So many people’s reputation is under threat these days — from bankers to cardinals to the Lib Dem peer Lord Rennard — that one imagines reputation management agencies, online or otherwise, are doing terrific business. The ancients got there more than two millennia ago.
Greeks regularly expressed their desire to be virtuous in terms of being ‘seen’ to be so, as if there were no point in virtue per se unless people knew about it. One law-court speaker puts it like this: ‘What is at stake for me is not simply to recover a large sum of money, but to avoid being thought to have dishonestly coveted what was not mine. That for me is the most important consideration.’ Another says, ‘When you borrow money, you call few witnesses, but when you return it, you have many, in order to be regarded as honest in your dealings.’
Nevertheless, Greeks were all too aware of the danger of appearances; as a great epic hero was characterised by Aeschylus, ‘He wanted not to seem, but to be, the best.’ Reputation counted for nothing beside the reality, and no reputation management agency could deliver that. As Aristotle saw, what counted in the end was not your desires, motives or ambitions, let alone your self-assessment (what a fatuous concept!), gender, race, sexual preferences, etc., but what you did — your actions.
As he pointed out long ago, virtue finds its expression, not in what we wish for (any fool can wish), but what we do to make that wish a reality — the decisions we take about our choice of means and how we put them into effect. If that is the case, he goes on, ‘Virtue and vice depend on ourselves, since where it is in our power to act, it is also in our power not to act, and where we can say “yes”, we can also say “no”.’ Consequently, he concludes, any argument that absolves bad men of responsibility for wickedness would also deprive good men of responsibility for virtue.
Reputation management? What tosh. It should be action management. Irony note for bankers: ‘reputation’ derives from Latin reputatio, ‘something to be considered when drawing up a financial statement’.
Comments