Virtue signalling is, quite possibly, our commonest vice.) (Leave aside that telling people you’re virtuous isn’t a virtue, it’s self-promotion. On Facebook and other forms of social media, therefore, you signal your so-called virtue, telling everyone how tolerant, open and compassionate you are, and wait for likes to accumulate. Thus relativism’s closest approximation to “virtue” is “tolerance.” Only tolerance will provide social cohesion between different groups, and save us from harming each other. By contrast, our modern relativism begins by asserting that making judgments about how to live is impossible, because there is no real good, and no true virtue (as these too are relative). Cultivating judgment about the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom, something that can never be out of date.
It was a book based on experience and observation, not conjecture, about the kind of happiness that was possible for human beings. Aristotle studied the virtues and the vices in his Nicomachean Ethics. He observed that the virtues always aim for balance and avoid the extremes of the vices. Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to “make the world a better place” before they’ve taken care of their own chaos within. Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it.
These paintings provided a visitor with the first window onto the full extent of Jordan’s concern about our human capacity for evil in the name of good, and the psychological mystery of self-deception (how can a person deceive himself and get away with it?)-an interest we share. The paintings were not there because Jordan had any totalitarian sympathies, but because he wanted to remind himself of something he knew he and everyone would rather forget: that over a hundred million people were murdered in the name of utopia. Paintings lionizing the Soviet revolutionary spirit completely filled every single wall, the ceilings, even the bathrooms. Not long after the Soviet Union fell, and most of the world breathed a sigh of relief, Peterson began purchasing this propaganda for a song online. But the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions-and there’s nothing freeing about that.
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