OUR SOCIETY IS NOT AT ITS BEST PRESENTLY, THOUGH THE SOCIETY AS A WHOLE IS BETTER THAN ITS POLITICAL/INTELLECTUAL CLASS: ‘Self and Soul’: Mark Edmundson’s biting critique of modern complacency.

Americans have become, Edmundson says, wholly pragmatic and small-minded, always on the lookout for the main chance and conditioned to be greedy for the gaudy trash supplied by our consumerist overlords. We move restlessly from want to want, never discovering any lasting satisfaction. As for living heroic or noble lives, our video games and movies do that for us. Meanwhile, Edmundson adds, “the profound stories about heroes and saints are passing from our minds.” Our days have no purpose. Instead of aspiring to grandeur, we surrender to pettiness and accommodation. . . .

It needn’t be this way. Edmundson devotes the first half of “Self and Soul” to several ancient exemplars of courage, compassion and contemplation, to those who, rejecting a safe and secure passage through life, consecrated themselves to some greater task. Achilles, for instance, knows he will die young, but his name and glory will last forever. In battle at Troy, he becomes fully himself. Alexander Pope summed up this warrior ethos in just three lines about another legendary fighter:

Now on the field Ulysses stands alone,

The Greeks all fled, the Trojans pouring on;

But stands collected in himself and whole

Today, Edmundson says, any commitment to military virtues is disdained “by middle-class men and women whose central aspiration is to endure and who seek not honor but respect, not ascendancy but stable existence.”

Now, one hardly expects an English teacher — a professor at the University of Virginia, no less — to celebrate the martial spirit. But Edmundson does, even going so far as to contrast Achilles with Hector, who is not just Troy’s greatest champion but also a loving son, father and husband. Nonetheless, he notes, Hector’s sheer humanity ultimately makes him a lesser soldier. Families call to us to be careful out there, to remember our children. The true warrior thinks only of honor and his code of valor.

The martial virtues are real, and are indeed forgotten today, though I am sadly near-certain that we will be recalling them more fully in the not-so-distant future. But a society that holds up the martial virtues as special exemplars is often a society in which other sectors are distinctly short on virtue of their own.

The book is Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals. Without taking anything away from Edmundson (to paraphrase Arthur Leff, when non-ironic odes to martial virtue emanate from the academy these days, attention must be paid) here are some related thoughts of mine on martial virtues.