Seven Deadly Virtues
(Page 3 of 4)
September/October 1996
Tom Hodgkinson, Utne Reader
4. SO-CALLED VIRTUE : CONSISTENCY
RELATED CONTENT
Bush Family Values Photo Album March 12, 2003 Issue By Erin Ferdinand, Utne.com They’re creepy and...
Enlightened cities around the world.......
An update from the Utne stacks.......
Our need for child-rearing advice has sparked an overload of "experts".......
This American jazz icon is always in style...
In a world that reinvents itself every nanosecond, it's damn near impossible to be consistent. People who advertise themselves as such, particularly moralistic politicians, are invariably hoisted by their own petards when their secret vices are exposed.
IDLER'S VIRTUE: INCONSISTENCY
Inconsistency frees the mind. You don't, for example, have to be stuck with some nasty remark you made while you were drunk over the weekend. Inconsistency means being able to say you're sorry, and mean it. As Aldous Huxley puts it, 'The only completely consistent people are the dead.'
5. SO-CALLED VIRTUE: RESOLUTION
A life spent being resolute can only lead to feelings of deep frustration and guilt. Resolute types have let their intellect rule their emotions and their spirit. They stick with dumb projects even when it's clear that they're causing more harm than good. Anti-abortion activists and military leaders definitely fit in this category.
IDLER'S VIRTUE : PROCRASTINATION
Historian J.B. Priestley said it best when he wrote, 'If, in July of 1914, everybody had been smitten with an intense desire to do nothing, just to hang about in the sunshine and consume tobacco, then we all should have been much better off than we are now.'
6. SO-CALLED VIRTUE: MODERATION
Being told to be moderate when the media celebrates excess--in war, big business, politics, and other pursuits--is a tall order. Excessive behavior is often the only way to wind down in a society that expects us to hurl ourselves unthinkingly into our work. We drink to forget.
IDLER'S VIRTUE: EXCESS
William Blake's favored aphorism 'The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom' is the idler's anthem. Excess is an expression of individuality, a fitting response to those who would limit our appetites in the name of self-improvement. The body has its own way of punishing us for overdoing it. We don't need the virtue elite to do that job for us.
7. SO-CALLED VIRTUE: INDUSTRY
This is probably the most misleading of all the so-called virtues. Hard work, we are told, will bring peace and prosperity. Put the hours in, and you will be rewarded. Wrong. The only thing that 'putting in the hours' leads to is a lifetime of underpaid servitude and, if you're lucky, five stars on your McDonald's uniform. (Nietzsche wrote that 'living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating others.') Industrious people are the ones who would rather sit at their desk doing nothing all day than take the afternoon off. You know who I'm talking about.