A Nonfiction Book
Is character and story possible in a world of metanarratives?
Where there are no “givens,” there can be values but not CCE distinctly or clearly, which for Dr. Hunter means there can only be a ‘reduction of moral exhortation into a peddling of sterile abstractions, weary platitudes, and empty maxims.’¹ Hunter wrote:
‘We say we want a renewal of character in our day but we don’t really know what we ask for. To have a renewal of character is to have a renewal of a creedal order that constrains, limits, binds, obligates and compels. This price is too high for us to pay. We want character but without conviction; we want strong morality but without the emotional burden of guilt or shame; we want virtue but without particular moral justifications that invariably offend; we want good without having to name evil; we want decency without the authority to insist upon it; we want moral community without any limitations to personal freedom. In short, we want what we cannot possibly have on the terms that we want it.’²
In this way, EAF can destroy CCE: I think Hunter would find the phrase “CCE of EAF” a contradiction. Whatever CCE that might be identified in EAF, it is so weak and insignificant that to call it CCE is erroneous and confusing. The only “given” in EAF is “it’s forbidden to forbid,” which in being a paradoxical “given,” is too weak to save the “CCE of EAF” from being anything more than a collection of “values.” On this point, I’ll let readers decide.
Hunter discussed how ‘Pluralism and social mobility undermine the plausibility and coherence of personal beliefs and their capacity to provide a stable sense of meaning’; how character was replaced by ‘an alternative vision of the self […] captured by the word ‘personality’ ’; how efforts to be inclusive undermine the necessary “grounding,” “particularity,” and “situated-ness” of CCE (‘it is the concrete circumstances situating moral understanding that finally animate character and make it resilient’); alluding to Charles Taylor, how we lack today ‘sources that can support our far-reaching moral commitments to benevolence and justice’; about how CCE ‘is at least as much a function of the social order as it is a manifestation of the individual person’; and much more — the book is rich.³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ Hunter pointed out that ‘character implies the moral autonomy of the individual in his or her capacity to freely make ethical decisions,’ and yet what is ethical is determined by the larger society, ‘received by the individual, internalized into subjective consciousness, and thus experienced as the basic ordering categories of life’: to say individuals have autonomy to be moral isn’t to say individuals have the autonomy to decide what is moral; rather, Aristotelian, it is to say character is the act of “fitting” one’s particular life within a communal schema.⁸ ⁹ Hunter wrote:
‘Character is formed through the slow reception of ‘god-terms’ deep within us — god-terms, as Philip Rieff put it, that exists as ‘presiding presences.’ As such, character is shaped not by a cowering acquiescence to rules imposed externally but as conscious, directed obedience to truths authoritatively received and affirmed. In this way the imperatives of social life […] possess a moral power that we recognize as transcending ourselves.’¹⁰
Like James K.A. Smith argued in You Are What You Love, Hunter noted ‘a person’s habits define their character,’ and thinking in terms of Smith’s thought, the larger society is from what individuals “receive” their loves, and hence from what they “receive” their character, which is ‘the internalization of [a] nomos as the very structure of [a] worldview […] the organizing categories of […] identity in all its fluidity and complexity.’¹¹ ¹² For character to be character it must ‘be embedded in the taken for granted structures of everyday life experience’ and ‘internalized into consciousness’: it is only when ‘the moral life is internalized that it makes sense at all.’¹³ ¹⁴
Hunter warned that ‘[c]oncerns for character development [have] largely disappeared’ in favor of ‘developing the child’s happiness and self-regard,’ and Hunter noted that though everyone always wants moral education, whatever ‘consensus that is achieved is soon attacked (and legitimately) as narrow, sectarian, not inclusive.’¹⁵ ¹⁶ Sounding like Berger or Rieff on how people today “turn inward,” lacking “givens,” Hunter observed that ‘[t]he content of moral instruction’ has changed ‘from ‘objective’ moral truths of divine scriptures and the laws of Nature, to the conventions of a democratic society, to the subjective values of the individual person.’¹⁷ In this ‘decontextualizing context,’ EAF has arisen (“the therapeutic has triumphed”), and Hunter noted this context ‘only feels inclusive to those who share its assumptions and moral horizons’ (and perhaps those “Nietzschean Children” who see “new horizons” as an opportunity for “becoming” and “creation”).’¹⁸ Hunter lamented that people today ‘urgently desire the cultivation of moral qualities, but under conditions (we insist upon) that finally render those qualities unattainable.’¹⁹ For Hunter, EAF can provide us values, an appearance of CCE, but nothing more: ‘[o]urs is a society no longer capable of generating creeds and the god-terms that make those creeds sacred.’²⁰
