Our virtues come to us down from the ages. They began with Moses’s exodus from the Nile River Valley; made their way through the rolling hills of ancient Greece; then through Rome, next the meandered deep into the forests of Saxony to England, and across the most dangerous ocean in the world to us. They are universal and everywhere. They are inherent in our being and and yet ethereal – just as thought is to deed.
Why are virtues so universally understood?
Because since time immemorial human beings have been born with virtues literally planted in our bosoms.
We are brought into this world with an innate and powerful moral inclination; a biological imperative so pervasive that it can be observed in infants as young as three months old. Even a baby that young knows the difference between cruelty and kindness and will respond differently to each, shunning one and embracing the other.
The Yale University Infant Cognition Center published a study along these lines in the journal Nature. The research startled the scientific world by showing that in a series of simple morality plays (not unlike those that William Shakespeare grew up on), in which puppet characters were used to illustrate the difference between good and evil. Six and ten-month-olds overwhelmingly preferred “good guys” to “bad guys.” The study concluded that human beings are born with a teeming store of pro-social behavior – as a built-in survival mechanism.
Paul Bloom, Yale researcher, psychologist and author of the book Just Babies, when asked about what infants possess with regard to morality, replied:
Babies possess “…an understanding that helping is morally good, and that harming, hindering, or otherwise thwarting the goals of another person is morally bad; a rudimentary sense of justice—an understanding that good guys should be rewarded and bad guys should be punished; an initial sense of fairness. And alongside these principles are moral emotions, including empathy, compassion, guilt, shame, and righteous anger.”
It is clear that even as infants we prize good over evil. But as we grow older and the nuances of life creep in and begin distorting our purest of notions, we tend to push aside the “better angels of our nature” in the name of expediency, comfort or convenience (just to name the more innocuous of reasons).
The Twelve Days of Christmas Virtues that follow illustrate how being virtuous makes one a better husband, wife, friend, colleague, mother, father and child. Concepts like, “Courage, “Humility and Faith” are beautifully demonstrated in the pages of history.
Every free people in history have instituted a code of morality in one form or another. We are built for it; it is in our DNA. We need it to survive.
Let us take you on a journey through the Twelve Virtues. Don’t worry. The ride is not arduous or complicated. It turns out you were born to do it.
God Bless You All.
