What It Means to Be a Better Person in the 21st Century

The Great Virtues of the 21st Century, How They’re Different, And Why They Matter

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Every age, I‘ve come to think, has its great virtues. It’s not that some don’t matter — but it is that some matter more than others. So what about this one? This troubled, strange time we find ourselves in, this crucial juncture of history? What are the great virtues of now?

Let me set the stage, a little bit, with the great virtues of the last age. I say the last one because we’re living in its twilight. That was the Age of Industry. Its great virtues were ones like competitiveness, industriousness, perseverance, calculation. Later psychologists of this age — ones you know — refer now to this set of virtues with new, fashionable labels, like “grit” and “resilience” and “flow” and so forth. These were the things we were trained to do — the people we were trained to be — from the day we were born, more or less. If you were like me as a kid, and you weren’t naturally this kind of person — well, you were probably a little lost, defiant, and they spent many, many years trying to fit you, like a square peg, into a round hole.

I have good news, and I have bad news. These aren’t the virtues of this age, and so if you’re not naturally this kind of person — self-interested, hypercompetitive, always seeking an edge, calculating your maximum gain and profit — well, now you have a chance to really blossom. But to do that, you’ll have to get over the weariness and trauma that many of us grew up with. This set of virtues we might describe as Homo Economicus, or Homo Industrialis. Industrial man or women — the economically rational self-interested actor. Meaning uninterested in anything, really, but material gain, consumption, status, and continually accumulating more and more of all that, even at the price of…not just a life….but life.

Because now, if we look around, we can see the cost of Homo Industrialis. The idea — born of Enlightenment — was that Enlightenment was this process of making everyone Homo Industrialis, productive, materialistic, individualistic, self-interested, and so, in the name of “civilizing” nations, some conquered others. A centuries long quest began. For power and resources, dominance and industry, possession and production and profit. Today, we can see, very, very clearly the cost of Homo Industrialis. Just a few hundred million, maybe a billion of such beings, people, walking apes — and the planet is whimpering, screaming, crying out in pain.

And so the Industrial Age is closing, with a Big Bang. Things are running out. The basics — water, air, food, medicine. Money, as a result, is in short supply, and our institutions are broken, distrusted, scorned, held in contempt, for not being able to supply the one good we expected, desired, were taught to want most of all: upwards mobility, the trajectory of material abundance arcing forever upwards. Having failed to provide that to us — the very thing that we were beaten into desiring, on this often unpleasant journey of being socialized, educated, acculturated to become Homo Industrialis — we turn on the very institutions that broke their promise after they molded us into vehicles of endless, insatiable appetite.

Virtues. They’re strange things. The story of the End of the Ages of Industry and Enlightenment isn’t that they don’t matter — but that its set of virtues, the ones above, had to be tempered. It’s not that being competitive or industrious and so forth are bad — but if that’s all you are, and there are a billion of you, well, that’s enough to make a planet shudder and scream in pain, because you’re overdoing it. Temperance, too, is a virtue. Moderation. Which are really forms of humility.

That’s the first great virtue of this age, but I’m going to come back to it, because to explain it well it should come last. So let me begin with in a clearer place.

What’s our job this century, as human beings, as a civilization, if we want life and democracy and abundance to survive, and everything not break down into chaos, violence, and ruin? It’s to become shepherds of life. Pligrims on a journey towards it. All life on this planet. From rivers to skies to the existences in them. From forests to soil. We must learn to temper our appetites, and conserve those things, now, in a radical way — more radical than ever before, and perhaps it’s worth reflecting on how sad it is that “conservatism” in this day and age is genuinely degenerate in this deep sense…about anything but that.

If we want to do that job, then the first great virtue to be learned is compassion. Now, this one might sound trite and obvious, but I want you to think about how efficiently the Age of Industry beat it out of us. When I’m back in America, people will literally step over others passed out on the streets. That’s not normal, but is in the States, because, well, who wants to interfere? Even if that person’s hurt, they might have a gun, might sue you, might get you. America is the most industrialized country of all, and forgive me saying something that shouldn’t be controversial at this stage, but is. It lacks compassion.

