Right and Wrong

The Book of Virtues
Compiled by William J. Bennett
Bookman Press

The enthusiastic reception which has greeted William J. Bennett's 832-page anthology of "great moral stories", essays and verse has surprised cynics and nihilists, but nobody else.  Reviews and sales over the past year in America, and over the past three months in a special Australian edition, underline what many eminent educators have been saying for years:  adults who care for the young are hungry for literature which upholds worthy principles, and which offers impressionable readers authentic role models.

For well over a decade, the material provided for school children on the related questions "What is right and wrong?" and "What is the good life?" has been woefully inadequate.  As the US Secretary of Education, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities under President Reagan, and a well-known defender of perennial values, Bill Bennett would have been painfully aware of this situation.  But, unlike many other public figures calling for better character formation in schools, he had the foresight to meet a pressing market demand before it could be fully articulated.

It would be churlish not to say "At last!" in response to a volume whose stated purpose is to allow parents and teachers to browse at their leisure among writings which provide "anchors and moorings" for children within a common world of "shared ideals".  And it would be ungenerous not to remark on the soundness and clarity of the editorial comments framing each of the ten virtues which arc given "form and content" in the anthology.  In his introductory statements, Bennett moves easily among ideas which have shaped lives in many parts of the world over hundreds of years.

At the start of Chapter 2, for example, he remarks that "just as courage takes its stand by others in challenging situations, so compassion takes its stand with others in their distress".  To introduce the fifth chapter, he says that Work is not "what we do for a living but what we do with our living", and soon afterwards that Work's opposite is "not leisure or play or having fun but idleness".  On Perseverance, early on, he quotes Harry Truman, who once observed that being a country's president "is like riding a tiger.  A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed".  Indeed, some of the remarks which prepare the way for the literature to follow are as instructive as the selections themselves.

It is therefore the more regrettable that Bennett's enterprise is marred in three important and related respects.  His classification of the virtues named in his ten chapter headings and within each chapter is hopelessly confused -- which means that he generates conceptual looseness about the nature of virtue itself.  Omissions hard to justify even on the grounds of "practical limitations" such as space give the volume as a whole a peculiarly provincial flavour.  And the selections vary enormously not simply in complexity, but in quality.

The fact that Bennett does not specify the ages of the children for whom the material is intended, remarking only that it progresses from "the very easy to the more difficult", need not concern sensible parents and teachers.  What he calls instruction in "the basics" rather than "tough issues" like creationism or euthanasia has an obvious commonsense validity.  But there are differences between "easy" and "linguistically inadequate", "simple-minded" and "simple", "corny" and "readable", which he does not sufficiently appreciate.

LITERARY QUALITY

As Lansdowne Press's best-selling My Country reveals, an anthology of imaginative writing can contain fine selections whose appeal will be both immediate and wide-ranging.  But this won't happen unless its editor has secure literary judgment.  Although Bennett rightly values literature which can be readily committed to memory by children -- as many of these selections apparently were by members of his own generation -- his understanding of the verbal qualities which facilitate and suitably enrich this process is both untutored and naive.

Almost all the verse in The Book of Virtues is of greeting card calibre;  and too many of the prose selections, penned by unknown authors, are similarly hackneyed.  Bennett lacks the ear which helps talented editors to distinguish immediately between the moralistic and the compellingly moral.  His chapter on Responsibility, which juxtaposes saccharine poems by Edgar Guest and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with powerful selections from Thucydides, Plato, Jefferson, Madison, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Martin Luther King and C.S. Lewis, dramatises a difficulty present throughout the volume.

Whether because of copyright problems (much of the material is in the public domain) or on the mistaken assumption that watered-down versions of classical tales have greater appeal than either the originals or the renditions provided by the greatest narrative writers, Bennett loads down his volume with disappointing retellings of great myths, legends, fables, and Bible stories.  This is equivalent to the wholesale replacement of traditional hymns with bland and undemanding modern ones -- a process which, over the past 30 years, has contributed to a vast popular exodus from churches.

Modern audiences may initially "like" utterances without rhythmic and tonal complexity;  but such utterances don't compel the repeated revisiting which is an automatic response to greatness.  When C.S. Lewis remarked that the best children's literature appeals as much to adults as to their progeny, he was explicitly quarrelling with the view, proffered by Bennett, that selections which strike grown-ups as "too simple, too corny, too old-fashioned" won't seem so to children.  On the contrary:  the most discerning youngsters recoil from inferior nourishment as surely as do their elders.

Not for nothing would most intelligent children hold their noses or stifle hoots if they were given a diet of poems like these:

When little Fred
Was called to bed,
He always acted right;
He kissed Mama,
And then Papa,
And wished them all good night.

He made no noise,
Like naughty boys,
But gently up the stairs
Directly went,
When he was sent,
And always said his prayers.

The Book of Virtues, p.44

The popularity of Madeleine L'Engle's beautiful books on Biblical events (e.g. The Glorious Impossible and Ladder of Angels), or of Jan Pienkowski's incomparable Christmas:  The King James Version, or of Lewis's own The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, attests to the responsiveness of children and their parents to literary quality.  So long as youngsters are exposed early, and regularly, to the finest prose and poetry available, they will continue to respond enthusiastically to it all their lives.

