Professional Ethos: The Case of the Soldier and the Philosopher
Chapter 8 of The Information Class
This is part of a longer book project about “the information class,” meaning— roughly— people who have been to college and have a propensity to earn their livings by doing creative mental work using computers. The book explains and generally extols this class and its leadership role, but probes the way it has lost the public’s trust by cutting its ties from moral traditions and following paths of its own inept moral reasoning into many crippling follies of the mind, for which “wokeness” is the handiest label— even as it largely retains the good habits that enable it to be so beneficent and productive in practice. The ultimate goal is self-help: to persuade the information class to abandon woke follies and re-root itself in tradition, so that it can provide the leadership society needs out of its present crisis. Stay tuned for more:
Once you admit the value of virtue in the economy, there’s no drawing the line. It’s useful all over the place. Principal-agent problems are everywhere, often much more complex than the simple Parable of the Dishonest Aspiring Cashier, and it’s usually easy to see virtue-based solutions if you don’t assume everyone is narrowly selfish all the time. Virtue is a factor of production as important as labor, land, physical capital or skills. This has politically incorrect ramifications, since it suggests that a lack of virtue may be the underlying cause of the underdevelopment of poor countries. But never mind. To explore all the economic functions of virtue, or build the concept of virtue up from simple cases like the Parable of the Dishonest Aspiring Cashier would take too long.
Instead, I’ll jump ahead and accept the wisdom of virtue ethics that the seven key virtues are courage, justice, temperance, prudence, faith, hope and love, and they’re needed everywhere. Nothing worthwhile can be accomplished without them. But what do they mean? That’s situational. Some general statements could be offered, but even MacIntyre zoomed in on what he calls “practices” as the starting point for building up an understanding of the virtues. I’ll follow suit, though not just with the motive of illustration. Practices are in themselves crucial to the economy. And two important practices may serve as cases in point: war and philosophy. As examples of how virtue turns into professional ethos as it gets applied to a specific vocation, let’s consider the cases of the soldier and the philosopher.
Courage for the soldier means, most obviously, facing death in battle. It also takes a lot of guts to do long marches in bad weather, and to sleep on the ground, endure hunger and thirst, and all the rest of the hardships that soldiers must endure. For the philosopher, courage consists, first of all, in doubting beliefs that may seem almost as necessary to him as air, and in outraging his fellow men by his doubts. It also takes courage to take on difficult problems that others shirk from thinking about, and to frame ambitious theories to answer daunting questions.
Justice for the soldier means, first, choosing good causes to fight for, second, following orders, and third, not abusing victory. For the philosopher, justice means stubborn and refined scruples in saying only what is true, including careful calibration of confidence to match the degree of evidence. Philosophers also need to be fair to their opponents, not maligning their motives unnecessarily, dismissing them too hastily, or blaming them too much when they go wrong.
Temperance for the soldier means, first, enduring all the privations of the campaign, and second, governing his passions, including those that would make him flee a good fight, those that would make him charge in rashly when prudence dictates waiting or retreating, and those that would make him rape and pillage, or deny mercy to a surrendering enemy. For a philosopher, temperance means setting aside appetites that would distract him from the pursuit of truth, and also moderation in his claims, and a scrupulous avoidance of overclaiming and overconfidence.
Prudence, also called reason or wisdom, means for the philosopher, above all, insight, discernment, judgment, understanding, wisdom, truth, the great goal for which he aims. There is also some prudence involved in allocating his theoretical efforts to topics that he can tackle, and not spending the powers of his thought randomly in all directions so that they bear no fruit. For the soldier, there is great prudence involved in logistics, in knowing when to fight and when to negotiate, and in planning the campaigns and battles.
Hope, for the soldier, means hope in victory, but failing that, hope of dying a good death, which will bring him honor and inspire and ennoble others. For the philosopher, hope is the virtue of struggling through a subject when it seems overwhelmingly difficult, and not giving up the quest for truth when others would have shrugged and turned aside.
Faith, for the soldier, means loyalty to king and country and cause and comrades. For the philosopher, it means retaining what he has learned, and not doubting it except when there is good reason, so that an edifice of truth may be built up.
Love, for the soldier, includes love of the things that he is fighting for, a sovereign or a homeland, as well as love of the battle itself, of the thrill and the challenge and the glory. For the philosopher, love means above all the love of wisdom, but that includes many other loves, for often we understand a thing best in loving it.
The soldier and the philosopher don't seem like particularly capitalist characters. They don't seem especially greedy or self-interested. In the case of the soldier, this is proved by death. You can't bribe a man to die for a cause. And at least one philosopher, Socrates, also died for his cause, at the hands of an Athenian jury who was sick and tired of how he disrupted their complacency with his penetrating questions. You could try to force these characters into the mold of the rational, self-interested agent, and some historical instances of the soldier and the philosopher might fit the mold plausibly. But those are corrupt cases. A soldier who will switch sides for pay, or a philosopher who will frame a theory to justify a patron, are betraying the vocation of the soldier and the philosopher. Soldiers and philosophers must care more for something else than for money or anything that it can buy. Learning to care about the right things is a big part of what it takes to become a soldier or philosopher.
At the same time, while capitalist theory can't really understand these characters, capitalist societies need soldiers and philosophers. A wealthy capitalist economy has a lot to plunder if it lacks the military force to keep raiders at bay. And it takes philosophers, in a broad sense of the word, to staff the universities which are so critical to training the personnel of modern capitalist corporations.
The professional ethos of the soldier and the philosopher help to solve the peculiar principal-agent problems that are characteristic of these jobs. Governments need their soldiers to be loyal, but often they can't reward them for it. Universities need philosophers to be truthful, but university administrators usually can't understand philosophers well enough to discern whether they're being truthful or not. Ethos, or professionalism, does what contracts can't.
The philosopher and the soldier are important not just as examples, but because each occupational ethos supplied one of the founding factors in the ethos of a historic ruling class. Medieval knighthood had the ethos of the soldier. The modern information class has a healthy dose of the ethos of the philosopher.