The Virtue We Need [Revised and Expanded]

Wisdom: The Most Important Virtue of Our Age?

Part I

To know what the most important virtue of our age is we need to have at least a basic understanding of our age. Our era is becoming increasingly characterized by uncertainty. Fortunately or unfortunately, more than a cursory elucidation of our situation is beyond the scope of this essay. There are geopolitical, economic, technological and environmental trends worth mentioning. When the more philosophical portion of this  discourse arrives I will argue that the virtue of wisdom underlies the meaningfulness and efficacy of all other virtues, and this in broad strokes is primarily due to (1) the aforementioned instability in our surroundings ; (2) the relationship between the deontological and virtue; and (3) the nature of agency itself.  Whether uncertainty itself can provide an ethical foundation for us to elaborate on will be a separate question, and finally I speculate on where wisdom leads us in the context of a philosophy that is politically active and not doomed to irrelevance to and by the larger population.

The first broad trend is the mounting pressure for a global realignment of political power. The United States has enjoyed disproportionate wealth and power, relative to the size of its population and resources, especially since World War II. There is a very strong historical correlation between the rise of economic/productive strength and a following rise of political strength, followed by an equally strong historical correlation between the over-extension of military power to preserve its empire and the subsequent “passing of the torch” so to speak as a militarily top heavy economy sooner or later collapses and the empire’s power is eclipsed on the world stage[i]. All political realignments following the collapse of empires are major. The current case however has the potential to be much too “exciting” for those living through it. First, for the first time in history the empire in question, namely the United States, has had a truly global empire and nearly hegemonic military, political and cultural power. Second, and much more importantly, the U.S. military—the true third rail in American politics—has expressly pursued policies with the goal of preserving American power indefinitely through the development and use of the next generation of technological military advancement, euphemistically called “Full Spectrum Dominance,”[ii] including the use of untraceable laser weapons[iii]—already unofficially in use in places like Iraq[iv]—and the weaponization of space[v]. It’s entirely possible that if this power is not largely relinquished voluntarily[vi], like it was in Great Britain after WWII, that the potential for disaster will increase dramatically, at the expense of the safety of the population of the entire planet, not to mention of course the further deterioration of domestic freedom.[vii]