Public virtue

 

On YouTube there is an American man, ‘post 10’, who makes videos of himself voluntarily clearing drains and culverts and allowing floodwater to subside. His videos are curiously fascinating and, judging from the number of views they rack up, very popular. He provides a running commentary, occasionally emitting mild animadversions – for example, against litter louts or the incompetence of local authorities in the matter of street-drainage. However, he is on friendly terms with the police, who sometimes wave to him as they pass by in their patrol cars: they recognise that he is doing, unpaid, a public service and no doubt wish there were more citizens like him.

He goes prepared, with a long-handled rake, wellington boots and, in colder weather, a fluorescent yellow jacket, and seeks out floods that need his attention. Great indeed is his satisfaction when he unclogs a drain and the polluted water begins, with sucking noises, to form a powerful vortex. Our satisfaction cannot match his, because we are not there, but it is of the same sort: a small victory against entropy, disorder, neglect, the forces that drag us down and in the end, alas, always prevail, whether in the form of putrefaction or the smoke from a crematorium chimney.

I cannot imagine a woman making such videos, and I suspect that most of his viewers are masculine. He is playing with water, something I remember doing myself as a small boy – and even now, after a rainstorm, I like using a booted foot to ease earth or wet leaves aside to let a big puddle drain or to divert the course of a streamlet flowing down one side of a lane.

Our man is warmly praised in the comments for his public spiritedness. Rightly so, but of course virtue is its own reward, and besides, he so obviously enjoys what he does that he surely wouldn’t do it otherwise. In a way, he exemplifies what should be the ideal society, without money, in which everyone conscientiously does that which he enjoys.

The fact that ‘post 10’ makes his activities public and presumably makes money thereby does rather compromise the purity of his virtue: but then that is counterbalanced by his encouragement of others to think about their own public spiritedness – or lack of it.