The signs say, “God voted against Proposition Two.” They are everywhere in this city of many churches—painted on billboards, scrawled on wooden signs, assembled from movable letters on rented panels that are wheeled out from churches to the sidewalks. No one in the city could miss the message. The issue is benefits. Should the city offer the same package to same-sex partners as it did to the husbands and wives of its employees? The council has approved a plan to do so, but opponents have brought on this referendum—in which, if the signs are true, God has long since cast His vote.
Here the difference between faith and reverence is glaring. The people behind the signs are showing faith, and plenty of it. But they are acting against reverence. They are human beings, and yet they suppose they know the mind of God so clearly that they can declare His vote on a civic matter. Reverence requires us to maintain a modest sense of the difference between human and divine. If you wish to be reverent, never claim the awful majesty of God in support of your political views.
You cannot speak on such matters with the authority of God. It is an especially vicious and harmful falsehood to say that you do—vicious because it is irreverent, harmful because it is like pouring fuel on smoldering disagreements. By every new follower you have, and by everyone you persuade that God is on your side, you make a tough situation harder to resolve. Your followers will never listen to the other side, never enter into discussion, never consider a compromise. In fact, by claiming that God votes with you, you have effectively opted out of political process altogether. When we Americans of European background read the most extreme claims of religious leaders from the Middle East, we have no trouble seeing that those claims are ruinous to political life. So it is easy for us to see how ruin springs from irreverence, at least in countries other than our own. But we may all too easily say, “What does this have to do with us? In distant countries, in religions not well represented in the United States, such things happen. But not among us, not among Christians or Jews.” Think again. All too often, believers in any religion set themselves against reverence. We often see a powerful religion, without a scrap of reverence, stamping out its more modest rivals in one crusade after another. But we never see a working political process without reverence.
Don’t misunderstand me: I do not mean that reverence must never speak up for what is right. Of course you must speak up for what you believe to be right. Silence is just as dangerous as dogma, equally destructive of the conversations that sustain community. There are reverent ways—often poetic—of trying to lend a human voice to God’s will. Great prophets and teachers have used them from time immemorial; they take reverent care that their words cannot easily be mistaken for a literal representation of the mind of God.
Now is the time when phones are ringing around town with calls from telemarketers. Someone somewhere is sitting down to dinner with a family, but not here, not in this house. Dad stopped off on the way home for his workout and ran into some friends; Mom brought Sarah home after soccer but had to turn right around for a meeting. David is over at a friend’s house.
Now Sarah is on the phone with a friend—her cell phone, not the one that’s ringing off the hook. She has the TV on in her room, algebra homework spread out on her bed, and a bag of chips open beside her. She’s very responsible, and she remembered to feed the dog before she went into her room and closed the door. The dog is not hungry yet, but when she is, she will go over to her dish and eat as much of it as she feels like, as a dog does when it is alone.
Food may eventually appear on the table in this house, but it is very unlikely that as many as two members of the family will be eating at once. This family will not eat together, hold hands or pray together before a meal, or talk about the day’s events. Chances are they’ll go to their respective dishes to feed, like the dog, when they feel like it. Something is missing from these people, something that makes the difference between feeding time and meal time, between a home and a kennel. If you ask them why, they will answer, “Who has time for family dinner? It’s only an empty ritual after all.” True. Without reverence, rituals are empty.
Janice has never voted and she tells me vehemently that she never will. “Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” she says, speaking of the candidates. “They are as like as two peas in a pod. What difference does it make?” She is in middle age, and I think she ought to know better. She has been engaged for many years in the debate about abortion and choice; the next election is for president, the winner will appoint people to the federal bench, and those judges will make decisions about abortion, decisions that will affect her life. “But aren’t you passionate about the abortion issue?” I ask. “Of course the election will make a difference.”
She looks at me with the pity in her eyes that she reserves for foolish children and philosophy professors. “My vote? My vote makes a difference?” She is convinced that the outcome will be the same whether she votes or not; the polls have already announced the winner. “And anyway,” she goes on, “even if the other guy wins, special interests won’t let him do anything different.”
Well, I lost the argument, and she kept her record unblemished. No votes. Forty years living as an adult in a democracy, and she has never voted. She is not alone. What could I say to change her mind? Not much.
