The center will not hold unless virtue is among us. The ancient Greeks knew that very well. They disagreed among themselves, however, over where virtue comes from. Is it learned or inherited? Is it natural—is it, in mythological terms, a gift of the gods? Does it belong to the aristocracy alone or the people in general? Can anyone acquire virtue? And if so, how? A broad consensus in ancient Greece (as in ancient China) held that all humans have a natural capacity for virtue, but that this capacity must be developed by teaching and may therefore be developed differently in different people. According to Plato, Protagoras held such a view.
Protagoras invented a myth in which the highest god gave reverence and justice to human beings as means for their survival, which depended on their ability to live in society. Reverence and justice supplement an earlier gift of fire and technology, which Prometheus stole for us from the gods, hoping that they would keep our species alive. But Zeus saw that technology alone, without virtue, is no defense against mutual destruction.
The gift of technology is divided among specialists: Some are doctors, some are shoemakers, some are housebuilders, and so on. Would it make sense to give reverence and justice to a handful of specialists—priests and judges, perhaps—and let everyone else practice their trades of law or medicine or farming without those virtues? Surely not. Zeus instructs Hermes to give reverence and justice to everyone.
The story comes as a surprise from Protagoras, because we know that he said he was an agnostic. Why should he, of all people, tell a story about Zeus? We shall see that he is not alone among humanists who support reverence. But why should Protagoras of all people say that reverence is part of the package Zeus gives to us? Later philosophers thought that justice was the foundation of society. Why add reverence? Why insist that the foundation of society is justice and reverence?
Protagoras understands what poets have been teaching since Homer: That justice is not enough. In the Iliad, Agamemnon has the right to take Achilles’ prize away from him—no violation of justice there. But when Agamemnon insults Achilles by taking the prize, he divides his army, with disastrous results. His failure is a failure of reverence.
Protagoras seems an odd source for this story for another reason: He is a teacher who believes that he and a few others are able to teach reverence and justice. But if these virtues are a gift of Zeus, why go to a teacher for them? If Zeus gives us reverence, then reverence should be ours by our god-given nature. But if it is ours by nature, why should we need a teacher? Culture is one thing, and nature is another; culture is invented and taught and learned by human beings, while nature is inherited at birth—or so we would like to think.
Protagoras’ myth will not allow so simple a distinction. In fact, the development of cultures is natural for human beings. Invention, teaching, and learning are our natural tools of survival; they are as natural and as important to the survival of our species as claws are to a lion or fertility is to a rabbit. There is this striking difference, however: All lions have pretty much the same sorts of claws whether they like them or not, and rabbits cannot help having the same remarkable fertility. Human beings, by contrast, invent different ways of surviving and different kinds of ceremonies to foster their sense of community. Technology looks different in different cultures, and so does virtue—especially reverence.
Protagoras says, however, that Zeus sends the same reverence to all people, and as a Greek of his time he must understand this to imply that Zeus gave the same reverence to all cultures. Some individuals, he admits, will have more reverence than others, and the same should go for societies. But all societies must have some reverence or be hopelessly vulnerable to becoming unraveled. Protagoras knows that foreigners have different customs than Greeks do regarding the dead, but he cannot overlook the fact that both groups have funeral customs and care about them deeply. He must mean that all human beings have a natural capacity for reverence, and that they must develop this capacity in their own cultures by invention and teaching. Of course this means that different people will invent different ways of being reverent. But then how could there be one thing that is reverence? How, in other words, could this book—the one I am writing now—have a coherent subject?
My subject is what Protagoras meant by the gift of Zeus to all human beings—reverence as an ideal that rises above cultural difference. My job is to show that we can talk usefully about bare reverence—not reverence as it has been practiced in this or that traditional society, but reverence as dreamers anywhere could try to foster it in hopes of improving the quality of their lives. Yes, this is an abstract idea, and it will be difficult to discuss—but no more difficult in principle than justice or courage or integrity, and we frequently try to consider those values outside any one cultural context.
The justice that philosophers seek to describe as a goal, for themselves or for the world, is not the justice provided in ancient Athens, or in T’ang Dynasty China, or in eighteenth-century Philadelphia. When modern philosophers seek to understand justice, they are doing the same thing that seekers were doing in those times and those places—seeking to translate a bare ideal into practice, which is pretty much the same ideal in each culture. So it is with reverence.
