Virtue, Wherefore Art Thou?
The rise of Christianity buried pagan philosophy for centuries as Christianity took control of all aspects of western life. But in 1649, the Treaty of Westphalia broke Christianity’s stranglehold on western life. The treaty ended the brutally destructive Thirty Years’ War, which pit Protestants against Catholics and tore Germany and other parts of Europe apart in a horrific carnage. The Treaty of Westphalia created the modern secular state. While Christianity still played a large role in western society, it lost its total control over it.
It slowly became like the cathedral pictured above; the structure is solid, but the inner life decayed. I do not mean to pick on Christianity per se, but if you look at the membership rolls and church attendance, they are steadily declining.
As the treaty loosened religion’s hold on secular affairs, it also opened the way for the Enlightenment and a potential renewal of pagan philosophy as students studied Greek and Latin as part of their classical education. They did not focus on the Greek religion and pantheon. Rather, they focused on government, science, and ethics. The Athenians executed Socrates for atheism and corrupting youth with secular-based philosophy. Socrates, Stoics, and many other Greek philosophers wrote of virtue and self-control. The scholars of the Enlightenment read these works and endeavored to go beyond religion to the development of self.
Most religion operates at the lower levels of the brain, using reward and punishment to compel behavior. Institutional religion is like a Skinner Box and is a form of operant conditioning. Institutional religion also emphasizes belief and acceptance rather than doubt and questioning. These suppress the higher cognitive functions. The Gnostics and their thoughts on Thomas and doubt are an exception. Perhaps that is why the institutional Christian church brutally suppressed them. But that is a story for another day.
The Greek philosophers and virtue operate at a higher cognitive and potentially moral levels. Operant conditioning works on reward and punishment. People do the right thing either to obtain a reward (heaven) or to avoid a punishment (hell). That sounds harsh, but I suspect it is true for most people. Institutional religion is a very effective way to provide a moral compass of sorts for most of society. Virtue requires people to do the right thing because it is the right thing, without hope of reward or fear of punishment. It is the opposite of operant conditioning and requires critical thinking. The scholars and men of action in the Enlightenment saw this and strove for virtue.
But virtue is damn hard and requires constant self-reflection. That is perhaps one reason the Greeks posted the sign “Know Thyself” over the entrance to the Oracle at Delphi.
Virtue requires self-reflection and critical thinking to determine “what is right”, unlike institution religion, which tells its adherents “what is right”. Therefore, on the surface, virtue-based approaches seem to have more risk, as “what is right” may be in the beholder’s eye and vary from person-to-person. But, as history has shown, institutional religion can also be fraught with problems. The institutional Christian religions brought us the Inquisition, the Thirty Years’ War, and other assorted problems and horrors, both large and small.
The issue is power. We must temper power with virtue or leaders fall into the trap that Lord Acton discussed: “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Virtue must control and direct power.
We still have institutional religion, but except for Islam, its power seems to be on the wane. So, what of virtue? Where do we learn virtue? It seems to be missing from society, culture, and education. I have taken courses on ethics at the bachelors, masters, and doctorate levels, but they barely mention virtue if they did at all.
When the Enlightenment came through after the Thirty Years’ War, Freemasonry came on the scene to help promulgate its ideas and teach virtue. Without going into a lengthy paper, I think Stoicism influenced the founding of Freemasonry. Most of Freemason’s founders had a classic education, where they studied Greek and Latin. These readings almost certainly included Marcus Aurelius’ Mediations, a commentary on Stoic philosophy. Freemasonry’s tenets are very similar to those of stoicism.
Lodges helped initiants to understand virtue through the “tools and instruments of architecture and symbolic emblems most expressive. In particular, the square and compasses taught the initiants to “circumscribe their desires and keep their passions in due bounds”. American lodges acted as a training ground for citizenship in a Republic.
But the excesses of the French Revolution and the Morgan Affair set forces in motion to curb the Enlightenment and the power of Freemasonry. Freemasonry is still around, but I suspect it is a shadow of its pre-Morgan self. It came back and flourished in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries but seemed to become more about networking and white male power than about virtue, despite the tagline, “Freemasonry makes good men better”.
So, what do we do now to bring back virtue into our culture?
First, we need to teach virtue through both a critical examination of the ancient Greeks and other cultures that taught it. Buddhism provides some fertile ground as well, since it has elements of both philosophy and religion, as well as mindfulness. How do you develop the skills to develop self-awareness? Schools can teach this as well as online courses.
Second, we need to conduct case studies of governments, institutional religions, and cults to critically examine them. I do not mean critical as in Critical Race Theory, or Critical Theory or any of its variants. Rather, I mean open and objective analysis without a specific political or cultural lens and objective. How do institutions lose their way? How do utopian ideas become cults? These case studies should include cases from multiple cultures and regions around the world.
Third, schools need to teach critical thinking. While schools engage in the various offshoots of Critical Theory, a Marxist dogma, they do not teach critical thinking. We need to teach critical thinking and use it in case studies and the critical examination of history and government.
The operant conditioning of institutional religion is ideal for a relatively static agricultural or industrial society where the rules do not need to change rapidly to respond to new and dynamic circumstances. A virtue-based approach is better suited to dynamic environments where rules may lose their validity outside their relevant range. A blend of both provides stability where required and flexibility where required.
Other blogs on virtue
Virtue and Courtesy are Requirements for Effective Solution Development and a Healthy Society
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