Janice is right about her vote. It won’t make a difference. The odds that one vote could turn an election—even a very close one, such as occurred in November 2000—are so small they vanish for all practical purposes. She has made her decision unconsciously on the basis of what philosophers call “rational choice theory.” There is no way—none, ever—to show that she would be making the best choice for herself and acting in her own best interest, by going to the polls and casting her ballot. She has nothing to gain from this, and at least an hour of her valuable time to lose. Voting is irrational.
If everyone made that calculation, no one would vote. I tried out that line on her, and she gave me the same pitying look. “Ask me something real,” she says. “Don’t waste my time with ‘if’.” She’s right again: She has no reason to worry about hypothetical questions. What happens in a scenario with a wild “if” clause will never really happen—never cost her a penny or cause her to lose a minute’s sleep.
So why should Janice vote? I tell her to see this as a matter of pure ethics, since my appeals to Janice’s personal advantage and even to her political interests have failed. “Ethics!” she snorts. “Where does it say, ‘Thou shalt vote?’ You know me. I don’t lie or cheat or steal. I give to charity and volunteer at the hospital. Are you telling me I’m a bad person because I do not vote?” I am foiled again. As we generally understand ethics these days, Janice has got it covered. She lives a good life without voting. In the end, I have no argument for Janice.
Voting in a democracy is a ceremony, and the peoples who turn out in large numbers to vote, unlike Americans, have a strong feeling for the value of ceremony. That feeling comes from reverence, but there is no argument for a feeling. Or for any other virtue as the source of feelings. You must grow up with a virtue in order to appreciate it. Janice has grown up with very little ceremony in her life and no appreciation for reverence. I can see that she has a vacuum in her mind where some people have a fountain of strong feelings. But she can’t see that now, and no philosophical argument will change her into the sort of person who would see it.
Voting is a ceremony. It is an expression of reverence—not for our government or our laws, not for anything man-made, but for the very idea that ordinary people are more important than the juggernauts that seem to rule them. If we do not understand why we should vote in this country, that is because we have forgotten the meaning of ceremony. And the meaning of ceremony is reverence.
The great trees in the hills behind town are awe-inspiring—at least to the occasional tourist who has taken a wrong turn on the way to the national park, where the trees are even grander. To the people of the town, who have been lobbying for years, along with a timber company, for permission to cut the trees, the trees are jobs and cash and sawdust—and much more. They are a promise that the town’s way of life will be preserved for another generation. In an open meeting to debate the issue, a tiny group of environmentalists bring out argument after argument on behalf of the trees, with no success.
Seeing the well-kept churches, they decide to appeal to the Bible. Citing Genesis 2:15, they say God put us here to “till the garden and keep it”; but they find that the majority of townspeople believe the opposite. To them, Scripture is unambiguous: we are appointed to make use of the things of this earth, not to preserve them, they say, citing Genesis 1:26–28. Perhaps there is scriptural authority on both sides.
The defenders of trees have been unwise to bring up religion, because then their opponents accuse the environmentalists of idolatry. “Are you telling us we should worship trees like the old pagans? Shame on you. We are all Christians in this town.”
Trying a secular tack, the defenders reply: “All right, this is not about religion. It’s about your long-term interest. If you cut them down, the trees will be gone forever. But if you leave them standing, they will be a steady source of income over the years. Tourists will come to enjoy them along with the wildlife that flourishes around them.”
But the town knows better. It will never be a tourist mecca. There are parks enough and they are easier for tourists to visit. The trees are more famous in the parks and their natural beauty is stunning. “The only thing our trees will ever do for us, if we leave them standing, is fall down and rot,” says a retired logger, and the town agrees. The environmentalists talk about erosion and the loss of habitat, but the logger has answers for them. “Look where the company has logged and replanted,” he says, and shows slides of contented wildlife in young-growth forest. The environmentalists talk about preserving species of trees, small plants, and animals, but the town knows there is nothing unique in their hills. And besides, why worry about species? Scientists may find ways to use the DNA of lost species, at some point in the future, but we do not need to keep things alive in order to preserve their DNA.
In the end the environmentalists realize they have no good argument for preserving the trees. They are astonished that the townspeople do not feel about the trees the way they do, but they know that arguments do not compel feelings. And they have to confess to themselves that they do not quite know why they want to save the trees or why they shudder at the thought of their being destroyed.
