A scout's virtues: cleanliness

A scout is clean: He keeps clean in body and thought, stands for clean speech, clean sport, clean habits, and travels with a clean crowd.

That's a familiar enough sentiment but it is mostly familiar to us as the subject of mockery. To enter into a discussion of is to enter a target-rich environment.

But can you think of anything good to say about cleanliness?

By way of analysis, I'm going to juxtapose and comment on a couple of other quotes.

First, here is Jesus as quoted in Mark's gospel (7:15):

Nothing that goes into a person from the outside can make him unclean. It's what comes out of a person that makes a person unclean. 

That's from the International Standard Version. Most of the better translations say "defile" instead of "unclean". That's sort of helpful because we read "clean" in a relatively value-free way. The Jews of Jesus's time did not. (It should also read "man" and not "a person".) 

Scholars always tell us that the Jews of Jesus's time did not wash their hands before eating because they worried about germs. They did it as part of a ritual and believed that the person who did not wash their hands before eating committed an affront against God. Likewise, the person who would share a table with someone who did not wash their hands.

And we're not like that? We don't worry so much about affronting God anymore but we do have all sorts of superstitious rituals about cleanliness.

A man goes to a public washroom. He goes to a urinal and not into a toilet stall. He washes his hands even though he did not accidentally pee on them. He showered and put clean underwear on that day. There isn't a surface in that washroom that is even close to being as clean as the skin on his penis. The dirtiest, most germ-laden surface in the room is probably the handle on the door he will grab on the way out. After he was washed his hands! Because he has just washed his hands he has cleaned competing bacteria out and left them all clean and slightly damp and, therefore, the ideal surface for the germs he will pick up from the door handle.

Not that there is anything unusual about the door handle of a public washroom. Every other door handle he will touch that day is at least as dirty. But he washes his hands because he handled his penis. Later, he will take it for granted that the woman he loves and cares about most in the world will put it in her mouth. Weird, wouldn't you say? 

Please, keep washing your hands but realize that a man washes his hands after peeing for reasons that have much less to do with disease prevention than we tell ourselves. He washes his hands after he touched his penis because it's a simple act of respect driven by a sense that one does not share such intimate contact casually, even at second hand. 

Dorothy Day did more for poor people than you and everyone you know put together. Here is what she told young idealists who showed up wanting "to help the poor".

There are two things you should know about the poor: they tend to smell, and they are ungrateful.

You might just convince yourself, reading Luke's version of the beatitudes, that you should be poor (although you'll probably be a complete hypocrite about it even if you do). You probably won't convince yourself that it would be morally better for you to be smelly and ungrateful.

Is cleanliness related to gratitude? You might say not but taking the trouble to be clean for others is a way of showing them respect and respect is part of gratitude. That can sometimes remain true even when the cleanliness in question is merely a social convention and has nothing to do with any actual risk of infection.

A scout's virtues: bravery

A scout is brave: He has the courage to face danger in spite of fear and has to stand up for the right against the coaxings of friends or the jeers or threats of enemies, and defeat does not down him.

You can see Alasdair MacIntyre both affirmed and refuted in that. 

On the one hand, you can see, even in this scout handbook, evidence that the tradition of virtue ethics is deep and that it runs along lines that only superficially resemble the way academic ethics operate. Academic ethics would look right past "face danger in spite of fear", "coaxings of friends", "jeers or threats of enemies" and "feat" that "does not down him" and say, "All these things are good but how do we define bravery?"The scout outlook is that we already know what bravery is. We might worry about refining our definition to deal with weird cases at the margins but the simple fact that the word exists and is commonly used in our language says that we have a good grasp on the concept. The problem, as I have said many times before, is training ourselves to actually be brave. (Academics have degraded ethics by making it entirely about making moral decisions.)

The refutation lies in the very existence of this text. Here is a tradition of passing along virtue ethics in a meaningful way that continued long after the collapse that McIntyre wrote about. 

You might be inclined to sneer at that. You might be inclined to say that it is so commonplace and light as to be insignificant.

That sort of move has a long history in philosophy. The Greco-Roman moralists—figures such as Cicero and Seneca—were similarly brushed off. In more modern terms, people study Kant's ethics at university, even though Kant has virtually nothing to teach us about how to actually live our lives, while regarding his contemporary Jane Austen, who can teach us a lot, as merely a source of entertainment.

