Dean Poling

The Founding Fathers were the original virtue signalers.

George Washington wrote, “Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of free government.”

Alexander Hamilton noted, “As riches increase and accumulate in few hands, as luxury prevails in society, virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard. This is the real disposition of human nature; it is what neither the honorable member nor myself can correct. It is a common misfortunate that awaits our state constitution, as well as all others.”

Thomas Jefferson: “Virtue is not hereditary. Virtue has to be earned and it has to be learned. Neither is virtue a permanent quality in human nature. It has to be cultivated continually and exercised from hour to hour and from day to day.”

Benjamin Franklin created The Art of Virtue, writings reflecting on the virtues of setting goals, getting old, gathering wealth, health, morality, religion, etc.

And these are just a smattering of the Founders’ thoughts on the idea of virtue.

The founders used the word “virtue” more than the word “freedom” in their documents, notes Thomas E. Ricks in his book, “First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country.”

“The word ‘virtue’ appears about 6,000 times in the collected correspondence and other writings of the Revolutionary generation, compiled in the U.S. National Archives’ database, Founders Online, totaling some 120,000 documents,” Ricks writes. “That’s more often than ‘freedom.’ The practice of virtue was paramount …”

Yet, it is the word freedom that has been drilled in our heads about what our country is about now and then. “Freedom” permeates our thoughts about the Founders and seeps into all aspects of our popular culture.

Imagine, watching the movie “Braveheart,” and instead of a blue-faced Mel Gibson as William Wallace galloping back and forth in front of an army of warriors yelling “Freedom,” he yelled “… and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take … our Virtue!”

Granted, “Braveheart” is a fictionalized tale of a Scotsman but, in reviewing their writings, our Founders were more likely to advocate virtue than freedom.

Hardly fits the derogatory way the word “virtue” is used today in social media comments and in many broadcast commentaries.

“Virtue” is a slur, now.

Most typically used in the phrase “virtue signaling.”

The Oxford Languages Dictionary defines “virtue signaling” as “the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one’s good character or the moral correctness of one’s position on a particular issue.”

If the definition doesn’t signal the derogatory meaning of the phrase, consider the example of its use provided by the dictionary: “It’s noticeable how often virtue signaling consists of saying you hate things.”

But “virtue” had a different meaning to the Revolutionary generation.

Virtue then “meant putting the common good before one’s own interests,” Ricks writes.

So, when the Founders wrote of virtue – and given how often they dropped the V word, they definitely were virtue signaling in an 18th century way – they meant weighing the many before the one, putting aside what’s good for me for what’s good for you and you and you.”

And while too many use “virtue” as another word to pull us apart, the Founders considered “virtue,” as Ricks cites, the fastener that holds public life together.

That’s a concept worth signaling.

Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times and editor of The Tifton Gazette.