Virtue, not power, is the true aim of politics



The great outbreak of evil in these past days stirred a memory of something I used to tell my freshman students on the first day of their introduction to politics class: Politics is about what is good.

We would read together the first sentence of Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics”— an unrivaled introduction to politics:

Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at some good, and hence it has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all things aim.

Aristotle goes on quickly to observe in his usual empirical way that many goods exist along with many arts developed to achieve the different goods. The medical art aims at the good of health. The art of shipbuilding aims at building good ships. The military art aims at victory in war. The art of managing the household, which the Greeks called economics, aims at the good of wealth.

Virtue is the end or aim of political life.

Some arts are subordinated to other arts, because the good at which the art aims is subordinate to a larger good, the way the art of the cavalryman is subordinate to the art of the general.

Aristotle then introduces the subject of politics with a great hypothesis: If there exists some good, some end, that we seek for its own sake, and we seek all the rest for the sake of or on account of this one good — if, in other words, we don’t choose everything for the sake of something else, which would make all of our desires empty and pointless — this would be the good itself, in fact the highest good.

He asks: Would not an awareness of this highest good have great weight in a man’s life? Wouldn’t the art of attaining that good be the sovereign or master art encompassing all the ends or goods of the other arts? And isn’t this what we call the art of politics?

The good that the art of politics aims at, he says, is “the human good.” What name do people give to the human good that encompasses all others and lacks nothing? The Greek word, Aristotle says, is eudaimonia, which we usually translate as “happiness” in English. The art of politics is the art of happiness. But it gets even better.

The art of politics is a practical art. It aims not just at knowing what happiness is but at being happy. Thinking happiness through, Aristotle finds that it does not have primarily to do with the body. It is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue — in fact, in accordance with complete virtue. You can’t be a happy man without being a good or virtuous man. And in this sense, virtue is the end or aim of political life.

Aristotle goes on to distinguish between virtues of character and virtues of intellect, or what we usually call moral and intellectual virtues. He argues that the specific virtue or excellence of the statesman — the political man par excellence — is the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom, what he would call “phronesis.” Phronesis is the only intellectual virtue that is inseparable from moral virtue. According to Aristotle, a man cannot possess phronesis without possessing all the moral virtues actively and in their fullness. He is a man in full.

I would tell students that to make progress in their study of politics — this practical art — they would have to make progress in virtue; they would have to make progress toward the human good; they would have to make progress toward happiness. This is what our semester would be about.

Happiness and politics go together?

If I were lucky, at least one hesitatingly confident realist among the students — they were still too young to be cynics — would be brave enough on this first day of class to raise a hand and say deferentially and politely something like: “What! Have you read a newspaper lately?” (They had newspapers back then.) “Every page is filled with violence, crime, corruption, and somebody grasping for power! To call someone a politician is an insult.”

And so the semester would be off and running.

I would admit that though Aristotle in his “Politics” defines man as a “political animal” because man is a “rational animal” — an animal possessing logos, or reason — he makes an empirical observation at the end of his “Ethics” that will be familiar to anyone who has read a newspaper: Rational creatures though they are, men sometimes do not listen to reason and are carried away by their passions.

Aristotle would agree with Alexander Hamilton, or rather Hamilton agreed with Aristotle, when he wrote in Federalist 15:

"Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.” And with James Madison’s even more famous saying, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

In addition, working on our non-angelic human fallibility and culpability, bad education causes us to make mistakes about what is good. For these reasons, Aristotle argues that both education and coercion are central to the art of politics and, alas, that practicing the art of politics is not a leisurely activity. It is the burdensome art of inducing others to do what they ought to do for their own good and happiness, even when they don’t want to.

These days, our children learn in school and online that it is good to shoplift or try to change themselves from a boy to a girl or from a girl to a boy. A shockingly large percentage of them have learned that it is good to kill those who disagree with you.

From his first day in office in 2021, Joe Biden — our then-educator in chief — made it the central point of American politics that being trans was being good and questioning the goodness of being trans was evil. He thrust this bad education into the face of his country — marching trans heroes before the cameras to model the “goodness” that all Americans should admire and publicly praise if they wanted to avoid ostracism, public shaming and canceling, expulsion from school, losing their jobs, being put in jail, or being murdered in cold blood.

Politics requires goodness

Knowing what is good is not easy. A man in ancient Athens with the greatest reputation for wisdom knew only that he did not know what was good. To have what was good, to be good, was so crucial to Socrates — the one thing needful — that it made no sense to do anything else with his life than to try to find out what it was.

