I normally skim the opinion pieces in the Sunday paper, but this one is worth reading:
Commentary: We mock virtue and wonder why we’re awash in vulgarity
BY MARK Y. HERRING
15 hrs ago
Whether we’ve actually read it or not, we’re all familiar with John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” But Milton also wrote an important poem in honor of virtue. “Comus” tells the story of the nefarious main character of the same name, a debauched sort who disguises himself as a villager and tries to seduce “The Lady,” a young woman whose brothers have left her in the woods to find food. His efforts to lure her to his palace of pleasure ultimately fail, and The Lady, by her steadfastness to right reason, is at last freed by her good discipline.
While “Comus” never made the headlines like “Paradise Lost,” it deserves to be remembered, and even taught in our schools and colleges.
I’ve been thinking of Comus as the courts sort out questions about a North Carolina charter school’s decision to require its ninth-grade language arts students to read “The Poet X” by Elizabeth Acevedo. Not because of how much “The Poet X” reminds me of Comus, but because of how much it doesn’t.
Acevedo tells the story of a young Harlem girl who uses slam poetry basically to slam her mother’s Christian faith. Filled with profanity, the story is explicit and explicitly blasphemous. And this is what at least one school decided our young people need to be reading: a book trashing Judeo-Christian values.
Our time is certainly out of joint. We have lost that one ingredient to good living: virtue.
There. I said it. Out loud. I’m sure I’ll be called a scold by my kindest critics, but it needs to be said. I don’t mean by virtue one of the well-known seven, although those are worth remembering (humility, modesty, diligence, patience, kindness, temperance and charity) — and Lord knows we need them in surfeit today.
What I mean by virtue is what it meant from its beginning: moral excellence. One could say that to be virtuous is to follow all seven of those heavenly virtues.
Our culture, it seems, has rather adopted the seven deadly sins instead (just for review: envy, lust, pride, greed, wrath, gluttony, sloth).
C.S. Lewis once wrote, “We mock honor and wonder why we have traitors in our midst.” I amend that only slightly: We mock virtue and wonder why we are awash in vulgarity.
It’s hard to get away from the vulgarity and even harder to resist. When forced to hear such things, even the most delicate among us loses respect for humanity, as Cicero reminds us. It ruins our politics, our theater, even our common conversations.
Among nearly everyone, the F-word is a comma or an adjective. It shows up in the casual conversation of young and old. It’s on T-shirts and all over social media. Stand-up comics cannot tell a joke without using the word ad nauseam, and apparently moms and dads cannot even correct their children without it, which, by the way, is often why their children use it so frequently.
This is to say nothing for the rest of our four-letter vocabularies, let alone their behaviors. But saying these words isn’t the only problem. As we like to say today, it’s systemic in our natures now. When it isn’t the words, it’s the sexualization of everything: clothes, ads, television shows, radio and everything else. The internet is awash with it, and I don’t just mean porn sites. Patience is gone, humility something we think others should have, greed an ambition, diligence thought to be elitist, kindness something you show to animals and modesty sexist.
So I’ll be a scold, and everyone can tell me to, well, you know, that “off” phrase. I hope for some, however, it will be a quiet clarion call to better living in 2021.
Mark Y. Herring is professor emeritus and dean of library services at Winthrop University. He lives in Rock Hill.
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