Thoughts on character

What will hopefully be the first in a series

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.

I’m still thinking this through, but at this point, I seems to me that character matters because it conveys the essence of what we were made to be like. God fashioned us in his likeness, which precludes mediocrity, or even some slack cut when we don’t live up to good intentions.

Real character acknowledges that we belong to something beyond ourselves. We’re called to step up to the plate in a Godly manner.

It requires the presence of mind to rise beyond habit and that which is burned into our autonomic nervous systems due to repeated reactions to experiences.

That, in turn, requires a desire to reach for something we only see dimly most of the time, but can’t resist when we glimpse it, or remember glimpses of it.

What’s involved in kindling that desire?

I think I’ll save that question for a future post, but feel free to discuss it among yourselves in Chat or Notes.