The Inverse Of Vice

It is often assumed that virtue is the opposite of vice, in the way that good is the opposite of bad. That comparison does not hold, because good/bad is an abstract polarity that may not actually exist in nature. A character attribute becomes a virtue when it exists in the correct proportions rather than in some extreme. The opposite of ice-cold bath water is not tepid, but scalding-hot. The balance is somewhere in the middle, and depends on context. If a bully is hurling insults, it may be virtuous to ignore him; if he is hurling stones, then no good will come of ignoring it.

This turns out to be a significant problem in general. People - who mostly prefer virtue to vice - are nevertheless led to one vice in the course of rejecting another. This turns out to be an acute problem in liberal democracy. It takes a certain threshold of sophistication to understand that virtues are proportional rather than extremal, that history is cyclical rather than linear, and that cause/effect dynamics are probabilistic rather than deterministic. The voting public is not up to that level of sophistication, as can be evidenced by the political messaging.

The moral dilemma is that the quest for virtue is apt to lead to vice. They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I always thought that meant that people are lazy, in the way that the gyms are always busy for a few weeks after New Year's resolutions are declared, and then thin out. But that's not right. Hell is the domain of real vice, not half-assed virtues. Few people are motivated by calls to be evil, but may with great enthusiasm take on anti-vice crusades which have the effect of injecting great energy into the cause of the opposing vice. Good intentions, misapplied, are far more dangerous than neutrality or even evil intentions.

How does evil take hold in people, who are generally good? By inversion. We know that the left is inverted. They reject the West as evil, and so seek its opposite. Of course they are misguided, as Western civilization has given more good to the world than probably all other civilizations combined. But the West is a collection of people, and thus flawed. Many of our opponents these days are working in reaction to the horrors of the two World Wars. Obviously there was no virtue in sending Europe's young men off to a pointless meat-grinder. So they have sought the opposite of that vice, which has lead to the fervent adoption of anti-nationalism and the rejection of traditional European identities of any sort. It's the reason that Hitler has replaced Satan, and Nazis the forces of evil. It's why they avow that Europeans have no culture, because to acknowledge that would lead invariably to the suggestion that those cultures are worth fighting for.

Perhaps it could be argued that the West became too Puritanical. The reaction has been militant atheism. This blog practically obsesses over what a disaster materialism has been for us. The West without a doubt was - and still is - overly imperial. The reaction to that has been to open up our own borders to the world. Invade the world, invite the world. Vice, vice. The inverse of vice is more vice, and those two opposing vices do not cancel each other out. Perhaps you think the old West was too disenfranchising to women. Maybe it was. The opposite has been the emerging matriarchy of today. Sweden boasts that they are the world's first feminist government. They are now under existential threat due to the immigration of foreigners and their own anemic birth rates. It's not nice or fair to tell women they can't vote, or probably even ideal, as they possess a great deal of social acuity, attention to detail, and risk aversion that men often lack. And yet, Sweden was never destroyed by chauvinism or militarism or empire, but a few decades of feminism may ruin the nation entirely.

A similar dynamic is seen with the historical oppression of homosexuality. Whatever your thoughts on that, it should be clear that the answer should not be the sexualization and castration of schoolchildren. That's the problem with the inverse of vice, is there is no proportionality. Slight & perceived vices are countered by extreme & actual vices. Extremism is always reactionary. This is why we must have a positive identity. We must have a firm understanding of the virtues we strive for, rather than the vices we oppose. If the virtue is not clear, then the reaction will lead surely from one vice to another. Ever since the West abandoned Christ - the ideal embodiment of virtue - we have reeled from one vice to the next. The young men of Europe were crushed between the gears of opposing ideologies that rose to fill the vacuum left by God - just as Nietzsche predicted. We'll never get to a good place by walking backwards. We must face fully towards the light to have any hope of getting to a better place.