The great trees have been alive on these hills for centuries. They rise on strong bases to great heights, they are homes to many creatures, they bear clouds of greenery above and provide dense shade below. Like everything that calls for reverence, these trees are beyond our understanding. We do not know what will happen when they are cut, and we cannot expect to be able to control all of the consequences of cutting them. No farmers can cultivate such trees; even if humans could live long enough, they could not duplicate the conditions under which this forest came to be. But these trees will be felled and then peeled, sliced, or chipped into the materials for homes that will probably be demolished in less than a human lifetime to make way for new construction. And why not? Trees must be cut and will be cut. Why not these?
It is very hard to show why not, and perhaps in the end the trees might as well be cut. But as things are, the environmentalists believe that the townspeople do not feel that anything is at stake besides money. They are blinded by their own concerns to the townspeople’s devotion to preserving their past. Something is missing on both sides, something without which there can be no contest in the meeting. What is missing is a sense of awe, a sense that depends on reverence. What can the environmentalists do to make the townspeople feel differently at the sight of their tree-covered hills? And how can the townspeople make the environmentalists see what it is they wish to preserve?
A remarkable feature of virtues is that you cannot argue people into having them when they do not. Imagine trying to persuade a squad of cowards to take courage and stand their ground. Aristotle’s chapter on courage would be wasted. You’d do better to open a bottle of strong liquor, as leaders of troops have known for centuries. Better than either argument or liquor would be to instill courage over time in a community of people who will support each other in doing what is right. Virtues are cultivated over time, and they have the greatest lasting power in close-knit communities.
So it may be too late for this town. But the town is reverent about something, and so are the environmentalists, and reverence has a way of breaking out of narrow channels. No virtue can grow large in an atmosphere that stifles any part of it. You cannot bring up your children to be principled or brave and also expect them to cave in to your authority. In matters of character, strength leads to strength, and one lapse leads to another (unless the force of community works strongly the other way). That is the idea behind Socrates’ famous belief that every lapse in virtue damages the soul.
The challenge for both sides, then, is not to find better arguments. It is to change this community, not radically, but by building on what is already there. Anyone who tried to transplant altogether new virtues into the town would see them rejected by the town’s immune system. Perhaps there are townspeople who are already in awe of some aspects of nature, but they are so familiar with the trees in their hills that they need to see them with new eyes. Perhaps the arts will help. Art speaks the language of reverence better than philosophy does, and so art can speak to the reverence that is already in the town. Paintings and photography, hymns and songs may widen the sphere of majesties for which people can feel a sense of awe. Once reverence is awakened, a little argument won’t hurt: People who are losing the capacity to feel awe are in danger of losing a great deal more. Both groups do care about reverence, but now suppose they also realize that reverence is not to be divided. Then the environmentalists should begin to feel the value of what their adversaries are trying to preserve. And the townspeople should conclude that they will be better people if they start finding in themselves, before it withers away entirely, the power to walk reverently in the enormous shadow of the trees.
The meeting finally peters out. Attendance was poor to begin with, and the discussion has outlasted the patience of most of those who came. For nearly an hour now we have not had a quorum. The coffee pot is dry, residue caking on the bottom until someone thinks to switch off the machine. One of our long-winded colleagues, who has been hectoring us for some time, has run out of wind—or perhaps realized that no one was listening. “I guess we’re done,” says the chair, and we survivors push back our chairs in disgust, muttering about how much time we waste in meetings. Waste, because we have accomplished nothing that we are aware of.
We did manage to have one vote, and it came out roughly as we all knew it would. We have heard each other say what we expected each other to say (most of us could have written the script). Powerful arguments have been deployed, but none of them has changed anyone’s mind. The outsiders feel more outside than ever, while the insiders are fed up with the outsiders for not recognizing that the majority position is truly the position of the department. We drift apart into caucuses, each one complaining of the intransigence of the others and the weakness of the chair in not putting down the people we disagreed with. A young colleague asks plaintively, “Why can’t we ever get anything done in a meeting?”
Why indeed? What is there, after all, to be “got done” in a meeting? Much as we believe in the power of argument (we are academics, after all), we have learned that we simply do not have the arguments that will change each other’s minds. The majority has already discussed the issues in corridors and on e-mail, and they know they have the votes to win. So why do we bother to meet at all? Do we forget, momentarily, the many failures of the past? Or have we forgotten, more generally, the purposes of a meeting?
