Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
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 …
Standards, Cultural Relativism, and Broken Windows This blog builds on the prior blogs Virtue: religion and philosophy, what does the founders’ vision embrace? and Virtue and Pandora’s Box: Effective Policy. Pandora’s Box discussed the damage some Victorian virtue policies wrought, but said the social justice movement’s “cure” may be worse than the disease it sought …
Ethics, Morality, and Virtue: Relative vs. Absolute Meaning Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” Genesis 11:4 “Then the queen began to lament and to weep, …
DIE Hydra! The image above is above is Heracles and nephew Iolaus fighting the hydra. This was Heracles second of twelve labors. The hydra had nine heads and when Heracles destroyed one, another sprouted in its place. Heracles and Iolaus found that if Heracles destroyed a head and Iolaus burned it quickly, the head …
The Looming NCO Crisis, Part 3: Military Culture Part 1 of this series framed the problem of the looming NCO crisis. Part 2 examined why the recruiting base is so low and ended on the cautionary note that even if the military solved the recruiting crisis, if the culture does not support excellence and …
The Looming NCO Crisis Part 2: Why is the Recruit Base so Low? Part 1 of this series discussed the low recruiting base for the Army and how that will translate into an NCO crisis. The Chief of Staff of the Army reports that only 23% of Americans in the target age range are …
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 …
The rule of law allowed the US to grow exponentially. It both facilitated foreign investment in railroads and other infrastructure and provided a stable set of rules for the growing civilization. But American culture is increasingly inclined to simply ignore laws people find inconvenient. As we ignore laws, we lose respect for the rule of law and the virtues that allows American to prosper.
The cardinal virtues and courtesy are essential for a healthy society and the formulation of policies and programs that solve problems rather than creating new ones.