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The seven evils are well known, but let's look.
. . Gregory the Great --6th century pope, formulated the traditional 7.
. . Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun. ~Joseph Epstein
POLITICS Without Principles
WEALTH . .Without Work
COMMERCE .Without Morality
EDUCATION Without Character
PLEASURE .Without Conscience
SCIENCE . Without Humanity
WORSHIP . Without Sacrifice
The precedent concept I started with was: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
To begin, a quotation from Thomas Hood that gets right to my point: "Evil is wrought by want of thought, as well as want of heart." He's saying that your heart may be right when you set out to do good, and yet you accomplish evil because you hadn't thought it through.
Having the courage of your convictions may be consistent and
brave, but it's still an evil if your convictions are foolish in
the first place. Increasing the strength of your convictions does
not change the validity or quality of them --it only increases their foolishness!
. . Sometimes we do the most harm for what WE feel are the right reasons. "Let me help you", said the monkey to the fish, as he placed it safely up the tree....
A simple example of hurting by trying to help is wearing plastic sunglasses to protect your eyes. Plastic is transparent to UltraViolet, and glass is opaque to it. Our eyes cannot see UV. So with plastic shades, less light that the retinas can perceive gets thru, so the pupils open up. They do not perceive the most damaging radiation: the ultraviolet. Unperceived, the UV does not make the pupils close, so the effect of the dark plastic might be to let more UV thru to your retina. The tint does cut it some, but still, in trying to help protect yourself, you might've made it worse.
But it is the obvious things that most easily escape our attention. Virtue is one of these things. We seem to think that virtue is the exact opposite of evil. We assume that all aspects of every virtue are absolute and pure. T'ain't so.
Emerson: "Goodness is much more dangerous than vice, because it is not subject to the constraints of conscience."
If you propose to find people of evil, do not look in bars or ghettos or mental institutions. Look for places that specialize in teaching their own brand of virtue.
We have only to look at places and times where supposed virtue has had power. The result of the unconstrained virtue has been terrible; e.g.: The Christian Inquistion, the Taliban theocracy in Afganistan. In lesser degrees: Israeli domination of Palestine, and psychologically, subtly, the Victorian culture.
Where virtue has total power, there is no balance, no restraint on the runaway excesses of virtue.
Any new spiritual philosophy such as Gaia is quickly faced with the question of evil, as if evil needed definition and good doesn't. It might be more interesting to examine our virtues first, and it is so often enlightening to look at things from fresh new angles.
Sometimes, the simplest definition is best. For instance, morality is simply knowing how not to hurt people and other living things. It's a simple definition, tho knowing how to avoid all harm is much more difficult in practice.
Sometimes, a term needs a more detailed definition. We might define virtue simply as good intentions. However, any virtue is still in need of wisdom, lest, despite itself, the good intentions result in harm. Don't pave your road with good intentions unless you look ahead, with all the wisdom you can muster, to see where this well-paved road leads. We know where the pavement of good-intentions often takes it.
Another quotation, this one lighthearted; from May West: "When I got the choice of two evils, I chose the one I never tried before." She'd be surprised at how I'll use her quotation. I think it shows that there is often some good within an evil, as well as some evil within good things. To picture this idea, the Tao yin-yang symbol that looks like a circle of two raindrops --one black, one white-- spinning together... often has a spot of opposite color in the center of each. (By the way, let's not make black the bad guy every time.)
Our thesis here is about that contrary spot within our virtues that so often will sabotage our best efforts. Indeed, those sneaky aspects of our virtues are more apt to sabotage our best efforts than our everyday efforts.
Hart's Deadly Virtue Law: Evil is done in proportion to ignorance multiplied by righteousness multiplied by altruism and again by orthodoxy.
. . "The best I can say it is this: The greatest of evils, indeed, perhaps all evils, are compounded of accidents of birth or circumstance, of innocent ignorance, of ego, and of virtue taken to prideful extreme." (after Forrest Church)
That last (virtue to excess) is by far the major source of evil. And these things compound not by addition, but multiply each other; a negative synergy.
Combine ignorance and charity, for instance, and you might send food to impoverished people in an already over-populated area.
