Sunday Sermon: Virtues and Values

Virtues and values are different. Virtues are qualities, values are opinions. Virtues always precede the creation of values. If virtues decline, the principles that create values decline. One of the great problems in the West is that we have made values a virtue; that is, any opinion if firmly held is to be honored as if it were a virtue.

Regrettably this is a direct result of diversity. Diversity at one time was a spice in life, an enjoyable holiday, even if momentary, from the everyday. One put one's judgment on hold and immersed oneself to some degree in something different and foreign. You ate uncooked fish, listened to music played on a different scale, tried to watch soccer, exercised in a sitting and distorted position. But this was always diversion; the proponents of diversity now demand you not just know and perhaps try it, they demand you approve of it. After all, who is to judge? The only difference between the Eskimos and the ancient Greeks is the Greeks died out. Perhaps their survival proves the Eskimos superior to the Greeks. But we want no judgments; we'll settle for the equality between the two.

This demand of reverence for diversity rather than a simple appreciation of it will never be a successful social attribute because it denies personal aspiration. It denies ideals. And everyone has them; they are not always interchangeable and they sometimes are in conflict. It is the basic element of tragedy and the energy behind history. It is the nature of what we are. We always hope to negotiate these differences but denying them is futile, blind and dangerous.

A culture cannot be universally accepting. Open mindedness is, by definition, not a principle; it is the absence of principle and dangerously close to indifference. Without unifying principles the culture shrinks into smaller units, then becomes tribal, then familial, then individual. Shards of a former whole, nihilistic and alone.