Temperance

What Temperance means in shared life

At a neighborhood meeting, your group is preparing questions about a disputed council decision. The suggestions have become a competition to humiliate the councillor. You have written a line that should bring the house down; it contains no question. You turn the card over and write what residents still need to know. For once, the best ending to your speech would be somebody else answering it.

Temperance gives…

Criticism can become harder to evade when it asks for a reason, an account or a change. People affected by the decision gain more than a memorable scene of someone being shamed.

Finding the balance

Restraint does not require mild opinions or a pleasant response to injustice. It concerns which satisfactions govern the action: seeking an answer can be forceful without treating another person’s humiliation as the prize.

In ordinary life

A public apology

Notice whether you want a correction and repair, or a longer spectacle of disgrace.

A petition draft

Read the demand separately from the insults. Ask whether the insults explain anything the signatories need to know.

Nearby virtues, different work

Justice

Justice attends to what people are due; Temperance checks the appetite that can turn accountability into punishment for its own sake.

Courage

Courage can face your own group’s disapproval when you decline to join its performance.

Recognizing a counterfeit

A counterfeit of Temperance: Calling every angry objection intemperate can protect power from criticism. The question is whether appetite has displaced judgment, not whether a speaker has made anyone uncomfortable.

How to cultivate Temperance

• Name the outcome before choosing the line that will get a laugh.
• Notice when agreement inside the group makes escalation feel compulsory.
• Leave space for an answer that could change what you think.

Try it today

Take a sentence you have privately drafted about a minor disagreement. Rewrite it so that the concern and requested answer are clear without a personal insult. You need not send either version. This is a reflection exercise, not an instruction to enter a hostile meeting.

Questions worth returning to

• What answer would satisfy the concern behind our anger?
• Would I still want this outcome if no one applauded our side?

Choose your practice

The situations on these pages are illustrative. These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Read these passages in their original settings through the source links.

1. Love is an agreeable, resentment a disagreeable passion; and accordingly we are not half so anxious that our friends should adopt our friendships, as that they should enter into our resentments.

   Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
   CHAP. II. Of the Pleasure of mutual Sympathy.

   Smith notices how eagerly people recruit friends into their resentments, a recognizable temptation in a group quarrel.

2. In fact, I had an angry wish to be instructive, and Melissa, as will sometimes happen, noticed my anger without appropriating my instruction, for I have since heard that she speaks of me as rather violent-tempered, and not over strict in my views of morality.

   Theophrastus (fictional narrator), in George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such
   XVI. Moral Swindlers.

   The narrator’s wish to instruct becomes anger, and anger is what the listener receives.

3. Some one ought to write an essay on the dangers to the soul of congeniality.

   Mary Parker Follett, The New State
   III the group process: the collective idea (continued)

   Follett’s deliberately sharp sentence questions the comfort of congenial company when it excludes the challenge of difference.

4. Under the influence of its fumes the whole people can carry out its systematic programme of the most virulent self-seeking without being in the least aware of its moral perversion,—in fact feeling dangerously resentful if it is pointed out.

   Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism
   Nationalism in the West

   The “fumes” refer to nationalism in Tagore’s preceding sentence. He describes collective self-interest making criticism feel like an injury, a pressure to notice before joining a punitive chorus.

5. Because the idealism of selfishness must keep itself drunk with a continual dose of self-laudation.

   Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism
   Nationalism in the West

   Tagore is criticizing national self-congratulation. Here the line exposes the applause through which a group can encourage its own appetite for punishment.

6. When they have thus been involved in crime, to follow them up and punish them, is to entrap the people.

   Mencius, The Sayings of Mencius
   Book I, Part I;
   Chinese; English translation by James Legge

   Mencius has just described people denied a secure livelihood. His rebuke asks a ruler to examine the conditions of wrongdoing before enjoying punishment; it does not supply a modern sentencing rule.

7. Hence free-will is not caprice or whim or a partial wish or a momentary desire. On the contrary freedom means exactly the liberation from the tyranny of such particularist impulses.

   Mary Parker Follett, The New State
   Chapter VIII, Who Is the Free Man?

   Follett treats freedom as release from momentary impulses, illuminating the choice not to feed an escalating exchange.

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