The Practical Wisdom of Living Virtuously

I recently ran outside in the middle of the night with a baseball bat to chase away an intruder who was obviously trying to do mischief.

My neighbors are torn over whether I was courageous or foolhardy.

Several have expressed the feeling that I was "lucky." The man might have been armed. He might have overwhelmed me with superior quickness and strength. I might have actually hit him with the bat, then faced legal liability for using "excessive force." 

On the other hand, one older neighbor insisted that if anything like that happened again, I was to call him and he'd join me with a "steel bar." He insisted that he would be "fierce." A woman, inspired, immediately ordered her own baseball bat. Many have thanked me for protecting "our community."

As I grow older, I find myself thinking more and more about the Ancient Greek concept of "virtue," and specifically about Aristotle's idea that all virtues exist on a continuum, one that is different for each individual.

Courage, for instance, lies on a continuum between cowardice and rashness (or foolhardiness). Generosity lies between stinginess and being a spendthrift. Truthfulness between self-deprecation and boastfulness. Friendliness between servility and sycophancy. We live in a psychological age, one in which we tend to view our behaviors, as a default, through the lens of our emotions. But I find a great deal of value in the continued practice of philosophy. Even as I wielded my bat, I was fully aware of my emotion (fear), but I was equally aware that hiding safely behind my locked door waiting for the police to arrive was, for me, the coward's option.

You can call it foolhardy machismo, and people have. I don't expect anyone else to behave the way I did. Indeed, I've talked the woman who ordered the bat into returning it. But there is always a price to pay for safety, or the perception of safety. 

Yesterday, I discussed bell hooks talking about our culture of fear and what it does to us both as individuals and as a culture. She writes, "Learning to face our fears is one way we embrace love. Our fear may not go away, but it will not stand in the way." To love in the face of fear takes courage. Being free takes courage. The courage comes first. As Doris Lessing asks, "What else is there for any of us but courage?" 

I worry that our obsession with safety is crippling us, and particularly this generation of young people. These children in our care are going to live their entire childhoods under adult supervision, forever being told to "be careful" lest they do something foolhardy. But courage, like every virtue, resides in each individual and the only way to learn what it means, for you, is through practice. And yes, this means, sometimes, perhaps often, erring on the side of rashness. Without courage, without knowing what it takes to be courageous in this world, one is left at the mercy of fear. And fear is the great destroyer of life.

Aristotle's assertion is that each of us must find, for ourselves, the mean between extremes. Living virtuously, he says, is an act of what he called "practical wisdom," the kind of thing that can't be taught, only acquired through the day-to-day practice of living. A life under constant adult supervisions, a life behind locked doors waiting for the police to arrive, never allows us to acquire this practical wisdom and to discover ourselves virtuous.

As Lessing goes on to wonder, "And perhaps (courage) is only a world for being prepared to go on living at all."

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