As a philosopher, then, I will try to present a sketch of reverence laid bare, the single core of the many conceptions of reverence that are found in the human world. I will illustrate this sketch from actual cultures, however, both ancient and modern, making special use of ancient Greece and ancient China. Because Greece and China were distant from each other, so distant as to be totally out of communication in ancient times, we would not expect their cultures to have much in common. But on the topic of reverence they show considerable overlap. This should not be surprising. Both cultures celebrate reverence in the belief that it is reverence above all that maintains social order and harmony, both cultures have a horror of civil war, and both are contending against the same human enemies of harmony—ambition, greed, fear, pride, and bad judgment. The ancient Greeks and the ancient Chinese were, in effect, trying to solve the same human equation. No wonder they arrived at similar solutions. If today, in the pride of modern thinking, we arrive at solutions that are quite different from theirs, we should ask ourselves how we know that our solutions are better. And if we cannot answer that question, we should take thought: we may have something to learn from the ancients.
Before I turn to the history of ideas, however, I need to sketch carefully the limits of the idea I am tracing back to its sources. How, in the abstract, do I understand the bare gift of Zeus? To answer this, I will work from a general theory of virtue that derives partly from the Greek thinker Aristotle and partly from ancient China. Most of what I say here is parallel to what should be said of any other virtue—courage, for example. My aim in this sketch is to provide answers to basic questions about how I am defining my subject. This is a preliminary sketch, an answer to the question, “What sort of thing is reverence?” Once we are clear on that, we can proceed to ask what it truly requires of us.
No. A virtue helps you feel like doing what is right. To give a complete description of a virtue such as reverence, I would have to figure out everything that is right that might fall into the province of reverence. I cannot do that. Suppose I give an account of reverence and then discover that some horrible things would be reverent according to my account. Then, because a virtue can’t lead you astray and still be a virtue, I would have to go back and revise that account. Nothing I say will be the last word on reverence. A philosopher would say that definitions of virtue remain defeasible.
The person you love is beautiful in your eyes. Of course. Now imagine that age or disease has taken away every trace of physical beauty—the strength, the symmetry, the delicate coloration of the skin—but you are still in love. Then ask this question: What beauty remains? Personality, a sense of humor, and above all, character—these can be beautiful. Beauty of character is what the ancient philosophers meant by virtue.
Plato presents a scene in which Socrates is introduced to a youth who has a body of breathtaking beauty, which would be fully apparent if he would shed his clothes. Socrates impishly suggests that if the boy could only shed his body they would know whether or not he is truly beautiful. Socrates then sounds the boy’s character by asking his famous questions.
A virtue is the capacity to have certain feelings and emotions when this capacity has been cultivated through training and experience in such a way that it inclines those who have it to doing the right thing. Emotions affect action; they are motivators. Fear makes you feel like running away, anger makes you feel like lashing out, grief makes you feel like crying. A virtue is a capacity, cultivated by experience and training, to have emotions that make you feel like doing good things. Take courage, for example: insofar as you have courage, you are able to feel the right sorts of confidence and fear—the sorts of emotion that move you to do whatever is courageous.
Not exactly. The more virtue we have, the less we will need to think about rules. This is helpful, because we sometimes find it hard to feel like following a rule, but it always feels natural to act in accordance with a virtue—if we truly have that virtue. Virtuetalk has been revived in recent years, but it runs against the grain of modern ethics, which is mostly about doing what is right whether you feel like it or not. By contrast, virtue is about cultivating feelings that will lead you in the right way whether you know the rule in a given case or not. Rules are hard to apply and hard to follow. Feelings, on the other hand, are easy to follow and hard to resist. That’s why, from the standpoint of moral education, virtue is best.
Laying down rules may give good results in many cases, but we cannot be sure that people who follow rules are doing so for the right reason. If they are not, then we cannot be sure they will do so in future. That is why we should not praise a person’s character merely for following rules. What is the right reason for following a rule? Some thinkers (following Kant) would say that this depends on knowing the rules in a certain way; others (following Aristotle and Plato) would say that it depends on being a certain kind of person—in other words, it depends on having virtue.
