What makes people good?

National Review, Sept 9, 1991 by David Martin

This is the minimum costing of whatever it is that makes people good. If you think that you can get it more cheaply, and so preserve your access to nice words, nice concepts, and appealing stances, reality will exact an even higher price.

A Home for Virtue

THE CASE for authority and sanctions is a case for the enforcement of rules. Goodness is more achievable where good habits rest on good order and clear expectations. Chaos is an enemy of the practice of virtue, and confusion a breeding ground of cumulative evil. That does not imply that we should, as Hilaire Belloc satirically put it,

Hold tight to nurse

For fear of something worse. But the "peaceable commerce" of human beings one with another does depend on degree," that is on graduated authority. Otherwise we are all prey to appetite," the "universal wolf." Only God can allow Satan to "go up and down upon the earth" wreaking what havoc he or she will. Only God can advance innocently toward evil to pay the cost of good directly in His own person. To imitate the innocent divine victim cannot be a matter of social policy, though it remains open to individual heroism at a particular exemplary moment. Indeed that exemplary moment is the most moving of all human demonstrations of the good, but it is not in the cognizance or remit of Caesar or society.

Anyone will recognize the menace of "appetite" and disorder who has had a child cruelly exposed in a playground where authority refuses to pre-empt the issue of bad behavior. Once accord to ill will a freedom properly accorded to good will, and good will begins to pass out of currency. It is not that people can or should be forced to be good, but that authority has to provide an opportunity for the good. Otherwise the decent are damaged and reduced to doubtful defensive strategies, while the indecent are confirmed in their indecency.

Virtue, then, is a reinforced practice, within the self and society. A good school is inevitably also a "school of goodness," recognized by the steady contented murmur of children doing what has become habitual and accepted without demur. Goodness flourishes where spaces and times are marked out for the regular practice of habitual, fraternal, and inoffensive activity. Only when this has been achieved can authority retire into the background to allow what is securely established to run on its own momentum. This is so obvious that it could only be ignored where people are afraid of fear, and authority unnerved by the label "authoritarian." Of course authority can also be inimical to the good, and this is above all the case where government is arbitrary. Arbitrary government often neglects moral language and allows good and bad to be displaced by deviance and conformity or adjustment and maladjustment. "Maladjustment" looks non-judgmental, even coolly scientific, but it is a tool of naked and improper power. Once judgments are medical rather than moral it happens either that "pathological" is employed as a covert and sneaky form of moral disapproval, or that the human being is treated as an object. The most deadly aspect of psychological techniques for securing control is their evacuation of moral lang-uage, because once moral language goes out of common currency there is no ground for complaint. Dismiss justice as meaningless and there is no court of appeal.