Thoughts on character - today's edition

Second in a series I began in May 2023

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The matter of character was on my mind earlier today, and I remembered that I’d written a post here about it in May 2023. I subtitled it “What Will Hopefully Be the First in a Series.”

I hadn’t read it in a while, but it stands up well. After discussing whether character matters in the public sphere, and acknowledging that “I don’t know how qualified I am to weigh in on this subject,” I look at what some noteworthy minds have had to say about what it is and its formation:

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.

And then I offer my own reflections on why character is significant:

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.

I doubt you’re surprised that my thoughts turning today toward the subject of character is occasioned by some of Trump’s cabinet appointees.

(Some are quite good. Chris Wright is an excellent pick for the Department of Energy, and Marco Rubio demonstrated the right stuff in his hallway exchange with a “peace activist on the subject of a Gaza ceasefire.)

I think you know the four I find, um, problematic.

While I think Tulsi Gabbard leads a pretty clean personal life, her 2017 Syria trip and her public statements on Ukraine make her an immediate thumbs-down for the DNI position.

Now, about the other three - Kennedy, Gaetz and Hegseth - and that “clean personal life” business.

A recent piece by Damon Linker at his Substack titled “MAGA’s Downward Moral Spiral” has come in for some subsequent discussion. I personally found it razor-sharp in its assertion of what’s important about the Hegseth appointment:

Despite the mass exodus of left-leaning professors from Twitter/X over the past two weeks—a subject I may write about in a future post—last week I had my most “successful” tweet in more than twelve years on the platform. As of Sunday morning, when I took the screenshot above, the tweet had been seen roughly 7.9 million times and liked 87,000 times.

The tweet has also provoked more than six thousand comments, a good number of them from MAGA-type Trump supporters. The point of my tweet was to mock the efforts of the Trump-supporting right to use photographs like the one I was commenting on to portray the president-elect’s nomination of Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense as some kind of triumph of wholesome masculinity and family-focused fertility.

Hegseth is 44 years old. He’s been married three times. He was unfaithful to his first two wives. Three of his seven children were born from his second wife. Another of the children was born of his third wife, whom he impregnated while he was still married to his second wife. The other three children come from his third wife’s previous marriage.

This isn’t the kind of thing I normally comment on—and the tweet certainly wouldn’t warrant a Substack post were it not for those thousands of MAGA responses. Over and over again they make the identical, sarcastic point, which I can summarize as follows: Oh, you guys care about morals now? That's just shocking.

If you’ve spent even ten minutes on social media arguing about politics with Republicans over the past eight years, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the move, which has become ubiquitous on the right since Donald “Grab ‘em by the Pussy” Trump first won the presidency: You say X behavior by a Republican is bad, but what about when a Democrat did X and you didn’t care? That makes you a hypocrite who lacks any standing to judge Republicans harshly.

If that were all and it were followed by the MAGA throngs combining their harsh judgment of past Democratic behavior with the consistent application of high standards to members of both parties, that would be one thing. But that’s almost never what happens. Instead, the MAGA types end up making a different and far more morally corrosive analytical move, implying that Democratic hypocrisy gives Republicans permission to disregard moral standards altogether: Democrats failed to judge bad behavior by their own officeholders harshly, therefore anything our officeholders do is fine and maybe even good, if only because rubbing it in the faces of our ideological enemies makes them squirm. And that’s all that really matters.

Then there’s Kennedy’s wife’s suicide after finding his diary, in which he recounted thirty-seven times in one year that he’d been unfaithful.

Gaetz? Are you kidding me?

To reiterate what I said in May 2023, “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.”

It’s most unhelpful for cultivating this when examples in places in which its cultivation ought to be the lodestar don’t give a flying you-know-what about it.

It’s trite to say, “What are we supposed to tell children"?” but it’s no less true for it.

Character? Ha ha ha.

Power? Oh, yeah, I’ll take some of that!