There are at least two levels of deadly virtues: those that harm others, despite their good intentions, and those that diminish or hide your true nature, feelings or growth. Most of what I speak of is the former --harm to others-- in the realm of sociology. The study of those "virtues" that hide your true nature is closer to psychology. However, whatever harms one will to some degree, harm the other.
Let's examine these deadly virtues one at a time, and look at combinations of them later.
The virtues listed by Plato are: Prudence, Justice, Temperance, Faith, Hope, and Charity (One of the ancient Greek forms of Love). Perhaps Fortitude (courage). We might add a few minor virtues, like Patience. And questionable ones like perfectionism. And one big bad dangerous one we'll save for last.
(Parenthetically, this leaves out my top one: Honesty! Or is this covered by Justice? I'm tempted to say that it subsumes justice --or is it the other way around?-- but I wind up just going back and forth. Like this:
There might coincidently be justice without honesty, and too often honesty without justice, but honesty is required for any consistent justice. But then, the existence of justice may be said to presume honesty. Justice is helpful but not required for a consistent honesty by individuals. Justice --when widely practiced and known-- sets a tone that further accentuates honesty in the public. A great positive synergy.
So I'll just lay the difference to semantics.
No, wait; just one thing.... with self-respect, it's better to be disliked for who you are than to be liked for someone you're not.
** Virtue number 1: Justice. Cicero called it the crowning glory of all the virtues --deservedly so-- and yet, even justice can cause evil. That evil is likely done by a type of strong-willed simpleminded justice that lacks compassion. (Anyone both strong-willed and simpleminded is likely to promote good-looking evils. Watch out for them.)
The quest for happiness, if unalloyed with compassion, can cause unhappiness for others, which will then feed back to you.
The situation that can make one person happy can make another person in the same situation miserable--or a person who shares the situation with that happy person, such as women who go with a guy until he falls in love with her, then dances away, satisfied.
Compassion --Rakhmones, in Yiddish-- is at the heart of Jewish philosophy. The concepts (justice/compassion) are so close, and our needs for them so valued, that we may get into semantics again if we look for a distinction between the words.
Without compassion, justice becomes mere revenge, and loses its power to really improve things. Should we, as the justice-wielding state, kill people convicted of murder, to show people who kill people that killing people is evil? The anger of people who call for the death penalty harms them; influences them to become disturbingly akin to the criminal himself. This then influences our entire culture into something more likely to produce more criminals!
Compassion itself is not always a virtue. It can have terrible results when misguided, and we must always be on guard against that. Missionaries are a fine horrible example. The ultimate misguided compassion would be a hypothesized 1940's German thought that Nazi crematorium jobs had to be saved, so the supply of Jews had to continue. ( I said it was ultimate!) We see a thin reflection of that today in the anti-environmentalists' call to continue logging --and to extinction hell with the lives of any and all species that live in those areas.
But, while horrible, this is not the misguided compassion I most fear at the moment. I am concerned with compassion-fatigue.
As regards care for the environment, I fear there will come a point where the environment has degraded so much that people just don't--or can't--care any more; they're in just too much pain and hunger to devote [or divert] any energy from their simple survival, which is somewhat understandable. But then, things will take a nosedive. When people begin to believe... and desire to believe, and act like things can't get any worse... then they certainly will!
I think we are almost born with a need for justice. We humans have a seemingly innate need for fairness, even altruism. Children display altruism very early, and are extremely affected and offended by unfairness. These qualities therefore seem to be natural, and we hope that you retain them into your adulthood. Fairness and altruism; they go together.
But note that: people work at jobs in order to increase the gap between rich and poor. Obvious, when you think of it; it's simply that we work for our money; to get a little richer, or less poor.
But a little altruism might be selfish! We would create a better life and world for ourselves. To increase the numbers of billionaires and the homeless, as was done in the 80's, is indeed voodoo economics. In the end, altruism is selfish. Policies that decrease the income-gap lead to a better world-wide economy. And the reverse: the wisest greed is based on altruism. Our selfish desire for a better social environment requires that we work toward justice and equality. It's like that contrary spot within those circling raindrops; but in this case, it's reversed: a spot of good within an evil.
I love this quote (as memory serves) on what I call Selfish Altruism. It's a very clever wish, a la Aladdin. "I wish that I be made the most poor, unhappy, sick, and ugly person on Earth... with no change whatsoever to myself." From Fredrich Brown, a sci-fi writer. That unselfish wish would give him a much, much better life. (even if the wish were not granted.) So was it really a selfish wish? Or altruistic? I think both.
