The Road to Character

To nurture your Adam I career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your Adam II moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses.

Without a rigorous focus on the Adam II side of our nature, it is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity […] A humiliating gap opens up between your actual self and your desired self.

Character is not innate or automatic. You have to build it with effort and artistry.

Only Adam II can experience deep satisfaction. Adam I aims for happiness, but Adam II knows that happiness is insufficient. The ultimate joys are moral joys.

In [Frances Perkins’s] method, you don’t ask, What do I want from life? You ask a different set of questions: What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do? In this scheme of things we don’t create our lives; we are summoned by life.

One sees this in people with a vocation—a certain rapt expression, a hungry desire to perform a dance or run an organization to its utmost perfection. They feel the joy of having their values in deep harmony with their behavior.

Perkins didn’t so much choose her life. She responded to the call of a felt necessity. A person who embraces a calling doesn’t take a direct route to self-fulfillment. She is willing to surrender the things that are most dear, and by seeking to forget herself and submerge herself she finds a purpose that defines and fulfills herself. Such vocations almost always involve tasks that transcend a lifetime.

People become solid, stable, and worthy of self-respect because they have defeated or at least struggled with their own demons. If you take away the concept of sin, then you take away the thing the good person struggles against.

Eisenhower […] held that artifice is man’s nature. We start out with raw material, some good, some bad, and this nature has to be pruned, girdled, formed, repressed, molded, and often restrained, rather than paraded in public. A personality is a product of cultivation. The true self is what you have built from your nature, not just what your nature started out with.

Like the nation’s founders, [Eisenhower] built his politics on distrust of what people might do if they have unchecked power […] [He] felt in his bones that man is a problem to himself.

[Dorothy Day] was incapable of living life on the surface only—for pleasures, success, even for service—but needed a deep and total commitment to something holy.

Suffering becomes a fearful gift, very different from that other gift, happiness, conventionally defined. The latter brings pleasure, but the former cultivates character.

The customs of [an] institution structure the soul, making it easier to be good. They guide behavior gentle along certain time-tested lines. By practicing the customs of an institution, we are not alone; we are admitted into a community that transcends time.

The magnanimous leader does not have a normal set of social relations. There is a residual sadness to him, as there is in many grandly ambitious people who surrender companionship for the sake of their lofty goals. He can never allow himself to be silly or simply happy and free. He is like marble.

The non-violent path is an ironic path: the weak can triumph by enduring suffering; the oppressed must not fight back if they hope to defeat their oppressor; those on the side of justice can be corrupted by their own righteousness.

Social sin requires a hammering down of the door by people who are simultaneously aware they are unworthy to be so daring. This is a philosophy of power, a philosophy of power for people who combine extreme conviction with extreme self-skepticism.

This moment was Eliot’s agency moment, the moment when she began the process by which she would stop being blown about by her voids and begin to live according to her own inner criteria, gradually developing a passionate and steady capacity to initiate action and drive her own life.

Love impels people to service. If love starts with a downward motion, burrowing into the vulnerability of the self, exposing nakedness, it ends with an active upward motion. It arouses great energy and desire to serve.

For Eliot, holiness isn’t in the next world but is embedded in a mundane thing like a marriage, which ties one down but gives one concrete and daily opportunities for self-sacrifice and service.

If you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it. To believe that you can be captain of your own life is to suffer the sin of pride.

Knowledge is not enough for tranquility and goodness, because it doesn’t contain the motivation to be good. Only love impels action.

Johnson tried to lift people up to emulate heroes. Montaigne feared that those who try to rise above what is realistically human end up sinking into the subhuman.

Johnson stands now as an example of human wisdom. From his scattered youth, his diverse faculties cohered into a single faculty—a mode of seeing and judging the world that was as much emotional as intellectual.

The realists believed in cultivation, civilization, and artifice; the romanticists believed in nature, the individual, and sincerity.

If you believe that the ultimate oracle is the True Self inside, then of course you become emotivist—you make moral judgements on the basis of feelings that burble up. Of course you become a relativist. One True Self has no basis to judge or argue with another True Self. Of course you become an individualist, since the ultimate arbiter is the authentic self within and not any community standard or external horizon of significance without.

Eventually [humble people] achieve moments of catharsis when outer ambition comes into balance with inner aspiration, when there is a unity of effort between Adam I and Adam II, when there is that ultimate tranquility and that feeling of flow—when moral nature and external skills are united in one defining effort.