Once upon a time, there was such a thing as virtue. It towered above all the lands and all the people; it was firm, resolute, and beloved. Classical and then Christian, the virtues not only maintained society, but breathed life into it. Emanating authority, truth, and goodness, virtues were the standard of righteousness that every person sought to imitate. In being true, the virtues were universal; they demanded the same of everyone and thus bound them all together. In being good, they nourished the hearts of the men and women who embraced them. Virtues were the moral foundations of society. In fact, they were what made a society a society, instead of a confused mass of people living in the same place at the same time. I am sorry to say that our own modern society is very much that, a pandemonium of voices all shouting at each other and in different languages too. We have lost our sense of virtue; we have lost that stake in nation and community, our sense of an absolute and common good. If we are to flourish, if we are to be anything but a mass destroyed by anarchic individualism, we must have virtue.
Now, the modern reader may immediately object on the grounds that we do not know what is true, or what is good, and different people in different places had different virtues. To this, it must be said that of course not all virtues were made equal. There are some that are truer and better than the others: the virtues of a Confucian are certainly not the same as that of a Christian. What is of note to this piece, however, is that the virtues were seen and understood as true and good and beautiful. They bound society. Certainly, one people may be further away than that of another, but where all virtuous peoples have been similar is that they have all had virtues, and they all have not had values.
First coined by Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘values’ were meant to cauterize the wound left by the retreat of Christendom from the forefront of society. As Christianity felt the bite of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, Nietzsche endeavored to maintain morality by putting the will first. Not only did he leave it up to the individual to decide for himself what was right and what was wrong; he left it up for every man to choose whether there was such a thing as “right” at all. Whereas virtues were maintained by a set moral order and a basis in objective truth, values were at the mercy of peoples’ every whim and appetite. Good or bad, true or untrue, what mattered was the valuing, not what was being valued. Chaotic and disorderly, values were a Nietzschean Frankenstein: a conglomeration of limbs and parts that never should have seen the spark of life.
Today, as we see on William and Mary’s own website, values have replaced virtues. They sit at the height of our Olympus, having dominated society’s ethos for over a century. In every institution, classroom, and home, values have utterly usurped virtue’s hegemony. Political parties campaign on ‘family values’ or ‘progressive values’ or ‘chicken values’ or whatever else someone decided to value on a particular day. You would be hard pressed not to see ‘values’ ridden as hard as a pack mule in order to carry the epistemological weight of the everyday person’s beliefs. But ultimately, values are valueless. They are an expression of what somebody likes or feels; what they are not is an expression of truth. Indeed, they are rather the death of truth, and the death of all that truth carries on its Atlassan back.
This is not to say that values left the world devoid of goodness. William and Mary lists integrity, service, and excellence as values that the college strives to maintain, and those are certainly good things. Of course, many people in many places believe and promote good things. But these goods are lost and separated in the whirlwind of modern skepticism. Prolific author GK Chesterton argues that “the modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity ([he is] sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
What makes virtues much superior is their harmony with each other. They are always dancing with each other, always ensuring that the rhythm and pace of their steps are free from stumbling. Without a sense of truth, we cannot have a sense of justice. Without a sense of justice, we have no use for truth. Virtue is rooted in the loving embrace of harmony, whereas values are discordant dogs howling in wild cacophony. Take William and Mary’s ‘value’ of integrity: “We are honorable, equitable, trustworthy, and committed to the highest ethical standards in all that we do.” What is honor in the absence of righteousness? What is equity divorced from an objective justice? What is honesty in a world lacking truth? What is an ethical standard in a society without any moral boundary? Our college’s intentions are good, but the hegemony of ‘values’ is simply unsustainable. It is an anarchy.
Nowhere is this more true than in the case of humility. Today, our society is rife with both a radical skepticism of the world and yet also the wildest confidence in the worldly. Humility, as Chesterton notes elsewhere, was always meant to make people doubt their means, but never their end. If even mentioned by the modern today, humility is always used as a crude dig at every faith or conviction that defies the doctrine of ‘values’. In September, I vividly recall talking at the Club Fair with a few socialist activists who were shocked and repulsed by my assertion that all of my beliefs were correct. They said, “But how can you really know?” and “it’s so arrogant to assume that!” and so on. Of course, if I thought my beliefs were wrong, they would simply not be my beliefs.
It is good to doubt yourself, but it is not good to doubt your self. At colleges like ours, all too often are people haunted with questions such as “What am I doing with my life?” and more importantly, “Why?” Humility has been contorted into a skeptic plague, where purpose and goodness are doubted, but wonder and faith are forbidden. ‘Values’ deify the self at the expense of deity; they exclude and isolate you from everything outside of your own will. Humility, as a virtue, is supposed to be in communion with confidence and justice. It critiques one’s vitreousness, not his or her sense of virtue. If we are to be humble, we cannot doubt humility.
The fundamental question people of our generation face is very simple: What do we believe in? While values still reign supreme, their foundations, assuming those exist, are beginning to crumble. More and more, young Americans look outside of themselves for meaning, goodness, and truth. They, whether consciously or not, find Nietzche’s answer unsatisfactory, as a Band-Aid to an infected wound. Despair and nihilism are what emerge from that lesion of values, as we find that the self cannot stand up to its own scrutiny. We doubt truth, we doubt the world, and we ultimately doubt ourselves. We doubt even if doubt can be doubted. Truth finds itself prey in a meaningless jungle of words. The will simply cannot satisfy; our souls yearn for more.
Yet, virtue issues its everlasting call, and more and more people run to its cry. It sings to us, ‘there is something called the true, the good, and the beautiful.’ We see that it is not a delusion at all, that the world is as it seems, that we can believe our eyes and our hearts. Dear reader, ask yourself, what do you believe in? What do you value, and why? For it is time to say that you and I believe in something greater than ourselves. It is time for us to leave values behind. It is time for virtue to reign again.
