The Seven Deadly Virtues

by Jonathan V. Last

  William McDougall, the Harvard professor of psychology who towered over the discipline at the turn of the twentieth century, noted a strong association between curiosity and wonder. In An Introduction to Social Psychology, McDougall identified curiosity as the distinctive mark of Western culture. He spoke of the “insatiable curiosity of the modern European and American mind that, more than anything else, distinguishes it from all others,” and mentioned wonder “as the name for the primary emotion that accompanies this impulse.” Perhaps because McDougall put this message forward as part of a defense of eugenics, his work has mostly been forgotten by historians.

  But his thoughts on curiosity were profound and merit revisiting. He believed that civilizational progress was made possible only by the “coexistence and conjoint operation” of conservative religion and progressive science. A civilization lacking one or the other cannot stand, he thought. Just after the First World War he wrote, “At the present time it may seem that in one small quarter of the world, namely, Western Europe, society has achieved an organization so intrinsically stable that it may with impunity tolerate the flourishing of the spirit of inquiry and give free rein to the impulse of curiosity. But to assume that this is the case would be rash.” The sentiment is not as obscurantist as it sounds. For McDougall, it was curiosity that spurred both the scientific spirit of inquiry and the religious impulse toward reverence—and curiosity was indispensable to keeping the two in healthy balance.

  Curiosity is a protean disposition. The editor Louis Kronenberger, in his memoir of a half-century as publisher, journalist, and author, remembered as one of the highlights of his career a delightful sentence he had discovered in an early draft of Charles Wertenbaker’s 1928 novel Boojum!: “He went into a restaurant and ordered twenty dollars’ worth of scrambled eggs, just to see what they looked like.” Here is curiosity at its most ambivalent. Wertenbaker’s character is indulging the silliest kind of curiosity, the kind that often comes accompanied with the adjective “idle.” But at the same time, Wertenbaker’s attempt to capture it is evidence of the highest kind of curiosity, the kind that plays the same role in culture that the profit motive does in economics. It is the driving impulse of most of literature, the stuff out of which to build a noble, honorable, and virtuous life.

  There are many kinds of curiosity. Only one of them qualifies beyond any shadow of doubt as a virtue: that is intellectual curiosity, or inquisitiveness. By figuring out what we are doing in this world we can come closer to figuring out our purpose in it. Hope and humility combine to make faith—a faith that, once a commitment to discovery is made, life will yield up sense. Saint Paul believes this, writing in 1 Corinthians: “God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”

  But it is not a purely religious thought, for Karl Marx thinks a version of it just as fervently, promising, in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, that “mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve…. We will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.” Curiosity is a virtue because the knowledge acquired through curiosity grounds your other virtues, while leaving to you the choice of what those virtues will be.

  The problem comes when we ask what knowledge is. Knowing the first canto of Dante’s Inferno by heart is knowledge. So is knowing that your neighbor’s daughter has a bun in the oven. Most people prefer the latter kind of information to the former. They are like Noel Coward in “I’ve Been to a Marvellous Party”:

  You know, if you have any mind a-tall,

  Gibbon’s divine Decline and Fall—

  Well, it sounds pretty flimsy,

  No more than a whimsy! …

  By way of contrast,

  On Wednesday last,

  I went to a mar-vellous party.

  Or Lord Byron in Don Juan:

  Don José and his lady quarrell’d—why

  Not any of the many could divine,

  Though several thousand people chose to try

  ’Twas surely no concern of theirs nor mine;

  I loathe that low vice—curiosity;

  But if there’s anything in which I shine,

  ’Tis in arranging all my friends’ affairs.

  Not having, of my own, domestic cares.

  In the popular mind, curiosity is less often associated with scholarship than with its ne’er-do-well siblings: gossip and prurience. The economist and psychologist George Loewenstein has written of “curiosity’s peculiar combination of superficiality and intensity.” In the older Western tradition this combination is a womanly one, as Loewenstein notes, and our literature is full of women whose desire to get to the bottom of things leads to disaster—running from Pandora through Eve to Lot’s wife and, eventually, I Love Lucy. Counterproductive nosiness is, however, a failing that afflicts all human beings. In his Confessions, Augustine writes of this inability to leave well enough alone, describing the retort of a Christian he knew who was being harassed by a questioner about what God had done before he created Heaven and Earth. Augustine quotes the man as having replied, “Scrutantibus gehennas parabat.” (He was getting hell ready for busybodies).

  When people speak of “low” curiosity, they often mean gossip, but it can describe almost any kind of novelty-seeking. In a modern society built around the marketing of sensations, hedonism has increasingly laid claim to the status of … well, not knowledge, perhaps, but at least a kind of expertise. The line blurs between taste and thought, between connoisseurship and wisdom. A sentence such as He seemed open-minded but he wouldn’t smoke marijuana with us would be unintelligible to John Stuart Mill. Yet such sentiments don’t sound so odd today. It might not be considered an abuse of the word “curious” to say you’re “curious” about whether Old Overholt makes you drunker than Jim Beam or whether the videos on one pornographic website are better than the ones on another. Again, such a use of “curious” might have been odd a hundred years ago, but it hasn’t been since the release, in 1968, of I Am Curious (Yellow)—the only X-rated film to feature both Martin Luther King and assassinated Swedish prime minister Olof Palme. (Not that I’m trying to make you curious.)

