The Search for Virtues

By LANCE MORROW

In his life of Mark Antony, Plutarch produced one hilariously elegant sentence. It turned the loverboy's debauches into a kind of civic virtue: "((Antony)) never feared the audit of his copulations, but let nature have her way, and left behind him the foundations of many families."

Plutarch as spin doctor: that was not drunken lust in Antony's eye, but, ahem, dynastic vision.

Sometimes virtues look better in retrospect. Antony died at a moment (30 B.C.) when Romans were already bitterly nostalgic for the austere virtues of the old republic. Antony represented a transition: he could live on bark and roots with his men when retreating out of the Alps before Lepidus (the old Roman virtues); and then he would anticipate the later empire by collapsing into a feckless boozehound (the new style). Anyway, Rome's embrace -- like America's now -- had grown vast and "multicultural." The republic's old purity of spirit had dissolved. Diversity overwhelmed simplicity. Quite apart from multiculturalism, if the present teeters between past vigor and future decadence, Americans right now are at their Mark Antony stage of development.

Good-old-days virtue . . . imminent decay. But that may be a misleading distinction -- an artificial paradigm that at its worst produces false conflicts, as between a kind of droolingly permissive liberalism and a family- values fanaticism.

William J. Bennett -- former drug czar, former Secretary of Education and long-shot conservative possibility for President somewhere down the road -- is a sturdy Roman who wants to restore the virtues in a dissolute time.

But in a new book, he manages to override the Roman model. Bennett suggests a superior truth about the American character: Americans do not care so much about differences in culture or even in color (despite much rancid history under that heading) as they care about character as it is expressed in behavior. The American challenge now is not to pay homage to every cultural variation and appease every ethnic sensitivity, but rather to encourage universally accepted ideals of behavior: self-discipline, compassion, responsibility, friendship, work, courage, perseverance, honesty, loyalty and faith.

Those qualities, in that order, are the 10 sections in Bennett's 831-page volume called The Book of Virtues (Simon & Schuster). The book obviously appeals to some appetite in the American people. Published in November, Bennett's book has been 10 weeks on the best-seller list.

In a sense, nostalgic moralists are almost always right, as Rome eventually proved. The problem is that nostalgic moralism may turn itself into a political program -- which produces jackboot simplism, the fascism that feels like a breath of fresh air as it approaches, and like an apocalypse in its aftermath.

Bennett is not demagoguing the verities. He anthologizes the old republic and the old virtues, but he addresses virtue at a level of commonality that is deeper than politics or nostalgia. "We must not permit our disputes over thorny political questions," Bennett writes, "to obscure the obligation we have to offer instruction to all our young people in the area in which we have, as a society, reached a consensus: namely on the importance of good character."

In this way, virtue itself becomes a diverse and embracing idea. The hundreds of selections in his book -- poems, essays, fairy tales, folklore, short stories -- are themselves multicultural, representing a variety of peoples, from Dead White Males, such as Aesop, Plato, Jefferson and Tolstoy, to imposing American blacks, such as Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., to the Indian authors of the epic Mahabharata.

The danger of The Book of Virtues is only that children will think it has a taste of medicinal worthiness. That would be too bad. It is full of stirring things the adult half-remembers and lovely oddments (Thomas A. Edison's diary in which he records that he was almost run over by a trolley because he was thinking fondly of his wife Mina) and entirely too much sentimental doggerel and the forced marches of Edgar Guest ("All this a baby costs, and yet/ His smile is worth it all, you bet").

Americans need to be repersuaded about the virtue of virtue. What are the chief American virtues now? All those that Bennett lists, no doubt. But they are terribly out of focus. Traditional societies evolve virtues; experience over generations teaches them which virtues are necessary (honor, hospitality and modesty for the Bedouin, for example). A somewhat violent, highly mobile information-television society of short moral attention span, of merciless scrutiny of its role models and of crazed blasts of overstimulation tends to subside into a psychology of grievance and entitlement.

Virtue is active, responsible and inner-directed. The atmosphere now encourages petulant passivity and other-directedness. Some of the most important virtues (self-discipline, courage, responsibility) require self- abnegation -- and nothing is further from the spirit of an age that regards self-abnegation as an offense against self-fulfillment, that pervasive American pseudo virtue that took root in the idiot '60s and killed all the healthy plants around it.

The Bennett book ought to be distributed, like an owner's manual, to new parents leaving the hospital. It is basic and corny in places, but as with everything else that got in the path of the baby boomers, it is necessary once again to reinvent the wheel.