America’s a weirdly cruel place. Think of how…anything works. From healthcare to work. Want healthcare? Sure, it’ll cost you the equivalent of a home over a lifetime, maybe, probably, even more. Work? Nobody much takes vacations because everybody’s scared of being fired from jobs which come with zero protections and usually little to no benefits. It’s no wonder that Americans run short on compassion. I don’t mean that as an insult. I really don’t. They’re good at many things as a society, but this? It’s not one of them. I highlight America as an example to illustrate the link between industry and compassion — it’s an inverse one, because the central idea of the Age of Industry was that if you’re not productive, well, you’re not really a human being. And for some who were deemed subhuman to begin with, having their labour stolen — slavery — was the only way to stay alive at all.

Compassion. What is it? Well, you might think of it in an overly complicated way. Americans find it…hard…because, most of all, they overthink it. What’s compassion? It’s incredibly simple. It’s just…talking to people. Not just people, really. Let’s think of it as getting to know beings in this world. Let me give you an example from my own life. Snowy, my little buddy, has a friend, and her name is Rosie. She’s a greyhound, and she recently had trouble with her hind legs. We saw Rosie, and her human, at the cafe the other day. And as she walked away, limping, whimpering a little in pain, her legs covered in bandages, I felt a great, great wave of grief.

I didn’t just feel bad, in some abstract way. I felt grief, for this particular being — Rosie. Because? Why? I know her. Snowy and her became friends, but it wasn’t instant, and it wasn’t easy. The little guy? He’s scared of big dogs, and Rosie’s a matriarch of a greyhound, haughty, commanding, gruff. Now they’re friends, but in the beginning? It was…challenging. And yet through precisely that challenge I got to know Rosie. Who she is. And now? I’m there for her. I asked if they needed anything, and her human said no. But hey — I would’ve done more or less whatever they needed. Some medicine from the store? Can I run some errands? Maybe I could bring some treats by? Sure — for my friend Rosie, no problem.

That’s a tiny, funny example of compassion. I use it because it illustrates how simple compassion really is. It’s just…getting to know…people. Not even people. You can have it for a doggie. I do. The things is that you have to open up a bit. You can’t do this weird thing that Americans do too much — stay closed up as tight as clams. 

When I’m in America, nobody talks to each other. Even if they pass by each other for years — they don’t even say hi. Snowy makes almost no friends in America, which is strange and sad, because in Europe, as with Rosie, it happens all the time. Americans are closed up, because, well, in America, getting to know people can be strange and dangerous — who knows if that person’s a gun nut, a fanatic, a lunatic? And yet…my friends…to develop this great virtue of compassion?

You don’t have to sit there and meditate on the pain of the world. It’s not complicated, and it’s not abstract. The first step? It’s just being open. As in observing the missed relationships around you. How many people do you see every day that you…well, see every day…and you still don’t know? If you want to build your compassion muscle, don’t worry about anything complicated, abstract, like meditating on the pain of existence — just start right there. The moment that you open up? You’ll get to know all these people, beings, existences, right down to little dogs — and the compassion will well up naturally.

Now. You might ask “Why do I even need it?” Good question. I’m about to tell you. How are you feeling these days? Pretty…bad? I thought so. Worried, stressed, anxious, afraid is how you probably feel, if you’re like most people I know. It’s not you, or just my friends, it’s the world. We can observe this as a trend — a great pulsation of dread sweeping the globe, causing an arrhythmia of fear in the human soul.

If you’re going to survive that, well, you need compassion. Why? For yourself. You see, it’s a strange and delicate thing, but in times like these, the most important thing you can have is compassion for yourself. Instead of beating yourself up, over and over again, over why it didn’t work out — that job, career, relationship, chance, idea, venture, what have you — in a time like this, when everyone’s path is troubled, when things really are regressing and failing, blaming yourself is a really bad idea. It puts you into a vicious circle of despair, and not the good kind — the fruitless kind.

Just getting back to some zone of normal, mentally, begins, in a time like this, with compassion for yourself. The other day, I called it “being gentle with yourself.” Here, I’m going to describe it a little differently, and that brings me to the second great virtue of this age.

Empathy. I know, I know. Everyone talks about it. But do you see many people practicing it? I don’t. That’s because we have a superficial understanding of how to practice it, which is because, in turn, the pop notion of it isn’t really the real thing. So what is? Let me ask you a question.

How much empathy do you have for…yourself? Now, many people think of the pop version of empathy, which is “stepping into another person’s shoes” — and so they’re baffled by this question. But without empathy for yourself, my friend? It’s going to be a miserable and difficult life, to put it bluntly. So what’s this weird notion of…self-empathy? Well, just look at yourself. I mean really see yourself.

