What has happened to civic virtue?
What has happened to civic virtue in a time we need it more than ever? Where is it? Republican forms of government, more than any other, need officials and citizens practicing civic virtue.
Civic virtue is the moral code of citizens emphasizing participating in politics to promote the common good. Civic virtue demands civility, social cooperation, honesty, courage, being informed about current events and ability to reason and deliberate based on evidence about matters of public concern.
The practice of these obligations has become ossified to be replaced with a degree of thoughtless selfishness that beggars the imagination. We see John Kennedy’s question: “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country?” as hopelessly outdated and quaint.
Today we see political reward for self-indulgence and self-centeredness. Bad impulses based on ignorance, hubris, cupidity, envy, hatred, misogyny or prejudice are no longer restrained. Incivility is rampant. No pretense is made of information based public reasoning. Slogans replace thought; dogma replaces critical analysis; condemnation replaces consideration. We seek not to be informed but to have our biases confirmed.
The dearth of public reason is seen daily in Helena where we hear appeals on the part of the legislative majority to maximizing freedom from government regulations — the more freedom the better. So, let people bring guns wherever they want (except the Legislature) even though the problem this was meant to solve was never articulated and we now have a solution to a nonexistent problem that will create its own problems or don’t mandate that people wear masks even though that protects the public. Inconsistently these same people argue for government to regulate the freedom and rights of women to control their own bodies, of the LGTBQ community to be treated equitably, of Native Americans to be treated with equality, the poor with dignity, etc. There is no consistency in position or underlying philosophy. On the one hand freedom is the paramount virtue and right. No, on the other it can be severely limited for religious or cultural and discriminatory reasons.
Or take the incessant braying about freedom. While freedom is critical, in the name of alleged freedom these purveyors of what is essentially anarchy forget that living in society means that we give up some of our personal freedom in order to secure the collective benefits of living in society and avoiding the evils that would occur if everyone was totally unrestrained. The incessant chanting about personal freedom in opposing public health measures is pernicious. Mechanically repeating the appeal to freedom does not obviate the necessity of providing reasoned arguments for one’s position. Remember: Freedom without wisdom is madness.
When you have political positions that are not grounded in facts or reason, by default you have appeals based on ignorance, superstitions, stereotypes and biases which are not solid ground for efficacious or beneficial policy-making but instead breed intolerance.
This atrophy of civic virtue produces an increasing inability to engage in constructive public deliberation. People no longer base their policy preferences on facts. People don’t think for themselves but rely on social media or authoritarian leaders to give them the unvalidated answers which they then repeat as though the pronouncements were infallible. Since their positions do not have a solid foundation, if you disagree with them, they resort to personal attacks and emotional opinions as we have seen in Butte regarding the Health Department. “It is only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves.” (Kafka) If an idea is not congruent with our biases or stereotypes, we reject the idea out of hand. Public discourse in the United States has become a vast wasteland devoid of civility and reasoning.
It is time that we take back our politics. "People are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsel of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves." — Edmund Burke
Dr. John W. Ray teaches classes in ethics, public policy and political philosophy at Montana Tech. Variations of this editorial will be presented late this year at conferences at the Sorbonne University, Paris; The University of Melbourne, Australia and Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Montana Tech.
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