** 2: Honesty in itself is a virtue that can harm. An easy example: depending on circumstances, it may be easy to hurt someone (including yourself) by telling or by avoiding even the little white lie.
Dishonesty hurts yourself. It's better to be disliked for who you are, if that be your lot, than to be liked for someone you're not.
** 3: Prudence was Scrooge's virtue. This is perhaps the clearest example of a good thing taken to a damaging extreme.
** 4: Faith. Ambrose Bierce: "Faith is belief without evidence... in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel."
Belief without knowledge... would you go under the knife of such a surgeon?
Would you join the rush-hour traffic on the new bridge of such an engineer?
...such an airline pilot?
Would you believe a scientist who spoke of knowing things that had no evidence?
A Theologian, then?!
** 5: Hope... (This definition is beautifully clear.) "Hope is desire and expectation rolled into one." Ah, but false hope.... To give someone false hope will usually cause them more harm than help. It may lead them to wrong choices, when the hard truth may have lead them to a choice that would've helped them.
** 6: Charity. Too often, what's paraded as charity is really only someone taking public credit today for giving something to a poor person who could've gotten that thing out of their garbage can tomorrow.
That kind of charity is the milk of human blindness; one that often does more harm than good. It is designed for how it makes you feel, not for what good it might do. I fear that most charity is for ego. Publicized charity--to any degree--is for ego; ego is the center of pride; and isn't pride a deadly evil?
Is pride a good or bad thing? Is there an egoistic pride that is to be avoided? That would include all false and nationalistic pride; all that lifts one or a group only by putting others down.
Yet there is a good pride. That which warms the insides as a feat or adventure or job is done very well. A private warmth which does not depend on the admiration of others.
Ask yourself what you are proud of, and consider that you might be a happier, more maturing person without, say, 90 percent of that pride.
Ego is compounded as it achieves more of the power it desires. That, in turn, feeds more ego, and leads to Lord Acton's dictum: "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
(I just snapped onto the reverse! It could be a motto for Howard Stern or Jerry Springer: "Corruption empowers, and absolute corruption empowers a little more.")
Ego is a large part of human motive. We all want to be better thought of. We desire to be, or at least be thought of, as the image of ourselves that we have in mind ourselves. When we compare our imagined image to an imagined image of others, we tend to distort and falsify one or both images somewhat, to look better in the comparison, or to fear that we look worse. This leads to the evils of racism and oppression.
**7: The seventh deadly virtue: Fortitude, true grit: Moral strength or courage in pain or adversity, not merely strength or endurance.
The best examples are good people we never hear about.
** 8: Patriotism. It has much of ego in it. Combine grit with idealism and we get the destructive super-patriot, like John Wayne, Ollie North, and all the way to Hitler. They tend to be military types.
Woolf: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
G. B. Shaw: "Patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior because you were born in it."
Mark Twain: "Patriotism contemplates the opposite of common brotherhood."
**9: Patience. [It might come under Temperance.] There are times not to be patient. You can cause evil by doing nothing. The problem might go away by itself. The government once said the starvation in Biafra was stabilizing at 6,000 deaths a day, as if that were good news. It patiently waited for months for the results of a study of the situation. If they'd waited longer, the study would've found that there was no problem... no starvation; there was nobody left to starve.
**10: Perfectionism. We must be wary of our desire for improvement. Here be dragons and pitfalls. Improvement is a good thing, but to try for perfection is doomed from the start, because there is no such thing. (More on that in our "On Identity" book.)
**11: Trust: The Titanic Captain trusted the engineers.
**11: Orthodoxy: This one's well gone into in the "Ritual" essay. And in the "Identity" book chapter on "Shoulds".
** COMBINATIONS:
Below are examples of various combinations of these virtues that compound in synergy, to produce Hitler, Idi Amin, the Mafia, and even people from Reagan to Mother Theresa. No... the shocking thing I said there was that there are virtues to be found in those first people!
Your finest virtues can lead you to your darkest evils. Unfortunately, the reverse is not true. More unfortunately, the people who commit those dark evils usually aren't even aware of it. They've done a good thing, as far as they know.
To do good things because you are told to is not virtue.
