It was about this time that I conceiv'd the bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection. I wish'd to live without committing any Fault at anytime; I would conquer all that either Natural Inclination, Custom, or Company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found I had undertaken a Task of more Difficulty than I had imagined...The "Difficulty" took many forms. Franklin observes that while thinking of correcting one "Fault," he would find he had committed another one. Bad habits tripped him up. Unruly desires overcame his ability to pursue virtuous actions according to the guide of reason. All in all, moral perfection was not at all as readily achievable as he had imagined. Characteristically, he decided that what he needed...was a system.
Franklin identified twelve virtues that he thought would, possessed together, produce perfection. Each was explained according to a pithy motto or instruction (on this, more soon). These virtues were: Temperance; Silence; Order; Resolution; Frugality; Industry; Sincerity; Justice; Moderation; Cleanliness; Tranquility; and Chastity. His general idea was to focus completely on one at a time, while monitoring his progress simultaneously in all.
When he showed the list of virtues to a Quaker friend with some self-satisfaction, Franklin found he had one to add. The Quaker "kindly" let him know that people thought him proud, "overbearing and rather insolent." When arguing, he was told, he wasn't satisfied just with being right, but tried to dominate his interlocutors. As we will see, Franklin liked to think of himself rather differently, and so he decided to cure himself of this vice, and added "Humility" to cap his list.
He was, I am guessing, pleased to do so, for with thirteen virtues, he might focus on one each for a week, and run through the entire list four times in a year – precisely. Franklin liked thoroughness and neat results, and now each season would be a thorough virtue program, a self-improvement project. Who knew what might be possible in a year? Day by day, Franklin kept records as he went, noting blots and successes.
* * *
I first read Franklin's autobiography when teaching it as the final text in a course designed to help new English majors learn to read and write better, and to be familiar with the entire range of literature in English. My course is the middle one of three linked classes, and includes literature from the 1530s through the 1780s. The course is large, generally enrolling 200 students, give or take, and is often a battle in which I stake my enthusiasm against my students' willingness to be distracted, my jokes or striking remarks against the constant onslaught of their texting, my presentation of ideas which repay focus and thought against their desires to flit among stimuli and memes.
Still, I do like the rapid pace of a crowded survey class. Often enough, when rereading the poems and novellas I assign and preparing my thoughts on their importance and achievements, I am delighted and impressed anew, charmed with each writer's originality and talents in his or her turn. Such pleasures are available to me in the form of 2-4 authors a week. But Franklin's Autobiography, one of the few texts I hadn't read before, provoked a more sustained fascination, outlasting my lecture preparation, my lecture. I was thinking about him, talking about him, for days on end.
Was it just that I was longing for students to adopt Ben Franklin's earnestness about labor and virtue, and his single-minded pursuit of what would improve, but also remunerate and credential him? After all, Franklin embodies many of the goals I have for how my course might light the way for my students – many of them of humble backgrounds, the first in their families to attend university; many of them paying their own way.
Or was it that I wanted to be Franklin, the charismatic populist sharing a system with the power to do more good more quickly and directly for the students than the necessarily slow processes of learning to think critically and write analytically could deliver? In the preface to this same second part of the Autobiography, Franklin prints letters from contemporaries who had heard of his having begun his memoirs and begged him to continue, just to inspire the young. "School and other education," noted Benjamin Vaughan, a merchant and doctor who had helped Franklin negotiate peace with England after the War of Independence, "constantly proceed upon false principles, and show a clumsy apparatus pointed at a false mark; but your apparatus is simple, and the mark a true one..." Couldn't Franklin, now as then, help me give my students what they lacked, the work ethic and drive I was too imperfect to persuade them to embrace?
The truth was that, once more, I was responding more intensely to the reading than many of my students, and not only with altruistic, teacherly solicitude and ambitions on their behalf. The truth was that, like Franklin, I am romanced by systems, rules, and enumerations, and was, similarly a little priggishly, buzzed by the prospect of what such a virtue "Method" could achieve. I immediately wanted to run through Franklin's virtue Project myself.
In fact, that, I told my friends, was exactly what I planned to do. Like Franklin, I'd spend a year on building skills in thirteen virtues, one week for each, cycling through them four times. I'd keep records and assess my progress in an ongoing and cumulative fashion. A convenient time to begin was just after the course ended, on the vernal equinox, March 21.
Except I didn't. In the rush of grading and preparing for more teaching, in the freedom from daily accountability temporarily granted by the break between terms, my plans for ordered self-improvement lapsed and faded. My characteristic vices and virtues held their ground.
Three-quarters of a year passed, and I taught the class again.
This blog will be the record of a 21st-century teacher and writer undergoing Franklin's Virtue Project for a year. We begin, this week, with Temperance.
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