Personification of virtue (Greek άρετή)
in Celsus Library in Ephesos, Turkey

Virtue

By Edward Skidelsky
Prospect Magazine, September 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

Our central problems are moral, not economic. This challenges the principle that individuals are sovereign in their own sphere, and that only when someone infringes on others may he be rebuked or punished.

John Stuart Mill was the originator of this principle, which has come to shape western public doctrine. Neither left nor right dares reject it openly. Yet it is a departure from the common sense of our species.

The pre-modern ethical traditions focused on those qualities of character making for a good and happy life — the virtues. The virtues are the natural excellences of the species. They are to us what speed is to the leopard or strength to the lion. They require years of training. Law is part of morality. The state is an association of people come together to lead the good life.

Under the influence of Mill and others, we have come to think of morality as a system of rights and obligations, and the philosophical problem as one of defining these rights and obligations. Virtue clearly has no place in morality so conceived, for virtue is what calls forth love and admiration, not what may be demanded. Unlike obligation, virtue suffuses the whole of life.

The four classical Greek virtues were courage, temperance, prudence and justice. The modern tendency is to reduce the whole of morality to justice, leaving the rest a matter of sensibility and taste. We admire feats of courage and self-denial. Such reactions are closely connected to the more strictly moral reactions of respect and indignation. Yet our public language forbids us to acknowledge this connection.

True virtue flourishes only under liberty. "The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling … and even moral preference," writes Mill, "are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice." Mill's error was to think of morality in atomistic terms. But morality is embodied in language, and language is social. By enshrining individual choice, liberalism has eroded the public language of morality, leaving nothing but a set of rules for frictionless co-existence.

Moral language in Britain today bears out this diagnosis. The old idiom of the virtues has been replaced by the neutralized jargon of the social services. Such moral language as does survive is crude and bullying. Economics is an offspring of moral philosophy. Today it defines itself simply as the science of choice under conditions of scarcity. Its practitioners are debarred from talking about morality.

Contemporary virtue ethics developed in Oxford. To call a man "brave" or "sneaky" is not just to express an emotion but to say something true or false about his character. Virtue ethics breathed new life into moral philosophy. Yet virtue ethics has turned into yet another academic game.

The green movement is an attempt to create a society in which some choices are recognized as better than others, in which nature is seen to put constraints upon the free play of desire. It is a religion without God.

Nicolas Mosley

By Edward Skidelsky
Prospect Magazine, September 2007

Edited by Andy Ross

Nicholas Mosley is thought of as an important but almost incomprehensible novelist. For 60 years, he has tapped away like some mad cryptographer, transmitting messages in an unknown code. I recently met Mosley in his basement flat in north London. Aged 84, he seldom goes out.

Mosley is the grandson on his mother's side of Viscount Curzon, from whom he inherits the title Lord Ravensdale. He is the son of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists and at one point the most unpopular man in Britain. But Mosley was lucky enough to have passed his youth in institutions — Eton, the Rifle Brigade, Oxford — where his father's misadventures were viewed with irony, not outrage.

Mosley was independently wealthy, so could do what he wanted. Together with his first wife, Rosemary, he embarked on an experiment. They bought a hill farm in Wales and reared sheep and chickens. They made efforts to bring up their children without any help. They read Freud and Jung. She painted. He wrote.

Mosley's early novels, published in the late 1940s and 1950s, are written in a turgidly tragic manner. In 1957, Mosley stopped writing fiction. When he started again in 1963, it was in the style that has stamped his work ever since. His characters have no personality and they speak in flat, jerky sentences.

Mosley has no interest in verisimilitude. "The only reality one can hope to get is of a separate order, the order of storytelling," he wrote as a young man, "and to try to get any other is a mixing-up of two worlds." But Mosley is not interested in stylistic experiment. For him, style is important only as a vehicle of moral truth.

In the 1950s and 1960s when Mosley temporarily abandoned fiction, he was part of the circle surrounding the charismatic monk Raymond Raynes. "I was enormously impressed by him. He was a very old-fashioned Anglo-Catholic in his formal presence, but when one met him and talked to him personally, he was extraordinarily open and gentle and undogmatic." For seven years Mosley followed the rules. "I became a churchwarden down in our little village church in Sussex."

