Virtues - like courage, ambition and creativity - that drive a society towards wealth creation and its own defence.
Rev'd William Boetcker and his ‘Ten Cannots’, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Shirley Robin Letwin have taught us about the importance of the vigorous virtues.
The VVs include courage, ambition, creativity, self-sufficiency and enterprise. They are the heroic virtues that ensure that wealth is created, that aggressors are vanquished, and that otherwise intractable social problems are solved. VVs produce the social and economic capital upon which civilisation depends.
Through the 1960s and ‘70s the VVs had been crushed by fat government. The taxes that fed the bloated programmes of the ‘Wilson-Heath-Callaghan’ years had blunted the incentive to work, invent and care for one’s family. Sixties socialism shielded people from the consequences of weakness, apathy and dependency - only encouraging more weakness, apathy and dependency.
Dr Letwin’s landmark 1993 book analysed how Margaret Thatcher’s governments revived the VVs.
The caring virtues
Himmelfarb has also talked of the caring virtues – virtues that include forgiveness, respect, tolerance and kindness. These virtues humanise society and ensure that vulnerable people are always protected. Strong societies will prize both caring and vigorous virtues in equal measure. If VVs are not twinned with caring virtues a society will descend into a Spencerian 'survival of the fittest' nightmare. Without VVs cultural decay will accelerate.
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