How can a free society cultivate the civic virtues it requires? This has become a fraught and perilous question in our time because it makes several assumptions that have fallen out of fashion. It assumes, to begin with, that a liberal democracy, or a democratic republic, requires a particular set of virtues. Our kind of society isn’t just for anyone. To be a virtuous citizen here requires a certain kind of preparation. This is true of any society, and the virtues that every society needs are related to the kind of society it is—or wants to be. So our liberal-democratic republic requires certain liberal, democratic, and republican virtues. As a liberal democracy, for instance, we require virtues like toleration, forbearance, patience, and humility. And as a republic, we require virtues like responsibility, courage, honesty, magnanimity, and faith. Republican and liberal virtues are compatible up to a point, though there is also some tension between them, which our society now sometimes feels acutely.
The second presumption underlying the question is that certain societies cultivate or tend to produce certain kinds of virtues. This is also true of every society. The way we live shapes the kind of people we are, and societies, by their practices, habits, assumptions, institutional forms, and historical self-understandings, tend to shape particular sorts of people.
So our society needs a certain kind of person, and our society shapes a certain kind of person. And the challenge for us often lies in aligning the two. How can we cultivate the kind of people we also need in order to thrive as a nation?
This will not happen on its own, by inertia or by default. We have to do it explicitly and intentionally, perhaps especially in a liberal democracy. There is no avoiding that fact. Left to our own devices, we citizens of a democratic republic will often tend to ignore our obligations to one another. We will remember our rights but not our duties; we will remember what we are owed but not what we owe; we will incline to an excessive individualism and forget that the free and responsible individual is less a natural fact than a social achievement.
We will particularly tend to neglect the republican virtues—the virtues essential to a government by the people and so a government in which we all have to play a civic role and for which we all have to take joint responsibility. And so we’ll tend to neglect the ways by which it becomes possible for the citizens of a free society to understand themselves as engaged in a common effort and to speak of their country in the first-person plural: as “we the people” or as “we” who together hold certain truths to be self-evident.
The freedom, equality, prosperity, and sheer manic energy of a liberal society tend to make us forgetful of these republican virtues, even though all those things depend on republican virtues. Free societies don’t coerce people to do the right things, and so they can only really succeed if people generally choose to do the right things—if what we want to do and what we ought to do are generally aligned. And that requires sustained attention on the formation of our desires, on teaching us what to want.
Taking seriously the formation of our desires may well be more essential in a free society than in an unfree society and all the more so in a free society that wants to govern itself: i.e., in a liberal democracy that is a republic. As James Madison put it in Federalist 55:
As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.
These qualities may be implicit in human nature, but they have to be developed in order to emerge. And yet the dominant ethos of liberal-democratic life can sometimes undermine an unrelenting focus on the formation of our desires. It can tell us that whatever we want is good, thereby deflecting our attention away from the cultivation of virtue.
The fact that the liberal ethos can undermine the preconditions for its own society is a hugely problematic paradox. Yet that paradox is not an argument against that society. Nor should we let that paradox become an excuse for ignoring the extraordinary moral achievement that is a society of free people living together as fellow citizens despite their differences (or for ignoring the extraordinary balance of dynamism, prosperity, moral purpose, and commitment to human dignity that our particular liberal democracy has achieved over the last two and a half centuries). But the paradox is an argument for working consciously and conscientiously to cultivate the ethos of our society, to push against some of the most vicious tendencies of liberal-democratic life, and to try to realize some of its more virtuous potentials—to summon up the better angels of our nature, as it were.
Can we do this? Of course we can. Look around you. We do it a lot. It is too easy when we contemplate our country now only to see the ways it’s failing or the ways our culture is corroding and our trust in one another is declining. Those things are certainly happening. But it is essential that, when we look at our country, we first see what it is doing well so that we can see how we might realistically address what it is doing poorly.
And our country does a lot of this work of formation very well. It produces the kind of people who, in an immense variety of ways all over the nation, are working hard now to nurture the next generation and to sustain our society’s strengths. This happens in countless communities in America: in religious congregations, in classical schools, in many pockets of sanity throughout higher education, and in a vast array of bottom-up political, economic, and cultural efforts to strengthen our society. This kind of work is always threatened, and in some respects, it’s threatened now more intensely than usual because the elite precincts of American life are dominated by people who are hostile to such traditionalist institutions. But it goes on courageously nonetheless, and to pretend this task is no longer possible is ultimately to shirk the demands of undertaking it.
We do cultivate essential virtues. But how do we do it, and so how can we do it better?
That question requires us to think about a subject that free and liberal, and therefore often individualistic, democracies tend to avoid. It requires us to think about institutions.
When we consider the challenges we collectively face, we tend to imagine our society as a vast, open space filled with individuals making choices. Sometimes we see that these individuals are having trouble connecting with each other, and so we work to address that by looking for ways to connect them. We talk about taking on loneliness and isolation through metaphors like building bridges or tearing down walls.
There is some value in that kind of thinking, but it ultimately mistakes the character of social life, ignoring as it does its structure and overlooking the forms of common action that make it possible. If our society is a vast, open space, it’s not just a space filled with individuals; it’s a space filled with these forms and structures of social life—a space filled with institutions.
The term “institution” is broad and can be vague. But for the sake of simplicity, we can say that institutions are precisely the forms of our common life: They are the shapes and structures of what we do together.
