne at the Paris Ritz?” He gave no answer. For that you’d have to buy his book. As I recall, plenty of people did.

  Nigel understood that curiosity is mighty. It is mightier than arguments. But it is, like many mighty things, hard to define. Curiosity has been little studied by men of science. Psychologists still squabble over whether to think of it as a trait (an inborn yearning for knowledge) or a state (a kind of discomfort or itch provoked by some specific mystery or temptation). Moralists have been similarly ambivalent. “The gratification of curiosity rather frees us from uneasiness than confers pleasure,” said Samuel Johnson. His contemporary Edmund Burke praised curiosity, but only faintly, calling it “the first and simplest emotion we discover in the human mind” and “the most superficial of all the affections.” It is hard to say what kind of virtue curiosity is, if indeed it is a virtue at all.

  It certainly feels like one. Curiosity is associated with a lot of attributes we consider evidence of right living. One is hope, for which “curiosity is little more than another name,” as the nineteenth-century English theological writers Augustus and Julius Hare wrote. That students are more eager to learn when they are hopeful, happy, and forward-looking has been agreed upon by pedagogues since the days of Rousseau, who wrote in Emile, “There is an ardor to know which is founded only on the desire to be esteemed as learned; there is another ardor which is born of a curiosity natural to man concerning all that might have a connection, close or distant, with his interests.”

  The problem is that curiosity is associated with hope even when it’s leading us into disaster. The cat that curiosity killed was filled with hope, too.

  My father worked as a designer of packaging; he was distinguished in his field, and it fascinated him. In connection with his work, he was always designing novelties in his own department, acquiring others at seminars and trade shows, and bringing them home to show his delighted children: six-sided lightbulb boxes, “brick packs” (juice boxes into which you could stab a straw), ingenious blister-wrap-and-cardboard packages. But one winter night in the 1970s he brought home a truly history-changing object—one of the first plastic soft-drink bottles. I think it was a half-gallon bottle of Coca-Cola. My mother and sisters were out when he came up the steps and showed it to me, and he clearly couldn’t wait until the whole family saw it. He was right to be giddy. This was really a revolution. The centuries-long age of broken glass bottles was drawing to a close. My father went down the hall to change out of his work clothes, leaving me alone in the living room. Not quite alone, though, because I had my curiosity with me.

  The bottle was sitting on the coffee table. I studied it. It occurred to me this thing probably wouldn’t break even if you dropped it. I picked the bottle up by its cap, lowered it to six inches off the living-room floor and let it go. Plunk! Nothing happened. Amazing. Now I wanted to see just how amazing. I picked the bottle up and held it a foot off the floor. The plunk! was a bit louder, loud enough to elicit an “Everything all right out there?” from my father down the hall. The Coke frothed quite a lot. Still … it was astonishing. An unbreaka
ble soft-drink bottle! Then I dropped the bottle from two feet.

  I probably don’t have to describe to you the almost deafening explosion it made as my father emerged into the living room. It drenched the two of us and ruined a rug, a newly upholstered chair, and a set of drapes. Princess Diana’s fiery wreck in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel was neither more immediate nor more incendiary than the rage my father flew into. I consoled myself, as I toweled off the wallpaper, that it had been a triumph for the scientific method.

  The contemporary psychologists Todd Kashdan and Paul J. Silvia are struck by the fact that curiosity’s power can be independent of whether it flatters or gratifies the curious person. “People are often interested in unpleasant, unfamiliar, and possibly unrewarding activities,” they write. So while curiosity is related to hope, it should also overlap with humility. A hipster in the habit of eating hummus, jicama, and quinoa can make the experience of eating bad macaroni and cheese tolerable if he can summon the resources of curiosity. While this is a psychological observation, it has much in common with the old religious injunction made to Irish Catholics that, when confronted with a painful or boring thing, they “offer it up”—that is, to endure it bravely in the optimistic spirit that no suffering is without its purpose.

  At its extreme, this impulse to treat adversity as something to be learned from is a form of courage—the master virtue, the one without which no other virtue can gain any purchase. Around the time of the Falklands War, I had two friends who were young officers in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. One, whom we’ll call Charlie, was preoccupied with what preoccupies most officers—the ability to get one’s men to follow one into battle—and made a study of the question. He is now in the British army’s top echelons. My other friend, Gareth, took a different approach. His virtues were of the sociable, disorganized kind that are better appreciated in civilian than in military life—getting drunk before work, for instance. I asked Charlie whether Gareth’s men would follow him into battle. He paused before saying, “Oh, yes … They’d be very curious.”