I confess with some shame that there was a time, not so long ago, when it would have been hard for me to use the word character without the acids of irony dripping from my lips. But something happened to the callow young man that I once was. It was the late 1970s, and I was working in Washington, DC, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Its director was a former professor of mine, James Hadley Billington, who would later become the thirteenth Librarian of Congress. Having had a brilliant academic career, Billington was considered one of the world’s preeminent scholars of Russian cultural and intellectual history. He was also an outstanding teacher whose lectures combined erudition, passion, and showmanship in a way that held undergraduates in his typically packed courses spellbound. So why, I finally came around to asking him, had he decided to leave the university?
He answered without hesitation: “I knew it was time to leave when I was in a faculty meeting discussing a job candidate, and a senior member of the department concluded his assessment of the candidate’s work by adding that he was a person of impeccable character—and almost everyone in the room started to laugh. That was when I knew I no longer belonged there.”
The explanation immediately struck me as stodgy, even a bit self-righteous, in its Victorian-sounding moral certitude. But even then, Billington’s anecdote troubled me. I didn’t like thinking I might have been one of those smug ones who laughed. After all, I had been well trained in the various critical disciplines of skepticism and suspicion. I had learned that words such as character came freighted with associations of class, gender, and privilege, the kind of word gentlemen tossed about while enjoying port and cigars in their clubs. But my suspicions were not just academic. This was at the end of a turbulent era that had been marked by an often-violent civil rights struggle, political assassinations, an unpopular war, widespread student unrest, the rebellious gyrations of the counterculture, and the resignation of a US president about to face impeachment. While the aftershocks of that era were receding, there still seemed reason to question all authority, particularly that of the “best and brightest,” those supposed paragons of character.
All the same, precisely because I was beginning to question my own shallow certitudes, Billington’s words put me in mind not just of those disappointing “best and brightest” but, even more, of those many men and women of his generation, my parents’ as well—people who had not merely survived the Great Depression and World War II but had proved themselves capable of great acts of generosity, courage, and sacrifice. These were anything but stick-figure Victorians, and they were certainly not “elites” in any of the currently misused and abused senses of that word. They were mostly members of the hard-working middle ranks of our society, men and women of all ethnic and regional backgrounds. Because of their steady strength of character, they had not only come through those trials but had left us, their children, with a far safer, far more comfortable world (yes, even despite the ructions of the sixties and seventies) than the one fate had dealt them—and probably more secure than the world we are passing on to our own children and grandchildren.
There is little need to say we live in fraught times, nationally and globally, or to enumerate all the challenges we face. We feel the pervasive precariousness like static in the air before a thunderstorm. Yet if forced to choose the one thing that matters most in this gathering gloom, I would not settle on any of the challenges themselves. I would point, instead, to the question of character, of whether we, the people, will be able to muster or even recognize the kind of moral courage needed to face those challenges. That kind of courage entails, among other things, real honesty and a humble regard for truth, a willingness to sacrifice for others, and the resilience that comes from faith in higher goods. Such courage is character in a sense that cannot be dismissed as merely parochial or privileged.
And it is the deficit of character in that sense that motivates the thematic focus of this issue of The Hedgehog Review, starting with the crucial question of moral formation. How effectively—or poorly—have we gone about the business of producing people of character? In “The Denial of the Moral as Lived Experience,” social theorist James Davison Hunter describes the progressive shallowing of moral life and formation in America as a result of well-intentioned but ultimately misguided attempts to accommodate the diversity of beliefs and traditions in our pluralistic society. Yet there is, Hunter argues, a way of achieving that laudable goal by acknowledging and respecting differences rather than by imposing an inoffensive but bloodless utilitarian regime based heavily on psychological theories and nostrums. “It will require the recognition that the moral life is every bit as institutional as it is individual,” he writes, “every bit as cultural as it is subjective, and every bit as much an inheritance of the past as it is bound by emotional, cognitive, and behavioral exigencies of the present.”
One outcome of the triumph of the therapeutic has been the enthronement of personality at the expense of character. The story of how personality became the distinctive marker of personhood is a long one, but philosopher Christopher Yates recounts a curiously decisive chapter in “Sorting the Self: Assessments and the Cult of Personality.” While our “fealty to the assessment establishment seems benign enough,” Yates writes, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and other evaluative instruments have helped reduce personhood to “a matter of emotional fitness, something to be arbitrated on the basis of tendencies and traits.” Ultimately, he notes, “the self is flattened into a brand without mystery.”