Liberation came when he read the Bible from beginning to end. Taken as a whole, it seemed to be saying to him that obedience and self-sacrifice are not the key to salvation. What is required instead is a certain "state of mind" or "style" through which God's intentions might be discerned. Mosley developed these ideas in a book, Experience and Religion (1965). From now on, theology would take the form of fiction.

The interdependence of good and evil is central to all Mosley's work. Accident (1965), his fifth novel, makes sense only on a symbolic level, in which one person can — like Christ — stand for another. Harold Pinter's screenplay follows the details of the novel closely enough, but soaks the whole thing in an atmosphere of scarcely suppressed aggression and lust. "I wrote a strong letter to Harold," says Mosley. "I said — look, this really makes it all so awful."

Mosley's conflict with the literary world came to a head in 1991 when, following the success of Hopeful Monsters (1990), he was invited to join the Booker prize judging panel. It was a disaster. Mosley resigned from the panel, firing off with an article in the TLS defending the "great tradition" against the modern novel of elegant despair.

The convolutions of Mosley's style arise out of the difficulty of writing about morality after the disintegration of the traditional language of morality. His heroes must tread a vanishingly thin line, on one side of which lurks cynicism and amoralism, on the other an appeal to duty. Such heroes are hard to write about. A new style is needed to do justice to them.

Leo Strauss

By Edward Skidelsky
Prospect Magazine, March 2006

Edited by Andy Ross

Leo Strauss, father of neoconservatism, believed in virtue rather than liberalism.

Leo Strauss was a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and died in 1973. A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, he remained a philosopher in the classic Germanic mould, with a strong overlay of Talmudic scholasticism. His work is subtle, laboured and recondite. Above all, Strauss was a teacher. He cultivated a large number of disciples. Straussians see themselves as guardians of wisdom.

Strauss regarded the work of the great political philosophers as written in a covert or "esoteric" manner. Following Nietzsche, he viewed the truth as something dangerous. The wisest philosophers therefore conceal their insights. To be more precise, they reveal their insights in a manner intelligible only to the wise few, while presenting the appearance of orthodoxy to the vulgar many.

Shadia B. Drury, research chair in social justice at the University of Regina, Canada, claims that Strauss's allegiance to democracy belongs to the merely public or "exoteric" aspect of his thought. In reality, Strauss hated democracy. Like Plato, he yearned for a tyranny of the wise. Like Nietzsche, he rejoiced in hierarchy and war. But he also realised that such goals could not be openly avowed. He therefore sought to advance them covertly. Strauss is a "profoundly tribal and fascistic thinker." His influence on the American right is a scandal.

The course of US foreign policy since 9/11 has confirmed Drury in her suspicions. Drury's diagnosis has become a commonplace of left-wing criticism. Cambridge historian Richard Drayton wrote that neoconservatives "learned from Strauss that a strong and wise minority of humans had to rule over the weak majority through deception and fear." In certain circles, Straussians have become the new Elders of Zion.

Strauss' defenders dismiss these allegations with scorn. Strauss fought for Germany in the first world war. He had the example of the Weimar republic ever before his eyes. He knew democracy's fatal tendency to softness and indecision. He wanted to bolster it with the sterner wisdom of the pre-democratic past. Churchill, not Hitler, was his hero.

Once we admit the principle of esotericism, we can attribute to a thinker almost anything we please. So it seems more reputable to take Strauss at his word. If we do, we soon discover Drury's interpretation to be a lurid caricature. Strauss is an unsettling figure. His writing is brilliant in detail yet curiously opaque in its overall design.

Strauss' central theme is excellence, both moral and intellectual. Excellence is the supreme end of political life. The classical philosophers judged regimes according to their ability to foster excellence. The best regime is the one in which the best men rule. It is government by the wise. But because they constitute a small and unpopular minority, the wise must work in collaboration with the "gentlemen," or enlightened aristocracy.

The ancient philosophers described the best regime as one embodying "natural right" and grounded in the natural order of things. The ancients viewed human nature in the light of its end or perfection. The founders of modern liberalism sought out its lowest common impulse, the will to live, or the desire for security. A regime consisting of a strong secular state with a monopoly on the use of force, whose citizens enjoy rights guaranteed by law, is the familiar result.

