The Connection Between Public Virtue and Our Politics

Washington almost always approaches political problems incorrectly.

Instead of thinking about human beings as unique individuals, many experts and lawmakers focus only on them as numbers to be used in mathematical solutions. What they forget is that the endless studies, books, and blogs that are produced, often miss what matters most about human life.

For example we can look at the numbers to find that being raised in a married family reduces a child’s probability of living in poverty by about 82 percent. But to speak of marriage, work, and education only in terms of utility and usefulness degrades them because their benefits go beyond the body.

Of course, we know these institutions can secure economic well-being and increase social mobility. But institutions like a family form us morally and shape our character, are foundations for virtue – which liberty cannot stand without.

Index of Culture and Opportunity

Given this surplus of info and shortage of insight, the Heritage Foundation has produced the 2015 Index of Culture and Opportunity, which Yuval Levin calls “a corrective to a misguided way of thinking about society that too often holds sway in American politics.”

The flaw, according to Levin, is that “to make challenges easier to understand and address, people divide politics into discrete ‘issues’ and try to take them up individually.” Each becomes a “social” issue, for example, and solutions are crafted to solve the problem in a scientific fashion by focusing on observable data and relying on statistics.

Liberals and conservatives alike are guilty of this utilitarian approach to social problems because they “both seem to believe that ­advancing human progress is a matter of shaping society in a certain way, rather than of shaping the human soul in a certain way.”

But this supposes that society is composed of individuals with the proper habits of mind and behavior to be free—not only from external constraint, but from one’s own self-destructive emotions and desires.

Good citizens, however, are not self-generating. They are the outcome of an education, not the K-12 kind or even college, but a moral education that the individual receives from society’s institutions.

To think this way reaffirms the complexity of politics, Levin says, it “view[s] society as an intergenerational compact for the preservation of the prerequisites for human flourishing to be advanced through the complex, layered architecture of our mediating institutions.” Such an approach reclaims the moral dimension that has been missing from our debates, and makes politics more human and less technical.

This does not mean there is only a single acceptable outcome—this would destroy the diversity of human personalities that enrich our lives.

“Flourishing”, as defined by Levin, takes many shapes so the particulars will differ from person to person. The point here and in the Index is that human flourishing becomes more likely when one participates in certain aspects of human life, such as family, work, leisure, religion, and liberal education.

Fixing America’s Trajectory

John Adams observed that without public virtue “there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty.” Since public virtue presupposes private virtue, “Every man must seriously set himself to root out his Passions, Prejudices and Attachments, and to get the better of his private Interest.”

If Americans are to correct the country’s trajectory, they should rekindle their convictions about the role of virtue in the modern world.

Such a rekindling demands a different way of thinking about our time, one that asks the correct questions and views the American virtues—self-reliance, assertiveness, civility, and moderation— as answers.

It requires us to see man’s happiness as being above physical pleasure, and more than material gain. It requires a way of thinking that considers the soul as the better part of our nature.