There isn't much more that needs to be said. We know what bravery is and we have a list of small things that we need to train ourselves to overcome. Once we have mastered those small things, we will be ready to deal with bigger ones.

That—the realization that being trustworthy in small things means we could be assigned bigger ones—requires bravery all by itself.

A scout's virtues: thrift

A scout is thrifty. He does not wantonly destroy property. He works faithfully, wastes nothing, and makes the best use of his opportunities. He saves his money so that he may pay his own way, be generous to those in need, and helpful to worthy objects. 

He may work for pay but must not receive tips for courtesies or good turns.

That is a manly virtue. You might miss that because thrift, as it used to be described when I was a boy, can be pretty girly. I say "when I was a boy" because nobody talks about thrift anymore.  Probably because it became such a girly virtue.

It became girly because thrift came to mean crap like saving wrapping paper, finding new uses for elastic bands and being the sort of busybody who makes everybody wait while they get out a pen and paper or a calculator out to work everyone's exact share when it's time to pay the bill at a restaurant.

But look at that text and see this: "He saves his money so that he may pay his own way, be generous to those in need, and helpful to worthy objects." That's old-fashioned manliness.

All of that "thrift" is about spending or giving away money! This may see contradictory if you're used to girly thrift, but manly thrift is a big, generous, overflowing virtue.

I'll continue this by going somewhere that might seem weird. A while ago we had a crazed, wanna-be terrorist shoot one of the soldiers standing guard at the national war memorial. Here's how an article in the latest issue of Anglican Journal starts:

As Canadians grappled with how to respond to the unprecedented violence that rocked Ottawa and the rest of Canada Oct. 22, the Anglican Journal asked leadership within the Anglican Church of Canada to reflect on the role of the church in troubled times.

I have a crazy suggestion. How about we respond by doing nothing at all?

Nothing happened to us! A good man, who'd dedicated his career to serving his country was killed. His family are devastated. But we suffered nothing. We should do nothing.

That is very unthrifty and very umanly writing. It's full of empty words. For starters, what was "unprecedented" about this violence? And was Ottawa, indeed the whole country, "rocked" by a senseless killing? Yeah, I wish that these things didn't happen but do you know what, they do happen. They happen all the time. If you were rocked by it, you're worthless bit of jello masquerading as  a man. Get over yourself. This wasn't about you.

We think of thrift as an economic concept but it's an emotional thing at base. An impulse buy is an emotional response. On strictly economic grounds, we already know it's a bad idea to make the impulse buy. We do it anyway because we haven't learned to manage our emotions.

Manage doesn't mean to suppress. It means to have the right kind of emotions, at the right time, in the right way.

Think about big gestures. What's the difference between a big gesture that comes of as manly, magnanimous or meaningful and one that comes off as trying to prove something, defensive or empty?

Thrift.

He works faithfully, wastes nothing, and makes the best use of his opportunities.

A scout's virtues: cheerfulness

Sentimentality is sentiment that is inappropriate for the object or situation or a sentiment that is not directed at anything at all.

Isn't "cheerfulness", then, nothing but sentimentality?

In this instance, those who turn to the 1911 Boy Scout's Handbook hoping to find an account of virtue from before the rot set in are going to be disappointed. This is the rank sentimentality:

He must always be bright and smiling, and as the humorist says, "Must always see the donut and not the hole." A bright face and a cheery word spread like sunshine from one to another, It is the scout's duty to be a sunshine-maker to the world. (p. 9)

Yes, it's a book for boys and not men but a boy is a man in the making and that sounds more like a Grade 1 teacher in the making. Once we've all finished vomiting, let's see if we can save the scouts from themselves.

The key to extracting something good from all that claptrap is to consider the placement of cheerfulness in the list immediately below duty. What is our duty to others as regards our emotions? Of course, I can be sad at a funeral but how much right do I have to impose my sadness on others outside of special occasions?

Consider the routine question, "How are you?" and the equally routine answer, "Fine!" The transaction was mocked as meaningless in the 1960s and 1970s. But what conditions justify answering that you are not fine? Because the second you do that, the other person has to stop and pay attention to you. It's not hard to imagine situations in which you might not feel fine but wouldn't bother the other person with your troubles.