To scrupulously avoid all evil for a lifetime has not a shred of virtue in it... if it was done to comply with an order (explicit or assumed), or for the approval of another.
Pride will amplify virtues as much as idealism will, and more people have extreme pride than have extreme idealism. Often, both extremes are found in the same person. Double amplification.
Pride has a Catch-22, also. It's hard to critique some effort that you're proud of; or, more to the point, it makes it hard to even think of the fact that it's necessary to critique it. (The self-critique must be learned for the skill of writing, believe me.) The masking effect of pride means that the harm that could result from his effort can sneak past a person's awareness, exactly because of the pride he takes in it.
Be not proud, just be. Recognize your bad/lesser points and be not ashamed; merely change them toward what you enjoy more. That's the easy side. What's really hard... recognize your good points, and beware of them.
Pride in our virtues tends to leave us with no grey areas. It's polarizing, because who wants to go halfway with their virtues?! What good is half a virtue? More of a good thing is... well, more of a good thing. It's hard to see what's wrong with that. How can you draw a line and say, "To take my virtue further than this is unwise"?
But if you don't draw that line, you'll trip over an invisible one.
To avoid a fall, be aware of the deadly aspects of pride. There are many kinds of pride. Political pride seems to bring up nationalism. (Say nationalist with a German accent to get the point. And please, beware of a would-be leader who waves any flag, including our own, too proudly.) Pride in power soon makes you a corrupt brute. Pride of group or race, you got bigotry. Pride of your looks, you're close to narcissism. Pride of your position in life yields snobbery and loss of empathy. Pride of accomplishment may make you do more harm than good, because you will tend to overlook those so-important side effects. Pride in your efforts could lead you to perfectionism. Pride in your philosophy could make you over-critical or lead you into idealism. The last two attempts --idealism and perfectionism-- are hopeless and therefore foolish; great examples of things --helpful in small doses-- that are very harmful in excess.
Righteousness is not always evil, but it certainly tends that way. The most evil people are always very righteous. [I cringe at saying always, but I'll go with it this time.] If they did not see their action as righteous, they wouldn't do it. If they did not think themselves so perfectly in the right, they'd have but half of the motivation that drives them so hard, and makes them so dangerous.
Justice, so often taken to heart by the idealist, can lead to self-righteous judgment. As a virtue taken to vast excess, it was the Inquisition. Rational limits are lost in rationalizations. Each step calls more loudly for another, especially when each harsh step taken makes worse the condition they were trying to fix. The idealist tends to miss the connection; ignores the contrary results of his efforts.
Any overextended strength becomes a weakness, as a long branch is weaker than a short one.
You may note, as I have in writing this, that it's idealism and pride that so often combine with others to further degrade them.
Justice and hate cannot coexist in one person, at least not at the same time. But hate often uses justice for a mask, as in the Inquisition and in various holocausts in the U.S., Armenia, Germany, and Bosnia. (Ethnic cleansing!)
An idealistic striving for perfect justice (or perfect anything) will be so frustrating that the obstacles they imagine will become hated.
Hatred is an acid that no flesh can hold without harm to itself.
* H.G. Wells: "Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo."
Longest-lasting, if not the strongest, is the hatred that comes from envy or jealousy, tho they are different things. The envious person is less upset by what is not had by himself than by what is had by someone else. Jealousy is less forgivable. The jealous person wants for the other person to lose it, more than he wants to have the thing himself.
Jealousy is greed and fear masquerading as a virtue. Tho it grows out of a fear of loss, it is the surest way to lose what you fear losing. Conversely, altruism is a good way to get the life you want. (And censorship a good way to get more of what you're fighting to get rid of.)
Ibn Ezra: "Love blinds us to faults, but hatred blinds us to virtues."
The former --love-- may sometimes be a dangerous fantasy (because of its loss of reality), but the latter --hate-- is always a loss. Both love and hate tend to exaggerate their objects. Love's exaggeration is not without dangers either. When your lover's image of you is not at all realistic, even if it's far more glowing an image, do you really feel as loved? Is it really you that he sees?
It's easy to talk about the evils of a person like Hitler, but that is not our purpose here, and I chose not to mention his accomplishments of good things.