Without reverence we think that it is irrational to spend time on any project that does not get results, and we understand results narrowly in terms of tangible benefits. But meetings are rituals, and the benefits of ritual are rarely tangible. If you do not realize that a meeting is a ritual because you hate ritual, and so you pass over its ritual aspects, then your meeting will yield no benefit at all. A good meeting does not drift on without a quorum, speakers do not continue till they are out of gas, and the coffee pot does not run dry (even if no one wants coffee). The chair is formal in opening the meeting, closing it, and directing discussion. All right, says my critic, suppose we do repackage our meeting as a more elegant ritual. In the end, won’t we still leave in disgust, with the major issues unresolved and neither side able to claim total victory?
Of course. Meetings are not about resolving issues or awarding total victories. Differences always remain in any human organization. Meetings are about how to go on in view of our differences, how to keep our differences from stopping us in our tracks or from breaking us up into two units. Most important, good meetings keep us from giving up on the department altogether and trying to accomplish our ends through other means, such as running to the dean or the president or a major donor. On very rare occasions, a meeting will yield workable strategies or compromises that all members can applaud. More often, though, a meeting will leave people on both sides dissatisfied—at least about the issues.
We can disagree and still not be dissatisfied with each other or with the existence of the unit itself. The ritual of a meeting should remind us that we are a group, and that we ought to be a group that works together, in spite of differences, to accomplish common goals through mutual respect. In a brilliant book entitled Ritual, Politics, and Power, David I. Kertzer shows how the ambiguity of ritual enables it to support the fellow feeling of groups in which there are deep divisions. Call this an irrational effect, if you will, but it is an effect we must try to bring off, or we face the collapse of our group.
Consider the ritual, every four years, of the party convention in the United States. Rarely is anything accomplished at these summer extravaganzas. The candidate and platform are already known in most cases, and the party has nothing to do but listen to its leaders tell it what a majority of its members already believe, and then to make a show of unity that includes all factions of the party. Irrational? An echo of dying traditions, as useless as a cavalry charge? John Kenneth Galbraith thought so. But any politician knows that a successful convention is an essential step in moving towards national elections. It is a ceremonial event of great power for bringing people together, but it is a political disaster if it goes awry.
All right, you say, meetings are rituals, voting is a ritual. But what does this have to do with reverence? Is there such a thing as reverence for the platforms of the GOP or the Democratic Party? No. Those are made by human beings, and true reverence, we’ll see, cannot be for anything that we humans make or control. In these cases, I think the object of reverence is the ideal of unity, because that transcends politics altogether. Unity is an ideal; it is what it is no matter what we think of it or what means we take to achieve it. Our ideas of unity may be more or less adequate to reverence, depending on how broad a view we take. At the narrow end, defying reverence altogether, would be the mere unity within one warring faction in my department; at the wide end, setting us up for reverence, would be the unity we build around goals of research and education we share with scholars and teachers everywhere. Ultimately, ritual in academic settings expresses reverence for truth. Truth, like unity, is not of our making, even though we have devised our own means for seeking it and expressing what we find.
Blame the bad meeting, then, not on factionalism or stubbornness, not on poor arguments, not on the cussedness of human nature. Blame it on a failure of virtue, a shared failure in the group and its leadership.
He was only doing his job. On his last day at the diamond, his job required him to call a series of balls against a pitcher in a children’s league. The child was in tears, humiliation and defeat staring her in the face. The father was in a mounting rage.
The umpire’s sudden injury was a hit with the newscasters, who played it for all it was worth: interviews with stunned children, sports officials, representatives of the umpire’s professional association, and a psychologist. The doctor of the mind chosen for this occasion had a simple message for the parents of child athletes: “Learn to control your emotions.” Anger, he implied, even rage, is normal in such circumstances. Just keep it down to a safe level.
“Control your emotions”—that makes a virtue-ethicist pay attention. Virtue, after all, is supposed to be the capacity to have the right emotions from the start. If you have emotions that need to be controlled, you are already in trouble. Dad should have been living his life all along in ways that strengthened his capacity for feeling anger just when he should feel anger and just to the degree he ought to feel it. Of course a father should be angry when his child is in danger, and he should be prepared to kill someone who threatens his child—in certain circumstances. In those circumstances, self-control would be a disaster. Even when self-control is called for, it is painful and prone to failure because it runs against our grain. But reverence runs with the grain—or, rather, as you cultivate reverence, you are changing the way your grain runs.