It's also easy to imagine people whose job requires them to be cheerful. The server at the counter may be feeling lousy but his job requires him to be cheerful. He might be in such a tough situation that he cannot be cheerful. But what is that? If someone really close to him died, he should get leave.

There are people who, as the Lemon Girl says, "are the sort of people things happen to". Live long enough and you will end up with an employee like that. Every week he comes in with another personal problem and bogs you and everyone else, including customers, down with his sadness or anger. You shouldn't feel bad about firing him but you do because, and this is what is wrong with this sort of person, their whole life is about being the centre of attention and they don't care that this makes them a burden to others.

Here is how I'd save cheerfulness. Cheerfulness isn't an emotion. Like empathy, it is a propensity to feel a certain kind of emotion in response to others. These emotions include judgment—judgments than can be sound or unsound. An empathetic person can respond supportively to your fears or, if they think those fears silly and unwarranted, tell you to get over yourself. To show empathy is to have a habit of charitably erring on the side of thinking others negative emotions are warranted. Cheerfulness is to have the habit of charitably erring on the side of responding to life's difficulties optimism and enthusiasm.

It's not a matter of simply suppressing or hiding your emotions. In some cases that may be called for but the real challenge is much harder; it is to actually direct yourself to have the more positive emotions. How is that different from sentimentality? It's different because it has a worthy object: charity towards others.

A scout's virtues: obedience

It's Saturday night at about nine o'clock and I have not posted on a scout's virtues all week and I promised myself that I would do at least one of these per week. It's only a promise I made to myself and no one would know any better if I didn't. So ... why not just skip it and go to bed? No one will know.

...

Is obedience a virtue? Or is it a duty? Deontology, post-enlightenment, rule-based ethics, is often described as duty ethics. It says that you have a duty and that duty is determined by rationally derived rules and it is your duty to obey the rules that reason gives you, whether you are capable of doing so or not.

Aristotle, on the other hand, said that rules always run out. Rules are good and perhaps even necessary but rules alone are not enough to guide behaviour. In this, he agrees with Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein never read Aristotle. But the point remains, the ability to follow a rule depends on an agreement, not just in definitions, but an agreement in judgment: an agreement that this counts as following a rule. Aristotle said that the right action is the thing that a virtuous person would do in a given situation. That is agreement in judgment. That will apply when there is a rule that covers the action. It will also apply when there is no rule. The two positions don't line up exactly (amongst other things, Wittgenstein had little to say about ethics) but it isn't hard to see how they could be made to line up.

Back to the subject at hand.

Obedience to "duly constituted authorities", an important qualification, is indeed a duty but learning to fulfill that duty teaches us virtue. Look at this language from the virtue section (pp 8-11) of the 1911 Handbook and you'll see what I mean:

To be a good scout a boy must learn to obey ... He must learn to obey, before he is able to command. He should so learn to discipline and control himself that he will have no thought but to obey the orders of his officers. He should keep such a strong grip on his own life that he will not allow himself to do anything which is ignoble, or which will harm his life or weaken his powers of endurance.

There is a lot there. Much of what is there will inspire resistance in anyone who  has gone through the modern education system.

Nowadays, we encourage independence of thought and authenticity. Well, we  say we do. Meanwhile, teacher thinks you should see a specialist and maybe be given Ritalin, little boy, because you're not as docile and pliable as the girls are.

A virtue is a strength. Virtue means manliness in Latin. In Greek the word arete means excellence. It's one of history's many ironies that the word has morphed from meaning someone who is good at doing things to someone who doesn't cause trouble for teacher.

Here's the thing: if you're a boy, being obedient is difficult. Maybe if you're a girl as well but boys struggle more with obedience. You naturally resist it. You are always trying to break free. To learn to be obedient to your parents, your teacher, your scoutmaster, does not come naturally. Girls thrive on the approval of others. Boys do not. To master obedience, we need to master ourselves.

He must learn to obey, before he is able to command.

And that remains true even if the only one we ever really command is ourselves.

Reread this part carefully:

He should keep such a strong grip on his own life that he will not allow himself to do anything which is ignoble, or which will harm his life or weaken his powers of endurance.

