Republican Virtues

Republican virtues - underlying the idea of the classical republic was a virtuous citizenry. When the citizens lost their virtue, they lost the freedom of their republic.

Too bad we have people wanting the Ten Commandments in schools when we should have Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. 

In Vice, Virtue And The Bill Of Rights Sheila Kennedys comments on another site about this subject. This paragraph stood out from the rest:

America’s history should not be whitewashed. We have frequently fallen short of the civic goals and governing philosophy embedded in the Declaration, the Constitution and Bill of Rights. But we have also honored the men and women who exemplified the civic virtues identified above–the civic leaders and elected officials who worked for justice and served with integrity and prudence, who have insisted on honoring America’s professed values and working for the common good. 

No one is perfect - that is the core of humility. A country cannot be more perfect than its people. 

Speaking of humility: My Father’s Conservatism. (The Dispatch)

“You don’t ask a person a question like that.” I still do not know, and there’s a chance he does not remember. He’s not culturally conservative either; my father has always been more of a “live and let live” kind of guy. I am talking more about the plainest meaning of the word conservative. The man is careful and circumspect.

He’s uncomfortable speaking in absolutes and is careful about asserting knowledge or skill, even in fields where he’s an expert. He’d rather be quiet about what he knows on the chance that his passivity opens the floor for someone else to share. “Ask so-and-so about that, he knows a lot more than I do,” he always says. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. But the point is that he does not care about being perceived to know a lot, he cares about being honest about the limits of his knowledge. He has no shame in appearing uninformed. My father is perhaps the wisest person I know, simply because he has never imagined himself to be.

*** 

 My father has always told me: “As soon as you think you got it all figured out, that’s the moment you don’t.” The vast expanse of information, the limitation of time, and the flawed nature of our species constrain our ability to ever know all that much. Yet, as long as we understand this, we’re capable of acting with wisdom. Sadly, it seems such self-awareness has gone out of fashion. When expertise, accrued knowledge, and circumspection become suspect, I’m not sure what about today’s “conservatism” is all that conservative anymore.

 Frankly, that is the conservatism I can get behind.

Rather than replicate the list of virtues and vices from Ms. Kennedy's site, here is the original list.

Reading a list of ARISTOTLE'S Virtues and Vices, I cannot find anywhere Trump and his pals fall within the definition of virtuous.

Not to be found on any of the lists is irony, which Samuel Loncar argues in Irony in the Age of Trump is a virtue needed nowadays.

The metaphysics of irony, its committed stance on what reality is like, becomes evident by observing those people for whom irony is a foreign condition, like a certain kind of ideologue (the kind that seems to dominate social media and news). Confident that the world is exactly the shape that they see it as, and that all it needs is themselves and those like them to be put to rights, they experience no tension in whole-hearted commitment to their cause; they take delight in the denunciation of their opponents as the unwashed and unrighteous enemies of the good, i.e., themselves. They live in a world cramped enough to be commensurate to their self-righteous egos. In such a world, irony is a crime against reality.

Irony’s opposite, then, is not sincerity. It is identification without remainder: humans lost in their causes, with no subjectivity left, nothing that cannot be fully commensurate to the world and clearly expressed. Irony is impossible for the fanatic, the anti-ironist who is thus himself an irony, for he fails to see the absurd contradiction between his small ideas and the big world that will surely fail him, contradict him, and refuse him his dreams, all of which he will ignore and deny while preaching his gospel. Comedy is one of the last preserves of irony, a safe space for the sacrilege that is the backward compliment meaning pays to piety after gods have died. This is why the surest measure of the totalitarian attitude is the hatred and suppression of comedy, which takes as its bread the contradictions, the ironies, of our lives.

I agree irony is a virtue needed more than all the certainties of social media and the tribes populating them.  

sch 5/12