Recently, students and fellow paqos in several classes I teach or co-teach have expressed their dismay at the state of the world, especially the state of the information universe as created by podcasters, news-media pundits, and politicians in the United States. They ask, “How did we get to this level of complaining, exaggerating, lying, shaming, ostracizing, tribalism, anger, and even violence? And, how can so many people be swayed, persuaded, even fooled by the outlandish conspiracy theories and easily-refuted misinformation that floods the online landscape and television airways? What happened to logic and reason, to debate and compromise? When did we lose respect for moral standards, tolerance, and just plain old politeness?

Good questions. There are no easy answers, but these conversations prompted my thinking about good old-fashioned manners. And that led me to thinking about the human value called “virtue,” which not only is out of fashion, but by today’s standards seems downright Victorian.

Don Juan Nuñez del Prado and his son, don Ivan, have said that in order to better develop munay, we would do well to first develop virtue (among a few other values). Virtue, to define it as directly and simply as possible, is behavior fueled by high moral standards. Morality, of course, is a concept itself that is difficult to pin down, for usually it arises from a world view or even an organized dogma. There are various “moral universes.” In terms of virtue, there is the religious sense of virtue, the humanistic sense of virtue, the atheistic sense of virtue, the utilitarian sense of virtue, and on and on, including standards that we adopt not from an established system of authority but from our own individualistic value system. So, when we talk about virtue as high moral standards, we have to ask ourselves to whose standard are we seeking to conform?

To answer this question, I turn to the point of view of a group of Santa Clara University professors, who co-authored an article “Ethics and Virtue.” They write, “For many of us, the fundamental question of ethics is, ‘What should I do?’ or ‘How should I act?’ Ethics is supposed to provide us with ‘moral principles’ or universal rules that tell us what to do. Many people, for example, are passionate adherents of the moral principle of utilitarianism: ‘Everyone is obligated to do whatever will achieve the greatest good for the greatest number.’ Others are just as devoted to the basic principle of Immanuel Kant: ‘Everyone is obligated to act only in ways that respect the human dignity and moral rights of all persons.’”

These scholars then ask: “But are moral principles all that ethics consists of? Critics have rightly claimed that this emphasis on moral principles smacks of a thoughtless and slavish worship of rules, as if the moral life was a matter of scrupulously checking our every action against a table of do’s and don’ts. Fortunately, this obsession with principles and rules has been recently challenged by several ethicists who argue that the emphasis on principles ignores a fundamental component of ethics—virtue.”

They list certain “virtues”—honesty, courage, compassion, generosity, fidelity, integrity, fairness, self-control, and prudence—and explain that virtue is not something we choose based on an idea or ideal, but is something we develop through our own experience. (I am pulling together various points they make into the following paragraph.) “Virtues are developed through learning and through practice. Virtues are habits. That is, once they are acquired, they become characteristic of a person. At the heart of the virtue approach to ethics is the idea of ‘community.’ A person’s character traits are not developed in isolation, but within and by the communities to which he or she belongs, including family, church, school, and other private and public associations. The moral life, then, is not simply a matter of following moral rules and of learning to apply them to specific situations. The moral life is also a matter of trying to determine the kind of people we should be and of attending to the development of character within our communities and ourselves.”

That explanation sounds a lot like what the Andean mystical tradition calls ayni. Ayni is often translated as reciprocity, but we have to dive into it a little deeper to discern its broader meaning. Ayni is intention coupled with action, which are then followed by both awareness that there will be an outcome and a commensurate new action/response in relation to that outcome. For indigenous Andeans and Quechua peoples, ayni is a value that serves, among other purposes, to strengthen social cohesion. When you search through the various definitions beyond reciprocity, ayni refers to doing a favor and returning the favor, or doing something for someone and expecting nothing in return (although the energy dynamic is that the living universe will return sami to you). So ayni always involves self and other, such that our choices are based on a consideration of how both parties can benefit. Ayni as an application of virtue, then, is a lived value. A value is a choice about who we want to be. Virtue, like ayni, is an application of will to apply that value—or cluster of values—to reveal how we actually show up in the world.