Christians believe that it is not good enough merely to contain your anger and not commit murder: “anyone who nurses anger against his brother [without good cause] must be brought to judgment” (Matthew 5:22). The father would have been a better person if he had not been angry at the umpire in the first place. Plato and Aristotle both understood self-control through metaphors of mastery by violence or force. As such it is a painful second best to virtue. The emotions should be our allies, not our enemies or our slaves. The need for self-control is a sign of undeveloped virtue.
In the case of the cold-cocked umpire, it is partly right to say that the father should have been able to control his anger. Anyone who is prone to anger at the wrong times had better learn to control it, or else prepare for a life in jail. But this way of thinking is misleading, because it suggests that the father’s major failing was in self-control. The father’s real weakness was in reverence.
The sanctity of the umpire is fundamental in any game or in any system of conflict resolution. The divinity that in old days was supposed to hedge a king was due, I think, to the king’s role as judge or umpire over disputes in his realm. This role also requires reverence on the part of the judge or the umpire, who must make every effort to be impartial, and not use the position to obtain victory for one side or the other. The reverent sports parent, like any other reverent sports fan, feels respect for the umpire, however foolish or unjust the umpire’s decisions seem to be, as long as the umpire stays in that role. That feeling of respect is enough to balance the anger that parents should feel on seeing their children unjustly treated. If you even feel that you could slug an umpire, you have failed in reverence.
Sports are the ritual events that are most widely known in modern life; they are therefore the best arena for us to observe our common habits of reverence and to contemplate the horror that follows from a breakdown of this virtue. It used to be said that sports build character, and it should be said more often and more loudly. The increasing number of assaults on umpires is just one piece in a large pile of evidence that modern society all around the world is forgetting the virtues that ought to grow on playing fields. Sports are becoming like war.
War is the ultimate game. This too has its rituals (in almost every culture that practices war), and these too can build or destroy character. In war there remain openings for reverence, in leaders especially, but also in the ranks.
The team leader—our commander—has a hangover, but he pulls himself together long enough to address the troops. Three things the old man wants us to remember. “Always wear appropriate headgear, especially when you may be seen by the Vietnamese; you need to have the respect of all of them, allies and enemies both. Second, keep your hair short [this is 1969]; if you receive a head wound it will be easier to treat. And, third, don’t worry too much about killing the Vietnamese. Their religion is different from ours, and they don’t mind dying the way we do. They think that when they die they go up and join the great god Buddha in heaven.”
Some of us know a little about Buddhism; almost all of us in this group have witnessed a Vietnamese funeral. We know the old man is full of shit, but then we have known that for a long time. Still, the audacity of this particular lie is breathtaking: these people do not mind dying? We know better.
Professional soldiers usually know that they are trained to fight people very much like themselves (at least when the parties belong to similar cultures). But amateur armies, gathered from levies of civilians, are a different matter. They do not have much training, and they do not think of themselves first and foremost as soldiers. Studies have found that such armies are reluctant to shed their civilian ethics; they are, in brief, loath to kill. Our old man is doing his best to counteract our civilian ethics in an especially tough situation. Unlike most American units, we have had prolonged contact with Vietnamese people in the role known as “advisers.” We know they are people like us, with passions and fears we can recognize, with virtues of loyalty we can admire, and with tendencies to go wrong not unlike our own. But the old man wants us to forget our common humanity. Looking back, I now think he wanted us to abandon reverence.
I believe that wars can be fought by reverent people. This may be the most controversial suggestion I make here, but it has foundations as deep as Homer’s Iliad. If it were not so, then we could not pick out, as Homer does, failures of reverence in the opposing armies. Reverent soldiers do not go on a rampage, desecrating enemy bodies or killing enemy soldiers who have become harmless. Reverent soldiers take no joy in killing, and they never forget that the human beings on the other side are just that—human. This is a hard thing to remember, even at the best of times. But reverence is not easy.
Well, says my imaginary critic, suppose there are a few reverent soldiers. They are the ones I would like to know after the war is over, in civilian life. But in combat, give me a platoon of brutes who have no thought for the humanity of anyone who is not in the unit.
This seems plausible, but it is wrong. First, in almost any combat zone there are people who are not in your unit but whose respect you need. This was crucial in Vietnam, where the war was being fought, as we said, “for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.” Training troops to be brutal to anyone who was not American would backfire. Second, you should consider how your actions will affect the other side. If you want them to take and exchange prisoners (rather than lining them up to be shot), then you must be willing to spare prisoners yourself.
