Keywords of the Moral Life: Struggle

You Are Not a Special Snowflake. You Are God's Own Caterpillar.

What if opposition is not a sign of the Fall, but an act of grace? What if the moral life was meant to be diagonal? Stay til the end for housekeeping announcements about the upcoming book club.

Your Virtue Will Come Up Short

Within conversations surrounding virtue, one of the most controversial questions is whether or not virtue is something which can be perfected: is our virtue something which can be brought to its fullness in life, indeed, if at all? Before we answer too quickly, what I’m most interested in is not whether or not any moral action can be without flaw: I take it for granted that when a butterfly flaps its wings in Seattle, there’s rain in China.¹

One of the reason that reasoning about our moral action by way of the consequences is a problem is that you can never fully enumerate the consequences. For me to refrain from spending money on Amazon is intended toward my own restraint, but has the effect of less money flowing through Amazon. This doesn’t hurt the owners of Amazon per se but it will potentially hurt the warehouse workers, their families, and the interconnected web of people that their income also affects.²

And so, in this way, the virtuous act can never be without consequences which are unforeseen. It doesn’t make the act any less upstanding, but it does mean that the full shape of virtue in public is always conflictual: it builds up and tears down at the same time. To build up chastity is to tear down lust, and to build up temperance is to tear down the long-term job security of a worker I’ll never meet.

This objection to virtue’s perfection—and in some ways, this is a minor objection—is also not an unserious objection. For if, in the moral life, we are aiming toward a life which helps makes the world and all that is in it into what it is meant to be, it’s worth asking why these different pursuits conflict with one another. Among Christians, the pursuit of goodness takes place in a world which is shot through with scarcity, meaning that excellent causes compete with one another for donor dollars and attention. It’s worth asking how my pursuit of goodness will always find itself attached—and even at odds with—the material flourishing of someone that I will never know.

The Hawk-Eyed Ghost of Reinhold Niebuhr

Enter the critique of Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was, among other things, a pastor of congregations in Michigan who found himself drawn into this question in 1932 as a recovering idealist. The former pacifist and socialist wrote his Moral Man and Immoral Society as an explanation of why he had given up on pursuing an idyllic social order, with a fairly straightforward thesis. People are, all other things being equal, capable³ of something like moral perfection on their own, but thwarted within societies because of the competing wills of their members.

Because of this, the ideal teaching of the Sermon on the Mount is held out as a “possible impossibility”, a transcendent value which can never be attained. As far as it goes for societies, Niebuhr’s not wrong: having something like perfect virtue is never attainable for whole societies, in two ways:

1. Virtue is described as being a kind of stable state in the soul, such that this seems fairly impossible for societies. There are always people being born and dying, always members coming in and leaving. This all lends itself to a fairly tumultuous picture of social life on the best of terms.

2. Societies are comprised of disparate interests, not necessarily because people are selfish and narcissistic, but because they are comprised of different people. The percieved immediate goods for some are not what others identify, which is why Burger King and Taco Bueno can both exist: there’s no real consensus as to whether burgers or tacos are the good food, and thus, we try to make room for both in societies.

The upshot for Niebuhr, then, is that virtue itself is possible for individuals, but even then, only kind of. We live in a society, and so, the good which I seek is only possible because of others: Christians have held for a very long time that goods—if they are in fact goods—are social and to be shared. A private good is not the ultimate form of a good, and saying that private goods are all we have means that none of us flourish as we should. Your particular virtue is only possible because of others, like it or not.

But here’s where writings like Thomas a’ Kempis’ Imitation of Christ shrug their shoulders to Niebuhr’s objection and say, “And?”

The Purpose of Struggle

Like the proverbial butterfly who crawls out of the cocoon when they are strong enough to emerge, the human’s growth in virtue comes not by submission alone, but by struggle. Far from saying that growth in virtue is something which occurs by being zapped into goodness, virtue is that which occurs in the matrix of struggle.