No. A complete ethical theory will talk about rules and rights and duties. This book, however, concerns virtue, and one virtue in particular. But rules cannot replace virtues, because virtues are self-motivating, and rules are not.
As I said in the beginning, reverence is the capacity for a range of feelings and emotions that are linked; it is a sense that there is something larger than a human being, accompanied by capacities for awe, respect, and shame; it is often expressed in, and reinforced by, ceremony.
These three are associated with reverence in both ancient Greek and ancient Chinese traditions, and they all belong to the affective side of what we might call “knowing your place” as a human being. We feel awe for what we believe is above us all as human beings, and this feeling helps us to avoid treating other human beings with contempt (chapters five and six). Shame is more complicated. Without reverence, we may feel shame as the pain of being exposed to other people for having violated community standards—and this is not a virtuous response, because it may have nothing to do with right and wrong. But when reverence is in play, we feel shame when exposed in our own minds to shortcomings vis-à-vis the ideals toward which we stand in awe, and this reaction does belong to virtue (see chapter eleven, “The Reverent Leader”).
No. Reverence is not enough by itself for a completely good character. You will need to develop other capacities in order to live a morally good life. But you may find that reverence is necessary—as is courage—to the regular exercise of all other virtues. Obviously, it can take courage to stand up for justice. Does it take reverence to be courageous? I think so. One of the differences between courage and fearlessness is that courageous people would be ashamed and therefore afraid of doing wrong because of the respect they feel for moral ideals. Their capacities for shame and respect grow from reverence.
When ceremony is empty of reverence, it loses its point and becomes mere ritual; but reverence never loses its point. Most cultures that reflect on their own ceremonies recognize the danger of performing ceremony with the wrong attitude or with no attitude at all. Reverence helps supply the right attitude for ceremony. Ceremony supplies one way of expressing reverence. There are others, such as Larkin’s poem.
Faith is not a virtue; it is either a specific creed or a specific relationship between a believer and God. Reverence has little to do with belief except insofar as belief is entailed by the emotions of awe, respect, and shame. I will enlarge on this issue in chapter seven.
Not at all. Anyone who shows reverence will have beliefs associated with reverence, and some of these beliefs will be religious. Nietzsche says that European Christian culture shows its greatest nobility in reverence for the Bible. But people may have different beliefs and still be reverent. I am detaching reverence from belief because I am in search of an account of reverence that is as neutral with respect to cultural differences.
Reverence is the capacity for a related set of feelings and emotions. Each has a different object: respect is for other people, shame is over one’s own shortcomings, and awe is usually felt toward something transcendent. Respect and shame are clear cases of emotions, according to the theory I am using here, and they are associated with beliefs about distinct objects—respect for your child follows beliefs you have about her (that she is human, for example); shame over a lie would follow your belief that you told a miserable whopper yesterday. Awe is a little different, because its objects are usually transcendent, and we do not know them as well as we know our children or our misdemeanors. You may feel awe in the face of the power of nature, without having clear ideas about what that is. I classify awe as a feeling rather than an emotion, because it tends to have objects that are not distinct and may occur in the absence of articulate belief. When we experience awe, we usually do not know how to say what we are in awe of. (The Larkin poem discussed in chapter three expresses awe without being reverent toward anything in particular.)
The principal object of reverence is Something that reminds us of human limitations. We speak of reverence to God, to nature, and to ideals such as justice and truth. Reverence toward objects like these yields primarily what I have called awe and it is usually inarticulate. A scientist who is reverent toward the truth is reverent in seeking the truth. Her very reverence makes her cautious; it prevents her from saying that she knows exactly what the truth is and keeps her mind open to evidence that should make her adjust her theory. To say that I am reverent toward X does not imply that I think X is spooky (the truth is not spooky to a scientist); but a claim of reverence does imply that I recognize that X is not entirely under my control, that I think X is what it is no matter what I do or believe, and that I accept a degree of mystery about X which I am trying to penetrate (see chapter seven, “Reverence Without a Creed,” on the object of reverence).
No. Reverence is not neutral with respect to religion, nor is any other virtue. If there is a religion that neglects or downgrades justice, then worshippers who learn to promote justice must fall away from that religion or else try to reform it. I will say the same of reverence. Some religions place a high value on reverence, and some do not. Because reverence is not the same thing as faith, faith-centered religion may place a low value on reverence, exactly as some faith-centered religion places a relatively low value on justice.
