“Resentment, like water, always flows downhill.” Even more often and for a longer time than I have spoken of the difference between “coercive” and “capacitating” power, I have seen and said that about the flow of resentment.
Read moreVirtueless Virtue, Worthless Worth
One’s character (ethos) is one’s destiny (daimon).
— Heraclitus
It has been said since the ancient Greeks that genuine virtue is its own reward.
What’s more, according to the ancient Greek authority Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, happiness — in the Greek of Aristotle’s time: eudaemonia, from the prefix eu- “good,” plus daimon “guiding spirit, fate, destiny” — is itself no more and no less than virtuous activity. According to him, if one wants to live a truly happy life, what one needs to do, and all one needs to do, is always to act in accordance with virtue to the best of one’s abilities.
If one only so acts, Aristotle assures us, then regardless of what chance — that is, what hap — may bring our way, we will remain open to it, which is to say happy. Aristotle teaches that virtue itself is of the very highest worth when measured in terms of such true happiness, the greatest of all good gifts, which virtuous action, and it alone, always brings us.
If one is mean-spirited rather than good-spirited, however, then one will be unhappy. The more mean-spirited one is, the more miserable one will become.
As Heraclitus taught centuries before Aristotle, whichever destiny befalls one, whether that of happiness or that of misery, is all a matter of what habit, to give a variant definition of ethos, one draws about oneself.
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Thus, one does not need to get paid in cash or any equivalent thereof in order to be motivated to act virtuously. Indeed, if one acts in order to receive any such payment, then one is not acting with any true virtue at all. Rather, one is acting from sheer greed, which, so far from being a life-enhancing virtue is nothing but a deadening vice.
It is no accident that greed is listed as one of the traditional “seven deadly sins” in Christian tradition, for example. Greed kills the spirit, reducing one to a spiritless life of unending unhappiness, regardless of whatever lies to the contrary one chooses to believe that one believes.
Greed is without limit. It never has enough. However many possessions greed manages to pile up, it is never satisfied and thus never brings happiness. What it brings, rather, is cash into the pockets of the masters of the contemporary global consumer market system.
That system feeds greed, and feeds upon it. The global consumer market system always fosters that evil spirit.
The old Hank Ketcham cartoon above captures that same spirit perfectly.
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The one limit of virtue is the absence of a limit.
— Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses
The absence of limit Gregory of Nyssa attributes to virtue in that line is of a very different sort from the absence of any limit to the greed fostered by the modern global market system. While no number of products, however large, can ever be enough to satisfy greed, virtue limits itself to seeking nothing external to itself. As I’ve already written above, Aristotle taught — some seven centuries before Gregory of Nyssa composed the above lines — that virtue is its own reward and that a life lived in accordance with virtue is precisely what constitutes happiness itself.
Such virtue — virtue that is its own reward and through the exercise of which comes happiness itself — is of no worth that can be measured by any set of external standards. To put the point colloquially, such virtue has no “cash value,” regardless of the nature of the cash at issue, be it dollars and cents, pounds and pence, or pride in oneself and in one’s accomplishments.
Whatever gets passed off as a virtue but does have any such “cash value” in any such cash of whatever sort, is nothing but a marketing scam, the vicious scam of marketing something altogether without virtue as though it had some. Such marketed virtues are virtue-less.
Whatever may be their worth in terms of cash value of such virtue-less virtues — that is, their salability in the contemporary global marketplace for machine-produced goods and their equivalent in digital, ideational, and other sorts of bits — they are without genuine worth of any sort at all to human beings, to any other earthly entities, to the gods in heaven, or to the very earth itself. Their market-worth is utterly worthless for whatever is truly worth anything.
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Office for Emergency Management, War Production Board (circa 1942–43)
Not to take any wooden nickels is good advice at all times, not just during World War II or other times of emergency, regardless of whether the emergency is national, international, or personal. Under any circumstances, whether emergency or every-day, it is always wise to stick to the real thing whenever it comes to virtue. Such a practice is itself a real virtue, which brings, as do all real virtues, its own reward.