Standards are the Raw Materials of Virtue: He Who Controls the Standards, Controls Behavior
In one sense, virtue is how a society controls and manages behavior. Some systems and societies use virtue to produce beneficent outcomes, while others use virtue, at least as the societal standards define it, to produce power and control. Religions historically filled this role and defined the elements of virtue. In another sense, virtue is an individual function and individuals seek to transmute their lower natures to a higher nature. Philosophy and some initiatic societies fill this role. The two came into a historical conflict when the Athenian government executed Socrates for atheism and subverting their youth with his ideas. Not that one path is better than the other. They serve different functions and sometimes, such as Sufis and Islam, they can exist together. Sometimes in harmony and sometimes not. The issue is the definition of virtue via standards and endstates.
The medieval (and later) alchemists dreamed of turning lead into gold. We know it can be done with intense energy and processes. Likewise, we can create diamonds by subjecting them to intense pressure and heat. The Freemasons speak of making good men better. Given the growth of Co-Masonry and Female Masonry, perhaps we should say make good people better. Regardless of men or people, the various Masonic orders use the same symbol for this transformation of the rough ashlar to the perfect ashlar.
The center figure is an alchemical symbol for transmutation. Forget the lead into gold transmutation and focus on the “good people better” transmutation. There are some students of the alchemists that think the lead into gold was just a metaphor for purifying the essence of one’s soul or consciousness.
Processes have inputs, to include raw materials; actions, events, and decisions; and outputs. The key to process design and control is to understand what results/outputs we want to achieve. Virtue as an output is in the beholder’s eye. Religions, philosophies, legal systems, and now social justice movements all have their view of virtue, but there can be wide dissimilarities between them. Even within a religion, there can be differences of opinion on ethics. Terrorists can use the same texts to justify their horrific actions as co-religionists use to encourage peace and compassion. I covered the differences between religion and philosophy in Virtue: Religion and Philosophy, What does the Founders’ Vision Embrace? so I will not belabor the point here.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows how complex virtue is. For example, they state:
Possessing a virtue is a matter of degree. To possess such a disposition fully is to possess full or perfect virtue, which is rare, and there are a number of ways of falling short of this ideal (Athanassoulis 2000). Most people who can truly be described as fairly virtuous, and certainly markedly better than those who can truly be described as dishonest, self-centred and greedy, still have their blind spots—little areas where they do not act for the reasons one would expect. So someone honest or kind in most situations, and notably so in demanding ones, may nevertheless be trivially tainted by snobbery, inclined to be disingenuous about their forebears and less than kind to strangers with the wrong accent.
For the US at least, I think collective virtue, supported by individual virtue can be measured by how well the behavior manifests the goals in the Preamble to the Constitution: “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”. Behavior that helps to manifest these goals is virtuous and behavior that precludes them is not. The keys to this virtuous behavior are integrity, self-control, self-reliance, respect for the rule of law, and a strong work ethic. In many ways, they mirror the ancient Greek version of virtue ethics.
When we marry this with Kant’s Categorical Imperative—people are ends in themselves and not means to an end, we potentially have a workable version of virtue.
In the end, virtue is about behavior. Both what we do and how we do it. The ends, no matter how good they appear, cannot justify the means, if the means are not in accordance with virtue. Virtue systems, call them processes, direct and control behavior by setting and enforcing standards. So, some systems change the definition of virtue by changing the standards and change behavior.
So let us start with the concept of a process. My book, Thrive in the Age of Knowledge, provides extensive coverage of process design and control, as do a few blogs, to include Critical Thinking and Policy Development and Analysis and Virtue and Pandora’s Box: Effective Policy. If we look at virtue manifestation as a process, there are several potential sets for the events, actions, and decisions section of the process:
- Religion
- Philosophy
- Laws and regulations
- Societal conditioning and expectations
Now what is interesting, is religion is declining, at least in the west. It appears the social justice movement penetrated it and seems to have a significant influence over the standards that religions propagate. Societal conditioning and new laws are taking its place in the West as the arbiters of approved behavior.
The 4 systems above all propagate standards. They may call them divine commandments, secular laws, philosophical outlooks, or a new justice, but they are all standards of some form.
But the churches remain a force, so what do we see? A very profound change in standards of acceptable conduct. A new generation of clerics and church managers is changing the expectations for behavior and standards of conduct. With virtue, the raw materials are standards.
The philosophical approach all but died with the French Revolution. The Romanticism movement was a counter to the Enlightenment and a way to tamp down its force and drive. Interestingly, Marxism, a utopian philosophical movement, added an energy back to it, that is still driving many social justice movements today. It also substituted its own standards for those of the Enlightenment. Critical Thinking and International Relations Theory, The “Critical” in Critical Theories, and a few other blogs provide background that shows the evolution of this thought and how it affected standards.
The new laws, or at least the approach to enforcing the law, are transforming. Prosecutors selective enforce laws and some cities are significantly curtailing and shrinking their police forces. Look at the rising crime in the cities. Even Nike closed a factory outlet in Portland over the crime. Look at Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Baltimore, and other cities. This trend did not start with Black Lives Matter protests and COVID. They started with Johnson’s Great Society and the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s. BLM and COVID just intensified them.
Without standards of some sort, how do we define, measure, and assess virtue? Those that seek to change western society understand these mechanics. They do not seek to do away with standards and the virtue processes. Rather, they seek to co-opt them and change their standards. The processes appear to be the same, so the change in standards goes unnoticed, at least as to their effects. The changes in the four processes work together. As they lower standards in one area, it makes it easier and less noticeable to lower standards in other areas.
And as the standards lower, our understanding of virtue changes as well. The processes still transform, but the end product is vastly different. Many of these movements see the ends justify the means and violate Kant’s Categorical Imperative and transform the concept of self-reliance to a group concept. We seem to move in the direction of operant conditioning and cognitive behavioral conditioning.