Why is it important not to harm your life or weaken your powers of endurance?

The motto, "Be Prepared," means that the scout is always in a state of readiness in mind and body to do his duty. To be prepared in mind, by having disciplined himself to be obedient, and also by having thought out beforehand, any accident or situation that may occur, so that he may know the right thing to do at the right moment, and be willing to do it. To be prepared in body, by making himself strong and active and able to do the right thing at the right moment, and then do it.

Can virtues exist in isolation? "I'm brave but lack other virtues.". It's fine to be brave in battle but that virtue is no virtue at all unless you have the good sense to know enough not to be brave in battle fighting for the Nazis or the confederacy. For Aristotle, bravery is impossible without the virtue of justice. For Aristotle, the men who flew the two jets into the World Trade Center were not brave. An attack on innocent people is the worst sort of cowardice no matter how much this might, as Bill Maher thought, seem to resemble bravery.

In addition to justice, you also need prudence, or practical reason, which Aristotle rates the most important intellectual virtue.

Look at the paragraph about "be prepared" again. You'll notice that the virtue of prudence is hiding in it:

... and also by having thought out beforehand, any accident or situation that may occur ...

Which leaves justice. Where is justice? Obedience takes the part of justice. And, however inclined we might be to resist, that makes sense for a boy. Wouldn't you agree? A boy should respect authority because a boy is too young to be deciding what is right and wrong.

I know, you're with Huck Finn.

What has Huck to do with this? Let me remind you. Huck has just written a letter that would turn Jim over to the authorities that Huck feels he should be obedient to. And he feels good for having done so. And then, he suddenly rejects it all. He looks at the letter but then he ...

... got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. 

Do you see the trick Mark Twain has pulled on us here? He is using language inspired by the Psalms:

" I keep the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices, my body dwells secure." (Pslam 16 beginning at verse 8)

Only Jim stands in for the LORD here. Everything Huck has ever been taught about morality—and we should remember that Huck has not been good at morality, he has been awful at it—tells him that he should turn Jim over to the authorities. He does not do this not, as we might guess, because he loves Jim but because Jim has loved him. This is good Christian morality. Huck, without realizing what he is doing, sees Jesus in the poor and suffering of this world as embodied by Jim who is unjustly kept a slave and he decides that he will reject all the authorities who have ever taught him in the name of this higher and truer justice he has learned from Jim. Jim is Huck's new father, a superior father to his natural father.

That's all very nice and good but how do you learn? Do you, as a boy, have access to this higher authority of love and, because it is love, God?

Twain may or may not have thought so. He may just be using Christian morality against the Christians Saul Alinsky style.

When Bob Dylan said,

You're going to have to serve somebody. It may be the devil or it may be the LORD, but you're going to have to serve somebody.

We all instinctively rejected that on the grounds that there was some third option. And that third option is what?

I'll just leave that there for now. I'll come back to it when I discuss Rudyard Kipling's Kim later.

I'll only say this: this is the most important part. If we can't make sense of this, then we have to give up on virtue as a guide to morality.

A scout's virtues: kindness

I suspect most people find this stuff boring and even if you've been sort of interested until now, the word "kind" will do you in. It's such a bland word.

By "kind" the 1911 Scout Handbook meant "kind to animals". In a sense, that is not surprising. Once you've covered off the other stuff—particularly "loyal", "trustworthy", "friendly", "courteous" and "cheerful"—there is no content we can give to "kind to people" without being redundant.

Kindness to animals is an important thing to teach the young, especially boys. But is there any reason to think deeply about this virtue beyond the age of 15? No, there isn't.

A scout's virtues: courtesy

There are, as I have already discussed, though perhaps vaguely, two sections from the 1911 Scout Handbook that I am drawing on here. There is a section called "Scout Virtues" (pp 8-10) and a section called "The Scout Law" (pp 14-16). There is a substantial but not complete overlap between the two sections. Not all the virtues appear as laws and not all the laws appear as virtues. Courtesy makes the cut on both counts.

Let's look at the text. In the virtue section, it says,

Another virtue of a scout is that of courtesy. A boy scout ought to have a command of polite language. He ought to show that he is a true gentleman by doing little things for others.