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Photo by Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images

But we do not need to be philosophers to know that boys cannot become girls, that biological males should not be competing against biological females in sports or sharing their bathrooms, and that killing those who disagree with us is evil. Glenn Ellmers, Salvatori Research Fellow at the Claremont Institute and an old friend, published a short essay on the urgent need, in this increasingly deranged world, to hold on to our common sense.

Machiavelli — the infamous teacher of “realist” politics — seeing unflinchingly what we all could read in the newspaper, taught that in a world where so many are so bad, it is merely common sense that it is necessary for those who would succeed in the art of politics to enter into evil. I would suggest an alternative lesson to students, one that I think is in the spirit of Aristotle: In a world where so many are so bad, it is merely common sense that it is necessary for the good to be great.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

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Why leftism attracts the sad and depressed — and keeps them that way



By now, the trope of the “sad leftist” has become so popular that it’s essentially a meme. Multiple studies show leftists are, on average, far less happy than conservatives. That aligns with the experience of many who observe self-professed leftists exhibiting more anxiety, gloom, and hostility than others.

It’s not difficult to understand why. If your main news sources tell you the president is a fascist, half of your countrymen are bigots, and the world is about to end due to climate change, you’re bound to feel — and vote — blue. Yet, even in Democratic administrations, leftists never seemed content.

People latch onto progressive narratives because they offer someone to blame. That brings short-term relief, but it quickly fades.

This suggests the root of their discontent isn’t merely political messaging but something deeper. Rather, the ideas implicit in leftism seem antithetical to a happy life and human flourishing — even if well-intended. Leftists push for diversity, equity, and inclusion in place of meritocracy, support a more powerful state to implement those ideals, advocate open borders to globalize them, and demand wealth redistribution to fund them. In the sanitized and euphemistic language they often prefer, leftists are about fairness, progress, and kindness.

Sad people lean left

Nate Silver recently weighed in on the happiness gap between conservatives and progressives. His take? People might have it backward. It’s not that leftism makes people sad but that sad people gravitate toward leftism: “People become liberals because they’re struggling or oppressed themselves and therefore favor change and a larger role for government.”

If this is true, it still doesn’t explain why leftism is correlated with sadness and why it offers no remedy. Conservatives, for their part, offer a diagnosis and a cure: Leftism is foolish and destructive — so stop being a leftist. That’s the gist of Ben Shapiro’s infamous line, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”

While clever and catchy, this oversimplifies the problem. People who ascribe to liberal or leftist causes don’t merely do so because they prioritize feelings over facts. Yes, some are true believers, but most are reacting to powerful cultural pressures and personal struggles. These feed destructive habits that, in turn, make them more susceptible to leftist propaganda.

After all, the narratives that comprise leftist propaganda are easy to understand and adopt since they lay the blame of all society’s ills on someone else. People are poor because rich people exploit them; people of color are marginalized because white people are racists; queer people are depressed because straight people don’t accept them; third world countries are dysfunctional because Americans and Europeans meddled in their affairs too much or too little; and leftists are unpopular because Trump and other conservative populists are effective con men.

The media’s vicious cycle

These narratives not only offer paltry short-term solace — they breed resentment. Instead of directing their efforts to personal improvement, leftists are encouraged to push their anger outward — sometimes through direct violence (vandalism, looting, even political violence) and sometimes indirectly by cheering on those who perpetrate it. In this way, left-wing media weaponizes its audience.

Nevertheless, the principle motivation behind leftist propaganda is not necessarily weaponization. It’s monetization. Beyond adopting leftist narratives and positions, audiences need to continue consuming leftist media and become addicted to it.

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Karolina Grabowska/Pexels

As Georgetown professor and computer scientist Cal Newport explains in his book “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World,” society has now entered the era of the “attention economy,” where media companies do everything in their power to hold people’s attention — for forever. In conjunction with tech companies, these outlets turn otherwise healthy people into helpless junkies enslaved to the apps on their smartphones.

Like any addiction, this one feeds a destructive cycle. People latch onto progressive narratives because they offer someone to blame. That brings short-term relief, but it quickly fades. The need for comfort drives them to consume even more leftist content, which distorts their view of the world and fuels resentment. Anxiety deepens. Misery spreads.