To make a huge jump... how about Mother Theresa? She is commonly seen as a virtuous person. But because (I merely assume) she has not concentrated a fair portion of her efforts on population reduction, and IF she has saved the lives of many people who will then manage to have children, it is very likely that her efforts will result in more misery and death than if she'd done nothing at all. if (I say IF) that is so, then why does she do it? Idealism, pride? Or because we don't think to examine our virtues?
Schweitzer might have escaped the super-virtuous label and its effects well. And though he doubtless increased the population of Africa, he probably didn't foresee the horrors of present-day African over-population. I imagine he'd have done his work somewhat differently had he realized that in the long run, he was doing more harm than good.
I don't know of the motives of Norman Borlaug. He was the botanist who evolved new varieties of high-yielding crops that allowed the population of (mostly) Asia to explode. His efforts saved thousands of lives... of people who then had countless children who will all starve as even these crops are outgrown! I hear that he has now --kind of-- recognized the problem publicly. (Sorry, I don't have the direct quotation. Haven't found it.)
Note that it was not his fault that those countries --and ours-- failed to cut population in the time he bought us. But, like nuclear physicists, many other professions are somewhat liable for the results and use made of their work. Borlaug could have said that he would destroy all the new seeds unless he saw immediate progress on the birthrate, perhaps in the form of new social programs and tax reform incentives.
A scenario to illustrate: If we do no better on population than we have... and medical research comes up with an instant cure tomorrow for Cancer, Aids, and everything else, it's probable that after only a few years, more people would've suffered and died than if no cures were found! This has been our experience so far, with DDT, sulfa, and penicillin.
The four horsemen of the apocalypse are usually seen as the greatest enemy that man has. They are what our greatest struggles have always been against. Yet lately, they are but a symptom of our own actions. They would not be seen as evil to the Hindu. Shiva is their Destroyer image, but in the manner of the forest termite --a necessary recycler. There is not room on Earth for an endless procession of the new, without an end to the old --human life included. Nature in process; no aesthetic mistakes.
** This brings us to the deadliest virtue of all. The strongest virtue will also have the strongest tendency for excess, and thus, evil results.
That terribly evil effect is from our highest virtue: our programmed-in capacity of --and drive for... love.
Love is both a virtue and a passion, and as such, can do more harm and result in greater evils than other virtues. Sometimes even love and human nature can lead us astray.
That evil, of course, results from people loving babies but having more than one. This most tender virtue, if not moderated, will cause everywhere what it is now causing over half the world: the horror of starvation and mass crime, including war.
We adore children, and nature has genetically programmed us to produce them. Yet it is obvious that just ignorantly --letting nature take its course-- has already resulted in population consequences that are evil beyond comprehension. And yet, it is also undeniably in the course of nature that we evolved brains big enough to recognize and solve that problem! With courage, knowledge, and love --for the good of the whole, including ourselves-- we will limit our family size to one child. Don't love new lives so much that you cause new deaths.
So let's practice our virtues, but also practice our wisdom, and be aware of the opposite color dot in the Yin and Yang of our lives; those bright spots in evils, and the shadows of our bright side.
As an aside, here are my Six Deadly Imperatives: should, supposed to, ought to, have to, got to, must. (shudsuppostaoughtahavtagottamust)
Exerpts from The Seven Deadly Virtues, a book by Rev. F. Forrester Church.
Shakespeare: "Virtue itself turns to vice, being misapplied." The more elevated the virtue, the more deadly.
An old adage: "The wise turn vices into virtues; the fool, virtues into vices."
The four philosophical and three theological virtues are only deadly when malpracticed, but then devastatingly so, for they land the appearance of nobility to evil. ... Basking in its reflected glow-- "we are just, we are faithful" --we may fail to notice that as long as we face the light, we cannot see our shadow. Blinded by our virtue, we forget that we have a shadow. And when we forget this, we become dangerous. ...almost everything these days has to be turned upside down before we can begin to understand it.
For too long, those of us with skeptical temperaments have contented ourselves with a false distinction, namely that anything not susceptible to investigation according to the canons of rationality is by definition irrational. ... everything else, including angels, heaven, hell, purgatory, and even God, we relegate to figments of the irrational realm. ... Much religion today continues to be irrational, of course. ... My own definition of religion is a simple one: religion is our human response to the dual realities of being alive and having to die.
