First Things First: ‘Ordo Rerum’ and the Good Life

A comment from Vice President J.D. Vance serves as a reminder to order our priorities and responsibilities for a virtuous life.

Biba Kayewich

In a January 29, 2025, interview with Fox News, Vice President J.D. Vance mentioned that “you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”

Known formally as “ordo amoris,” it’s a concept that dates back to early Christianity and describes the order of charity or love, with their attendant obligations. But Vance’s ranking of the affections rankled some. To British critic Rory Stewart, who called Vance’s remarks “bizarre” and “pagan tribal,” Vance responded on social media: “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’ Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone?”

More Questions

Though this debate disappeared from the public square after a few days, the points it raised continued to intrigue me. Vance’s defense of ordo amoris led me to think about what might be called “ordo rerum”—the order of affairs or things in our lives.

How many of today’s troubles derive from disordered priorities? As death approaches, we sometimes speak of getting our affairs in order, but what if we’ve failed to order our affairs throughout our lives? Could a blurred and confused hierarchy of personal values explain the present quandary of what writer Walker Percy called “the strange case of the Self, your Self, the Ghost which Haunts the Cosmos”? Could a cause of the malfunction in our individual lives and our culture be as simple as a failure to rightly order our aspirations and activities?

And most importantly, is this broken ladder of values the root of our unhappiness?

Aristotle Meets a Groundhog

“Groundhog Day” perfectly illustrates the ruin and waste that may result when the ordered priorities of life are either mixed up or ignored altogether.

This film features narcissistic weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray), who is sent to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to cover Groundhog Day for his Pittsburgh TV station. While there, he gets stuck in a time loop, repeating Groundhog Day over and over again. His reactions to this fate range from extreme self-indulgence to attempted suicide, but always, when he wakes in the morning, it’s Groundhog Day.

Phil eventually resolves to use this repetition of days for good: to improve himself and help those around him. He learns French, ice-sculpting, and piano, rescues some of the townspeople from harm or trouble, and finally wins the heart of the woman he has come to love.

In his book “The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead,” Charles Murray compared “Groundhog Day” to Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” which examines morality, the virtues, and the pathway to a happy life. From being a sarcastic, self-obsessed jerk, Phil becomes a Renaissance man and a model of kindness and decency beloved by the people of Punxsutawney. He reorders the hierarchical values in his life, and so experiences beauty and goodness. As Murray pointed out, the movie encapsulates Aristotle’s ideas on the connections between virtue and happiness.

Phil learned a key lesson by rearranging his ordo rerum. He discovered that to find the true self, we must lose our obsession with self. To find happiness, we must follow a correct order of things and affairs.

But what about the rest of us? Are we aware of an ordo rerum at work in our own lives?

Our Disordered Culture: Two Instances

We’ve told two generations of young women to delay family life and children in favor of work, a teaching that ignores the laws of nature. Consequently, more women are experiencing difficulties becoming pregnant, and our society is now far below a replacement-level birth rate. Even worse, our culture has sent the explicit message to both men and women that income and work satisfaction matter more than family.

We Americans also spend billions of dollars each year on physical fitness and beauty products. Moreover, as Leonard Sax points out in “The Collapse of Parenting,” our young people are drawn to the army of influencers on social media, who stress the importance of outward appearances, wealth, and fame. Gone are the old injunctions regarding the primacy of character over power, looks, and money, and the idea that “beauty is only skin deep.” Consequently, many people pay far less attention to what they put into their minds and souls than to the hours they spend exercising or to what lotions they apply to their skin.

Twisted Goods

That there is a proper order of things is apparent all around us. The schools our children attend start at the same time every day. Even most homeschooling moms understand the importance of following a schedule. Our work demands that we show up for a job at a certain time and perform. We generally go to bed and wake up on a regular schedule. We eat eggs or cereal for breakfast, not lasagna or tuna casserole.

In other areas, however, we sometimes pay less heed to the proper ordo rerum. In our desire to be good mothers and fathers, we fall into helicopter parenting, supervising and overseeing our children to a fault and so depriving them of the opportunity to mature. Providing for the material comforts of our family is good, but we can twist that good into a vice when we get so caught up in work that we neglect our spouse and children.

Here’s a personal case in point: In my early 40s, I went through a period where I became Mr. Volunteer, helping three nuns establish a school, teaching Sunday classes to middle-schoolers, serving on church committees, and acting as Cubmaster for my son and his friends in Scouting. All were worthy causes, but looking back, I see that I spent some of my energy unwisely, because I was derelict in attending to our family’s businesses at a time when we were short of money.

When we set the wrong priorities, or when we give priorities no consideration at all, the eventual result is usually failure and frustration. We have scrambled the right and proper ranking of obligations and things.

Sound Judgment Will Win the Day

Biba Kayewich

In the above response to his critics, J.D. Vance offered a critical key to the practice of ordo amoris: common sense. Old-fashioned common sense demands that we make sure our children have food enough to eat before we volunteer to work in a soup kitchen.

The same holds true for the ordering of things and activities. Common sense tells us to use our credit cards for necessities before we spend money on luxuries. Common sense tells us that teenagers looking at screens for more than seven hours a day, which is the national average, is unhealthy. Common sense tells us that if we wish to raise children who know and practice the virtues, we need to help build their character through stories and poems as well as by our own words and deeds.

The decisions we make every day, guided by our priorities and common sense, determine who we are and what we will become. Being aware of the proper ordo rerum, which may vary slightly from household to household and person to person, is key to making this happen and is the ticket to a good life.