As their emotional state deteriorates, they seek comfort in even more content. Eventually, this behavior sabotages their ability to function. They become dependent on the very content that made them feel worse in the first place. Many even join the performance, filming themselves crying, ranting, and broadcasting their despair for clicks.

Meanwhile, the titans of the attention economy grow wealthier and more powerful. They refine their algorithms, suppress dissent, and tighten their grip. The last thing they want is for their users to wake up — to take Newport’s advice, unplug, and rediscover meaning in the real world. They might just find happiness. And stop drifting left.

Model a different life

This presents an opportunity for conservatives hoping to transform the culture. The answer isn’t just a matter of advocating time-tested ideas but of modeling the habits that reinforce these ideas. Rather than view leftists as incorrigible scoundrels and idiots who refuse to open their eyes, conservatives should see them as unfortunate people who have been seduced, reduced, and enslaved by powerful corporate and government interests.

This means that conservatives should do more than offer political arguments — we must pull them away from the vicious cycle through modeling a better life. Leftists (and many on the online right, for that matter) must be reminded that being perpetually online and endlessly scrolling is a recipe for sadness. In contrast, church, family, friends, and meaningful work are what empower people. They are what make us human — and happy.

Once the cycle is broken — and the leftist has regained some control over himself — the case for conservatism becomes much easier. If Nate Silver is right that sad people gravitate to the left, then it’s only logical to assume happy people should be attracted to the right. Conservatives should cherish those values and habits that make them, on average, happier and more fulfilled. It’s time to stop drinking leftist tears and help them out of their malaise.

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Why 'follow your heart' is terrible advice — and God knew it all along



All normal human beings want to be happy. Aristotle observed that happiness is the goal of human life. For us Americans, the pursuit of happiness is even enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as a self-evident, unalienable right. We can all agree that we want to be happy, but it’s much harder to find consensus when we ask what happiness is and how we can achieve it.

Despite disagreement on the finer details, for Americans (and most in the West), happiness is closely connected with being true to oneself, following one’s heart, and personal fulfillment. For example, 84% of Americans "believe that the 'highest goal of life is to enjoy it as much as possible.' Eighty-six percent believe that to be fulfilled requires you to 'pursue the things you desire most.' Ninety-one percent affirm that 'the best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself.'"

'The more you worship your self, the less you become your self. You become a shadow, a specter, an unself.'

These ideals are part of the cultural air we breathe, and we find them embedded throughout popular culture. One song from Disney’s "Mulan" soundtrack advises listeners: “You must be true to your heart / That’s when the heavens will part. ... / Your heart can tell you no lies.” In the 1994 animation "Thumbelina," the narrator Jacquimo sings, “When you follow your heart, if you have to journey far, / Here’s a little trick. You don’t need a guiding star. / Trust your ticker, you’ll get there quicker.”

In her hit song “The Voice Within,” Christina Aguilera counsels listeners to “look inside yourself. ... Just trust the voice within.”

As theologian Thaddeus Williams humorously observes, “There are enough tween-targeted self-worship pop songs to fill a year-long playlist. We hear songs about bucking authority, songs about your wildest dreams all coming true, about being a super girl, or some roaring animal goddess who eats people’s expectations for breakfast.”

Along similar lines, television producer and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes contends, “Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be.”

At a commencement address at Stanford University, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs told graduates, “And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

For Christians, there is an element of truth in this advice based on God’s sovereignty. Our individual personalities, interests, and desires are part of who God has made us to be (see, for example, Psalm 139:13-16; Jeremiah 1:5). These can all be indications (though not necessarily determinative) of the goals and dreams we will pursue in life. As Dallas Willard writes, “Because we are God’s co-laborers, our wants and desires are ... important to God and God’s plan for us (1 Corinthians 3:9 KJV).” Frederick Buechner notably observed, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” It would go too far to make this a universal principle, but in God’s sovereignty, many Christians have found this to be the case.

The key difference for Christians is that our desires and goals must be submitted to God’s will and direction, and the ways in which we pursue them must accord with scripture.

As Thomas Tarrants comments, “When our desires are God-centered, they are good and fulfill their intended role. But when they are self-centered, when our desires are captured by the things of the fallen world and the sinful nature (the flesh), they are evil. These have been called disordered loves.”

Even as Christians, we need to regularly evaluate our desires to ensure they aren’t the fruit of disordered loves. Martin Luther observed that due to the Fall, our human nature became “deeply curved in on itself” and thus “not only bends the best gifts of God toward itself” but “wickedly ... seeks all things, even God, for its own sake.”