Third, and this is the most important reason, you cannot simply disengage a virtue like disengaging the clutch of a car with a standard transmission. A virtue, if you have it, is not under your conscious control, and if you give it up, no act of will can bring it back to you. (That is one of the lessons of posttraumatic stress.) Even if it were true (which it is not) that brutal soldiers are better soldiers, we would still have to count the enormous moral and psychological cost of turning so many people into brutes. Perhaps that would deter us from war altogether; I think it should. If you are not a pacifist, therefore, you should hope to work out a way for war to be waged without a great sacrifice of virtue.
As I wrote this book, in 1999–2001, the United States was in the supreme moment of its power. For what the United States has done since 2001, see my preface. But in 2001 the nation was not far from where England stood in 1897, when Kipling wrote “Recessional” as a reminder that power leads to arrogance, and arrogance to a fall.
The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
. . .
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
. . .
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
Indeed, it would be less than twenty years before England began bleeding away its young men in Flanders, and the long, slow, irreversible march began to the loss of empire. Even in this poem, in lines I did not quote, Kipling betrays some of the symptoms of arrogance—racism above all (when he speaks of “lesser breeds without the Law”)—that would eat away at the empire and its economy.
History has never doted on a world power. A great power may frighten the rest of the world into gearing up and joining hands to destroy it for their own defense (as happened to Athens). It may grow into a rich plum for pillage by outsiders, as happened to Rome and China. It may grow so complacent that its people forget to pay the price of power, or, with no external threat to unify them, they may fall to wrangling and so take themselves apart. Most likely, however, they will rely on whatever they have done in the past to protect them, and at some point technology or world affairs will have passed them by.
“Lest we forget,” writes Kipling, drumming the refrain into our heads through the recessional. Lest we forget what? The ancient Greeks would have answered, “That we are mortal, that we are born and die, and that in between these events each of us has time to make a fatal mistake.”
You don’t learn a virtue from outside. You cannot even appreciate a virtue from outside. You won’t see why you should be reverent unless you already are at least a little bit reverent, and you’ll never learn reverence unless you already practice it. You learn it by finding the virtuous things that you do and doing more of them, so that they become a habit. Aristotle understood that. So did Mencius: if virtues must be imposed from outside, they will always run across our grain. Luckily, reverence is all around us, so there are plenty of starting points for anyone who wishes to cultivate reverence.
Look at the many things we do with reverence every day: They are all the things that go wrong without it. Ritual and reverence in common life are so familiar that we scarcely notice them until they are gone. In sports, entertainment, the law court, the voting booth, the boardroom, there are ritual and reverence. We see them in the church whose members live in genuine awe of God, the community that votes, the department that meets well, the sports events that run with due ceremony. Most importantly, we see reverence in good leadership, in education, and in a home that is more than a place for eating, sleeping, watching television, and playing games. Home above all is the place where small rituals bring a family together into a family, where the respect they share is so common and familiar that they hardly recognize it as flowing from reverence.
All of these things are changing, however. Old ceremonies die away, and the new ones may not look at all like ceremonies to us. What place does ceremony have in the routines that emerge in e-mail and on the web, or in the living arrangements of unmarried couples, or in ways of sharing children between remarried parents in blended families? How in this new world of ours do we show respect? And why, amid so many changes, should we show respect for each other at all? Isn’t ceremony a waste of time? And so we seem to be losing sight of respect and our ceremonial ways of showing it.
Reverence is even harder to defend than ceremony. Listen to the news or read the papers and you will find that “irreverent” has become a word for something good. Anything bold or innovative may be called irreverent because it is not held back by old-fashioned tradition, and so is anything that pokes fun at pomposity. Artists and thinkers have good reasons to break with tradition, of course, and in doing so they seem to break with reverence as well.
They seem to break with reverence; we seem to be losing sight of respect and ceremony. In reality, I argue in this book, reverence, ceremony and respect do not disappear—they cannot disappear from a functioning society. It is only that we fail to recognize them. So I am not saying that ancient societies functioned better than modern ones do. Far from it. I am saying that the ancients had a better understanding than we do of the virtues on which any society depends. What we are losing is not reverence, but the idea of reverence. We go on unconsciously doing reverent things, and this is fortunate, because the complete loss of reverence would be too grievous to bear.
