Over at what is quickly becoming my favorite site, Postmodern Conservatives blog over at Culture11 (a great site in itself), Patrick Deneen (late of What I Saw In America, my old favorite site), has a thought provoking post on the culture of "choice" and its ability to promote a virtuous citizenry. It's worth a read. Here's part:
But perhaps this is the wrong way to proceed, and misunderstands virtue: perhaps virtue was not supposed to be this hard or this willed, but rather was an accomplishment not of individuals, but of cultures. After all, it is Aristotle who begins in the Nicomachean Ethics to speak of virtue as a form of habituation, a pre-conscious set of practices that we learn before we are necessarily conscious of them as virtues. One can compare the habituated acquisition of pre-modern virtue to the learning of table manners: children are taught gradually the proper way of eating in a civilized manner before they have any awareness of the grounds for such practice. Indeed, it is seldom the case that even parents know the deeper cultural and even philosophic grounds for the practice of table manners: it is something into which they were likewise habituated when they were children. There is a strong suggestion in Aristotle that most of the virtues of humans begin, and are ultimately successful, due to successful habituation, and not the heroic philosophic and willed capacity to act with virtue in spite of the structure and assumptions of the wider society. (snip)
A “culture” of choice is not neutral about choice itself. Thus, while virtue is available to the few counter-cultural heroes of a liberal society, the anti-culture of liberalism has the effect of “habituating” its young toward the embrace of ever greater multiplication of choices. I find very little virtue in resignation to such an outcome – rather, I see a deep reneging of the responsibility of an older generation in providing guidance to the young about choices that are better and worse, based upon the experience of history, past, and tradition....Liberal emancipation ultimately takes the form of not caring enough to send the very best. It’s watchwords are, "not that there’s anything wrong with that" - no matter what "that" is. One is hard pressed to imagine a worse philosophy of parenting, or, by extension, a worse attitude of an older generation to a younger. Perhaps we should consider whether a “culture” of choice means that we are stuck with virtue, or whether in fostering such a “culture” we are sticking it – but decidedly not virtue that we ourselves avoid – to our children.
Why should we care about the virtues, or as we now say, the "values," of the greater society? Because they set the limits on what is acceptible and what is not. We all have to live together, not as atomized individuals but as part of a greater whole. Thus for a decent society to survive I must be concerned with controlling my own base desires and cultivating my own virtue, but that includes caring about the virtue of others with whom I must associate. We need to know how to treat each other well. The public has an interest in cultivating virtues associated with a free person, namely that ability to self-govern one's passions and desires. For a homey example, take a look at my post below on dress. Fifty years ago one would be ashamed to go to church wearing blue jeans. Now one wouldn't think twice about it. Here is an example (surely not the most important one) of how the greater cultural assumptions influence behavior. To take an example more obviously associated with virtue, public cursing, both in the form of vulgarity and actual profanity (i.e., profaning the Lord's name), is certainly higher than in the past. One reason is the proliferation of such language in our movies, television and music. It sets the tone that it is acceptible to use harsh language in almost any situation (note that I make a distinction between public and private vulgarity).
Patrick Deneen may go too far in attributing the decline in virtue with the self-indulgence and consumerism that typifies modern market economies. For a corrective, see Peter Lawler. Still, I am afraid Patrick is more right than Peter.
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