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| Exploring Character |
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Discussion Membership
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Pushing CharacterPeople insist on trying to push character onto others when much of the real work--the work inside their own head--remains unfinished. If you think you know what to do but don't know why, you don't know character, much less how to convey it to someone else. How hard is this to admit? Seneca nailed the issue 2000 years ago: We readily recognize in others a superiority in courage, physical strength, experience, agility, or beauty. But a superior judgment we concede to nobody.1 Character is not about applying rules. It's about being able to make complex life decisions?and to understand and justify them. This is not easy.2 Sure, people can fake character by following rules for one reason or another, but rule-based living has been described as a magnificent temple built on a foundation of mud.3 Those who live by rules have no certain criteria for determining good and evil. An act is good because of the principle that motivates it, but rules aren't principles.4 It would be nice if people could have universal rules, like Plato proposed 2300 years ago, but no one ever found proof of their universality. Churches, which typically depend on rules and examples demonstrating them, have a hard time getting the message across to anyone but those faithful who already are convinced. Religious campaigns don't convince, they compel, with no less power than Machiavelli proposed 600 years ago to coerce people to behave. More recent philosophers have resigned themselves to believe morality can't be anything but relative and therefore ineffective at organizing society. But relativity itself is irrelevant if personal points of view are expressed in a framework that others can recognize holds true for themselves as well. Frames of reference, constructed from similar experience, while not universal, are as effective as if they were universal. Deciding how to act can then be explained in terms even the culturally distant understand and can believe. Developing character has to be a two-step process to work: use the distant party's personal experience to develop a similar frame of reference.5 Then use that common framework for decision-making. This gives structure to a world in despair because science has put tremendous and otherwise unbridled power in that hands of anyone who cares to learn enough to use it.6 In the race for civilization, this gives character compelling momentum, and civilization deserved hope. Developing character, then, has to be a two-step process. First, use human experience to develop a shared frame of reference. Then use that frame to develop understandable decision-making. People have to get beyond the traditions that only carry them so far. Doing anything less than developing a shared framework dangerously stalls the expansion of character. Understanding that there is a framework that can be shared, and a process for character that uses it, puts responsibility on every individual's shoulders to master it, to make it work personally, and, for safety's sake, to teach its value to others. You make the difference when you understand why. Besides taking care of your own life, your charge is two-fold: Yours is the important power to hint ? build safety into the system by helping people discover a mechanism to behave. Then you can help people think about thinking and, in doing that, think clearly and wisely.7 In other words, if you want to push character, do nothing more than live sensibly, and let your choices hint to others what works.
Stephen Waters
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