This is how a great poet imagines the loss of reverence:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
(W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”)
“The ceremony of innocence is drowned”—not dead by drowning, not floating belly up in a tide of blood, but drowned out by a cacophony of irreverent voices, which prevent the falcon from hearing the falconer. In a totally reverent society, the center would hold, the falcon would hear the falconer, ceremony would rise to the surface. Passions would settle, through audible ceremony, into harmony. A world like that is the poet’s dream, free of conflict between innocence and intensity, harmonizing the best and the most passionate. The reverence of that dream is an ideal, a perfection never achieved in human history. We have never been God’s trained falcons.
So where do we live in relation to reverence? Somewhere between the gyres of the trained falcon and the anarchy of the blood-dimmed tide. We have neither lost reverence altogether nor achieved it; we are, as we have always been, in between. An in-between state is always hard to describe; we must avoid the temptation to go to extremes. True, we lack the reverence of a traditional Confucian village, but that does not mean we lack reverence altogether. Nor does it mean that the Confucian village was ideal; it may have had an authoritarian structure that fed the arrogance of its leaders and starved their reverence. Again, perhaps our lives on the Internet are guided by subtle rituals that allow us to work together with respect for each other’s rights and goals, but that does not mean that the society of the internet is a reverent one.
What we have lost is not reverence but the idea. We do not know well enough what it is, or why we need it, or how we should cultivate it. I am not proposing that we reestablish old dress codes or rigidly maintain forms of courtesy that are vanishing. No one has the power to do those things, least of all a philosopher. What I am proposing is that we restore the idea of reverence to its proper place in ethical and political thought. We will be better off, I think, if we know what it is and why it matters. Only then can we consciously preserve and cultivate it as we run down the rapidly accelerating current of cultural change. Otherwise we may be like passengers clinging to the gunwales of a craft tossed by white water, unaware of the steering paddles at their feet.
Perhaps it is best forgotten. Ceremony and reverence fell out of favor among intellectuals ages ago. Plato started the trend when he repudiated old ideas of reverence along with traditional myths about gods at war with each other, competing in violence and duplicity. Reverence is tied to aspects of traditional religion that intellectuals of all periods have wanted to criticize or reform. Critics have good reason to put old ideas behind them, either for the sake of intellectual freedom or in the hope of moral progress. And, indeed, we ought to forget some forms for expressing reverence, along with old myths, but there are other forms, and there is an underlying idea to remember.
“I have a great reason to hate reverence,” says one of my friendly critics. “It almost ruined my life. When I was a child, older people kept trying to shut down my mind by throwing a blanket of reverence over it. It was as if they were fighting a fire. Reverence is for prigs. If you invite them to bring reverence storming back into our lives, won’t it throttle laughter, subdue humor, make irony straight? Besides, reverence is like patriotism. Scoundrels appeal to it—people who use the language of virtue to talk others into submission. And then there’s all that about how you dress. Philosophers ever since Socrates have dressed comfortably, thank you. They don’t show respect by wearing starched shirts and shoes that hurt their feet. Fashions can be really cruel, especially to women.”
It is true that bad things have been done in the name of reverence or with reverence as an ally. Any virtue can be distorted and abused; no doubt Hitler would have been less successful if his people had been less courageous or, for that matter, less reverent. But courage did not belong to the Nazis any more than reverence belongs to the extreme right of the present day. No one owns reverence. It is not cruel or repressive in itself. It does not put down mockery or protect pompous fools. And most important, it cherishes freedom of inquiry. Reverence sets a higher value on the truth than on any human product that is supposed to have captured the truth.
“All right, maybe I should try to stop hating reverence. But I can’t see why we need it. It’s superfluous. If there is any moral content to reverence, that is covered equally well by other virtues, such as justice and wisdom.” This objection goes back to Plato, who declared reverence to be a mere part of justice and then left it off his lists of virtues in later works. Suppose, as many believed, that reverence is service to the gods. But then what service do the gods want or need? If the gods have the sort of wicked goals we read about in ancient myth, then serving those goals could hardly be a virtue. But suppose the goal of the gods is justice; in that case, serving the gods would be a good thing to do, but the moral content of that service is entirely due to justice. Reverence on this theory would be like patriotism again. Patriotism is a virtue when your country follows justice, otherwise not. And if it is good, that’s because it belongs to justice, not because it belongs to your country. We shall see, however, that justice does not suffice for a healthy society. Justice can be arrogant, rough, and heedless; without reverence justice can tear people apart.
