Virtue Made America

Virtue Made America

“No theoretical checks, no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.” James Madison. We inherited what may be called the “Founding Virtues” from the founders of this nation. We derived them from the earliest settlers as the embodiment of our founding ideals. For many of us these are not ideals chiseled in stone somewhere and paid homage once a year. These are virtues, principles of living, enduring values taught to our children in the hope that they shall find both meaning and practical use in their lives. Sadly, it seems, the great majority of our modern culture is against our efforts. For Benjamin Franklin the guides to out behavior at a more subtle level had to come from within, or as he put it: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters. The expense of our civil government we have always borne, and care easily bear, because it is small. A virtuous and laborious people may be easily governed.” I believe Franklin would believe himself back in France before the French Revolution if he were to visit Philadelphia today. He might even agree with the epitaph on W.C. Fields tomb stone, “I’d rather be here than in Philadelphia.”

So just what are these virtues of which I refer? Religiosity may be regarded at the first and perhaps the foremost. Most of those individuals and families who were the first to traveled to a strange and undeveloped shore devoid of housing, shops, towns with churches full of other worshipers were facing a great unknown. They were, for the most part, members of a Protestant sect either unpopular or illegal in England, France, and many other European countries. If they traveled to New Spain they would be treated as heretics and be imprisoned or even put to death. So they were faced with their backs to the religious wall, sailed that very long ocean voyage, some of whom did not survive, only to step foot in a new and completely unfamiliar world. They put their trust in their God and not just survived but created a new world for themselves and their children, never forgetting it was their God who got them where they were. They obeyed the dictum to go forth, be fruitful, and multiply. The disbelievers of today question the need for any belief in any god or religious spirit. To them, religion is repressive, it is authoritarian, it is an impediment to being a real and authentic individual able to express his or hers inner desires and wants and needs. The world will provide all that we need, trust in our government, our corporate businesses, in individuals and groups who proclaim they have all the answers to the ills of the world. Believe and you shall be free, just don’t look behind the curtain.

The second great virtue is Marriage, that institution born of religious belief, first in the Hebrew civilization and then of the Christian extension. While the Hebrew (later the Jews, as we came to know them) were still stuck in tribalism, the twelve tribes or houses of Israel, Christianity gave us through the Greek civilization (so much of the New Testament was written in Greek in Greek occupied areas – cities and lands) the ideal of the marriage contract. Christianity helped to lift society out of the tribal way of living, of writing civil wrongs through violent actions of revenge, of treating women and children as chattel property, as the inferiors of men. Each man and woman were equal before the eyes of God, their salvation dependent on no one but themselves. True, it would take a few centuries before the christian world would recognize and give women the equality they greatly desired. But in marriage a woman became her husband’s partner and at least an equal in the sight of God. And men came to take on the role of partner rather than master of his chattel possessions. So by the time men and women had come to the shores of America the Enlightenment had emerged and found its way to America. Unlike today, the ideals of faithfulness and fidelity to one another in marriage were a great necessity, in society, in church memberships, in the eyes of men of political position. Men and women seldom had respect for the libertines in society, something many European visitors found remarkable. Marriage was a great moral commitment to be greatly honored by all. Today, it ranks very low in terms of moral commitment, just another contract to break and pay the damages. Yet it was marriage that raised the children, gave them not only moral instruction but moral example. It trained them to become adults and adopt the behaviors of the founding fathers and mothers.

Let us now speak of Honesty. When it comes to making a limited government work (something I see little discussed by libertarians) it is that basic sense of honesty that counts, for nothing short of a police state will force people to refrain from crime if they are predisposed otherwise. We are seeing this in the inner cities, we are seeing this play out with the hordes of BLM and Antifa sympathizers, with those for whom progressive political ideas are the norm. The assumption that people will follow the rules (respect for Rule of Law) is indispensable for making a free market economy work. Our corporate entities would appear to have lost sight of this basic practice. As John Adams would remark about the difference in revolutions in Europe and ours in America, “It is a want of honest; and if the common people in America lose their integrity, they will soon set up tyrants of their own.” We knew the value of honesty, of respect for law, because we had to create not only a basic society for ourselves in this wilderness, but one that would give rise to self governance, something that cannot exist without a sense of honesty and decency and morality. Funny how today’s liberal and left leaning never mention morals except to say how old fashioned they are and how then have no relevance to any standard. “Morality is what we declare to be convenient.”

Our founders used to talk about the industry of American society. We may believe they meant Industriousness, that broad sense of purpose, if you will. It represents a cluster of qualities that motivated the Revolution. It was far more than a matter of freely speaking one’s mind or attending the church of one’s choice, or to be taxed according to one’s representation. The real industriousness was that need to be able to get ahead in life, to make something of oneself, to create a better world for one’s family. As Henry Adams pointed out that industriousness affected those on the bottom of the American society more powerfully than those on the top.

“Reversing the old-world system, the American stimulant increased in energy as it reached the lowest and the most ignorant class, dragging and whirling them upwards as in the blast of a furnace. The Penniless and homeless Scotch or Irish immigrant was caught and consumed by it; for every stroke of the axe and the hoe made him a capitalist, and made gentlemen of his children….The instinct of activity, once created, seemed heritable and permanent in the race.”

These are the basic virtues that once defined this great nation and now we are faced with their erasure not only from our society but from out history, as if such virtues never existed and never will again. From this, the greatest danger of our time springs all the other dangers. The stolen elections, the imposition of Critical Race Theory into our educational system, and the possible future health damage from what now appears to be a forced vaccination program. “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary….”