A long time ago, a group of Greeks claimed that the only thing worth pursuing in life is virtue. Virtue was lauded as divine, as the supreme manifestation of humanity's social and rational being. All other qualities — success, power, wealth, health, love — were to be subjugated to this one holy thing.
This ancient view of virtue is difficult to digest. It seems to the modern reader a sort of crude and unnecessarily hard thing, especially when there are many examples where being virtuous, or, 'good', seems to be easy. For example, smiling at a fellow stranger, holding the door for a neighbor and donating to charity could all be regarded as 'good behavior.' Even not killing could — depending on the context — seem like good behavior. These behaviors seem to require little if any of the immensity that the ancients observed, and it seems that all human beings are perfectly capable of being 'good.'
But this illusion is a product of the modern context. We live in a time, relative to history compared in millennia, of supreme order, abundance and safety. This context has lowered the gravity of the tension between serving one's own self-interest and doing the right thing.
This illusion is only disrupted on brief occasions, and when it is, the truth that being good is hard comes clearly into light.
Wars are a good example. Behind every soldier is the task of fulfilling one's military mission, even if that mission means slaughtering innocents. Systems turn people into instruments of purposes not their own — every situational factor pressures the soldier to fulfill his task and neglect the moral essence of the act. The product of such pressures usually results in the triumph of one's role over his moral sense, and atrocities are committed.
Poverty is another example. Being poor often means working jobs with no possibility of material advancement, having low education and less access to resources, and living in constant fear that one spontaneous accident may mean the end of your life or the life of your loved one. The impulse to find unconventional methods of income is pushed to its extreme in this context, even when fully knowing that the method may be immoral.
These examples just show us that most people are good because they are placed in a context where being good requires little sacrifice. Placed in other contexts, the pressures of self-interest often overwhelm, and one abandons whatever sense of morality one has as rationalization for survival.
It would take not just immense self-control but also an active devotion to virtue in order to curtail the contextual forces that lead one to immoral acts. Only a rare few men and women are blessed with such talents and luck. Being good, like any other skill, requires constant practice, and it is either refined or broken in the face of challenge.
What the ancients taught us about virtue is correct. Being constantly good is hard, hard enough to require a lifetime of devotion and learning. Their context made this plain — constant war, little abundance, and profound cruelty were marks of the times. Ours obscures it. But every now and then the easy world cracks, and we are reminded of the old truth.
Whether or not virtue is the only thing worth pursuing, it is at least the one thing that determines whether everything else we pursue does good or harm. To be wise, to be just, temperate, courageous — these are practices worth pursuing and reviving, even if the modern world has denigrated them as nice-to-haves, or worse, as poor qualities not worth cultivating when they challenge our aims.
But only those who dedicate their lives to it can truly stand the tests of hard contexts. Being good is not easy.