The Kids May Be All Right

Growing up in a very religious household, I found the language of organized religion to be a second mother tongue.  I was just as comfortable talking about piety, chastity, and works of mercy as I was talking to my friends about how Green Day’s American Idiot was the most punk album we had ever heard.  What always struck me then, and continues to do so now, is how people (even those who are nominally religious) are uncomfortable with the language of organized religion.  Few examples epitomize this phenomenon better than does my generation’s relationship with the four cardinal virtues: justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude.

One of the most striking observations that a contemporary reader has to make when examining the cardinal virtues of St. Thomas Aquinas is the lack of interest that modern society pays to them, and no virtue has lost more to the passage of time than has prudence.  Prudence is at its core “acting with or showing forethought; having or exercising sound judgment in practical or financial affairs” (“Prudence”).  Prudence has gone from competing with justice for the right to be called the greatest of all virtues, to being actively derided in modern society.  The word itself has become an antiquated joke; using it means dating yourself as behind the times. To call someone a prude has become an insult, and it seems people everywhere are attempting to reject the idea of taming the will in favor of an ideology which places no concrete restriction on one’s action.

The irony of all of this is that in people’s rejection of prudence, they are simply responding to the paradigm shifts of post-modernity in the most prudent way possible.  The old trappings of religion have been tossed off prudence, but the virtue itself remains.  People continue to attempt to tame the will towards creating the greatest good.  They still try to understand the ultimate goal of their lives.  And they still try to decide what to do based on how to achieve that goal.  This is the essence of prudence.  It is the idea of the greatest good, however, that has changed with the passage of time.  No longer do people imagine it in the terms of religion or salvation.  Therefore, the actions they take will look very different from those of someone whose end goal is religious salvation.  Even though the actions may be radically different, that does not make them any less prudent in their own ways.

Prudence’s progression to where it finds itself today begins in the traditions of Christian morality.  In order to understand its role as one of the cardinal values, we can look to St. Thomas Aquinas for his definition of prudence.  St. Thomas explains prudence as the property by which “a man not only commands others, but also commands himself” (Aquinas).  Simply put, prudence is not eating the candy bar because summer is two months away, and you don’t want to be embarrassed to go to the beach.  Or, less simply put, to borrow the language of philosopher Harry Frankfurt, prudence is allowing the second order will, the will that you identify as your real self or real will, to triumph over the first order will, that is the first urge of the body (O’Connor par. 13-14).  A prudent person commands his or herself to put long-term ends ahead of short-term pleasure, and in doing so orders his or her actions around achieving those long term goals.  More often than not these long-term goals were framed in the morality of Christianity.  A prudent person would forgo some of life’s pleasures in order to secure eternal salvation for his or herself.

Its position as one of the cardinal virtues is enough for us to understand the importance and honor that people previously placed on the virtue of prudence.  But what is of more interest here is its fall rather than its rise.  The fall of prudence can be traced back to the mid-twentieth century when, coming out of the Second World War, people were reevaluating the usefulness of the ideas and philosophies of previous generations, including that of prudence. And we can better understand this reevaluation by looking at The Beatles song “Dear Prudence,” in which John Lennon sings of the beginning of society’s rejection of prudence.  The lyrics question if prudence actually does more harm than good to its adherents: “Dear Prudence open up your eyes / Dear Prudence see the sunny skies / The wind is low the birds will sing / That you are part of everything / Dear Prudence won’t you open up your eyes?” (“Dear Prudence” 1968).  A metaphorical understanding of these lyrics sees the lines as addressed to prudence itself as a virtue.  In so doing, The Beatles offer what is one of the most common critiques of prudence: that it is living intentionally with one’s eyes closed.  Whereas prudence has typically been understood as rational self-control, the Beatles and the generation they are emblematic of challenged that assumption. Instead, the people of late modernity saw prudence as blinding, keeping one from getting a complete view of the world and everything in it. Prudence got in the way of experience and in doing so prevented its practitioners from coming to a more complete understanding of reality. Prudence would tell you not to sacrifice your career to move across the country to be with someone you just met. Contemporary culture would flip that script.  In the cult of experiences that developed in the twentieth century, forgoing that experience would be a mortal sin.

Now this might cause one to believe that prudence has gone out of fashion, and in a way this would be right.  Certainly prudence as a word with its connotations of strict religious morality is no longer considered desirable.  I would argue though, that the actual state of prudence is actually more complicated than simply dead and gone.  Prudence by its strict definition, training the will by reason in the service of the greater good, is still alive and well. Yet people are now responding to a world where the modus operendum (even for many religious people) is that God is dead, and the understanding of the greater good has changed to reflect this new reality. If having too much sex causes you to burn in hell for all eternity, then the prudent choice is clearly celibacy.  However, in a modern world where you do not believe that damnation is the result of an active sex life, the prudent choice becomes a lot different.   If that is the case, then values must be re-imagined and new end goals must be drawn up.  It is no surprise then that we would act in a different way than our ancestors who lived in a world saturated by religion.  What has replaced Puritanical religious morality is a passion for the present and for the experienced and lived life.

It is this creation of new values that contributes to the popular understanding that there is a lack of prudence in modern life. Paradoxically, it is in this set of new values, which taken on face value might be seen to represent a lack of prudence, where prudence is saved.  On our deathbeds, my generation hopes to say that they experienced life to the fullest degree possible because we operate under the assumption that morality is permanent, the here and now truly is the ultimate reality, and we intend to make it the best possible reality that we know how. We take very seriously the fact that from dust we came and unto dust we shall return.  As such, we look to create lives for ourselves that are full of a different kind of meaning.  It is only fair then to judge the prudence of our actions in connection with our newly created meanings. In our own way, we are practicing the utmost prudence, even though we reject it in name.  We do as John Lennon asked and open our eyes to every new and interesting experience that life has to offer.  We are willing to set aside our “prudishness” to explore things that were previously seen as taboo, whether that be sex or poverty or even something as simple as skipping work for a day in the park.  Some are even willing to forgo all of that for the thrill of living on the margins of society.  All of these choices are prudent when one understands that the end goals that the choosers are trying to achieve have more to do with life and experience than an abstract religious morality.  While we may reject the religious mold of prudence, we consistently make choices we believe are in our own long-term best interest and aligned with the greater good, which is at the end of the day what constitutes true prudence.

Works Cited

Aquinas, St. Thomas. Aquinas Ethicus: or, the Moral Teaching of St. Thomas. A Translation of the Principal Portions of the Second Part of the Summa Theologica, with Notes by Joseph Rickaby, S.J. (London: Burns and Oates, 1892). Chapter: QUESTION XLVII.: OF PRUDENCE. 1. Web. 15 Oct. 2012. <http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1967/124147>.

Lennon, John, and Paul McCartney. “Dear Prudence.” Rec. 1968. The White Album. The Beatles.1968.  Vinyl recording.

O’Connor, Timothy. “Free Will.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) Web. 16 Nov. 2012. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/>.

“Prudence, n.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 3^rd Edition. 2007. OED Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 16 Nov. 2012.