This is why the self-focused approach to happiness always fails, especially when God is excluded. In our fallen pride, Timothy Keller writes, “We labor under the illusion that we are competent to run our own lives, achieve our own sense of self-worth and find a purpose big enough to give us meaning in life without God.” Further, if we “look to some created thing to give us the meaning, hope, and happiness that only God himself can give, it will eventually fail to deliver and break our hearts.”

As actor Jim Carrey once insightfully remarked in an interview, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that that’s not the answer.”

The way of shalom

If happiness isn’t arrived at by following our hearts and being true to ourselves, how can we obtain it?

The concept of happiness in scripture is best captured by the Hebrew word "shalom," which suggests life in its fullness, well-being, contentment, and completeness. Its New Testament counterpart is "eirēnē." Both are often translated into English as “peace.”

Philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff proposes that a better translation of shalom is “flourishing.” He writes, “To experience shalom is to flourish in all one’s relationships — with God, with one’s fellow human beings, with non-human creation, with oneself.”

Because both we and creation are fallen, we won’t experience happiness to its fullest extent until the new heavens and earth (Revelation 21). But Wolterstorff’s categories encompass the essential elements for experiencing happiness in our everyday lives, and we’ll briefly explore each one below.

Relationship with God

Our relationship with God is foundational and makes flourishing in the other two categories (self and others) possible.

We discover in the early chapters of Genesis that God designed humans to exist in a relationship with Him, and that relationship was severed because of the first couple's rebellion (Genesis 1-3; Romans 5:12). As a result, humans are born into the world “dead in [our] transgressions and sins” (Ephesians 2:1).

However, because the Father sent the Son to rescue humanity, we now “have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1). Because of this restored relationship, Christians are now “blessed ... in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ” (Ephesians 1:3). We are united to Christ and draw life from Him through the Holy Spirit (John 7:38; 14:16-18; 15:4-5).

Christians can flourish as human beings because we can now attain the ultimate end for which we were created — to know and love God. Blaise Pascal insightfully noted:

There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remains to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings. ... But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.

Relationship with ourselves

As mentioned earlier, because of the Fall, our humanity became “deeply curved in on itself.” Romans 1 describes the degeneration that occurred: Our thinking became futile, and our hearts were darkened. We became idolators, and God turned us over to evil, which corrupted us in numerous ways. We became “filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity” (Romans 1:29).

These vices led us in the opposite direction of flourishing. As Cornelius Plantinga Jr. affirms, “God hates sin not just because it violates his law but, more substantively, because it violates shalom, because it breaks the peace, because it interferes with the way things are supposed to be.”

In order to reverse what was lost in the Fall and to bring us back to a place of wholeness, God regenerates us in salvation so that we are new creations (2 Corinthians 5:17). We have a “new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:24). This new self is “being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” and we “are being transformed into [God’s] image with ever-increasing glory” by the power of the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18).

This redemption is a continual source of peace and joy for the believer because it reminds us that we are “more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope," writes Keller in "The Meaning of Marriage."

Relationship with others

Just as the Fall fractured our relationship with God and with ourselves, it also ruptured our relationship with others. After Genesis 3, we see how shame and blame distorted the harmony once enjoyed by Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:7, 12). Instead of living in the unity and mutual support God intended, humanity became prone to hostility, division, and violence (Genesis 4:8; 6:11–12).

Scripture testifies that in Christ the “dividing wall of hostility” between peoples has been broken down (Ephesians 2:14). By His death and resurrection, Jesus creates “in himself one new humanity” (Ephesians 2:15) and invites us into a new family where earthly differences do not divide us. Paul reminds us that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female” because all are “one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). In this new community, we learn to bear one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2), forgive one another as we have been forgiven (Colossians 3:13), and spur one another on “toward love and good deeds” (Hebrews 10:24).

When we come to Christ, the Holy Spirit begins a process of sanctification in order to shape us to be more like Jesus and less focused on our own agendas (2 Corinthians 3:18; Philippians 2:3-4). In the process, we experience more shalom in our relationships with others.

Trevor Hudson’s description of this change is especially apt:

We sense [our heart] becoming more open toward others than ever before. No longer is it curved in on itself. We begin to become aware that the person next to us has an infinite, irreplaceable, and precious value in God’s eyes, just as we have. There is a new gentleness with others, especially in moments of failure and struggle. ... We know intuitively that we are joined with our neighbor, and with the whole creation, in an unbroken connection with God’s heart.