Given the poverty of moral formation in our own time, people are unsurprisingly turning to past models, including those of antiquity. Books by or about the classical period’s great ethical thinkers and their schools now fly off the presses. But as classicist Ryan S. Olson urges in “What the Ancients Knew,” we should “beware of imposing our own understandings on the ancients who could help us.” Noting that “formation in antiquity was grounded in cultural and historical realities that are a world apart from late modern ones,” Olson offers a synoptic tour of underlying institutions and practices that made the formation of virtuous and flourishing citizens the focus of civic life.
Taking on one of the great formative legacies of the ancient world in her essay, “The Character of Tragedy,” humanities scholar and critic Martha Bayles ranges from Aristotle to Samuel Beckett to science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke to show the many ways in which both classic and popular works of tragedy drive home a central message through their “dramatic portrayal of a character who, while navigating the inevitable contingencies of an embodied, time-bound life, is suddenly brought low by extreme suffering unrelieved by God, the gods, or any other transcendent source of meaning. The key to tragedy,” Bayles continues, “is the degree to which that character bears the torment without succumbing to despair. From that crucible emerges the steel of virtue.”
Forging the steel of virtue does not appear to be one of the major goals of the American university. Indeed, argues political scientist Rita Koganzon in “The Coddling of the American Undergraduate,” many elite residential colleges are dedicated to protecting their charges from any experiences, including intellectual ones, that might upset their presumably delicate emotional equilibrium. Unlike the in loco parentis dispensation of times past, the new mode of supervision seems designed to ready students “for a life of continued monitoring and restriction in professional and social life, a lifetime of dependence on the adult analogs of student life administrators and grievance officers, located in human resource departments and even in Facebook group moderation policies.”
Of the virtues that require cultivation, argues sociologist Joseph E. Davis in “The Basis of Everything: The Fragility of Character in a Truth-Challenged World,” fidelity to truth is not only essential to relationships with others and one’s community but is also “the bedrock of human character.” Yet survey after survey reveals an alarming decline in honesty and truthfulness among all Americans, particular the younger cohorts. The causes are not straightforward; nor do they attest to a complete indifference to moral behavior. As Davis shows, we must look at larger social forces. “Students have not abandoned the value of truthfulness,” he writes, “but honesty, in the absence of common social standards and normative integration, has, for them, lost its intrinsic value. As one value among others, honesty, when measured on the scales of instrumental calculation, weighs in less decisively than those values that improve one’s chances to be a ‘winner.’”
Character also calls for a quality often scanted or ignored: moral imagination. In her movingly personal essay, “Vocation and Moral Imagination,” sociologist Angel Adams Parham invokes the people and stories that have inspired her own work as both a scholar and a founder and director of a program that brings a classical liberal arts education to under-resourced communities. Bridging the worlds of academia and community-oriented service is neither encouraged nor rewarded in any obvious or formal ways, she admits, and when graduate students approach her about following her example, she has no easy answers. “I tell them that taking such a path is sure to be filled with as much difficulty and sacrifice as intrinsic reward—that they must first do the necessary and painstaking work of securing a position in the hypercompetitive academy.” Nevertheless, she argues that we can sustain a large ambition and vision by cultivating a moral imagination that helps us, in Emily Dickinson’s words, “dwell in Possibility.”
“How do we foster the conditions conducive to a truly enduring moral and ethical order?” So asks educator and foundation executive James C. Rahn in “The Necessity of Networks: The Case of William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect.” Considering the career of the great English abolitionist and his fellow reform-minded evangelical Christians known collectively as the Clapham Sect, Rahn describes the accomplishments and shortcomings of this influential network of moral crusaders, including their launching of a revolution in manners that we have come to know as Victorian morality. Influential as the Claphamites were, however, Rahn is equally concerned with why efforts of moral reform and improvement such as theirs tend to be so transitory—at least in the modern world. Is it because such reformers emphasize the trappings of uprightness instead of the reasons for it—“a morality,” he writes, “without metaphysics”? It is a question we would do well to ponder.