• Jonathan Last, editor, The Seven Deadly Virtues: 18 Conservative Writers on Why the Virtuous Life is Funny as Hell, Templeton Press, 2014, 183 pages, $24.95.
RALEIGH — This book’s publisher is clearly striving for the second coming of The Book of Virtues by William Bennett, which sold a few copies back in the day. In the introduction, Jonathan Last of The Weekly Standard marks the differences between 1993, when Bennett’s book appeared, and 1971, when the federal Department of Education didn’t exist. “We are as far away from 1993 today,” Last explains, “as they were from 1971 back then.” The Seven Deadly Virtues provides evidence of that reality.
The book comes billed as “humor,” and on Fox News, Jonah Goldberg, one of the 18 conservative writers on the roster, billed it as a veritable laugh riot. That’s too much to put on any book, particularly one of this type. To entertain and instruct is a tough task, but a few of the writers in The Seven Deadly Virtues manage to pull it off. P.J. O’Rourke, for example, has never seen protesters chanting “No prudence! No peace!” We all want justice, he says, but nobody seems happy when they get it for themselves. Indecencies are all alike, and every decency is decent in its own way. And O’Rourke knows what the deal is.
In current arrangements, government is virtuous on behalf of individuals, grabbing their money and, after overhead, spending it much more wisely than they ever could, and with much better results. “We have faith in government though we may deny it,” O’Rourke writes, “the very size of the Leviathan is a mark of our faith.” As for tithing, “government lays claim to 40 percent of our entire GDP. And, as for government services, daily attendance by Americans is almost 100 percent.”
In O’Rourke’s view, traditional virtue survives but “it just doesn’t provide modern Americans with the minimum compensation that they feel is necessary to meet their basic needs.” And as editor Last notes, “the superficial moral framework of the modern virtues turns out to be an insufficient organizing principle. When it comes to virtue, the old ways are still the best ways.”
Andrew Ferguson notes that boorishness is the opposite of prudence, and characteristic of the New Science. He charts “evolutionary psychologist” Stoshi Kanazawa, a barrel of laughs who believes that women of all races are more attractive than men, “except for black women.” This sort of thing is the result of the view that human beings are a “not-so-special species, nagged and pulled by unconscious impulses, the random consequence of a blind and pointless process stretching back to the beginning of time.”
On the virtue of courage, Michael Graham wonders how a nation born in rebellion can “let the government tell us what size sodas to drink” and endure the “cattle call” of airport security. Graham sees courage as the essential virtue: “What good is intelligence if you’re not strong enough to stand up for good ideas?” Good point.
Andrew Stiles cites C.S. Lewis that temperance never meant abstinence but “going the right length and no further.” Now temperance is “a means to demand fealty to the whims of those who think they know better.”
On the virtue of chastity Matt Labash cites Lewis’ observation that sex was supposedly a mess because it was “hushed up.” Now we chatter about it all the time and it is “still a mess.” Further, Labash says, “no matter how much sex we are having, we as a culture are making a lonely, sad, muted sound.” And sexual morality, editor Last observes, “is now a function of health outcomes.”
Joe Queenan laments that pithy expressions from our glorious past no longer resonate in this grasping, fun-loving society. He finds that thrift is a laudable virtue, but one that should be used only in emergencies. Cheap people are repulsive, he says, and “thrifty people are merely annoying.”
Jonah Goldberg explains that integrity “is the measure of how successful we are at acting on our desire to have the right desires.” The standards of integrity once meant something but now involve adhering to one’s own principles, “because they are the only legitimate principles.”
Christopher Buckley holds forth on the virtue of perseverance, which “must march hand-in-hand with her sister virtues. When she does, she is majestic indeed.” That closes out the 18 contributors in this rather slender volume. Even so, between O’Rourke and Buckley, readers will find plenty of filler, in places moderately instructive and sometimes unintentionally entertaining.
Sonny Bunch of the Washington Free Beacon says, “forbearance is the rare virtue that provides its own rewards.” He also writes that one of the most unsettling aspects of the politicized life is that “those who embrace it are not un-self-aware.” Alert readers may recall George Orwell on the “not-un” formulation: A not un-large dog was chasing a not un-small cat across a not un-green field.
The Seven Deadly Virtues is a mixed bag, but it’s good to see that conservative writers still read C.S. Lewis, whose works have maintained their appeal. Lewis avoided “forced jocularities” on serious subjects and believed that readers should not allow themselves a new book until they have read an old one in between. Between Bennett’s 1993 book and this one, readers might consider Richard Grenier’s The Marrakesh One-Two (1983) and John Kennedy Toole’s 1980 A Confederacy of Dunces. Even in the Age of the Tweet, these books can make readers laugh out loud while serving up a supersized helping of the truth.
Lloyd Billingsley is a contributor to Carolina Journal.