There are many challenges in instituting Aristotelian virtues on American society. For one, America has left the institution of morals and virtues up to, not society but, to churches and the family. And over the years we have moved from a religious based society into more of a spiritual based society, which, in turn, usually leaves the responsibility, more or less, to parents and other family members. The government creates laws, not to produce virtuous people, but rather to protect certain interest in their Utilitarian philosophy. Society, these days, would rather produce cowards than men of courage. An example of these can be found in the contrast of the lives Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. The history books have been feeding us the doctrine of the docile “turn the other cheek” Martin Luther King Jr. while ignoring the radical, and somewhat sensible messages Malcolm X was instituting. How can anyone be full of courage when they are turning the other cheek waiting for another smack? We tell our parents not to whoop your child, because it can cause emotional damage to them. Or we tell kids not to fight back go tell someone in charge. All these suggestions destroy our sense of courage. If we were to insist upon people having temperance many institutions would lose financial power. Our society is built upon consumption and we are expected to be over indulgent in those consumptions. While liberality is a practice that most Americans believe in it is consistently under attack and left solely to the individual. We also display empty vanity “America, we are the best, at everything,” is the general feeling of most Americans, but cannot be constituted as proper pride, as it is foolish and highly ethnocentric thinking. Our society has destroyed the mean in search of the greater means. Society cares not about the virtuous person; rather we care more about the greater good for the greatest amount. It is in my strongest belief that if we were to set laws that created virtues we would not be such a hedonistic society. But pleasure is money, and money is power. So we will continue to produce consumers who have no thoughts of virtues. “Buy this, you need that, you don’t have three of these?” This is all that we are teaching our youth these days and there needs to be some sort of change. This change must be instituted, not only by an individual or a family, but it must have communal support as well. Because it takes a village to raise a child, it would take, then, a society to raise “virtuous” people. If society were to implement virtues Confucian virtues would be far greater than Aristotelian virtues. Aristotle was concerned with the individual, whereas Confucius had the larger picture in mind of fixing the whole of humanity.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 00:39:28 +0000
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