  There really is a hedonistic element in curiosity, in that satisfying one’s drive toward it can be a liberation or—if not handled responsibly—an enslavement. Today’s online companies understand curiosity’s compulsive power. Consider the preposterous headlines that AOL runs over what used to be a “news” site. Instead of enlightening the reader, AOL abuses him—rather than impart information, it alerts him to his deficiencies. So on Groundhog Day, when other websites pointed out that a Pennsylvania groundhog had seen his shadow, betokening six more weeks of winter, AOL headlined, “What did Punxsutawney Phil predict?”

  You can tell a lot about a culture by which kinds of curiosity it fosters and which it represses. In earlier times, parents dissuaded children from idle curiosity with fairy tales, but told them to “stop, look, and listen” when it came to important matters. Today, idle curiosity, the kind that leads to clicks, hits, and tweets, is encouraged while barriers are erected to constructive curiosity. Consider the case of the pyramid schemer Bernard Madoff: His impossibly high returns drew notice from financial analysts as early as the 1990s, but financial watchdogs were dissuaded from investigating him by the real risk they would be sued.

  If we consider “virtue” the name for a weakness that can be used by the worldly against those who possess it, then curiosity is certainly a virtue. In a world of “big data,” built on the tracking and inventorying of individual Internet users’ behavior, curiosity is guilelessness. The curious person reveals himself to marketers and the other authorities who shape his life and shows them he has “nothing to hide.” The virtuous citizen is one who follows his impulses wherever his own ambition or other people’s advertisements lead him. This is
an inversion of traditional moral practices. “Curiosity” is a virtue in much the way that “boldness” or “insubordination” is. It is vitally important in some times and contexts. It is an outright vice in others.

  CHAPTER 17

  Perseverance

  All the Way to the End

  Christopher Buckley

  PERSEVERANCE ISN’T A WORD you hear much today. It doesn’t roll trippingly off the modern American tongue. At four syllables, it takes perseverance just to pronounce it. A quaint, biblical word, a relic preserved under glass or in aspic, or embroidered a century and a half ago by a New England schoolgirl named, say, Abigail, on a piece of muslin. I cannot recall when I last heard it aloud.

  But as a concept, perseverance rocks. It rules. Its antonym, giving up or quitting, is regarded as odious and—worse—un-American. Quitting has been the subject of spluttering excoriations by such paragons of see-the-thing-throughness and victory-at-all-costs as Theodore Roosevelt, General Patton, Vince Lombardi, Bluto Blutarsky, and a thousand self-help gurus. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off! You can do it!

  Of all the “deadly” virtues extolled in this attractively packaged and reasonably priced little volume, perseverance may be the one that most lends itself to motto, sloganeering, and escutcheon. You could do worse than have on your coat of arms the concise boast: Persevero. I persevere.

  In heraldry, this virtue is traditionally represented by three symbols: the beaver, the camel, and the snail. Not quite totems to strike fear into a black knight charging at you on his steed, twirling a nail-studded battle mace. But these gentle creatures do embody reliability and durability.

  Beaver dams attest to the implacable industry of these erstwhile suppliers of hat-making material. Pre-Range Rovers, the camel got the job done. One thinks of the scene in Lawrence of Arabia as Lawrence and Sharif Ali stare out over the vast furnace of the Nefud Desert, which must be crossed to attack the Turkish garrison at Aqaba. Ali remarks with Bedouin sangfroid: “If the camels die, we die. And in twenty days they will start to die.” (In reality, Lawrence and his men never actually crossed the Nefud on the way to Aqaba; they skirted its edge. But why tamper with a great line?)

  As for the humble but determined snail, the influential Victorian preacher Charles Spurgeon paid it this high accolade: “By perseverance the snail reached the ark.” I prefer another gloss on the indomitability of the noble mollusk: A man lives alone in the middle of the forest. One night he hears a knock on the door. Opens it, no one’s there. As he closes the door, he sees a snail on the stoop. He picks it up and hurls it with force back into the forest. Three months later, he hears another knock on the door. Opens it. Snail says, “Whadja do that for?”

  But then, we don’t use coats of arms much anymore. Today, we proclaim our personal slogans and mantras on bumper stickers and refrigerator magnets. One of the most prominent of the latter variety is a distinctive, white-on-red poster of British World War II vintage urging—commanding—the viewer to KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON. If you thought, as I did, that this was a slogan to sustain Londoners through the Blitz, you would be incorrect. No, this particular poster was never actually deployed. It had been prepared in the event of an invasion. Thanks mainly to the valor of the Royal Air Force, it was never needed. The threat of German invasion is now, happily, a very distant prospect for Britons and Americans, and yet the slogan adorns Frigidaires and Sub-Zeros everywhere.