But to say this needs a little qualifying: the struggle to do that which is commanded of us to do? No brainer, but not what I mean. The struggle against temptation? Yeah, kind of . The struggle which is put there by God?

Now we’re talking.

Some have their greatest temptation at the beginning of their conversion, some at the end, and some after a fashion are troubled with temptations all their life, and there are many who are but lightly tempted. And all this comes from teh great wisdom and righteousness of God, who knows the state and merit of every person…”⁴

Growth in virtue, as part of the journey of the soul toward God, is endless. And so, welcome to the life-long struggle:

Our fervor and desire for virtue should daily increase in us as we increase in age, but it is now thought a great thing if we hold a little spark of the fervor that we had first. If we would at the beginning break the evil inclination we have to ourselves and to our own will, we should afterwards do virtuous works easily. It is a hard thing to leave evil customs and it is harder to break our own will, but it is most hard forever to lie in pain and forever to lose the joys of heaven. If you do not overcome small and light things, how shall you then overcome the greater?"⁵

Please note that he says that early avoidance of temptation is so that you can really work it out later. It is not the case, Thomas writes, that we begin to live a life of ease, but that as we grow, the challenges get harder, and only possible insofar as we learned how to struggle a little bit in the beginning.

zombie butterfly

To look at Niebuhr’s objection again, Niebuhr has it all wrong: that virtue is difficult in society is part of the point. Of course life is hard, dummy!⁶ And yet, on we go. To follow Kempis here is not to say that God tempts us, but it’s also certainly to reject that God won’t give us more than we can bear: on Kempis’ view, God is the one putting the weights on while you’re doing the benchpress. It won’t kill you, but holy moly, you kind of wish it would sometimes.

The true challenge of Kempis’ version here is that struggle—in a surprising mirror to Orthodox spirituality—is intrinsic to the moral life, and not something which necessarily recedes into the distance as we age: the struggle just moves around. The good news here is that the one who is putting the weight on is also the one who helps you to lift it, to bear up under it, that we might be fit for service in the kingdom of God. God is not the proverbial teacher laying rules on without giving a finger to lift them, but the one who bears with us in our weakness.

It bears asking, then, what kinds of disservice we do to ourselves in structurally diminishing struggle as a part of the moral life. It is one thing, for example, to avoid going to the bar if alcoholism is your vice, but another thing to work for the abolition of alcohol in all times and places. It is one thing to have counseling services available for students in need, and another thing to presume that students are fragile and unable to do hard things absent constant supervision. When it comes to other vices, vices which prey upon minors and the vulnerable, vices for which there is no redeeming element, there’s a different case to be made, and structural abolition may be in order.

My point here is simply this: ease in the moral life is not always desirable, and may even be detrimental to us. For in this world you will have trouble, and so forth and so on. And we journey onward with God.

Book Club Announcement: if you’re a paid subscriber, watch for the Zoom link coming next week. Until tomorrow, I’m still offering one of my most recent books (of your choice!) if you sign up for annual paid subscription.

1. Or put differently, if I decide to refrain from shopping in order to cultivate modesty or to fast to learn how to want things well, this has real impacts on the shift schedules, crop rotations of source farmers, and job possibilities of companies that I would otherwise frequent. I don’t think my contributions to the bottom line of any company is all that significant, but if the pursuit of virtue were to become contagious, who knows what happens?

2. This is not just a problem of globalization: our finances are interconnected in real innumerable ways which cannot easily be extricated. This is why, among other reasons, Mammon is so hard: it has an altar in every home.

3. All rights reserved here, and a whole bucket of salt: being capable of being good depends on more than simply one’s desire or intention, but the social conditions in which one learns the stakes of the moral life are not beside the point here.

4. Imitation of Christ, ch. 13.

5. Imitation of Christ, ch. 11.

6. Niebuhr is no dummy, of course. I jest. But it really does strike me as silly how much work this objection does for him: because something is hard or unlikely or requires us to go slowly so that we can go together isn’t a strike against virtue. Perhaps it just means that it’s by divine design that the strong and the weak are bound together.