Virtue is having its 15 minutes of fame in America _ well, 40 weeks of fame on the New York Times best-seller list, actually. A book by William J. Bennett called The Book of Virtues has been on top of the list for 40 weeks and it to be published in Australia this month by Bookman Press.
The book is a collection of “”moral” stories illustrating what Bennett calls the ten main virtues: self-discipline, compassion, responsibility, friendship, work, courage, perseverance, honesty, loyalty and faith. Its aim is to teach children character.
In America, the book has sold 1.4 million copies and the publishers hope a success of similar proportion in Australia _ say 100,000 copies.
Normally, Australians lap up the latest rubbish from America: back-to-front baseball hats; ersatz food; idiotic toys; junk movies and so on. This time, though, the American producer is likely to be disappointed. More of why that is likely anon.
Basically, the book is a collection of short stories and poetry collected from western literature (and doggerel) each with a moral theme. Bible stories, Greek philosophy, poems from Hilaire Belloc, stories from O. Henry, Hans Christian Andersen and so on are grouped together under the ten headings with an introduction to each by Bennett. Each story carries the moral that if you do awful things you get your come uppance one way or another, but if you do the morally right thing you live happily every after.
Bennett was Education Secretary (Minister) in the Reagan Administration. Then he headed George Bush’s prohibitionist and manifestly unsuccessful anti-drug campaign.
He opens with a quote from Plato’s Republic; “”Shall we just allow children to hear casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds for ideas for the most part the opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up? We cannot . . . . Anything received into the mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales that the young first hear be models of virtuous thoughts.”
Bennett says the purpose of his book “”is to show parents, teachers, students, and children what the virtues look like, what they are in practice, how to recognise them and how they work”.
“”If we want our children to possess the traits of character we most admire, we need to teach them what those traits are and why they deserve both admiration and allegiance,” he says.
The book “”is in the basics”; the difficulties (abortion, euthanasia, nuclear war) can be taken up later, he says.
He claims a universality for the virtues set out in the book and hopes that it will be the answer to a universal cry for a resurgence of moral values. However, it is just as easy to see in the book a peculiarly American value system, and a white, Protestant one at that. Certainly, some of the historic and geographic differences between America and Australia make Bennett’s choice of virtues and the illustrations of them out of place here.
The idea that perseverance will overcome is wasted on the drought-stricken farmer in Australia, for example.
Bennett’s notion that work is one of the ten top virtues and has its rewards (spiritual and/or material) sits better in America than Australia.
As Americans pushed west they found great rivers and fertile valleys. Even if they struck the odd desert there was a mountain range in the distance and beyond that was California. Each place could be settled and worked upon. In Australia, the stories of the explorers and the sad history of the soldier-settlement schemes show that work is not an especially rewarding virtue, spiritually or materially.
Honesty, too, does not seem to get the reward it ought in Australia _ at least in the political system. Graham Richardson’s cavalier rejection of it and the resulting success of his protege against John Hewson who so honestly and foolishly told all is testament to this.
Bennett chooses “”compassion” rather than “”charity” _ you can feel good about feeling pity for the poor, but you don’t actually do anything about it, and you certainly do not encourage the government to have any role in doing anything about it.
Friendship, courage and loyalty are fine in the top 10 list of virtues, but Bennett’s choice of self-discipline, responsibility and faith, when combined, have an American flavour.
Self-discipline and responsibility are virtues that depend on self _ upon individual action and individual assessment of that action. They are not virtues that rely upon collectively doing good for others.
Faith, too, is an individual virtue. It is also the cornerstone of Protestantism. The first Protestant, Martin Luther, said salvation came through faith alone, not through good works and deeds of observance, as in the Catholic tradition.
The virtues that Bennett emphasises in his book are the ones lauded in the tradition of the Protestant ethic: hard work, self-discipline and individual responsibility. On the other hand virtues like generousity and charity are not as highly regarded by him.
The link between the Protestant ethic and capitalism was made earlier this century by Max Weber and R. H. Tawney. They pointed out that hard work and self-discipline when combined with the simple tastes of the Puritans (all wearing the same black hats and simple black clothes) was a recipe for capitalism. It meant capital was produced by hard work and then accumulated because the ethic of self-discipline and self-denial meant it could not be spent. It coud not be spent, for example, on the sumptuous bounty of art works and gold resident in the Vatican. Moreover, simple tastes gave mass production an easier target market.
The emphasis on individual virtue meant, of course, a lesser role for government or, indeed, organised charities like the Salvos. In America you have to pick yourself up. If you can’t, its your fault. The Protestant ethic has no room for original sin, or original defectiveness that can only be overcome with help.
The Protestant ethic is about the individual and his direct relationship with God without any interference from authority, like a priest, bishop or Pope. The only authority is inanimate _ the Bible.
Translated to civil life we have calamity. Everyone pursues an individual course, no-one (especially government) helps others and the only authority is inanimate _ the Constitution.
When the thing starts coming apart at the seams, the response is a call to return to “”good old-fashion values”, to “”virtue”, to “”universal truths”. And the authors of these calls _ Bennett among them _ do not realise that the selection of what they see as virtues or universal truths might be part of the problem.
Now, obviously, this analysis is somewhat exaggerated _ deliberately so to illustrate a point. The choice of the top 10 virtues is not a value-free exercise and there is no universality about the place of these virtues in the world.
I suspect that in America the book will do proportionately better than in Australia. America _ founded by religious Protestant refugees and now marred by rises in drug and gun use and, until this year, rises in crime _ is a more fertile ground for this simplistic sale of virtue than Australia. Australia has a more caring state, a more tolerant religious base, criminal foundations which abhor hypocrisy, and an unforgiving geography which suggests god, or fate, does not necessarily reward the virtuous.
Thus we have a different approach to virtue. The comparative lower sales of a book on American virtue will no doubt show that.
In isolation, of course, many of the stories have great literary and intellectual merit. It is a case of the parts being greater than the whole.