‘The Virtues of Limits’: In Defence of Boundaries
A review of ‘The Virtues of Limits’, by David McPherson; Oxford University Press, 2022.
There really is something delightfully counter-cultural about a book that defends limits, one which, perhaps tellingly, brings to mind for this writer Gainsbourg’s saying that ‘Je connais mes limits. C’est pourquoi je vais au-délà.’ (‘I know my limits. That is why I go beyond them.’) Over less than two hundred pages the thinker David McPherson mounts the case for knowing and respecting boundaries — existential, moral, political, economic — claiming that this is a precondition of a life well-lived. Anthony O’Hear put it best when he said that ‘if philosophy is about how one should live one’s life, McPherson’s book is exemplary.’
The first part pits the ‘choosing-controlling’ outlook of the Promethean or Nietzchean vitalist against what McPherson sees as the wiser ‘accepting-appreciating’ stance. The former involves a sense that life is a project of striving and self-overcoming in pursuit of some ideal. Those with the latter mindset start from the belief that they might have had nothing, and see everything good that they receive as received – that is, as a gift or blessing. Rather than put off being happy till they reach some arbitrary point, they find happiness here and now, in the good things they have and might not have had. Such a view on life follows naturally from recognising limits, since our life is down to chance, we depend at every stage on others, and, in the end, we die. To see plainly that we are not gods is the first step to cultivating humility (the ‘master limiting virtue’), and reverence.
In the second part, McPherson argues that (to simplify things) a friend to everyone is a friend to no one. The cosmopolitan, universalist outlook entails raising an abstract and passive humanitarianism above concrete and active affection and support. Acknowledging that our sympathy only goes so far, that we belong to these people in this place, is to start to develop the virtues of neighbourliness and loyalty; not for nothing, notes McPherson, did Christ tell us ‘love thy neighbour’, not ‘love humanity’. Father Zosima admits in The Brother Karamazov that
‘The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom…it has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.’
Indeed, it is through the particular that we grasp the universal, which is one of the threads that runs through the book.
In the second section, McPherson persuasively argues that, to simplify things somewhat, a friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
The third part deals with political limits. Here, McPherson claims that to try to recast the world into some perfect shape is not to respect boundaries. In doing this we tend to undermine more realistic moral aims, such as making sure each of us has enough to live: hence why he is a ‘sufficientarian’, not an egalitarian. In this, he puts one in mind of Eric Voegelin, who warns in Science, Politics and Gnosticism that the Marxist, like the Manichean, seeks to make a heaven of Earth and makes it hell instead. McPherson goes further: that utopia is impossible by definition is the point, for it gives the utopian an abiding goal in life and a seemingly honourable excuse to turn his back on the world and reject all that is good in it.
In the fourth and final quartet, McPherson looks at economic limits, and here he takes aim at unfettered free-market capitalism and the dream of boundless riches. In his view, these make a virtue of vices (such as greed), and bring us little real joy in the long run: one study shows that once we are earning $75,000 a year, our happiness stops rising with our salary. McPherson thinks we should cultivate moderation—in effect, knowing when enough is enough—and contentment, which is to be happy with our lot. More still: we should view economic freedom in light of its effect on people, communities and the natural world, not just as a means to satisfy our wants.
As I have already said, the whole argument seems fantastically counter-cultural, but his conclusions sound rather like the sort the sort of thing a sensible older relative might tell us over dinner. I hasten to add that this is not a criticism: in fact, it sometimes seems to me that in an age of extreme metaphysical naturalism, which states that ‘all truths are scientific truths’, we need reasons for what earlier generations took to be self-evident. So McPherson is performing something like a public service, really: grounding old virtues like humility, reverence, and neighbourliness in sound reasoning. His take finds support in the writings of Aristotle and Confucius yet speaks to modern troubles for the simple reason that human nature does not change. Genetic engineering, projects for global equity, consumer capitalism, the trashing of the natural world—these, for McPherson, are simply the latest expressions of our fondness for, if you like, flying too close to the sun.
As I have already said, the whole argument seems fantastically counter-cultural, but his conclusions sound like the sort of thing a thoughtful older relative might tell us.
Naturally, this line of thought invites a few objections. Have not many of our finest achievements sprung from the urge to go where no one has gone before? A strict respect for limits would hardly have carried us to the Moon, perhaps the paradigmatic instance of man reaching beyond his boundaries. One might add the numberless other expeditions, the life-saving advances in medicine, the cathedrals of science like the Large Hadron Collider, and the dazzling theories of our best physicists. And one might ask, too, how much harm has come from our failure to think and act beyond pre-existing physical and conceptual boundaries. It was Kafka, I think, who said war was a ‘monstrous lack of imagination’.
McPherson does not address such objections directly (it is a slim book, after all) but he does make clear that respecting limits is not the same as refusing to cross them. One may be committed to the virtue of neighbourliness and still giving money to charity. It seems his quarrel (though that casts him in the wrong light, for his tone is steadily humane) is chiefly with those who make a virtue of crossing boundaries, or try to, as well as those who attempt to dismiss any defence of limits as needlessly reactionary or unfeeling. What in my mind he does show is that there is truth to the notion that, if you like, charity begins at home.
It seems that for McPherson, we are always striving to break down walls, cross lines and transgress any way we can. That may well be true, and may be why we now talk somewhat paradoxically of ‘setting’ and ‘defending’ our boundaries. For if McPherson is onto something, and I suspect he is, then it might be suggested that when we lose respect for existential, moral, political, and economic boundaries (and neglect the corresponding virtues) we start to test each other’s. I do not mean to say that unpleasantness is some sort of new invention, only that we might—might — find ourselves at a more comfortable distance from, say, the unreasonable employer (or unreasonable employee), or the overzealous activist, if we had just a slightly clearer sense of why limits are what they are, and why that might just be a good thing.
