SQUARE PEGS AND ROUND HOLES

        DISCUSSING VIRTUE AND GOOD IN POLITICS 

   In the last half of the twentieth century, the most promising voice in the direction of political discussion about virtue and good was that of Robert F. Kennedy, as he sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968. For him, justice involved more than the size and distribution of the national product.  It was also about higher moral purposes . In a speech at the University of Kansas on March 18, 1968, Kennedy spoke of the war in Vietnam, riots in America's cities, racial inequality and the crushing poverty he had witnessed in Mississippi and Appalachia. He then turned from these explicit matters of justice to argue that Americans had come to value the wrong things. "Even if we act to erase material poverty," Kennedy said, "there is another greater task. It is to confront the poverty of satisfaction . . . that afflicts us all." Americans had given themselves over to "the mere accumulation of things." 


     Our gross National product now is over 800 billion dollars a year. But that Gross National product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts . . . the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why why we are proud to be American. 

   Listening to Kennedy, or reading this passage, you might say that the moral criticism he leveled against the self-satisfaction and material preoccupations of his time was independent of his point about the injustices of poverty, the Vietnam War, and racial discrimination. But he saw them as connected. To reverse these injustices, Kennedy thought it necessary to challenge the complacent way of life he saw around him. He did not hesitate to be judgmental. And yet, by invoking Americans' pride in their country, he also, at the same time, appealed to a sense of community. 
   Kennedy was assassinated less than three months later. WE can only speculate whether the morally resonant politics he intimated would have come to fruition had he lived.
   Four decades later, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama also tapped Americans' hunger for a public life of larger purpose and articulated a politics of moral and spiritual aspiration. He got sidetracked by a financial crisis and deep recession that prevented him from turning the moral and civic thrust of his campaign into a new politics of the common good. Too bad.