Timothy Snyder on virtue ....

I found this interesting and challenging. The eminent historian of Ukraine and eastern Europe is sitting in bunker near the frontline against Russia's invasion, thinking about meanings and moral virtue.

Moral Language (Kharkiv Meditations, 3/10) by Timothy Snyder

Kharkiv Meditations, 3/10

Read on Substack

Here's my abbreviated transcription: 

... it's alright to use moral terms in general. ... I'm trying to break through a certain taboo we have about acceptable ways of expressing ourselves on media .. on the ways it is acceptable to talk about politics or even society.  ... we find ourselves talking about interests and calculations as though those were real. ... But what about things like cowardice and courage?  ... Without terms like cowardice and courage, you can't talk about politics ... especially when you get down to a small family of oligarchs where human vices and virtues start to count for more than they would if politics were apportioned [characterized?] more neatly by ... the rule of law. ... It becomes necessary to use these kinds of terms to describe ...

I don't think you can talk about the leaders of the present administration without talking about greed. ... Greed is more real, more real than interests or calculations. ... And if we deprive ourselves of that language ... if we don't have a word for putting our commitments around a vice like greed, then we can't address it. ... we can't solve it. ... if the people who are greedy or avaricious ... if they parade it, they don't hide it, if they display it ostentatiously, what are we do?  

Because if we lack the word to describe what they are doing, they are changing reality. ... They are making things normal. And we are helping them because they are embodying ever more perfectly a vice. And we are embodying ever more perfectly the inability to describe that vice.  ... Together we are creating a politics [in which], let's say greed, becomes normal.

... terms like cowardice or courage are as much of our objective reality as terms like interests or calculations. And if we are afraid to use them, we're not actually describing any reality better, we're describing it worse. ... we may also be contributing to some of the vices we should be describing.  

 A few observations on Snyder's lesson for us -- perhaps I should call it his sermon. 

•  If they trouble themselves to look at the behavior of our rulers, most Americans seem to understand that we are seeing extraordinary violations a moral code so fundamental that it is hardly conscious. "Trump is a crook. He doesn't care who he hurts. They lie. They are careless of human life. They are cruel." This moral instinct either isn't there at all or, among a considerable majority, is simple and obvious. This moral repulsion accounts for the fact that right now polls show intense disapprovers of the Trump administration vastly outnumber intense approvers. The repulsion fuels intensity.

•  Among most people, approval or disapproval of politicians does include personal assessments about "interests or calculations." The huge example is folks' recollection that prices were lower under Trump I. But this assessment exists within a context in which hardly anyone believes that politicians are working for them, not for themselves. When you think the politicians are just transactional scum anyway, it's easy and adequate simply to weigh what they might do for you. But if you think pols should provide anything more than a cheap date, the moral repulsion kicks in these days.

• Snyder seems to me to be talking to, and about people, who cannot use moral language about the Trump regime for fear of showing themselves to be unsophisticated -- not savvy. In the media, and perhaps in academia, defaulting to "interests or calculations" when moral repulsion would be truer and more accurate looks to me like habitual timidity. Elite institutions too often reward pusillanimity, reward shaving the rough edges off uncomfortable truths. The Trump regime is showing that the often gray haired zealots of "No Kings" and the like may be the real sophisticates in our current moment.