The essential trait both presidential tickets lack

Since nobody understands the importance of character, policy talk amounts to a lot of gibberish

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I occasionally flirt with the idea of setting up a magazine-table-of-contents front page for Precipice, with departments, such as world affairs, arts and culture, economics, timeless principles, and notes along the way of my faith walk. Those seem to be the main categories I deal with here.

I haven’t moved on that yet, and I think a major reason is that my main mission here is the quest for the unifying theory. My observations concerning any one of these categories may seem to distinctly pertain to it, but I hope I convey that they don’t exist in isolation.

You may have noticed that from time to time I get on a kick of writing posts about various human traits, identifying characteristics of the human condition, and the work of defining virtue. That often happens after I’ve spent some time with Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas and other mega-stars of the genre.

This is no idle pastime. To refer once again to the Precipice About page,

I invite you to join me on a journey, a search for genuinely solid ground, on which we can plant our feet and not feel perilously close to free fall.

If our toes are truly gripping the edge of the precipice, is there time for such a search?

I’d argue that there is no other sensible use of our time.

Put a little differently, there is nothing else worth equipping ourselves with in the quest to make sense of, and act nobly in, the world of autumn 2024. The previous post here was about how woefully fraught with limitations a pragmatic view of foreign policy is, for example.

In May of last year, I wrote a post titled “Thoughts on Character,” a few of which warrant a fresh look:

I wrote a post over at Late in the Day this morning about the civil-case jury that found Donald Trump liable regarding the charges of sexual abuse and defamation brought by writer E. Jean Carroll. Toward the conclusion, I said this:

I'm thinking about character a lot these days. I'd like to learn more about how to cultivate it in myself. This is a subject I intend to explore in my next Precipice post.

I don’t know how qualified I am to weigh in on this subject. I spent a great deal of life making decisions, including major ones, without the slightest idea why I was making them. That’s had ramifications not only for the circumstantial consequences of those decisions, but more generally for the formation, or lack thereof, of this thing called character in myself.

But - and here, I don’t wish to diminish my responsibility for the effect of that on where I am today - I’m in that boat with a whole lot of my fellow citizens.

The example that was the subject of the LITD post this morning testifies to this. One of our two major political parties still musters such reactions to the Very Stable Genius as enthusiasm, fear and perceived pragmatism. A whole lot of GOP voters still think he’s great, and most of its apparatchiks and holders of, and aspirants to, elected office dare not speak plainly about what kind of person he is, lest they get the Liz Cheney treatment, and many more Republicans can’t see their way out of the binary-choice framework.

The other side of post-America’s political aisle is no place to go looking for character, either. All these proponents of net-zero emissions goals, of forging ahead with entitlement programs with no tweaking of them even as they’re set to run out of money soon, of reparations, and of the surgical mutilation of healthy teenagers know they’re pushing unworkable and morally hollow initiatives.

There is still a great swath of the populace that is trying to find its way to something stable. While Rotary Clubs and Bible studies and youth soccer leagues can still be found across the country, what Robert Putnam saw happening twenty years ago is continuing apace.

True, lots of people of goodwill still greet their neighbors and co-workers cordially when they see them in the grocery store or the cineplex. Not everyone is shooting up public spaces or acting like maniacs in subway cars.

But it seems tenuous.

And our culture really doesn’t have an arts component anymore. Sure, every burg large or small up and down the pike has an arts council and an arts district, and one can hear good baroque or jazz recitals in the performance halls on university campuses, and one occasionally comes across a novel that speaks to the human condition in a mature way, but the days of Ellington and Dos Passos are long over.

Most of it is “entertainment.” Of that, there’s no shortage. Taylor Swift and the Marvel Comics movie franchise stand ready to take your money. We take to distraction like heat-seeking missiles.

One thing that doesn’t much factor into any of our attractions or aversions is the question of whether decent human beings are to be found in their presentation to us. Whether those in the realms discussed above can or can’t be thought of as solid human beings matters little to us.

But before I, with this log in my own eye, get too far in discussing the speck in the eye of the society in which I live and maneuver, it behooves me to look further into what this thing called character is.

Christian philosopher Dallas Willard says character is a product of habit. He says we carry character, or whatever flimsy substitute for it we’re letting drive our actions, in our bodies, that it’s the sum total of years of responses to experience, for better or for worse. He says of St. Peter, who talked a good game about total devotion to his Lord, that when push came to shove, his body automatically ran “in the wrong direction.”

Dostoevsky makes the same point thusly: “It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.”

Daren Jonescu, a Canadian who teaches philosophy at a South Korean university, says that steely resilience is actually the key to genuine happiness:

To choose the severest sobriety when forgetful intoxication is presenting itself as the entire meaning of pleasure. To forcibly lean your soul into something on that day when the whole cosmos seems to be enticing it toward the nothingness. This capacity, which in ordinary speech is often trivialized, by those who know little of it, as “willpower,” is at least a necessary condition, and perhaps the definitive virtue, of the best life. For the best life, understanding that phrase seriously, is the life lived amid a thousand temptations away from, and threats against, living it.