Much more could be said about how God has restored shalom to the three relationships just examined, but the key point is that these are the true sources of our happiness rather than anything we can dream up ourselves based on our individual desires and ambitions, especially when self seeks to occupy God’s throne. Thaddeus Williams thus concludes: “The more you worship your self, the less you become your self. You become a shadow, a specter, an unself. The longer and deeper you stare into the mirror, looking for answers, the more it will feel like looking at Edvard Munch’s 'The Scream.' This is the strange paradox of self-worship.”

This article is adapted from a post that originally appeared on the Worldview Bulletin Substack.

Home alone for spring break — and hopelessly homesick



Last week was supposed to be one of the best weeks of my life.

When I told my friends why, they responded with a mix of disbelief and envy: “How did you pull that off?” “You hit the lottery!” “Can we trade places?”

At the time, they were busy cramming their kids’ belongings into as few bags as possible, all while trying to stay under the 50-pound airline limit. Spring break had arrived, and my friends were jetting off to various corners of the country to yell at their kids in unfamiliar settings.

The news I broke to them? I wouldn’t be joining the spring break chaos. Due to a poorly timed elbow surgery, I couldn’t travel. My wife would be taking our three kids — ages 10, 7, and 4 — to Utah for a ski trip without me.

So what’s a temporarily solo dad to do with a quiet house and only his beloved bulldog for company?

I had grand plans. Each day after work, I’d come home, change into sweats, and spend the rest of the evening doing what I love most — lighting up a cigar and diving into a good book. Better yet, I’d start two hours earlier than usual, reclaiming time normally lost to homework, sports, and bath time.

Losing the normal rhythm of my day made something very clear: Without my family around, my life had no order. And it’s that order that gives me purpose.

With my family returning the day before my 40th birthday, I saw this as my opportunity to live large for a week — maybe even earn a spot on a “40 under 40” list. But if I’m being honest, my real goal was simple: Do as little as humanly possible.

Still, some things had to get done.

I did three loads of laundry before realizing I hadn’t added detergent to any of them. For dinner each night, I drank a protein shake made of nothing but powder and water. (Apparently, my wife didn’t leave me any actual food.)

I hand-washed every cup, plate, and utensil I used — not because I wanted to, but because the dishwasher intimidates me more than anything else in our house.

It didn’t take long to realize that without my wife around, I function at the level of barely breathing.

But wow, was I free.

That night, the cigar lasted a little longer. My dog got to sleep in the bed. I even sent a few humblebrag texts to my friends.

Then came the next morning.

No waking to the soft sound of the shower running after my wife’s early workout. No stroll down the hallway belting out Travis Tritt’s “It’s a Great Day to Be Alive” to wake up the kids. No chance to embarrass my son by singing in the school drop-off line in front of the girls in his class.

When I walked back in the door that day and saw my daughter’s theater bag hanging in the mudroom, I would have done anything to sit in traffic and drive her to her Monday-night rehearsal — the same drive we always complain about.

But instead, there was nothing. Just that “freedom” I had been craving.

And in that moment, I realized I had it — freedom from the mundane routines of life. And I was miserable.

Losing the normal rhythm of my day made something very clear: Without my family around, my life had no order. And it’s that order that gives me purpose.

I was homesick at home.

It turns out this is completely normal. According to the General Social Survey — one of the most respected studies of American life — men and women with a spouse and children are the most likely to report being “very happy.” For men ages 18 to 55, marriage nearly doubles the likelihood of happiness compared to those who remain unmarried.

Andrew Tate’s followers might want to ask for a refund.

For me, the longing wasn’t just about missing companionship. I missed the “work” that comes with having a family. And according to Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies, that’s also typical.

But the benefits of that work extend beyond the home.

“It’s getting harder to ignore the data that show men fare better when they have the ‘positive pressure’ of caring for a family,” Wilcox writes. “Stable marriages don’t just benefit kids. ... The obligations of family life motivate men to work harder and smarter. Fathers literally make more money when they have kids.”

Something deeply rewarding comes with the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood. I’ve gained a new appreciation for the frantic Sunday dash to church and the hours I’ve spent untying double knots.

And if Brad Wilcox is right, those cuddles might even be boosting my income.

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