Dear Prudence

I'm indebted to Peter Schramm for pointing out this excellent short discussion of prudence, the virtue most lacking in our culture. It's the virtue enabling right action, or choosing the best means to the end. But for some reason when people discuss it (if it is discussed at all), they end up discussing proper ends and saying nothing at all about how we choose the right means -- nothing at all about prudence itself. This is an important article because failure to understand prudence is at the root of all kinds of intellectual errors of our day: the re-writing of Lincoln into a racist, the thought that Pius XII would have done better to denounce the Nazis louder at whatever cost in Jewish lives, the sterility of contemporary "Just War" discussions, pro-life absolutism which prefers purity over life-saving. For the most part, we moderns don't even think of prudence as a virtue:

Prudence carries with it today the connotation of "prude"—a person of overexaggerated caution, bland temperance, hesitation, a lack of imagination and will, fearfulness, and a bad case of mincing steps. This would have surprised the classical philosophers, who thought of prudence as one of the four cardinal virtues and who linked it to shrewdness, exceptionally good judgement, and the gift of coup d'oeil—the "coup of the eye"—which could take in the whole of a situation at once and know almost automatically how to proceed.

When we do, we wrongly think of it as a commitment to seek the middle ground:

What separates prudence from moderation is that "moderation" is an attitude preoccupied with the integrity of means but not ends in political action. Moderation is a tragic attitude, because it understands only too well the constraints imposed by limited human resources and by human nature.

This is why "moderation" so often becomes paralyzed and snarled in an effort to placate competing moral demands or to insist on pragmatic process without regard to what the process is producing. Being wise "does not mean that prudence itself should be moderate, but that moderation must be imposed on other things according to prudence." Daring, which "leads one to act quickly," might also be the work of prudence, provided that "it is directed by reason." Prudence, then, does not avoid action; if anything, it demands action of a particular kind.

This is precisely, by the way, why the Senate doesn't produce good Presidents, even though every Senator thinks he'd be a great one. The senatorial temperament is committed to process and compromise. These things have a contribution to make to the polity --the Senate is designed to be a deliberative body and a check on rash action-- but the Senatorial instinct to deliberate endlessly and compromise first isn't what's called for when you're Chief Executive --or "Decider," in Mr. Bush's unfelicitous but apt expression.

This is the section I appreciate most. It's an indictment of "realist" foreign policy, among other things, but I read it also in the context of perennial strategy debates among pro-lifers and the things you read in Catholic columns about Just War, the economy, any number of political issues:

At the other remove from prudence stands absolutism, which is about the integrity of ends without sufficient attention to the integrity of means so that it invests its servants with the attitude of disdain and certainty [I'm thinking of just about every column I've ever read on the death penalty or the war, matters which the Pope himself has expressly said are subject to prudential judgments --ed.]
This is the universe where it is supposed that wills are free from ultimate constraints and that only willing and power are lacking to attain a good end.

Prudence, however, pays equal attention to the integrity of ends and of means. Prudence is an ironic rather than a tragic attitude, where the calculus of costs is critical but at the same time neither crucial nor incidental.

My sense is that in Catholic circles, a healthy reaction against the proportionalism and ends-justifies-the-means morality promoted by dissenting theologians has led us to fall lazily into just this absolutism. We know that ends don't justify means, but forget that means must be directed to ends. We pay too little attention to the question of whether the means we advocate are likely to get us where we're going -- and we fall, too, into a materialism that seems to fear only physical suffering, without regard to what damages the human spirit.

Not to mention the fact that this approach leeches all the joy, creativity & adventure out of Christian existence, but that's another topic.

I'll just cite one more item:

Prudence prefers incremental progress to categorical solutions and fosters that progress through the offering of motives rather than expecting to change dispositions. Yet, unlike "moderation," prudence has a sense of purposeful motion and declines to be paralyzed by a preoccupation with process, even while it remains aware that there is no goal so easily attained or so fully attained that it rationalizes dispensing with process altogether.

All of this is taken from the introduction. There follows a short intellectual history of prudence in America and what we can learn from Lincoln's prudence. Those of us who aim to be the "good guys" in politics should read and learn.