The main difference between reverence and respect is this: You can have too much respect, and you can have respect for the wrong things. It is wrong to respect false judgments or vicious people. But if reverence is a virtue, it can never require of you anything that is wrong. So reverence does not require respect for just anything, and reverent people will feel contempt for whatever deserves contempt. Reverence includes the power to feel the right degree of respect in each case. Go back to the example of courage. What is the difference between courage and confidence? You can have too much confidence, but you can never have too much courage, because courage is, among other things, the power to feel confidence when you should and not when you should not (for more on respect, see chapter eleven, “The Reverent Leader”).
One more difference: reverence entails a capacity for respect (among other things). Respect is something you feel. Reverence (as I am using the word) is the capacity to have feelings. It is not simply a feeling in itself.
Reverence is not humility. The opposite of reverence is hubris—which is always a bad thing—but the opposite of humility is pride, and pride can be a good thing. The reverent soul has much to be proud of, and should be proud. Leaders should be proud of their teams and of their missions. Humility smacks of obedience to authority, sometimes even of obsequiousness. But a reverent soul can stand up to authority and is never obsequious. Humility in a person with authority is usually a fraud, and the reverent soul does not stoop to fraud.
Yes. Reverence means keeping in mind that we share human weakness and vulnerability with other people. Compassion grows from a sense of common weakness. Reverent people, seeing someone suffer, are aware that they could suffer in the same way. Compassion understood in this way is compatible with justice. (See chapter twelve, “Compassion.”)
No. If you have reverence, you may exercise it in religion, but you may also exercise it in politics, in the classroom, on the battlefield, or wherever you have moral choices to make. You may be fair-minded or courageous without being religious, and you may be religious without being fair-minded or courageous. It is the same with reverence: Reverence and religiousness overlap, but they do not entail one another. Even an atheist or a non-theist may be reverent.
Not if reverence is a virtue such as courage. If courage is what we think it is, then Jewish courage is no different in kind from Christian or Buddhist courage; indeed, we would be silly to call it by such names. Courage is courage, regardless of the religion of those who display it. Reverence is the same; it straddles boundaries between religions and bridges the gap between religious and secular life.
Religions may come into conflict over points in theology, forms of worship, or specific ethical rules. They may disagree over the relative importance of justice and faith, and they may quarrel over exactly what justice requires or how it should be administered. Still, religious people should be able to recognize that the justice they are trying to foster in their own minds is the same sort of thing as the justice they recognize (or find missing) in people who belong to religions other than their own. They should find the same true of reverence, if reverence is a virtue.
My claim that virtues straddle cultures and religions should be controversial; many philosophers and social scientists will reject it. Most elements of the controversy are not germane to this small book. My argument for the claim is simple—it is the book itself. If the book can give its readers a fairly clear sense of what reverence is without bowing to the demands of this or that religion, then it will have made a case for my thesis.
Yes, but not as much as you might expect. Reverence in polytheism is still recognizably reverence, even if it is directed at gods who are thought to be evil. The chief limitation on reverence as a virtue is this: it must have an object that is not a slave to human interests, and that is not held to be a mere product of culture. Why? This is a complicated matter. (See chapter seven, “Reverence Without a Creed”.)
Several modern religions, along with many ancient ones, practice reverence toward gods who are capable of evil—or so it is believed. If the divine is not capable of evil, these believers would ask, where does evil come from into our world? That is a hard question. One common answer—and a very reverent one—is that we human beings do not know enough to judge whether the actions of divine beings are good or evil. In any case, we would be wrong to withhold reverence from what we feel to be divine simply because we do not find that it measures up to our human standards of goodness.
In any case, reverence in religion supplies a strong sense of distance between human and divine, and reverent people think it foolish to try to take on divine attributes. For this reason, reverence toward evil gods does not put people into danger of becoming evil. Religion that is centered on reverence is not afraid to face the idea that the divine may seem evil in human terms.