Let me say that again. Really see yourself. Who do you see? You look at yourself, as we all do, and see so, so many things. The person you wanted to be, the exaggerated version of your failures, perhaps an outsized, narcissistic notion of your successes, and so on. Seeing yourself is seeing that person. Seeing the seer, a Buddhist monk might call it. See the whole of that person, which is you. That’s the person you really are. There you are — this fragile thing, more beautiful and noble than you know. You want the best for yourself, for the world around you, and you blame yourself for so much when it all goes wrong, even when that’s far, far beyond your control, capabilities, resources. See that person. That’s self-empathy.

It begins with looking backwards, often. I see the little guy I used to be, and I have empathy for that kid. He found it so, so hard just to exist in this world. He was abused and hated and tormented just for being himself, like a lot of kids who are different are. But that kid was brave. He was determined, tough, and even though nobody told him any of that, he stuck in there anyways. He persevered, through all that, and became, well…me. 

That’s not a pat on the back. Far from it. It’s still incredibly painful for me to think about that person. The kid I used to be. But not in the old way — memories of all that pain, resurfacing. In a different one. Now, I wish someone like the person I am today had been around, to tell that kid that he was OK. That being different, in these ways — creative, thoughtful, sensitive — these things were gifts, and some gifts are so painful they’re seeds struggling yet to be born. Do you see what I mean a little bit? Maybe you’ve done this — but if you haven’t, you should. Because…

There’s a central idea within the notion of virtue itself which is so profound that it’s always stayed with me. You can only give to someone else what you’ve cultivated in yourself first. Think of…strength — the cardinal virtue of the industrial age. Today, we say “being strong for someone.” But we all know we can hardly do that unless we have learned to be strong ourselves, or in modern parlance, have grit, resilience, toughness, and so on. So it is with empathy.

You can’t really give it to anyone else unless you have it for yourself first. And when you have it for yourself — when you can see yourself as this forlorn, beautiful, tragic, noble thing, who’s still hanging in there, trying, despite it all, with all these conflicts and desires and traumas, as deep as an ocean, as wide as a summer sunset — then you can begin to really give it to the rest of the world around you.

I start there because empathy isn’t “just stepping into someone else’s shoes.” If it were, that’s what influencers and celebrities on Instagram would be promising. Here, take a glimpse at my perfect life. Step on down into my shoes, you pleb. See how fine and comfortable they are? That’s not empathy. It’s marketing. Marketing of a particularly gross kind, which is triggering resentment in people, and making them feel small. Real empathy in this case? Would be observing your own reactions to this sort of psychic pollution. Hey, that pretend perfect life? It made me feel really inadequate. Not just small, though I felt that — I felt unsafe, threatened, I hurt a little bit, for how deprived my life in ways that matter intensely. Empathy in this case is the opposite of the reaction the marketers want people to examine, and you can see how little of that there really is.

So what’s real empathy for others? It’s incredibly difficult. It’s trying to experience another being’s world, reality, existence. Think of Rosie the greyhound again. I know it’s funny, but sometimes I wonder: what’s it like? You see, the doggies in my neighborhood have their whole own parallel world. They stop and sniff, they go to the park, they know each other, they know the streets and avenues and grass and seasons in a way we never will. What does Rosie see when she sees me, I wonder. It’s hardly just me, because of course, Thoughts of Dog is a huge Twitter account. 

We all wonder what it’s like to be our dogs and their buddies. We say “we don’t deserve our dogs (or animals)” precisely because we have some inkling that their emotional experience is even stronger and truer than ours. That is why they are so strongly bonded to us, and it haunts us, mystifies us, baffles us — because it’s something we can never really experience. But we can try. We can try to imagine what it’s like to have emotions that strong that we’d just…run up and say hi, you weird ape, like Rosie does to me…or that we’d defend home at all costs…or that we’d try and warn whenever we knew something was off. That’s empathy.

It should be obvious why we need that, too. Think about the world. What’s happening out there? Mass extinctionis. And if they go? We go. At some point, critical breakdowns will happen. Ecosystems will collapse in from the bottoms, if the worms can’t turn the soil, the fish can’t clean the rivers, the birds get even more and worse flu, and so forth. We are going to need to start imagining what it’s like to be them.