  Are things that bad? Or does this indicate that we have a primal need to be bucked up and encouraged not to throw in the towel? KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON is a dignified exhortation, quintessentially British, especially compared with its modern, American variations, which include “Keep on Truckin’” and “Keep On Keepin’ On.” It certainly beats the fatalistic millennial cri de coeur, “Suck It Up, Bitch.”

  Another P-themed refrigerator magnet much on view these days is, “Never, never, never, never give in!” That’s a bit strident, but then we’re a culture whose idea of persevering is “Thank God It’s Friday”—Wow, we made it all the way to Friday!

  The author of “never, never, never” is, of course, that archetypal bulldog of pluck, indomitability, and Vitamin P—Winston Churchill. It’s from a speech he gave in October 1941 to the students at Harrow School, boys who soon would be shouldering the burden of battle themselves. His actual words were, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.”

  Churchill’s rhetoric was at its most stirring when the chips were down, when perseverance was an even more indispensable quality than courage. He gave four speeches during the war with perseverance as the centerpiece: “Blood, toil, tears, and sweat”; “We shall fight on the beaches”; the Harrow speech; and this one, arguably the most moving, after the fall of France, when things were darkest:

  Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

  That “thousand” was not a random number. Hitler had declared a “thousand-year Reich.” This was to be a contest to see whose system would persevere over the other.

  Churchill could also be rather witty on the subject, as he was when he said, “If you are going through hell, keep going.” But my favorite is his private mantra on that theme, condensed to a three-letter acronym: “KBO.” It’s scrawled on a coffee-stained, weathered Post-It note on my desk. It stands for “Keep Buggering On.” It works for me, but if you’re going to declaim it out loud at the dinner table, discretion is probably advised.

  Churchill was the product of an age—the Victorian—that exalted perseverance above other virtues for reasons both spiritual and practical. It was a jolly admirable quality in and of itself, but there was also a monarchy to sustain against mounting republican sentiment, uppity colonies full of mutinous wogs, and other formidable empires to fight. For Rudyard Kipling, the era’s most lapidary spokesman, perseverance served as the theme for his best-remembered poem:

  If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

  To serve your turn long after they are gone,

  And so hold on when there is nothing in you

  Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

  Another English poet of the time, William Earnest Henley (note the middle name), made it the subject of his signature piece, “Invictus”: “My head is bloody, but unbowed…. I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul.” It was Tennyson in 1842 who first enshrined perseverance as a particularly Victorian virtue: “Come, my friends, / ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world … / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” It’s the motto of Outward Bound. To this day Ulysses surely remains the quintessential inspirational poem.

  In America, at about the time Tennyson was sharpening his quills, a rhyme was introduced to schoolchildren. It survives today, amid the militant emphasis on diversity, differently abled–ness, gender neutrality, and other contemporary virtues. It went—rather, it goes—like this:

  If you find your task is hard,

  Try, try again

  Time will bring you your reward

  Try, try again

  All that other folks can do

  Why, with patience, should not you?

  Only keep this rule in view

  Try, try again.

  It’s from The McGuffey Reader. Some 120 million copies of it were placed in the grubby little hands of American schoolchildren between the 1830s and 1960s. “Try, try again” is a more accessible (as we say today) concept than “perseverance.” Same idea, only barefoot and wearing a straw hat, like Huck Finn. An adjunct concept, self-reliance, would soon become a great theme of Emerson and the Transcendentalists, sending Henry David Thoreau off into the woods in a postindustrial revolutionary huff. (How delicious it was to learn that his mother continued to do his laundry while he self-reliantly rusticated on t
he shores of Walden Pond.)

  As I type, today’s New York Times brings the obituary of a Brigadier General Robinson Risner. He was shot down over Vietnam in 1965 and endured one of the longest captivities in that misnamed hellhole usually called the “Hanoi Hilton.” Among the tortures he suffered were three years’ solitary confinement—in total darkness. As the obit recounted, “He once experienced an anxiety attack, but knew he would be beaten if he screamed. He stuffed a blanket in his mouth.” Civilian perseverance is a fine thing; in a warrior, noble.

  Laura Hillenbrand has built a brilliant literary career on the theme of perseverance, most recently with her account of the ordeal of Louie Zamperini. Zamperini was Job on steroids. After his plane ditched in the Pacific, he spent forty-seven days adrift in a raft croaking from thirst, scorched by the sun, and snapped at by ravening sharks. Having somehow survived that, he washed up on a beach into a notoriously sadistic Japanese prison camp. Having survived that, he returned home to drink and to the nightmares of posttrauma. But in the end he emerges, as the book’s title asserts, unbroken.

  It is staggering and humbling to contemplate what soldiers endure: the winter of 1778 at Valley Forge, the suicide assaults on Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg, the phosgene gas–choked trenches of World War I. Inside the German gun emplacement at Pointe du Hoc in Normandy is a plaque that commemorates what Lieutenant Colonel Rudder and his Rangers managed on that June day in 1944. It includes his bewildered remark to his son when they visited the site ten years later: “Will you tell me how we did this?” As James Michener wrote at the end of his Korean War saga, The Bridges of Toko-Ri, “Where do we find such men?”