Any virtue can be abused. Tyrants can exploit the courage and reverence and even the justice of their peoples. We have seen this in our own time; vicious rulers in both European and Confucian cultures have taken advantage of their people’s habits of respect—habits bred in reverence. Savage commanders exploit the courage of their troops. Honesty among friends is prohibitively dangerous when the friends are likely to be reporting to the secret police. To say that virtues are always good, then, is overly simple. They are never bad in themselves, but they can lead to trouble in a bad context. People pay a high price for clinging to virtue when they find themselves in a vicious system, and so one of the classical goals of statecraft is to build a system in which virtue may safely flourish—so that one may call for virtue without demanding enormous sacrifices. Also, most people’s virtues are not complete, and partial virtues may be very bad indeed. Soldiers may follow a vicious leader into danger and be party to a terrible crime. In doing this they may show some measure of courage. But soldiers who had a full measure of courage would not be party to a crime; they would instead join the resistance against the vicious leader.
The virtue of reverence is good in itself, if it is a virtue, but since we do not always know what it is to be reverent, we are liable to use the word “reverence” for something that is bad, such as rigid adherence to tradition (see chapter nine, “Relativism”). Virtues are notoriously hard to define, and we are often taken in by what I call “imposter virtues”—ideas that can make us feel good about doing bad things. Clinging to tradition is not reverence; it is an especially harmful imposter, masquerading as reverence.
Many people think that clinging to tradition is simply what reverence is, but virtue ethics does not ask what it is that many people think. It asks how we may best live our lives. People’s opinions are helpful in this inquiry, but they cannot be the final arbiter. How could they be, when opinions vary so widely? If reverence meant following tradition no matter what, then it would be no better than the tradition in question, good on some points and bad on others. So clinging to tradition cannot be a virtue, and if it cannot be a virtue, it cannot be reverence. It is an imposter. There is a reverent way of respecting tradition, even after it has been abandoned, and that is to treat it as one might a glorious building from antiquity. The Parthenon in Athens is worth preserving as a monument to the past, but no one should live in it, and it would seem irreverent to renovate it in ways that could make it habitable. There is also a reverent way of respecting a tradition while it is still alive. If we are going to live in a tradition and not abandon it, we must respect it enough to maintain it through renovation and not preserve it as a monument. And this does not transgress the line between human and divine, as clinging to tradition does, if it mistakes human customs for the will of God.
It’s not easy. Ethics is not an easy subject. The short answer is that virtuous people will steer away from imposter virtues, whether they can fully account for their choices or not. The long answer is that we would be wise to consider the imposter virtues that are easily identified; if we do so, then we can aim to avoid whatever closely resembles them. The catch is that imposter virtues resemble real ones fairly closely. That is why they are so tempting.
Courage looks a lot like the ability to take great risks without hesitation, but an addict who pumps heroin from an unknown source into her veins is taking a great risk without hesitation, and she is not courageous. She is oblivious to risk, owing to her addiction, but if she feels a moment’s satisfaction at the thought of her own courage, she is being taken in by an imposter virtue—and so are her more timid friends if they admire her. False courage may come from a bottle or a vial or a box of pills, but real courage is not blind to danger. Real courage has a clear mind; it makes distinctions between one sort of danger and another. Imposter virtues generally cloud the mind; that is why they are dangerous.
Narrow adherence to tradition is like narrow patriotism (“my country right or wrong”), which is good if your country is well led, bad if your country is poorly led. The analogy is helpful, because narrow patriotism is plainly an imposter; in the previous century, we have often seen that narrow patriotism allows people to think well of themselves while committing the greatest atrocities. Patriotism on behalf of the Third Reich was no virtue. But true patriotism was possible even then; it led to brave acts of resistance to policies that were a disgrace to Germany. Narrow adherence to tradition and narrow patriotism go wrong in the same way, by offering us what appear to be morally valid excuses for suspending our own moral judgment or closing the lid on our own moral compasses. And false courage does the same: if you are drunk or addicted you cannot think or feel as you otherwise would.
So good advice for avoiding imposter virtues is this: Never accept as a virtue any condition that clouds the mind.
No. Tradition is not God. Reverence flourishes in religions that understand the difference.
No. Mockery serves reverence in two ways: by reminding stuffed shirts about their imperfections, and by awakening a sense of shame in people who have allowed theirs to lie dormant.
No. You cannot feel shame without feeling respect for something larger than yourself—family, society, or moral ideals. And reverence is the source of your capacity to feel that there is something like this that you should respect.