I honestly don’t know how atheists or agnostics - that is, those who, like my former self, may grant that there is a transcendent power governing the universe, but feel that it’s of minimal importance - grapple with the concept of character. Even if they come up with a bullet-point means of identifying it - foregoing advantage in a situation in order to ensure a just outcome for a fellow human being, exhibiting perseverance in pursuit of a noble goal, speaking plainly but compassionately to a friend headed down a wrong path, demonstrating loyalty - on what basis do they conclude that that it has more value than living as a shallow, solipsistic shell of a person?

Character matters because something even more core to human existence matters.

Seen in this light, post-America’s choices, for presidential tickets and political parties, is nothing short of terrifying.

Never mind the Very Stable Genius. His depravity, solipsism, need to be glorified above all other considerations, and intellectual incoherence are obvious to anyone whose eyeballs aren’t floating in Kool-Aid. I may come back to him in a bit because he’s still peddling the I-alone-can-fix-it line, currently as applied to the Mideast crisis.

We’ll see. First, I want to discuss Kamala Harris.

In particular, I want to discuss how she may not be too qualified to weigh in on matters of the family, which would manifest itself in areas such as abortion, marriage, and what kids need.

Her parents were both UC Berkeley academics. Her Jamaican father’s field was economics, and his work in it was of an unmistakably Marxist bent. Her parents split when she was seven, after several years of them each taking various teaching and research positions at colleges in various locales. Her mother, who hung with the activist crowd in Berkeley, instilled the a-woman-must-be-resilient-and-wily-to-make-it-in-an-undependable-world values that were supplanting the special place held by family in the 1970s.

I won’t dwell on her affair with Willie Brown, but it’s out there. She started her political career in a tawdry manner.

She didn't ever have kids, and at age 49, married for the first time, to an entertainment lawyer whose first marriage went kabust because he impregnated the nanny.

It’s here where things might be presumed to get sticky, to warrant treading carefully. This is where the where-do-you-get-off-judging-someon-else’s-story responses might surface.

But seriously, can we not just look at the facts at hand and draw some conclusions about Harris’s ability to judge character? Yes, I know that the families involved are now all on the same page and goodwill permeates their relations. But where is some kind of solid acquaintance with the stable two-parent family from which subsequent generations of same emanate?

What does this have to do with the world-stage scene of late September 2024?

Well, consider the main reason the US has such a close alliance with Israel. Israel is a Western nation, albeit one geographical located in the Mideast. It contributes Jerusalem (the faith component) to the Jerusalem-Athens formulation of Western civilization, the Athens component representing human reason. It has a basically free-market economy. It’s a technology hub. Muslim Arabs serve in the Knesset, even as Israel maintains its Jewish identity. And, as we know from the Old Testament’s long “begat” passages, family lineage is core to Judaism.

You would have had to do some earnest thinking about character to bring clarity to what is going on in Israel, across its northern and southern borders, and in the region more broadly.

It’s not about the suffering of Gaza inhabitants. That could end in the next five minutes if Hamas would do two simple things: release all hostages and dismantle itself.

The exploding-pagers-and-walkie-talkies undertaking was not, as Democrat former CIA director Leon Panetta has characterized it, “terrorism.” Rather, it was a brilliantly executed, impeccably noble and historically pivotal maneuver.

And there is no ambiguity about Iran. It is orchestrating the pace and severity of the five-front violation of Israel’s sovereignty. It is demonstrating its key role in the anti-West axis by supplying missiles to Russia to use against Ukraine, in exchange for nuclear technology.

A presidential candidate worth voting for would say this plainly. There would be no equivocation.

Harris can’t take such a stance, because she’s completely steeped in the legacy she upholds: the Howard Zinn view of US history, the mindset behind Obama’s apology tour, the deliberate ignoring of polls showing majority Palestinian support for Hamas, even in the West Bank, so that she and her ilk can continue to prattle about a two-state vision.

Now, as for the above-mentioned Trump blurting about Ukraine and Russia, the same - or rather, mirror opposite - principle applies. Trump is incapable of getting what is really going on. A sovereign nation was just sitting there being itself, populated with the same range of human virtue and vice as is found in all nation-states, and got invaded by its neighbor without provocation. He’d approach this transactionally, and assume that he could get both Putin and Zelensky to see him as able to give them a scenario they could live with.

Neither of our presidential tickets or the parties they are associated with has any vision for the world stage, because neither of them gives a flying diddly about character. Real character. The kind that comes from contemplating what loyalty, discernment, self-sacrifice, freedom of the deepest kind, an understanding that the highest authority over us is not human, are, and acting on what one concludes.

That’s the real level on which our prospects are bleak. We are entrusting the continuity of a world in which we can assume our safety and freedom to flourish to one of two forces, neither of which knows why these things are worth defending.