Culturally, he will have to demonstrate that even though he comes from an unusual background, he is a fervent believer in the old-fashioned bourgeois virtues: order, self-discipline, punctuality and personal responsibility.
Loosely adopting a set of criteria, or "virtues" — order, balance, elegance, coherence, and self-knowledge — he delineates the merits of, for instance, Herzog & de Meuron's 1988 Stone House, in Liguria, whose exposed concrete frame saves rough, mortarless rock from "rustic incoherence".
And in a society as traditional as Mexico's -- where women are responsible for virtue and order, as Octavio Paz once wrote -- mere involvement in crime is enough to cause outrage and fascination.
The "common danger", requiring "hope" and, more pointedly, "virtue" in order to "meet [and to repulse] it", is surely as much the spectre of a dictatorial administration, emboldened by Dick Cheney's theory of the "unitary executive", and its dangerous freedom to abuse the rights of man, as it is the present economic crisis.
The best way to understand him is to take him to be assuming that one will need the ethical virtues in order to live the life of a philosopher, even though exercising those virtues is not the philosopher's ultimate end.
The idea is to perfect the learning virtues in order to become, ultimately, a sage, which is equally a moral and intellectual state.
Those who have passions need the virtues in order to control the passions (In Metaph. 2, 1-10).
He allows for the Aristotelian insight that the particulars of the situation always outstrip one's rules, so that one will always need the moral and intellectual virtues in order to act well (Commentary on NE, II, 2, 259).
One needs to go through an initial stage of mastering these basic virtues in order to 1) reinforce one's altruistic impulses and curtail the egoistic ones, 2) be inclined to seek principled rapport and harmony in interpersonal affairs, and 3) be moved by a sense of oneness with others and all things.
Barack added, "And what Michelle has done is to remind me every day of the virtues of order... Being on time.