Shame is not a bad feeling. Like most emotions, shame can be good or bad depending on the circumstances; shame in particular can move us powerfully to make sacrifices. (Only love, I think, rivals the power that shame has over us for good or ill.) Athletes may win out over pain in order to escape the shame of defeat, soldiers may risk their lives to escape the shame of leaving a comrade to the mercy of their enemy, a lonely hero may tell a hard truth so that she can avoid the shame of facing her conscience with a lie. Most of this is good, but, like respect, shame can go terribly wrong: in the Iliad, Homer tells how Hector lost his life, and the war, because he was ashamed to face his troops after a minor defeat.
Virtues are capacities for having feelings in good ways. Insofar as you have courage, you will feel confidence only when that is a good way to feel. In the same way, you will feel the good sort of shame insofar as you are reverent.
Shame is different from guilt. Perhaps we would be better off if we could live without feelings of guilt; but feelings of shame, and the fear of shame, push us to live better and be better people. Life without shame would be a disaster.
By doing reverent things, just as you become courageous by doing courageous things, or fair-minded by doing what is fair. But, then, how to start? It seems you must be reverent in order to start becoming reverent. But that would be impossible.
There is a similar chicken-and-egg problem for any virtue. The ancient Chinese took the issue very seriously. The prevailing trend in Confucian philosophy, developed by Mencius, was to suppose that every human being is endowed with the seeds of virtue. I think that is what Protagoras had in mind when he said that Zeus gave us justice and reverence. On both views we are born with capacities that we may or may not develop in good ways.
So a better question to ask would be, “How can I become more reverent?” And the answer is, “By looking to see what you are already doing that is reverent, and doing more things that are like that.”
By the feelings from which it springs. This is not easy. You can do things that look brave without actually being brave. Suppose you fight hard merely because you want your friends to think that you are brave. That is not bravery. In the same way, if you act respectfully in order to make a good impression on your boss, you are doing something that looks respectful. But an action is truly respectful only if it proceeds from a feeling of respect.
Even if you know that you are moved by feelings of respect, however, you still do not know that this feeling springs from the virtue of reverence. For this you need to look at a wide pattern of your feelings: Do you feel and show respect for your underlings as well as for your boss? If not, your respect has nothing to do with reverence. This makes the chicken-egg problem all the harder. You need to know where your actions and emotions are coming from before you can know yourself well enough to cultivate a virtue. This is one reason why the ancient Greeks cared so much about the command they believed came from Apollo—“Know thyself.”
If you ask this question and really think you need to know the answer, you are a hopeless case. You are like a cellist who sets out to play the Bach suites, stops suddenly, and asks, “Why should I try to play the right notes?” Or a mathematician who pauses in the middle of a proof to ask why he shouldn’t slip in a few fallacies. You are a living human being, and you are living through a complex set of social practices; you cannot ask whether you should take those practices seriously without stepping outside of them. But you can’t step outside a practice while you are engaged in it.
There is a tough problem for philosophers here. Most modern ethicists are looking for a theory that will provide a grounding or a foundation for ethics or morality—a rational answer to the why-be-good question. But hardly anyone who takes virtue ethics seriously, whether ancient or modern, thinks it worthwhile to wait for external foundations to be secure before setting to work on virtue.
Not a helpful distinction: the English words derive from Greek and Latin for exactly the same thing. Some modern thinkers apply “morals” to timeless ideals and “ethics” to norms that are embedded in social practices, but they rarely say what to do if these seem to conflict. Virtue ethics generally resists the distinction, and reverence plainly cuts across it, since reverence serves timeless ideals through social practices.
Sadly, yes. A virtue may have more or less purchase on the mind, and it may be competing at times with other internal forces too powerful for it to overcome. Brave people may act in cowardly ways; fair-minded people may commit injustices. And even those who have developed the virtue of reverence to an uncommon extent may not act always in accordance with it.
Perhaps. Is there justice among thieves? Is there reverence among people who are cruel, foolish, or vengeful? This is a hard question, and not unique to reverence. Philosophers call this the problem of the unity of virtue: Can you have just one virtue and leave the rest aside? Or does the cultivation of one virtue bring other virtues along with it? We have already agreed that no virtue is a guarantee against wrongdoing. You can have a virtue and still do wrong things. But can you have a virtue along with a set of vices? I think not. Cowardice will undermine reverence or any other virtue, especially when danger threatens; cruelty and injustice are flat-out incompatible with reverence.
