by Linda R. Hirshman

The intellectual and policy worlds are full of talk about how liberals, including Democrats, and Democrats, including liberals, can articulate the case for liberalism. In a tentative venture into the debate last week, I suggested that Aristotle's insights into the dangers of extremism add a valuable moral insight into the current contests. Since philosophy is the business I have chosen, it is not surprising that I would think of Aristotle's Politics, when issues of political morality are on the table. The work of Richard Kraut, one of the foremost scholars of Aristotle, convincingly lays out the Aristotelian argument for moderation. The conventional wisdom of course is that Aristotle was a defender of slavery and women's inferiority and thus disabled from providing wisdom in these emancipated times, an argument that would also eliminate the Declaration of Independence. But, as Kraut's work reflects, that argument survives only in the memories of half-educated comment trolls. The revival of classical thought as a guide to current conduct, called "virtue ethics," is more than two decades old. The intellectual resources just lying there for picking, I see the beginning of a boomlet in classical philosophy. The June issue of Harper's Magazine has an exemplary feature titled "Undoing Bush," including painful and painstaking essays about how to start rebuilding a respectable national administration on many fronts--the civil service, the courts. Amazingly, though, at the end of all these important, but basically mid-level policy prescriptions was an essay about "The National Character," by contributing editor Earl Shorris. Shorris speculates that the Bush administration and its supporters in Congress suffer from what Aristotle called "a disposition to evil." The war, he says, is not an "accident" or and "error," but an ethical failure, born of a lack of the classical virtue, courage, in face of the fearful attacks of 9/11. Lacking courage, Shorris continues, a person is unlikely to be able to demonstrate the other classical virtues, temperance, prudence, and justice, "none of which can be found in either the Bush Administration or the majority of the Congress." Worse, he reminds the readers that "Bush and his minions in the Congress were reelected in 2004," so the failure of character goes much deeper than the particular government. Until the country understands that it cannot resolve its fear with a disposition to evil, he concludes, it will be unable to reverse the Bush years. Part of the reason for the bleeding over of the virtue ethics revival into more popular political discourse is, of course, the pressing need for a moral language to frame the challenge to one of the most vicious periods of American politics. One of the lessons of the Bush years is that even the American Constitution did not establish a machine that would go of itself. We need more than the injunctions of classical liberalism to leave each other alone. We need virtue in our rulers. Where will it come from? Religion is one source of moral guidance, to be sure. But even setting aside the scary implications of using religious law in a democratic republic, Christianity turns out to be thin gruel for public policy. The most interesting information to emerge from the (all Christian) Democratic candidates' road show is how private and personal their Christianity is. If his Christianity comforted John Edwards when his son was killed, it's a great thing he had it. Maybe Hillary could ask her God to help her lose weight or put up with Bill's screwing around, as she suggested. But the Deity is strangely silent on the subject of health care and populist Edwards presumably wasn't guided by Jesus' reminder that the poor are always with us. Turns out the only real public guidance the New Testament seems to provide beyond the uncontroversial prohibitions of killing and stealing is the deeply dubious Pauline tradition of homophobia and other embarrassing efforts at sexual governance. True, Shorris also accuses the Bush gang of lacking the Christian virtues of hope and charity. They are possessed, however, of an excess of the third virtue, faith, with which they have given themselves permission to commit evil acts. Faith, unlike hope and charity, being the distinguishing virtue of Christianity, it seems fair to read Shorris' essay as mostly about the loss of classical virtue and the overabundance of faith. A similar theme infuses Christopher Hitchens' best-selling book, God Is Not Great. At the end of 250 pages of point-by-point explication of the follies and dangers of revelation based moralities, Hitchens finally finds someone he can trust: Socrates. "From Socrates," Hitchens says, the very tone of his prose shifting markedly, "we can learn how to argue two things that are of the highest importance. The first is that conscience is innate. The second is that the dogmatic faithful can easily be outpointed and satirized ... In essence the argument with faith begins and ends with Socrates." Looking for moral revival after the Bush years, frightened of people who talk to god, malnourished by the formalistic prescriptions of liberalism, it is not surprising that the rich tradition of classical philosophy calls.