N. T. Wright on Virtue
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(an excerpt from Wright’s After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters, pp. 18-22):
Thursday, January 15, 2009, was another ordinary day in New York City. Or so it seemed. But by that evening people were talking of a miracle.
They may have been right. But the full explanation is, if anything, even more interesting and exciting. And it strikes just the note we need as we launch out on our exploration of the development of character in general and Christian character in particular.
Flight 2549, a regular US Airways trip from LaGuardia Airport, took off at 15:26 local time, bound for Charlotte, North Carolina. The captain, Chesley Sullenberger III, known as “Sully,” did all the usual checks. Everything was fine in the Airbus A320. Fine until, two minutes after takeoff, the aircraft ran straight into a flock of Canada geese. One goose in a jet engine would be serious; a flock was disastrous. (Airports play all sorts of tricks to prevent birds gathering in the flight path, but it still happens occasionally.) Almost at once both the engines were severely damaged and lost their power. The plane was at that point heading north over the Bronx, one of the most densely populated parts of the city.
Captain Sullenberger and his copilot had to make several major decisions instantly if they were going to save the lives of people not only on board but also on the ground. They could see one or two small local airports in the distance, but quickly realized that they couldn’t be sure of making it that far. If they attempted it, they might well crash-land in a built-up area on the way. Likewise, the option of putting the plane down on the New Jersey Turnpike, a busy main road leading in and out of the city, would present huge problems and dangers for the plane and its occupants, let alone for cars and their drivers on the road. That left one option: the Hudson River. It’s difficult to crash-land on water: one small mistake—catch the nose or one of the wings in the river, say—and the plane will turn over and over like a gymnast before breaking up and sinking.
In the two or three minutes they had before landing, Sullenberger and his copilot had to do the following vital things (along with plenty of other tasks that we amateurs wouldn’t understand). They had to shut down the engines. They had to set the right speed so that the plane could glide as long as possible without power. (Fortunately, Sullenberger is also a gliding instructor.) They had to get the nose of the plane down to maintain speed. They had to disconnect the autopilot and override the flight management system. They had to activate the “ditch” system, which seals vents and valves, to make the plane as waterproof as possible once it hit the water. Most important of all, they had to fly and then glide the plane in a fast left-hand turn so that it could come down facing south, going with the flow of the river. And—having already turned off the engines—they had to do this using only the battery-operated systems and the emergency generator. Then they had to straighten the plane up from the tilt of the sharp-left turn so that, on landing, the plane would be exactly level from side to side. Finally, they had to get the nose back up again, but not too far up, and land straight and flat on the water.
And they did it! Everyone got off safely, with Captain Sullenberger himself walking up and down the aisle a couple of times to check that everyone had escaped before leaving himself. Once in the life raft along with other passengers, he went one better: he took off his shirt, in the freezing January afternoon, and gave it to a passenger who was suffering in the cold.
The story has already been told and retold, and will live on in the memory not only of all those involved but of every New Yorker and many further afield. Just over seven years and four months after the horrible devastation of September 11, 2001, New York had an airplane story to celebrate.
Now, as I say, many people described the dramatic events as a “miracle.” At one level, I wouldn’t want to question that. But the really fascinating thing about the whole business is the way it spectacularly illustrates a vital truth—a truth which many today have either forgotten or never known in the first place.
You could call it the power of right habits. You might say it was the result of many years of training and experience. You could call it “character,” as we have so far in this book.
Ancient writers had a word for it: virtue.
Virtue, in this sense, isn’t simply another way of saying “goodness.” The word has sometimes been flattened out like that (perhaps because we instinctively want to escape its challenge), but that isn’t its strict meaning. Virtue, in this strict sense, is what happens when someone has made a thousand small choices, requiring effort and concentration, to do something which is good and right but which doesn’t “come naturally”—and then, on the thousand and first time, when it really matters, they find that they do what’s required “automatically,” as we say. On that thousand and first occasion, it does indeed look as if it “just happens”; but reflection tells us that it doesn’t “just happen” as easily as that. If you or I had been flying the Airbus A320 that afternoon, and had done what “comes naturally,” or if we’d allowed things just “to happen,” we would probably have crashed into the Bronx. (Apologies to any actual pilots reading this; you, I hope, would have done what Captain Sullenberger did.) As this example shows, virtue is what happens when wise and courageous choices have become “second nature.” Not “first nature,” as though they happened “naturally.” Rather, a kind of second-order level of “naturalness.” Like an acquired taste, such choices and actions, which started off being practiced with difficulty, ended up being, yes, “second nature.”
Sullenberger had not, of course, been born with the ability to fly a plane, let alone the specific skills he exhibited in those vital three minutes. None of the skills required, and certainly none of the courage, restraint, cool judgment, and concern for others which he displayed, is part of the kit we humans possess from birth. You have to work at mastering that sort of skill set, moving steadily toward that goal. You have to want to do it all, to choose to learn it all, to practice doing it all. Again and again. And then, sometimes, when the moment comes, it happens “automatically” as it did for Sullenberger. The skills and ability ran right through him, top to toe.
Which is just as well. The other options hardly bear thinking about. Supposing they had been novice pilots simply “doing what came naturally”? Or supposing they’d had to get hold of a book with detailed instructions for coping with emergencies, look up the relevant pages, and then try to obey what it said? By the time they’d figured it out, the plane would have crashed. No: what was needed was character, formed by the specific strengths, that is, “virtues,” of knowing exactly how to fly a plane, and also the more general virtues of courage, restraint, cool judgment, and determination to do the right thing for others.
These four strengths of character—courage, restraint, cool judgment, and determination to do the right thing for others—are, in fact, precisely the four qualities which the greatest ancient philosopher who wrote about such matters identified as the keys to genuine human existence.