On the other hand, no vice is complete. Protagoras had a point: Any human being capable of working with others must have basic virtues at some level. That is why there is some justice, and even some reverence, among thieves. A perfectly vicious man would have to operate entirely on his own.
Not easily, at least not in action. “Virtue has neighbors,” says Confucius (Analects 4.25), and virtue never works as it is supposed to work in a vacuum or in a hostile human environment. If you are a soldier, and if you are the only one in your unit who has courage, then you will not be able to give full expression to your courage in action. In fact, you may have to act in as cowardly a way as the others unless you can miraculously communicate your courage to them.
Suppose you decide to show the others what courage is, and you leap out of your foxhole alone into a firestorm. Even if you live, you will not have shown courage. Courage is not that stupid; it cannot require you to throw away your life hopelessly in an action you take by yourself.
The social factor is even more important for reverence, which typically affects the shared behavior and shared feelings of people in a group (as in my example of the musicians). It is virtually impossible to act alone in the exercise of reverence. That is because reverence uses ceremony as a kind of language of behavior, and you cannot use a language all by yourself. You must be around other language users both in order to learn a language and to use it. That is why people who seek reverence don’t merely try to improve themselves—they try to involve family or church or community in the language of reverence—in shared events, in ceremony, even, perhaps, in poetry.
Writing poetry is one way you can show reverence in an irreverent society. In “High Windows,” Larkin sees no reverence around him, and yet his poem finds language for reverence.
Of course. I can speak correct English to someone who does not. If English is spoken in my group, there is a good chance that my ungrammatical friend will understand me, and there is a faint chance that he will follow my good example. In the same way, if there is some behavior that expresses reverence in my group, I can act reverently toward people who are irreverent—and I ought to do so. They may understand me, and they may follow my example. But our experience of bad grammar is not encouraging. Bad grammar is contagious. People admire those who are tough enough to break the rules of grammar. And they tend to admire those who break with reverence or undermine ceremony. All the more important, then, is leadership.
Because even in democracy, virtue—or vice—trickles down. All virtues belong to leadership, but reverence is particularly a virtue of leaders. Both Greek and Chinese traditions bring out reverence in discussions of leadership. If leaders do not show reverence, then their followers will need to act crudely in order to be heard. A boss who is arrogant will come to a bad end, because he will not hear the opinions of other people, and so he will have no check on his natural human tendency to err—unless someone breaks through his barriers of contempt. Breaking barriers leads to habits that are fatal to reverence. But around a reverent leader there are no thick walls to crash through, and habits of mutual respect can flourish.
No, but many of our contemporaries would say yes. In an irreverent society, crude behavior may be highly successful. Crudeness then looks like irreverence, with the result that irreverence looks like a virtue. Not so. Both of these appearances are misleading. Protesting bad leadership is never irreverent. Irreverence is the violation of reverence, but in the neighborhood of bad leaders there is little reverence to violate.
When people praise a film or a song or a book for its irreverence, I think they almost are always using the wrong word. They mean to give praise for boldness, independence, honesty, and a boisterous contempt for anything pretentious or arrogant. All this is compatible with reverence. For extreme, but reverent, protest, think of Antigone. In Sophocles’ drama, Antigone protests against her uncle, the king, who has denied burial to her brother. The unburied brother may have been wicked, but after his death he belongs to the gods, and it is gross irreverence to deprive the gods of what is their due. The Chorus in the play seems to think that Antigone’s protest has gone too far; they think her enthusiasm for reverence is dangerous, and perhaps also unjust, but they recognize that she has exhibited true reverence, and they admire her for this (853–56, 872–75).
But with this example, I have passed beyond bare reverence. No actual example of reverence or its violation is bare in my sense, because reverence always occurs within a culture. Antigone speaks for the ancient Greek way of being reverent—one way, out of many, for remembering what it is to be human, and by that memory to play a truly human part in life’s drama.
To lift our thoughts too high;
We are human and our time is short.
—The Chorus in Euripides’
Bacchae 395–97