Some institutions are organizations. A university is an institution. So is a hospital, a business, or a church. They are technically and legally formalized. Some institutions are forms of a different sort—maybe they are still shaped by laws or norms, but they’re not exactly organizations. The family is an institution, for example. It’s the most basic and fundamental institution of any society. We can speak of a profession like medicine as an institution. The rule of law is an institution.
Institutions are durable. They maintain their shape over time and usually change only gradually and incrementally. Flash mobs don’t count. But most important, what is distinct about an institution is that it is a form—in the deepest sense. A form is a structure. It is the shape of the whole. So a social form, an institution, is not just a bunch of people: It is a bunch of people ordered together to achieve a purpose, pursue a goal, or advance an ideal.
An institution gives each of us a role in relation to other people and in relation to the purpose we’re trying to achieve together. It says you’re a student, you’re a teacher, you’re a principal, each of you has certain responsibilities and obligations and privileges because of your role, and together you are pursuing the education of the coming generation, which is the purpose of a school.
This means that institutions are also, by their nature, formative. They structure our interactions with each other, and as a result, they structure us. They shape our habits and our expectations, and ultimately they shape our characters and our souls. They help to form us, and in that way, they also inculcate some distinct virtues in us.
When you are shaped by an institution, precisely because you’re given a role, you’re not just a person floating out there in the world. You are a student at this school or a doctor at that hospital or a member of that church or a worker at that factory. And that gives you a particular kind of character, a particular set of goals and boundaries and behaviors. For example, by the time one of my colleagues told me he was a Marine for many years, I already knew that. I knew it because he carried himself, spoke, and behaved in ways that I know to identify with the Marines. We all have such experiences because we have certain expectations about how institutions form people.
Institutional life is where virtues are cultivated. And what happens inside our institutions that makes that cultivation possible is not just instruction but habituation. We are shaped to live a certain way by watching others and by acting ourselves in ways that mold virtuous habits.
So the challenge of cultivating the habits that our democratic republic requires is a challenge to our institutions. Our failures of formation are often institutional failures—failures of family, of community, of professional institutions, of educational institutions. The successful formation of the citizens of a democratic republic therefore requires healthy institutions geared to habituating us in virtue.
These virtues sometimes cut against the ethos of liberal democracy itself. They force us to think about obligations and responsibilities and to subsume our individual identity within that of a larger community. This means that some of our most important formative institutions have to cut against that ethos too. Many institutions that are essential to liberal democracy are not themselves always liberal and democratic. The family is not a democracy; neither is the US Naval Academy.
The habits those institutions instill in us are the habits a free society requires but does not always cultivate automatically. So although they are culture-shaping, they are also countercultural. They shape our culture precisely by keeping it in tension with itself. That tension is a kind of secret sauce of American life.
People inside our key institutions, and especially the people with the most authority and power in those institutions, have to think consciously about the formative part these institutions play and so about what kind of example they are setting and what kind of habits they are creating in the people shaped by the institutions they run. This means, in part, that leaders of these institutions have to work to sustain people’s trust in the institutions they are responsible for by upholding the ethos of each institution and playing their own parts appropriately.
For people in positions of leadership and authority, but in some ways for all of us (since don’t we all have roles to play in some important institutions in American life?), this has to start by asking the great unasked question of this moment: “Given my role here, how should I behave?”
That is what someone who takes an institution seriously would ask in a moment of decision. And a lot of the trouble facing our core institutions now might be described as a widespread failure to ask this question.
“Given my role here, how should I behave? As a member of Congress or a soldier or a sailor, a student or a teacher, a pastor or a worker, a parent or a neighbor, what should I do here?” This is a question that can make us better because it can force us to think about what is expected and required of us and what it would mean to be responsible in a given situation.
A lot of the people we most respect these days seem to ask that kind of question before they make important judgments. And a lot of the people who drive us crazy, who we think are part of the problem, seem to fail to ask that kind of question when they really should. The appeal of ignoring that question is very powerful. It’s very tempting now for many of our key institutions to abandon their core work and instead just see themselves as platforms for performance—for making a political statement, sending a cultural message, or just getting more followers on social media rather than playing the particular role assigned to us in the institutions that matter to us. Succumbing to that temptation, however, would destroy trust and devastate institutional integrity. It is therefore also deadly to the work of cultivating the virtues most crucial to a democratic republic.
Our system of government is actually very aware of the need to facilitate formation within institutions in order to cultivate key civic virtues. We often think, for instance, of the rights protected by the First Amendment as purely individual rights to do what you want. But if you actually look at them, they are rights to participate in formative institutions—institutions that teach us what to want.
The freedom of assembly obviously can’t be practiced individually. But neither really can the freedom of the press, of speech, of petition, or even the religious freedom that necessarily comes first. These are all rights that inhere in individuals, but they are rights of individuals to participate in the lives of institutions and communities in necessarily formative ways.
Our society can cultivate the virtues it requires by working to keep these core institutions—from the family on up—strong and free and protected. And we as individuals can cultivate those virtues in ourselves and others by self-consciously embracing our roles in those institutions. We often fail on both of these crucial fronts now. And doing better will require us to understand how virtues are cultivated, why institutions matter, and what the freedom of a free society is really for.
This essay is excerpted from The Necessity of Character: Moral Formation and Leadership in Our Time, edited by James Mumford and Ryan Olson, a volume produced as a supplement to Volume 26, Number 1 of The Hedgehog Review and in partnership with the Moral Ecology Trust. The book is available for purchase here.