Apart from community, righteousness becomes self-righteousness, without responsibility, freedom turns to license. By this measure, patriotism, loyalty and faith can be the sponsors of fanaticism. The paradox is that every virtue, when placed on a pedestal, is potentially deadly, evil veiled beneath its rhetoric and further masked by public applause.
Our world is rife with terrorists for truth and God, sustained by fortitude, compelled by love, and bereft of wisdom.
As hunter gatherers, God was coterminious with nature. (+Gaia)
With farming, God was mother of creation/procreation.
With mass society/cities, God = King-image, then King-of-all; even cruel, =Christian. Judgemental; mortify the flesh and escape it [suicide?]. Under [this] god's aegis, the world which once embodied God became the devil's playground, worldly things leaden and sinful, the earth itself an arena of temptation from which the motivated spirit tries to escape... [alien even to ourselves!]
With Kopernigk and Galileo, God = watchmaker. Impersonal.
Justice calls down judgement, prudence is the ability to discriminate between right and wrong and act accordingly, temperance is self-restraint on behalf of others; fortitude is the courage to suffer for another; faith is the confidence that life has meanings....
The wolves have a different version of Little Red Riding Hood than we do.
There is more than enough evil in the world to give both "us" and "them" incentive to mount crusades to vanquish whatever evil we perceive in the actions or systems of the other. ...end up fighting crime by criminal means...
Seneca: "Virtue with some is nothing but successful temerity."
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.
. Erich Fromm
Without doubt, the greatest injury... was done by basing morals on myth, for sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it was built.
. Sir Herbert Samuel
No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were devine.
. A.J. Ayer (obviously, the only real morality is internal. What's forced is not morals.)
{...growing gap between] rich and poor... it becomes clear that the rising tide they've been talking about has lifted only the yachts and battleships; the rowboats got swamped in the wake.
Here we have the perfect recipe for deadly virtue: take any set of actions, however half-baked or rancid, dress them with a liberal helping of God and family... wrap the dish in the American flag, and give it a name like "Project Democracy". ... As Colonel North's testimony shows, we can so love our country that we are willing to destroy the principles on which it is founded.
In a curious reversal, Larry Flynt --a man not seen as a hero-- suddenly became one. ("The People vs Larry Flynt" movie is highly recommended.) He stood the test of the courts to test the constitution, and he --and it-- won.
Hitler was a tee-totaller and a vegetarian. He was devoted to purity. Evil is not the lack of good intent; it is the perversion of good intent. Any given quality or value, if lifted above the scale of associated values and weighed independently, becomes an evil. I think of those people who love humankind; it's just individual human beings they can't stand.
Virtue is not a perpetual fight against an intrinsic evil. It is merely awareness! ...awareness of how we are better off with this action, not that one.
Knowledge is not virtue --knowledge is power, and power can be employed for good or evil.
Fraternity: the kinship of all people.
Former Gov. Richard Lamm of Colorado: "Beware of solutions appropriate to the past but disasterous to the future."
Legends need not be based in fact to be grounded in truth.
I must admit that the Catholic doctrine of purgatory has no scriptural basis... ...the trinity has no scriptural basis either.
Not only is much suffering self-inflicted, and therefore unnecessary, but every unnecessary burden we bear burdens the world.
Everything that exists is related, tracing its genesis to the instant of universal creation. We too are star-stuff, woven into an infinitely complex organism.
Holmes Rolston III: "The number of associations possible among our 10 billion neurons, and hence the number of thoughts humans can think, may exceed the number of atoms in the universe. Humans too, are stars in the show." In and of itself, this should be enough to inspire awe, the primal religious emotion.
Einstein: "The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, as a meaningful unity."
Eric Hoffer: Thus blind faith is, to a considerable extent, a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves; insatiable desire a substitute for hope; accumulation a substitute for growth; fervent hustling a substitute for purposeful action; and pride a substitute for unattainable self-respect.
Isaac Asimov's "Unlovable Virtues":
Serious
Responsible
Practical
Dutiful
We could add more (sensible, proper... but it's the same idea).
And, on the other hand, here's a Charming Vice! : Flattery.
"Wounded vanity knows when it is mortally hurt, & limps off the field, piteous; all disguises thrown away. But pride carries its banner to the last; fast as it's driven from one field, it unfurls it in another." Helen Hunt Jackson, American author 1831-1885.