The law section reads,

He is polite to all, especially to women, children, old people, and the weak and helpless. He must not take pay for being helpful or courteous. (Emphasis in original.)

I'm sure that some of the people who are kind enough to read my stuff take one look at this and wonder why I spend all this effort analyzing such seemingly trivial stuff. My answer to that is you learn an immense amount about the history of the culture here.

Consider first the two sins we moderns tend to see here. The quote from the virtue section commits the sin of inauthenticity. We see "command of polite language" and we think artifice and fakery. We don't want polite language so much as we want genuinely felt language that tells us that the person really cares about us. And that care  should be "felts", as opposed to "thought". We want the authentic response from the core of their being. When we read Jesus telling us to love others we imagine that to mean having "real" feelings for them. We don't think it would be enough to master polite language and good manners while perhaps hiding that we find the other person boring and unattractive.

There is, it seems to us, something condescending about courtesy. And we are right to think so because, as I am sure everyone knows, the root of the word is from court and to be courteous means to act like a member of the nobility and, we want to say, you are not nobility and that's a damn good thing.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the sin of authenticity is combined with that of sexism.

Benevolent sexism represents evaluations of gender that may appear subjectively positive, but are actually damaging to people and gender equity more broadly (e.g. the ideas that women need to be protected by men).

That's from Wikipedia. I love the way this clear case of ideological belief is reported as if it were scientific fact. Anyway, you can see the problem. The 1911 Handbook groups women in with children, the elderly and weak and helpless.

And yet ...

This stuff isn't crazy. I know we're not supposed to say it but women do need to be protected by men. Not all the time but there are some times when a big strong man or, better, a group of big strong men is exactly what a woman needs to protect her. We all play along with the polite fiction of integrating women into the military but we all know that it's men who who are going to succeed or fail in doing the protecting if we are ever attacked. Similarly, we all agree that women should be in the police force but only a ridiculously naive person would think that an all-woman police force could protect us effectively. The same is true with firefighters. There are some kinds of things only a man can do. Technology has shortened the list considerably but there are still a lot of things women need men to protect them from.

One odd thing about "benevolent sexism" is that just about everyone likes it. Men feel better when they behave this way and women feel better when they are treated this way. The fight against it brings to mind Ann Althouse's point that feminism is as much about changing women as it is about changing men; to succeed, feminists need to teach women to resent it when men are courteous. So far, they have not been able to do so.

As to authenticity, I've said a lot in the past and will say more in the future. Here I will only say that authenticity works best in an in-group. You need to know someone pretty well to show authentic love and respect for them. You can do it with your family and friends. If you work for a small employer, go to a small church or live in a small enough town, you might even manage it there. The second you meet a stranger, however, you'll need courtesy if you mean to be kind.

My final thought is that when you do meet that stranger, one of the reasons to be courteous to them is because you are a representative of an in-group where you can show more authentic concern for one another and one example of such a group might be the boy scouts.
 

A scout's virtues: Friendly

Well, there had to be one weenie one.

A scout is friendly: He is a friend to all and a brother to every other scout.

As we used to say when I was a student, want to time me on this one?

Actually, I'll just assume that you can see the problems.

What I'd rather discuss is the necessary exclusiveness of friendship. The virtue hiding here, and there is one, lies in the fact that friendship is something special, is something you don't give to everyone. And every boy/man should not only be able to be a good friend but actually be one.

(The "friendly"above could only mean "behaving like a friend", as opposed to actually being one.)

That's a hard sell on a list of virtues appropriate to an organization such as the boy scouts.  Friendships are not only exclusive, they are also private. And they are based on a desire for self improvement. A friend should challenge and even threaten you a bit.

And yet, friendship, as we'll see when I get to Rudyard Kipling's Kim later, friendship is a huge part of the scouting ethos.

A scout's virtues: helpful

This is the virtue that puts the "boy" in Boy Scout. Helpfulness is a boyish virtue. By that, I don't mean that men aren't helpful but rather that helpfulness is a virtue you work at during your youth.  Learning helpfulness as an adult male seems like learning to tie your shoes as an adult; it not only demands an explanation, it suggests that you are developmentally challenged.