Why? Because, well, we are going to need to reinvent everything. That brings me to my third virtue, which is wisdom. What’s wisdom? Well, let’s think about it using the examples above, pretty simply. Hey, if the animals keep going extinct, so do we. Or at least a whole lot of us do, and since I’m not a fascist, maybe that’s not a great thing. But what do we do about it?

Wisdom, in our modern parlance, can be thought as cause-effect seeing. But in a deep way. Ten effects ahead. Seven generations, as the old and beautiful expression of it goes. What’s the effect of the effect of…a global economy…predicated…on seven billion people desperately overproducing artificially cheap stuff…for a billion…to be imaginarily rich…for a few decades? The planet dies, and takes civilization with it. Cause-effect thinking, at a level that’s generations, levels, orders out from immediacy.

But there’s another, deeper, truer way to think of wisdom, too. As a kind of justice. Let’s go back to empathy. What is it like to be another…existence? Not just a human one, but…pick on at random. You know Rawls’s veil of ignorance? Fate chooses the human you’d be at random — and that’s how should build our laws and institutions, so that everyone’d be OK with that circumstance. It’s wise to do that, Rawls argued, because only such arrangements can endure.

Let’s expand the Rawlsian Veil beyond being just human. What if fate could make you…anything? Well, it’d be pretty bad luck to be born, I don’t know, a cow, because humans would farm you and kill you in a terrible way, the odds are. It’d be bad luck to be born…oh, hold on…anything…because we humans are causing a mass extinction. You see the point of my example. Expanding the Rawlsian Veil makes it super clear how foolish our path is.

But it takes, crucially, empathy to do that. To arrive at that set of thoughts. Because you have to imagine what it’s like being all those other beings. Hey, you have to think to yourself, it must be pretty awful to be…the kind of being who just exists to get slaughtered. Or whose entire species is going extinct. Real empathy means you imagine what those existences are like — and then feel what emotions they’d probably feel, too. What does a cow feel, on the way to the slaughterhouse? We can’t say for sure, but we can say it’s probably some level of absolute terror, and we can also say, knowing how strong emotions are in our doggies, that that terror is probably way, way more horrific than even ours. Awful stuff we’re doing, and we know no other way, yet, which is why we keep doing it.

But we must change now. Wisdom is that, in the end. Understanding the necessity for change. Remember how Aeschylus famously put it? “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” Many people know that quote, because JFK famously read it in one of his speeches. But not enough people know the next line. “Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering.”

Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. Ah, my friend. This is one of the most beautiful ideas a mind has ever had. And one of the truest. Wisdom comes at the price of suffering — that’s fair, maybe even obvious, right? But justice inclines her scales? What does that part mean? It means that the point of the suffering you go through to get to this place called wisdom — is so that it never happens again, to anyone or anything else.

Wisdom becomes what the ancients see it as — and in this quote by Aeschylus, you have the truest understanding of it there ever was. Not just as some form of clculation, but as a moral duty. Virtues are all moral duties, after all, but wisdom is the greatest, most difficult one of all: none shall, must, will, suffer, the way I have suffered. Or else what does pain mean? What’s the point of all the hurt? It’s so that when I learn, you benefit. Justice inclines her scales back, then. She gives back to you what she took from me, and I open her hand to give you that gift.

Do you see how beautiful and transformative and radiant this notion of wisdom is? How different it is than…today’s? Today’s idea of it is some jargon about productivity, maybe or some other jargon about calculating things well. But it’s not really about any of that at all. As Aeschylus tried to teach us, so many millennia ago, lost to time, wisdom is gained when my suffering prevents yours, theirs, everyone’s. Only then is a person wise. Only then is a course of action wise.

That, of course, brings me back to the point. What do we need to do this century? Well, the first and foremost task is to give all this suffering meaning. Yours, but not just yours. The human world’s, but not even just that. All the mighty, terrible, grief of extinction. We must act like it matters, and change everything now, from what we eat to how we produce to why we consume to who we teach ourselves to be and become. Otherwise, my friends? This great tidal wave of suffering, this pulse of fear and pain lancing through the heart of the world? It will have meant nothing. And how we change that is one person at a time, beginning, each one, with themselves, which brings me right back to you, and the question of the great virtues of now.

Umair 
February 2023