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Greetings Visionaries:<br><br>
Rose and Donavan raise legitimate concerns about whether the City of
Moscow should be spending its money on the Virtues Project. They
make good arguments that limited city funds should be used for more
immediate needs.<br><br>
Some years ago I was at a conference in Seattle and I was sharing the
podium with a social worker who was working with Seattle drug addicts.
Her office had sufficient resources for therapy and money to address
living conditions, but still she found that she was making very little
headway with her clients. She discovered that the main problem was
that her clients had very few skills to overcome the temptations that led
to drug use. Sending them to counseling and giving them a better
place to live did nothing to address this problem.<br><br>
My paper "Non-Violence as a Civic Virtue" was next, and
initially I did not see how I was going to make any connections to her
paper, but now the link was obvious. Rose and Donavan are focusing
on the symptoms of a broken society, which we definitely should address,
but we also need to attend to the reasons why so many people lack the
basic skills to lead good lives.<br><br>
The ancient Greeks, Buddhists, and Confucians realized that the virtues
are those requisite skills, and if they are not taught early in life, and
if there are no good role models for the virtues, then your society is
drifting down that notorious creek without a paddle.<br><br>
By the way, I want to commend Dan Weaver for his excellent column on
Virtues and Character (<i>Daily News</i> June 5&6). He even
mentioned Aristotle!<br><br>
For a draft of my essay "Moscow as a City of Virtues" see
<a href="http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/moscowvirtue.htm" eudora="autourl">www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/moscowvirtue.htm</a><br><br>
Yours for a City of Virtues,<br><br>
Nick Gier<br><br>
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