As CS Lewis explained the relationship between a value and a virtue (as presented by Terry Glaspey in his review of Lewis’s teachings, Not a Tame Lion), “A ‘value’ is an idea we hold in our head about how things should be, it is a morally neutral term which specifies a preference. ‘Virtue’ in the other hand, is a quality of character which leads to action. All too often, values are something we only argue about; virtue is a way of living.”

Even the Buddha has something to say about virtue as action: “Just as treasures are uncovered from the earth, so virtue appears from good deeds, and wisdom appears from a pure and peaceful mind. To walk safely through the maze of human life, one needs the light of wisdom and the guidance of virtue.”

Virtue, as a  kind of ayni, is a stepping stone to munay, because munay is not the emotion of love, but the choice for love. It is love under your will. CS Lewis (again through Glaspey) says we should be wary of our emotions, because they are fleeting and changeable. “[I]f we wait to act with virtue until we feel like it, we might wait for a very long time. We don’t have to feel charitable to act with charity. I may feel no love for a difficult neighbor, but I may be called to help him or her.”

Whether you call this value virtue or ayni, it’s clear that it is much needed in the world today. Instead of practicing commonly shared values, we tend to be steeped in a kind of moral relativism where there is no consensus about the conventions by which we measure our words and actions as useful, helpful, and uplifting or not. At the extreme, there seems to be a complete absence of the awareness for the need for moral standards. Despite the complexity of any discussion about moral standards, I think we can all agree that when there is a lack of moral sensibility, we teeter on the precipice not only of social chaos, but also of personal inner turmoil. As Yeats writes in his poem “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

Sounds a lot like our world today. . . 

This “center” is our moral center, the capacity for shared values that lift us up and fuel both our individual evolution and that of our collective humanity. The individual cannot be cleaved from the collective without losing an essential quality of what it means to be human: that we each are our brother’s and sister’s keeper. If ayni teaches us anything, surely it is this.

A chakaruna in the Andean tradition is one who builds bridges: between him- and herself and others, between communities, between traditions, between heaven and earth. When two groups find themselves separated by a turbulent river, each group gathered on opposite sides, the chakaruna—through an application of will, of ayni or virtue—begins building a bridge.

With that thought in mind, perhaps deep down it is not our disappointment or despair about the media onslaught of misinformation and our distrust (or disgust) at the people creating and perpetuating it that really disturbs us. Perhaps, deep down our discomfort is that we are witnessing, in unprecedented ways, the cleaving of the individual and of the warring “tribes” from awareness of our personal and collective responsibilities to each be productive and compassionate members of a human family. The disintegration of social cohesion can take us down one of two paths: it either leads to a potentially disastrous dissolution of collective bonds or to our collective transformation. Our discomfort right now may be that it is an entirely open question to which end we are racing.  

So, in our brief discussions of these topics in classes, my students and fellow paqos and I tend to agree that there is only one certain approach. It’s not an earth-shattering insight. It is the age-old adage that we have heard from Buddha, Christ, Gandhi, and so many others: take responsibility for yourself.

If each of us chooses to be a bringer of sami rather than of hucha, to be chakarunas—if we choose to cultivate our munay and improve our ayni  (and act from virtue in whatever measure we can)—then we each are undertaking a truly revolutionary act, and no doubt even an evolutionary one. Intention alone is not enough. Without action, we practice neither ayni nor virtue. Retreat from the social or political sphere certainly is an option, but one that, to my mind, is an abdication of responsibility both to the personal and the collective. None of us can thrive alone. But we cannot thrive collectively if we don’t agree to honor our common humanity, which starts with treating each other with tolerance, compassion, humility, and kindness.

As I tell my students, “You don’t have to like everyone or be friends with everyone, but you want to be able to bring some measure of sami to every interaction, no matter how challenging or difficult. Some of us choose not to do that. But some of us, because of our state of consciousness and the amount of hucha we carry, are unable to do that. If we are not able to do that, then choice ceases to be a factor and we have lost some of our personal power. If we are able to (despite our very human emotions), then we have acquired greater personal freedom.