But it only appears that way. For when we read the explanations provided in the 1911 Handbook, we realize that to be helpful meant a whole lot more then than the word does now.

The first discussion of a Scout's virtues (pp 8-10) actually gives little attention to helpfulness. You get the impression that it is not one of the capital-letter virtues. This is a little surprising given how much attention the good deed for the day gets. In popular understanding of Scouting, being helpful and doing a good deed every day are second only to "Be Prepared".

It is interesting that,there is no virtue to correspond to preparedness in the Scout Law. And yet, the motto is unquestionably at the heart of the scout virtues, even more so than being trustworthy. Here is a telling detail from the Handbook's explanation of what is required for preparedness.

To be prepared in body, by making himself strong and active and able to do the right thing, and then to do it.

Fans of the great Greco-Roman moral thinkers will recognize the philosophical approach here: what you can and do do is more important than what you think. It's also a very manly moral philosophy in that only a vigorous and strong man could reasonably be expected to live up to it.

How did such a manly idea become the wimpy, juvenile nonsense that the public perceives scouting to be about? Well, it's partly the fault of the scouting movement. The Wolf Cub pack I was part of in my youth was a very feminized culture. Our leaders were no different from kindergarten teachers; not one could have lit a fire or tracked an animal to save her life.

Now, we might wonder if there aren't certain inescapable pedagogical realities at work here. Scouts are boys after all and Cubs are very young boys. They need to be protected! Yes ... to a point.

When I was a kid there was an old Scout's Pathfinder Annual in the house. It, like every Pathfinder Annual of that era, had a feature on the scouts who had received the highest awards of scouting. Some of these were awarded posthumously! One that always stuck with me was the scout who jumped into a burning oil truck and drove it away from the house it had been making a delivery at. This could easily have been a posthumous award but wasn't as the boy leapt from the truck and ran away before the fire exploded to full force.

Would we teach a boy that sort of virtue today? Or would we teach him to save himself first?

Have a look at the wording on being helpful from the manual:

A scout is helpful: He must be prepared at any time to save life, help injured persons, and share the home duties. He must do at least one good turn to somebody every day.

There is a descending order of romance and bravery running from being prepared to save life and ending with help with chores around the house. But there is a lot that isn't being said because it didn't have to be. Helping around the house meant helping with the manly deeds, deeds that required hard work and strength. A scout might help his mother dry the dishes but the understanding was that the core of his helping would be doing many stuff with his dad. That's no longer true. As Robert Glover correctly notes, we men are now raised by women and that has been the case for a long time.

A big part of being a man today requires us to make a conscious break with our mothers and other teachers. We have to stop seeing being helpful as a way to fit in and be good little boys who are docile and easily controlled and see it instead as a way to establish our identity as men.

A scout's virtues: loyalty

This is the second in a series in which I think out loud about the content of the 1911 Scout Handbook. These are not necessarily my final views. I'm just trying out some thoughts to see how they feel. To see the whole series, click on Be a Scout?

He is loyal to all to whom loyalty is due: his scout leader, his home, and parents and country.

Notice the qualification: "loyal to all to whom loyalty is due". I made this point last time because it is always the case with virtues. They cannot be reduced to rules because any set of rules will be too narrow. If Kant had tried qualifying truth telling to deal with even a small fraction of the circumstances that life's vicissitudes toss up, he would have reduced his moral rule to nothing. That is precisely why he argued, insanely but coherently, that we should tell the truth to everyone regardless of the circumstances.

To be loyal then, is loyal to those who are due loyalty. Let's contrast that with courtesy. You should be courteous to, among others, the weak, meaning both the physically and the morally weak. It would not be appropriate or virtuous to be loyal to the morally weak.

Loyalty also reminds us that virtues are part of a social system. Loyalty only works if the people you are loyal to understand that it is part of a social system of moral obligations. This isn't just a matter of mutual benefit like the grade schooler's selfish argument that you should tell the truth to others so that they will tell the truth to you. Rather, the entire social system relies on it. That is why ingroups where loyalty runs deep are so different from other groups.

