Thirteen virtues, seven sins: A meditation on the search for meaning in an ordinary life.

Benjamin Franklin, www.thequoteblog.com

In his early twenties, Benjamin Franklin set upon what he was to call “a Bold project for moral Perfection.”  He developed a list of twelve virtues in order to master them, and then added a thirteenth – humility – after a friend pointed out that he was prideful, a comment prompted, perhaps, by the sheer audacity of the undertaking. So much virtue all at once daunted even young Franklin, and he determined to concentrate on each merit in turn, a week at a time, charting his progress in a notebook by marking each transgression with a dot.  Thirteen virtues divided the year tidily into four courses and he expected that, “by a number of courses, I should be happy in viewing a clean book.”

From The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, digitized by Google Books

Alas, Franklin never achieved a “clean book,” and from the vantage of his 79^th year he looked back on his youthful endeavor with bemusement, noting that “I was surpris’d to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined.”  By that time, he had made peace with at least some of them, “for something, that pretended to be reason, was every now and then suggesting to me that such extream nicety as I exacted of myself might be a kind of foppery in morals, which, if it were known, would make me ridiculous….”

There is a saying about the Founding Fathers that “George Washington was first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen, but Benjamin Franklin was first in everything else.”  A prodigious writer, inventor, scientist, statesman, diplomat and revolutionary thinker, he introduced himself throughout his life as “Benjamin Franklin, Printer,” and he was above all America’s first great communicator.  If he’d had the technology, I’m sure he would have been our first blogger as well.  His virtue project, with its weekly attentions, is tailor-made for the form, and he would have enjoyed both the discipline and the public nature of the practice.  Even near the end of his life, long after he had ceased keeping track, he used tales of his youthful earnestness to flirt with the ladies of Paris, and he sometimes regaled them with the ivory slates that had replaced his original charts on paper .

I’ve never aspired to moral perfection – it always seemed fantastically out of reach – but I admit to various fevers of that most American obsession, self improvement:  diets, exercise programs, spiritual practice, time management, and various schemes to rid my life of clutter.  Now perched in midlife at an age roughly halfway between that at which Franklin first devised his list of virtues and his late-in-life autobiographical reflections, I no longer believe myself capable of fundamental change.  If I could have overcome my grumpiness, my self absorption, my untidiness, or my tendency to talk too much – to name just a few of my more minor faults – I would have done so by now.

At this point I’m more interested in consciousness than perfection, and it’s the mindfulness implicit in young Franklin’s cause that intrigues me.  How virtue and vice play out in ordinary life invites the big questions:  What do we mean when we call someone a good man or a good woman? What does it take to live wholeheartedly? How do we learn to live authentically? How can we repair our transgressions?

And so I begin this year-long meditation organized, at least to start, around Franklin’s thirteen virtues and peppered with attention to another archetypal list, the seven deadly sins. I expect to veer from that form as time goes on:  I have never been able to use a recipe a second time around without amendment, and there are a panoply of attributes Franklin left out of his charts (though not out of his life) that intrigue me, such as gratitude, generosity, courage and forgiveness.  I expect this blog, like life itself, to surprise me.

I don’t expect, by the end of the year, to have arrived at a higher virtue or answered the great questions of life.  “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart,” the German poet Marie Reiner Rilke told a young poet. “Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.”  This exercise is a love song to questions, and as another poet, Maya Angelou, reminds us, “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”

Read “Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection” in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin on Google Books, page 146.