Virtue

In his essay "Looking Back on the Spanish War, George Orwell wrote the following passage: 

Civic Virtue  in Green-Wood Cemetery
by Rhododendrites

Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the 'change of heart', much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system. (emphasis added)

Orwell's concession of the "partial truth" of the talk of the need for a "change of heart" proceeds naturally from a comment he made in his essay about the work of Charles Dickens:

The central problem — how to prevent power from being abused — remains unsolved. Dickens... had the vision to see that. ‘If men would behave decently the world would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds.

Orwell identifies a classic paradox  here: how do you make a good society out of human beings with impulses, and in some case a real disposition, to behave badly. The context of these quotes also hints at a solution. In art and literature in religion, in all areas where human beings choose to participate and where we accept our participation may change us, even if we do not necessarily choose to change, we consent to address our inner lives and thoughts, the source from which our behaviour springs. Thus, a writer such as Charles Dickens, or a religious teacher, or a poet, painter or playwright can exhort us to see ourselves and the world in a different way. Religious teachers and artists have the authority to ask us to change the way we think, and in that sense the person we are. Politics, on the other hand, exists to define standards of behaviour we will, if necessary, enforce. Enforcement, in the final analysis, means some form of violence. 

To begin with the principle: the body politic does not have the right to shape its members. Politics stops at my skin. To go on to the practical: as Orwell notes, focus on the individual serves to distract from the real business of politics: putting in place the rules, expectations, and structures we require in order to live together as the people we are, not the people some utopian vision hopes for.

In practice, this means we ought to resist the utopian dreams of a new kind of human in a regenerate world. We should also, just as strongly, resist conservatives who excuse their resistance to modest, practical changes on the spurious grounds these changes will benefit working class people who behave in "unvirtuous" ways. In fact, when we analyze these two impulses, we often discover they are actually two sides of the same coin. 

By happenstance, this February, Rod Dreher's blog published two comments in succession, illustrating both sides of the problem with the politicization of virtue. 

First, Dreher writes about measures to reduce child poverty, as well as the proposal to hike the minimum wage from its current level to fifteen dollars an hour, or some value sufficient to sustain a family over an average week's work. Dreher expresses concern a government child allowance and a livable minimum wage will degrade the morality of the working class. He cites an article by Ezra Klein:

Wanda Lavender lives in Milwaukee. She’s 39, with six children and one grandchild. She used to be a day care teacher and proud of the work. But after a decade, she was still making $9 an hour. She was a single mother by then, and the money wasn’t enough. So she began working at Popeyes, too. She did both jobs for a time, putting in more than 60 hours a week.... I’d met Lavender because she’s organizing for a $15 minimum wage, and she said the experience had been transformative.

Rod Dreher reads Ezra Klein's article, including the account of Ms. Lavender's situation, and responds thus:

But the thing that struck me in reading the lede to Ezra Klein’s piece was: how do you get to be 39 years old, with six children and one grandchild, and no husband in the house?

I'll resist the temptation to list the significant number of ways a woman can end up with children and no husband, but Mr. Dreher has concluded it has something to do with self indulgence or immorality. Indeed, his whole article consists of contradictory comments, expressing an inarticulate and ultimately irrelevant sense of resentment. The question of government supports for children is a matter of justice to the children, who, as Dreher conceded, can't choose their parents. The minimum wage proceeds from a basic proposition related to human dignity: a person's time is their life. To ask, or to force, them to exchange it for a wage too low to permit them a decent life violates their dignity. This concern is not a new one: when St. John of Patmos introduces one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse with:

‘A quart of wheat for a day’s pay, and three quarts of barley for a day’s pay, but do not damage the olive oil and the wine!’ 

 This often gets interpreted as a reference to famine, but it literally says the standard labourer's wage does not suffice to sustain life. Rod Dreher asks

...whether or not the people who are going to be asked to help the world’s Wandas out by paying more for consumer goods to pay her a $15 minimum wage have a right to expect anything from them.

Of course, corporations paying less than living wages, and people who take advantage of the low prices of goods and services offered by those companies, receive a subsidy from the "Wandas", not the other way around; not to mention the hundreds of people from Cambodia, Bangladesh, India, and elsewhere who toil under conditions we would never accept in order to support our lifestyles. When it comes to people who actually produce goods and services for less than a living wage, George Orwell, John of Patmos and a host of other writers are correct, and Dreher is deeply mistaken: we need a change in the economic system, not a change in hearts. We especially ought not to denigrate the millions of women whose heroic work, both raising children and sustaining the economies we depend on, in far less comfort and with less recognition than they deserve. 

Just a few days later, Rod Dreher writes a very different post, one where, apparently without realizing it, he does a pretty complete about face. He writes about the situation of Jodi Shaw at Smith College, crediting her with "Living Not by Lies". In his blog post, he relays Shaw's own account of her experience of hectoring at anti-racism training sessions, the about face by an administration, which she claims thwarted a project of some importance to her career. I see no need to treat all Ms. Shaw's claims as certain or true in order to appreciate the imbalance, and indeed the irony, of an elite institution addressing structural inequalities by requiring their least powerful employees to participate in "trainings". I have an extreme skepticism of any attempt to meld politics with notions of therapy or personal improvement, but you don't need my skepticism to wonder whether these trainings make much difference to the actual problems they purport to address. Consider the status of Smith College, an elite institution tasked with, among other things, providing credentials for admission to the upper levels of economic opportunity in one of the most unequal nations, in one of the most unequal epochs of history. Even without my mistrust of the therapeutic, Orwell's comment about the privileged favouring a change in hearts over a change in economic systems appears to fit this case pretty neatly.

In the larger sense, it makes sense to have, at the very least, reservations about the promotion of virtue as a solution to social problems. While a decent society inevitably depends on the willingness of its member to conform to structures designed to promote decency, it still makes more sense to guide behaviour than to attempt to mold character. As Ralph Nader once put it, if you want drivers to not get into collisions because their brakes lock up, installing anti-lock braking systems works better than trying to drill all drivers in braking techniques.