via a comment from Joe

by Stephen Soukup November 22, 2025

The other night, I was blessed to have dinner with old friends, friends who were once the best I had in the world but whom I hadn’t seen in ages. The good news is that, even after all these years, we were able to pick up our friendship right where we had left off, as if no time had passed. There were no awkward silences, no conflicts over newly differing opinions, and no embarrassment over life changes, victories, failures, and all the rest. It was good.

The better news is that during dinner, something happened that both reminded me of why we were such good friends in the first place and also reminded me of important and eternal truths.

I arrived at dinner right on time, walking over from my hotel on a cool and rainy evening, passing a homeless man, sprawled out on a bench, wrapped in a ragged, old blanket, right in front of the restaurant. He said nothing to me. Inside, one of my oldest friends had already been seated and was waiting for the rest of us. Not long afterward, the rest of our party joined us.

Maybe twenty minutes later—as we were finishing our first drinks and were about to order food—our waitress brought a to-go meal and coffee out to my friend, the first to arrive. He excused himself, took the meal and coffee outside, and returned a few moments later. You see, he, too, had passed the homeless man, but, unlike me, had been asked for his spare change. He apologized for only having fifteen cents to give the man, but promised to make up for it. The meal and the coffee were his way of making up for it. When we asked why he felt obliged to do so, he told us that he didn’t feel obliged at all. He just figured that, as the four of us (me, a conservative, and the rest libertarians) were going to be sitting around, complaining about the government and kvetching about the size and scope of the state, it was only right that he do something to help someone, outside of the purview of the state.

As I say, this reminded me of why we had been such good friends in the first place. He is kind and generous and decent, but subtle and composed about it all. He’s a good man, but never asks to be recognized as such.

And there are lessons in his behavior.

First, kindness, generosity, and decency are virtues. Of the four cardinal virtues—prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance—they all fall under the heading of “justice.” A just man is kind and generous, not for the sake of acknowledgement or admiration, but because he knows that he has been given much and, in turn, that much is expected of him.

Sadly, as I’ve written repeatedly over the decades, echoing such intellectual giants as Alasdair MacIntyre and C.S. Lewis, truly virtuous men and women are in short supply these days. As MacIntyre noted, this is due, in part, to the slow but nearly complete switch in our civilization from an ethics based on virtue to one based on “values” and the loss of moral sense and community resulting from that switch. It is also due, in part, to society’s failure to insist on the teaching of virtues and the inculcation of successive generations with the thoughts and behaviors that enabled our civilization’s rise and facilitated its survival. As every virtue ethicist since Aristotle has understood, virtue must be taught, and it must be reinforced, over and over again. As C.S. Lewis put it in his “The Abolition of Man”: “The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting, and hateful.”

Unlike much of our generation and even more of successive generations, my friend was properly “trained.” He was taught and compelled to practice the virtues that matter and always have mattered in our civilization. How do I know this? Well, in addition to seeing his behavior, I know his brother, who just happened to be one of our other dining companions the other night. And I know that he, too, is a kind and generous and decent person. Moreover, I know their parents, who are among the kindest, most generous, and most decent people I have ever met. They’re all good people. I am privileged to know them.

A second lesson here is one that is particularly relevant today, as Americans fight over such public welfare initiatives as SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. As you may recall, during the recently ended longest-ever federal government shutdown, SNAP benefits were delayed. Many people on SNAP grew angry, hostile, and even violent at the prospect of having their benefits halted, if only temporarily. Democrats accused Republicans of trying to starve their constituents and of conspiring to commit genocide against the poor (and no, I’m not exaggerating). Meanwhile, President Trump’s supporters were equally agitated, with some complaining about SNAP recipients’ “sense of entitlement,” as well as the rampant fraud and abuse in the system that, in the end, takes advantage of those who work for the benefit of those who don’t. Some scenes were indeed quite ugly.

Now, I know that American conservatives revere Alexis de Tocqueville most for his brilliant observations about early America and his equally brilliant observations about Revolutionary France. For my money, though, his most brilliant yet almost entirely ignored observation was one that he made about Great Britain in his largely overlooked Memoir on Pauperism, which he delivered to the Royal Academic Society of Cherbourg in 1835. The memoir is about “public charity,” based on the ruinous effects of Britain’s Poor Laws, and in it, Tocqueville notes the inevitable and deleterious effects of state-sponsored welfare:

The law strips the man of wealth of a part of his surplus without consulting him, and he sees the poor man only as a greedy stranger invited by the legislator to share his wealth. The poor man, on the other hand, feels no gratitude for a benefit that no one can refuse him and that could not satisfy him in any case . . . . Far from uniting these two rival nations, who have existed since the beginning of the world and who are called the rich and the poor, into a single people, it breaks the only link that could be established between them. It ranges each one under a banner, tallies them, and, bringing them face to face, prepares them for combat.

In his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te, Pope Leo XIV rightly demanded that Catholics maintain their personal charitableness but also, more or less, endorsed the view that the state must be the primary material provider for the poor. Pope Leo denounced “ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation” and that, consequently, “reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control.”

One might say the Pope is tilting at windmills here, since such ideologies are largely nonexistent and are practiced nowhere on earth. Even Tocqueville, nearly two centuries ago, acknowledged that the state must be the backstop for those circumstances when private charity inevitably fails. One might also say that the Holy Father is ignoring human nature and, by extension, making matters worse. As the rise of neo-socialism and the recent anger over SNAP demonstrate, and as Tocqueville warned 190 years ago, envy is the inevitable result of the overweening welfare state, as are resentment and frustration. One side in the public welfare equation resents what it is “forced” to provide, while the other assertively demands what it is “owed.”

By contrast, when my friend returned from delivering the meal to the homeless man, he was smiling from ear to ear—in large part because of the deep gratitude the food’s recipient had expressed to him. Public charity is inarguably a necessity, and it is not an evil in itself. Nevertheless, excessive reliance upon it tends, as Tocqueville noted, to destroy the virtues of both the “givers” and the “receivers.” Private charity does the opposite. It reinforces the virtues of generosity and gratitude.

A third, related lesson from the events of the other evening is that the practice of virtues is contagious. As it turns out, my friend only bought dinner for the homeless man. The coffee was bought and paid for out of her own pocket by our waitress, Cynthia, who was moved by my friend’s generosity and also wanted to help. Cynthia, I would wager to say, gave more out of her poverty than out of her surplus. Yet she did it and did it happily.

It’s amazing—and easy to forget—what people can do when encouraged to be virtuous. Life may, as Hobbes insisted, be nasty, poor, solitary, brutish, and short. But the people who experience it are not, at least not when they are allowed to be otherwise.