Have We Lost the Sense of Virtue?

Is there just too much self-help advice out there?  

Jonathan Haidt thinks so and writes that the quantity of advice undermines the quality of our engagement with the truly important ideas that can make an important difference in our lives.   A self-proclaimed Jewish atheist,  Haidt is a social psychologist who specializes in morality and the human emotions.  I was so impressed with how he had defined the new/old emotion of elevation that I ordered and read his book The Happiness Hypothesis.

Haidt takes ten great ideas and examines them in light of what we have learned from science, calling it modern truth in ancient wisdom

Take virtue for instance.   When Aristotle speaks of happiness as a realization of the practice of virtue, people roll their eyes.   What Aristotle means by virtue is not something  prissy and do-goody, but more an excellence of a practical sort.   What  Aristotle was saying is that the good life is one where you develop your strengths, realize your potential and become what it is in your nature to become.  Sounds a lot like The Point of Aging.

Morality for the ancients,  Haidt says,  was a kind of practical wisdom and moral education that included important unspoken knowledge – skills of social perception and social emotion so finely tuned that one automatically feels the right thing in each situation, knows the right thing to do and then wants to do it.

He relies much on the positive psychology movement sparked by Martin Seligman which identified six broad and related virtues that can be found across all cultures: Wisdom, Courage, Humanity, Justice, Temperance, and Transcendence (the ability to forge connections to something larger than the self)

Within these six broad virtues, there are identifiable character strengths which when practiced lead to the six higher-level, abstract virtues.

1.    Wisdom

•     Curiosity
•     Love of learning
•     Judgment
•     Ingenuity
•     Emotional intelligence
•     Perspective

2.    Courage

•    Valor
•    Perseverance
•    Integrity

3. Humanity

•     Kindness
•     Loving

4.    Justice

• Citizenship
• Fairness
• Leadership

5.    Temperance

• Self-control
• Prudence
• Humility

6.    Transcendence

• Appreciation of beauty and excellence
• Gratitude
• Hope
• Spirituality
• Forgiveness
• Humor
• Zest
  

You can diagnose yourself or take the strengths test at authentic happiness. 
 
Haidt says think of virtue as a garden of excellences.  As you develop your own strengths, your own excellences, you’ll find it instinctively rewarding because they come easily to you.   If one of your strengths is the appreciation of beauty, you love to find more ways to appreciate beauty and will likely create beauty of your own.  

When you develop your strengths,  you become totally engrossed and lose self-consciousness and the sense of time.  Some call it experiencing “flow.”  The more sports-minded call it “being in the zone”.   It doesn’t seem like work but what you’re supposed to be doing.    Practicing virtue is its own reward and scientific studies show practicing virtue brings more happiness,  better health and greater well-being.

Virtue is not ethics, the modern day thinned down version of morality that only comes into play once or twice a week as you ponder what you should do in a particular situation.   Virtue is not about what you do in a particular situation, but what you do day after day as you develop your character. 

But we seem to have lost the language of virtue and what it is to be a virtuous mother, father, soldier, businessman, doctor and so on.  The philosopher Alasdair MacIntire who wrote in After Virtue that the loss of a language of virtue, grounded in a particular tradition, makes it difficult for us to find meaning, coherence and purpose in life.    I say forget the doomed attempts to create a universal, context-free morality.  Look to your own life, improve your own nature, your own qualities.

As Aristotle wrote,

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.