Liberalism shifts the accent from the question "is it good?" to the question "is it within my right?" All moral problems are reduced to problems of law. Liberal theory is concerned with the construction of institutions that will secure citizens their rights even in the absence of virtue. Nor is it concerned with truth. In its eyes, all opinions are of equal value, provided they do not disturb the peace. Ultimately, liberalism degenerates into relativism.

In Strauss' words, liberalism deliberately "lowers the goal" of political life to increase the chances of its attainment. But liberalism's neglect of excellence is in the long run self-destructive. Any regime rests ultimately upon the wisdom and courage of its leaders. Liberalism suffers a further disadvantage in comparison with its rivals by extending to them a tolerance they do not reciprocate. Churchill demonstrated that only the residually heroic element in liberal democracy could save it from destruction.

Strauss did not look to the hereditary nobility. His was an aristocracy of spirit, not of rank. Hence the vital importance he attached to education: "Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness."

Strauss was not the "profoundly tribal and fascistic thinker" described by Drury. But neither is he a figure with whom liberal democrats can feel entirely comfortable. Nowhere does Strauss acknowledge freedom or equality as intrinsic goods. Their value is to create a space in which excellence can flourish. Strauss is an unashamed elitist. This is enough to mark him as a fascist in the eyes of some.

Modern neoconservatism has moved a long way from Strauss. But it grows out of a typically Straussian anxiety. Strauss viewed the cultivation of virtue as the end of politics, but virtue implies an ideal. Liberalism tends to relativise all ideals, to reduce them to mere opinions. Politics gives way to economic management. New sources of idealism are urgently needed to counteract this rot.

Strauss' response to this predicament was to cultivate pockets of wisdom in the interstices of mass society. But his solution was too subtle, too elitist for modern tastes. His neoconservative descendants realised that the goal of awakening civic virtue could more easily be achieved by transforming liberal democracy itself into a fighting faith, into an object of worldwide struggle and sacrifice.

But the problem with the neoconservative version of liberalism is that it is not really liberal at all. Classical Anglo-American liberalism was emphatically not a "fighting faith." It was sceptical of all extreme faiths, religious and political. And although it fought when it had to, against aggressors such as Napoleon and Hitler, its preferred means of promulgation were trade, enlightenment and international law. The new liberalism is nationalist, warlike, zealous. Its model is Israel.

If this interpretation is correct, then neoconservatism is indeed an esoteric movement, although not in Drury's sense. Like so many other forms of imperialism, its secret focus is domestic. Its ostensible mission of spreading freedom around the globe is in reality an instrument for the kindling of public spirit at home. Indeed, neoconservatives would shudder at the success of their enterprise, for the global victory of liberal democracy would mark the end of history and the final domestication of man.

Anatol Lieven is correct to see the influence of Strauss as reinforcing the "tendency in the American security elites as a whole to see themselves as a version of Plato's Guardians, a closed, all-knowing, elect group, guiding, protecting (like guard dogs) and when necessary deceiving an ignorant and flaccid populace for its own good, in order to protect it from ruthless enemies."

Strauss' most important bequest to neoconservatism was his revival of moral language. He wrote robust, classical English, full of epithets such as "honorable," "noble," "mercenary" and "vulgar." One word he did not use was "evil." But that has not stopped his successors. The routine attribution of evil to political enemies is one of the less pleasant traits of today's neoconservatism.

This unembarrassed use of moral language is in conscious defiance of the prevailing trend towards more "non-judgemental" modes of speech. Strauss was a passionate opponent of value-free social science. It is simply not possible, he claimed, to describe social phenomena in non-ethical terms, for social phenomena, unlike their physical counterparts, are ethical to their core.

Our reluctance to use moral language has its ultimate source in the dark cloud of guilt hanging over the west ever since 1918. Neoconservatism repudiates this psychic burden. It offers the exhilarating certainty that there is good and evil, and that we are on the side of good. Strauss understood the sacred awe before the limits of human power that the Bible calls "fear of God" and the Greeks expressed in the concept of cosmic justice.

Edward Skidelsky is a lecturer in philosophy at Exeter University, UK.