This weekend, I left my wallet with all my credit cards, along with my iPhone and my iPad alone in a room with about twenty people and went for a forty-minute hike. As you've probably guessed, the people were all family members and their partners. And it's important to note here that thefts do happen among family. A good friend of mine ran the same risk about twenty years ago and one of his nephews cleared out his wallet to buy drugs. Conversely, you might get away with leaving your valuables behind at a bar or coffeeshop. But we take the risk with family more often, so much so that we don't even think of it as a risk, because we can expect loyalty from family members.

As a consequence, the person who isn't loyal doesn't just hurt the person they betray; they put an entire moral system at risk.

That, now that I think of it, is also why there has to be ingroups. For I think that what makes an ingroup is not, as psychologists would have it, that we psychologically identify with a group but that we buy into a shared moral system. Once upon a time, to be a citizen required that we buy into a shared system of moral obligations. The liberal project, however, has been to build a society where the foundation is inalienable rights. But a society where only rights are shared and not moral obligations would crumble. We learn about shared moral obligations in ingroups, starting with the family and, in a liberal society, ingroups are the only source of shared moral obligations since citizenship no longer requires them.

I suspect the political consequences of this are far-reaching for loyalty is also an exclusive virtue. To be loyal to your scout leader is to be loyal to the organization and its values and not just the person in the office. To see why this is the case, think of the way some feminists defended Bill Clinton when he sexually harassed women. Was that loyalty? No. It was, at best, blind allegiance.  If loyalty is to have any meaning, then leaders who fail to live up to the standards of the group need to be mercilessly excluded from the group and only allowed back in after some sort of public penance and then only as members and not leaders.

(The Democrats and their supporters found the Republican efforts to impeach Clinton scandalous. The real scandal was that they didn't do it themselves. "The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures.")

Loyalty then, requires not just individuals willing to be mutually loyal but a social system. You might think, well, why can't my friend and I, or my spouse and I, agree to be loyal? Well, you can but that is only because you live in a  society where friendship and marriage are part of the agreed-upon moral system.

As I start this project, these words keep coming back to me:

It [scouting] is, in a word, a school of citizenship through woodcraft. ... Therefore, the aim of the Scout training is to replace Self with Service, to make the lads individually efficient, morally and physically, with the object of using that efficiency for the service of the community. (Robert Baden-Powell)

The usual criticism of being a boy scout type in today's society is that the values are out of date. But the reverse critique, that the values only seem out of date in a corrupted society, is equally coherent and, I think, more plausible,

A scout's virtues: trustworthy

From the 1911 Scout's Handbook by the Boy Scouts of America:

A scout's honor is to be trusted. If he were to violate his honor by telling a lie, or by cheating, or by not doing exactly a given task, when trusted on his honor, he may be directed to hand over his scout badge.

I love this stuff. It's exactly what was missing from my childhood. What follows is not a thorough analysis but my first reaction to what I read.

I should add that there is plenty of other good stuff such as a scout's promise and the scout motto but I'm drawn first to the virtues for reasons that, I hope, should be obvious to anyone who has read any of my stuff.

So, is the above a virtue or a rule? It sounds like a rule and you could (mistakenly) take it as one. The thing that makes it more a virtue, in my opinion, is the all-important qualification: "when trusted on his honor". Take it as a rule and that qualification will rapidly start to seem a little ridiculous.

As a rule, it has a lovely, old-fashioned gentlemanly feel about it. "Will you do it?" and then, "On your honour?" One is reminded of one of the Watergate conspirators who was willing to break the law, reportedly, would feel obliged, on his honour, to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth if asked to testify under oath. I don't know if that is true but it demonstrates the fundamental problem with rules. How do you know you're following a rule? The right answer, as all Wittgenstein fans will know, is that following a rule means more than meeting some definition of following a rule. There must also be a shared judgment about what being trustworthy is.

At this point, you might be tempted to claim that is circular. Well, it would be if we were thinking of an entirely abstract thing when discussing being trustworthy. We are not. Trustworthy here means something embedded in some set of social norms and practices. As MacIntyre says, every morality implies a sociology. (That's not an exact quote.) Everyone grasps that some kinds of games not only allow but require you to deceive your opponents. To be asked to do something "on his honour" implies not just a certain set of circumstances but also a general agreed upon judgment that this is such a case that honour is required.

