Delusions of Virtue

Theodore Dalrymple is one of my favorite writers. As I was ruminating over the ethical considerations of some fictitious situations a very real one was brought to mind by This Article in City Journal. Not unlike Marty McFly, we see real-life persons trying to reinvent the past to favor their perception of their own virtue. Dalrymple states: "...the human mind is a subtle instrument, quite capable of uttering untruths by mechanisms other than lying. Sometimes we cannot distinguish among the possibilities." Thus he makes a case that people who might claim to have been named for a famous mountaineer before he ever scaled Everest, or inventing the internet must be seen in light of the modern concept of 'virtue.' Dr. Dalrymple describes what he calls the "...modern psychopathological symptom: The Delusion of Honesty. A delusional belief is impervious to reason or evidence. In societies like Britain and the United States, once steeped in Judeo-Christian culture, such convictions become common when a belief in Original Sin finds itself replaced by a belief in Original Virtue—particularly one’s own." Now that's profound!

Does such a world, in fact, look ever increasingly for mathematical models [such as Google algorithms] to assure that everyone's self-held belief directed actions don't collide. Sort of like a moral sequence of traffic signals. In the end, a post-Christian society such as Europe must discard the notion of some overall guiding virtue for a pragmatic set of traffic rules.

No doubt, many 'reworkings' of the past to favor one's own view of virtue are harmless. Still the Marxist assigns himself virtue but see's the entreprenuer throughout history as an evil force to be reckoned with. The 'movers and shakers' are his 'oppressors.' This is where reinvention of the past becomes very dark as a science. At some point a broad-brush judgement will impune everyone who is not like me. The Marxist may try to re-write the algorithm to always distrust the entrepenuer, whom he sees as an 'exploiter,' forgetting that it was risk-takers like Edison who brought us modern convenience which we all take for granted. The concept of 'Original Virtue' seems to have many exceptions!