“I agree that justice is not enough. But why bring back reverence, of all things? You yourself admit that reverence is mainly expressed in rituals or ceremonies, and those things are always perfunctory. People just go through the motions. Sure, those rituals may mean something to the folks who perform them, but really they’re just a spectacle for tourists. If reverence is tied to ceremony, it can’t have any value that could run across cultures. So let’s keep talking about justice. It may not be all we need, but at least we have some hope of finding universal principles of justice. Leave reverence to those people who are still bogged down in tradition.”
My critic thinks that rituals belong only to primitive societies or in the more primitive churches that he avoids—though he would never use the word “primitive” in cultivated society. He’s not aware that his own society is riddled with rituals. Just as we scarcely know, from breath to breath, that it is air we are breathing, so we are unaware of the ceremony that attends our common lives. Ceremony does not need to be perfunctory; reverent ceremony in any culture is performed with feeling. And the feelings are often universal: there is grief and reverence in the face of death wherever there is a funeral, and there are funerals wherever there are human beings.
Modern antipathy to ceremony has prevented our coming to a full understanding of the classical Chinese tradition. Wherever ceremony is practiced, there will be people who go through the motions, and some will say that going through the motions is all that is required. But that is not the burden of classical Confucianism, though you might miss the point from most translations. In translations of the Analects, reverence comes across as something like “ritual,” which is not recognizably a virtue at all. Consider this famous passage from the Analects of Confucius:
The Master said, “Without Li, respectfulness becomes a laborious bustle; without Li, carefulness becomes timidity; without Li, courage becomes insubordination; without Li, frankness becomes rudeness.” (Analects 8.2.1)
Going through the motions of empty rituals could not make the difference between tiresome courtesy and the real thing. To translate Li as “rituals,” in view of the way most moderns understand the word, would be like translating a sewing manual as instructing its readers to run thread through the eye of a garden hoe. Li does involve ritual, but Confucius insists again and again that there is more to it. What has been lost in all the standard translations is the reverence that has to be in the minds of those who practice Li. Reverence lends ceremony the feelings that make ceremony worthwhile.
“Feelings!” exclaims my critic. “Feelings are too messy to define. If reverence is about feelings, there’s no way you can talk about it with the precision that philosophy demands. And besides, feelings are too hard to control. Feelings just come over us, but ethical theory is supposed to deal with choices we can make. Philosophers should take justice and integrity as standard virtues, because these can be understood in terms of rules. Reverence defies conversion into rule-based ethics; there is no rule about the feeling that should go with courteous behavior, or how much one should grieve at a funeral, or how genuine must be the respect one shows to a superior. Why don’t you leave this subject to psychology?”
Yes, I agree, feelings are hard to write about, and yet they are what move us best: We hardly ever do something well if we do not feel like doing it. That is one reason why reverence is important. Unlike rules, virtues put our feelings in tune, and well-tuned feelings give us strength to live well and avoid bad choices. Reverence, for example, gives us the ability to shudder at going wrong. When it fails, as it does all too often, people in power forget how to be ashamed. A world leader may feel himself invulnerable and so desecrate his office with a tawdry affair. A captain of industry may feel herself outside the law and so seek to destroy competition by any means that come to hand. The head of a nation may feel that he is right to destroy a people in his territory who lack the strength to save themselves. The leader of a religious sect may claim that she speaks with the full authority of the one true God. These people do not shudder at doing what they do or at claiming what they claim. But if reverence were at work in them, they could not bear to be as they are.
And so, for all these reasons and more, reverence has been fading out of our conscious lives. We have not lost our capacity for reverence. The capacity for virtue belongs to all of us as human beings. What we are losing is a language of behavior—a self-conscious sort of ceremony—that best expresses reverence in daily life; and, along with self-conscious ceremony, we are losing many of the occasions on which people used to find ways to be reverent. Still, all is not lost. We are aware of reverence in our daily lives more often than we know how to put a name to it. The falcon hears the falconer for a moment, glides round on steady wings, and does not know what it has heard.
His interests were entirely academic;
He wouldn’t ever use a word he didn’t need,
And what he said was reverent and precise,
Brief, to the point, and high-toned.
Moral virtue reverberated in his speech,
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach.
Chaucer’s description of an Oxford
scholar, Prologue to the Canterbury
Tales (Woodruff translation)