There is also an implied notion of legitimate authority. Suppose a scout were part of a group of hostages and the leader of the group holding the hostages charged him with delivering some message and made him promise, "on his honour", that he would not take advantage of his temporary freedom to inform the police and the scout swore he would keep this promise. A certain kind of moralist would argue that he would be honour-bound. After all, the "rule" seems to imply that. Some others, like me, would regard even discussing the possibility that the scout was honor-bound in such a situation to be ludicrous. On the basis of what? Here, to be Wittgensteinian again, there is a place where reasons stop and we appeal to a shared judgment that says that anyone holding hostages is not a legitimate authority.

Okay, enough about what "on your honour" does not mean. What can be positively said of it?

More from the Handbook:

Indeed, this [honour] is the basis of all the scout virtues and is closely allied to that of self-respect.

I'd humbly suggest that that is/has to be reversible.  What I mean is that all the other virtues taken together will tell us what kind of boy a scout is supposed to be and that if his self-respect requires him to be the kind of boy who does these things, then we can say what honour is; we can say that honour means being the sort of person who actually does these things.

I was reading, on Ann Althouse's blog, the other day of research that said that

"People on the receiving end of an act of kindness were about 10 percent more likely than the average person to do something nice themselves later in the day." 

"On the other hand, those who granted that kindness were slightly more likely than average (about 3 percent) to commit a small act of rudeness or dismissiveness later in the same day — granting themselves 'moral license' to do so."

I doubt very much that the claimed specificity here—10 percent and 3 percent—is anything but hubris. That said, you can see how it could be a problem. Having done my good deed for the day, I might just slack off. How could we overcome this? Assuming we don't pull a Tierney and write it off as impossible, the answer is to make doing good deeds a part of your identity. In that case, failing to do so will feel like a violation of our self-respect. In this regard, doing at least one good deed a day is not a matter of ticking off the requirement as it is a matter of training yourself to be a certain kind of person.

That still leaves "on your honour" undefined but, I think, suggests what the definition would be: it would be an accumulation of requirements like a good deed for the day carried out not just to tick them off but to train ourselves to be a certain kind of person.

I hope to be able to flesh that out as I go along.

A scout's virtues

In the Atlantic, John Tierney, a professor and author, writes about the Boy Scouts. The article itself is interesting but it's some introductory remarks that Tierney makes that just staggered me.

I knew early on that I wasn't cut out for the Boy Scouts. I was a Cub Scout for only a year in elementary school before the reality was clear to me: Those worthy attributes mentioned in the Scout Law were beyond my reach. 

And now, more than a half-century later, those virtues are also beyond my memory. So, with my addled brain unable to call up the Scout Law from its dark, gray recesses, I Googled it. What I found rings a bell: “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.” To me, that sounds more like an aspirational statement than a law, but who's to say?! Whatever you call it, that set of traits is still beyond my reach.

Still beyond his reach?! Brave I can see someone having doubts about in that there is a subjective aspect to bravery such that a person might always think they should be braver than they are. But even there, I think that it is easy to set a standard of bravery that any man who wishes to call himself a man should live up to.

To say, as Tierney does, that those virtues are beyond your reach is more a statement of intention than of aspiration. There is no reason a high-achieving adult like Tierney couldn't attain all those virtues. I'd even go so far as to say there is no reason he shouldn't. Yes, they are something to aspire to but they should all be easily achievable. When Tierney says he can't, he really means that he won't.

What's more, I suspect Tierney would, were he called on this, easily change his rhetoric and begin arguing for why it should not be expected that anyone should attain these virtues. I suspect I could even guess what some of his arguments would be.

My relationship with Cubs was about as short-lived as Tierney's but for different reasons.  After a year and a bit in the Cub Scout Pack at Saint Dunstan's it became painfully obvious that the women running the show weren't serious and that we were never going to get to do anything adventurous. So I bailed and found my adventure elsewhere. Since then, I've met others who had experiences with Cubs and Scouts. Some had experiences like mine. Others were lucky enough to join organizations that had serious, knowledgeable leaders who created opportunities for adventure and learning.

Lately, I've been reading the 1911 Scout's Handbook. It got me wondering, what would it be like to set out today to attain all the skills, knowledge and virtues that were required of a scout of that era? I'm not sure what they are just yet but I am going to make it my project to find out.