Schmaltz not only impoverishes language;  it falsifies emotion.  One reason for the continuing, universal appeal of such humorous classics as Winnie the Pooh, the Curious George books, or Beverly Cleary's Ramona, Henry Huggins and Ralph S. Mouse series is that their vision of life is morally balanced without being sanctimonious.  Because they don't sacrifice reality to the need for an improving message, they instruct at the same time that they delight.  What they render morally is never tainted by smugness.

CLASSIFICATION

Bennett's choice of so much trite material is not unrelated to his higgledy-piggledy classification of the virtues.  There are, unfortunately, important forms of intellectual formation within moral philosophy and the expressive arts which he has never experienced -- despite being a philosophy major at Williams College and doing a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of Texas.

As Mortimer Adler makes clear in his brilliant volume for Encyclopaedia Britannica's Great Books series, Syntopicon, the contemporary tendency -- exemplified by Bill Bennett -- is to think of virtue chiefly in terms of character rather than of mind.  This is a mistake.  The ancient conception of virtue as the quality which makes a person good extended to the sphere of thinking and knowing as well as to desire and action.  Plato, Aristotle and, later, the great medieval metaphysicians divided all the virtues into intellectual and moral, or excellences of mind and character.  Bennett's book would have a very different conceptual and aesthetic cast if he had taken into account this division.

Of the natural virtues (i.e. those attained by one's own efforts) commended by the Greeks, the cardinal virtues, which are organically related, are prudence (the most intellectual of the four), justice, fortitude and temperance.  Christian moralists, accepting this grouping, nonetheless believe that more than natural goodness is required for salvation.  According to St Paul -- on whom Bennett relies in other contexts -- faith, hope and charity (the supernatural virtues) are of even greater importance, because they direct human life to a plane which exceeds man's nature.  These three virtues are infused in humankind freely by God, as gifts.

Over the centuries, great thinkers preoccupied with the question "What is the difference between good and evil?" have turned to the ancients and their theological heirs in order to reflect systematically on vice and virtue.  Many of these thinkers, for the sake of cogency, have accepted their essential grouping of faith, hope, charity (or love), and then prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance.  Many, too -- including Mr Adler and others who have influenced Britannica's conceptual frame -- have looked to the Greeks, and to the theologians who took the lead from them, to decide upon the virtues which should be defined under each of these seven large headings.

A modern educational psychologist, David Isaacs, who has written an enormously helpful book, Character Building, about the stages at which children respond to direct instruction in the virtues, has followed their example, and has constructed a chart as shown above.

Sensibly, Isaacs recognises that virtues like compassion and friendship, to which Bennett gives chapter headings, are actually manifestations of much larger generic virtues:  respectively, love (or charity) and temperance.  He takes it for granted that obedience, the most important moral virtue to inculcate in young children, is an aspect of justice.  And he acknowledges that the intellectual, in contrast with the moral, virtues cannot be properly set in place until a person is close to being adult.

Because Bennett lacks a conceptual apparatus as trenchant and lucid as this, he illustrates the importance of essential expressions of moral goodness such as justice by grouping them under headings (e.g. Responsibility) which are, to say the least, intellectually fuzzy:  Of the ten virtues which are given chapter titles, six deal with aspects of fortitude (fortitude itself is cited as an example of courage:  an inside-out feat which should make logicians, as well as metaphysicians, wince).  The only major intellectual virtue which is accorded adequate space is loyalty.  Thus, without realising it, readers encounter both an imbalanced and a woolly compendium of shoulds and should nots.  Faith gets a chapter heading, but not Hope and Love (instead there is Compassion, which is only one of many aspects of love suitable for exposition in an anthology for children).  Under the heading Self-Discipline -- by which Bennett seems to mean Temperance -- tale upon tale about greed and anger follow (cf. Isaacs).  In the chapter on honesty, lies are understandably given more space than other forms of fraud;  but such basic considerations as the difference between evasion and forthrightness, which play a central role in children's daily lives under the broad heading Truthfulness, are not directly explored.

Numerous Old Testament stories are retold, but parables or key events dramatised in the New Testament (e.g. the account of the Prodigal Son) barely rate a mention.  One recognised saint, Francis of Assisi, gets slightly over a page (The Sermon to the Birds).  There are no excerpts from such morally resonant utterances as Paul's letters or -- from another influential moral tradition -- the analects of Confucius.  In their place are page after page of verses like "Little Fred".

Despite these embarrassing weaknesses, however, Bennett's book is a helpful starting point for adults who share his awareness that "children are essentially moral and spiritual beings" who deserve to experience a much richer literature than, of late, they have been given.  The opening paragraph of the entire volume, from a longer epigram culled from Plato's Republic, is worth quoting in full:

"You know that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing:  for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken ... Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?"

Even though it's true, as Bennett points out, that people of good character don't all "come down on the same side of difficult political and social issues", the need for schools to offer reminders about choices made by Horatius, Damocles, and Icarus, Ruth and Naomi, Silas and Barnabas, and Men-Tse remains pressing.