Virtue is Knowledge

“I can’t do anything about it”, said 8 billion people.

Augustine and Descartes fractured humanity’s con-science by centering the self within the universe. Before, the self was identified by the “we”, as in the “I am because we are” of Ubuntu. In Archaic Greece, timé (honor) was the public recognition of virtue and courage, inseparable from the community. Loss of timé was worse than death. In Classical Greece, a person was understood fundamentally as zóon politikón (political animal) who couldn’t fulfill their nature outside the shared life of the polis (city). The modern idiot derives from ιδιώτης, the private individual, who didn’t care about communal affairs, and ostracism was physical removal from the community.

One might think that today awards and canceling are equivalent to honor and ostracism. But there is a social ontological difference. In the ancient world, the loss of honor affected the whole community, and ostracism was for communal preservation. Awards and canceling target the individual without causing a systemic rupture in the community, because the individual has been decoupled from it.

The peak of this mentality is reflected in the Nobel prizes and in how highly we regard them. We seek the isolated genius. We want to become the isolated genius. We disregard the contributions of others. We live in a community, yet we honor the individual regardless of what they give back to the whole. This absurdity leads to self-isolation and the feeling of incapacity to affect the world around us.

The communal self still operates in small-world systems. We still have groups of people forming strong bonds, like the academic cartels in science. Where is the structural threshold? What drives the sense of “we” across distinct small worlds?

With the internet and social media, our world has enlarged. Can there be a collective self in a large world? Which motives push the threshold from “I” to “we” in larger collectives?

Virtue, how one’s life affects the whole, is knowledge, said Socrates. From this perspective, the isolated genius, the atomized intellectual, today’s influencer, is an idiot. We lost this understanding along the way. Until we recover a conscience that binds intelligence back to communal virtue, we will remain atomized spectators rather than a living body, each one of us thinking, “I can’t do anything about it.”