‘Character outside of a lived community, the entanglement of complex social relationships, and their shared story, is impossible’; for Hunter, ‘the ‘decontextualized’ self is reduced to little more than will.’²¹ ²² Sounding similar to David Hume according to Dr. Livingston, Hunter wrote:
Hunter explained in his book the idea of “habitus” and its indivisibility from particular communities, a term that tries in my mind to combine the terms “givens” (which we’ve used throughout this paper) and “habits” into one. ‘Habitus refers to the taken-for-granted assumptions that prevail in a particular society’: they are the habits, modes of thinking, and ways of life incubated by “givens,” and overall habitus is far more important than a single moral lesson.²⁴ ‘At the most basic level of experience, habitus operates as a system of dispositions, tendencies, and inclinations that organize our actions and define our way of being.’²⁵ For Hunter, meaningful character is impossible without habitus — he wrote habitus is needed ‘to translate character into design’ — and both are impossible without particular community.²⁶ Hunter acknowledged that culture always changes, ‘yet the habitus that makes it comprehensible, consistent, and compelling has steadily dissipated,’ contributing to the psychological and existential anxiety that so concerned Rieff and Berger.²⁷ ‘Habitus is indeed wearing thin. Where a consensus remains in our moral culture, it does so only in terms of the shallowest of platitudes,’ platitudes which have ‘lost the quality of sacredness, their commanding character, and thus their power to inspire and to shame.’²⁸ ²⁹ When it comes to ‘the good,’ without habitus, ‘[o]n what grounds do we come to care about it’?³⁰
‘Implicit in the word ‘character’ is a story,’ and without particular community, people lack story that they are part of without thinking about it.³¹ Without “givens,” any story we are part of is a story which we know we are in: it is a metanarrative, like Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of An Author, and hence existentially destabilizing. It could be said that the “restlessness” of our world is a result of us being characters who know we are in a story, and furthermore we are characters who are looking for a story in which we can forget again that we are characters in a story (an “unconsciousness” which Hunter suggests requires “givens” and “habitus”). Can we un-know what we know? Hunter’s work suggests character is gone for good: ‘we want the flower of moral seriousness to blossom, but we have pulled the plant up by its roots’ (in the name of justice, inclusivity, and other things that only an immoral person wouldn’t support).³² Today, ‘[t]he advocacy of virtues or consensual values [has become] little more than a mechanism for the assertion of personal preferences. Their validity depends upon little more than the sentiments of individuals who, by choice, accept them.’³³
Is it possible to know who we are without character? Characters are those in stories: how can we be in a story without character, and if we’re not part of a story, how can we have identity? If we’re not in a story, it might be impossible for us to “rest,” but the only way to establish a story is to establish and protect “givens” and reinforcing communities which necessarily risks exclusion in requiring “exclusive moral orders.” Under EAF, to be in a story may require making a tragic tradeoff that will seem too high and an injustice to pay. This being the case, and if Hunter’s work is correct that character is impossible today, then character cannot be what brings us today “rest.” If it is necessary for “belonging again,” then the time when we could “belong” is finished. However, perhaps this is only “character” as traditionally understand: the possibility of the “Absolute Knower,” “Deleuzian Dividual,” and Nietzschean Child might still be with us.
As noted, character is possible where there is “habitus” (“givens” plus “habits”), which places us in a (communal) “story” versus an existentially destabilizing “metanarrative” (like Pirandello’s play). It could be said that the “restlessness” of our world today is a result of us being people who are trying to be characters in a story but who also know that “stories are just stories,” and thus we struggle to “fully come into character.” We are people looking for a story in which we can become “thoughtless” about being in a story, and hence become “characters” — but after the fall of “givens,” we’d have to be master “method actors” to accomplish this task. Perhaps an “Absolute Knower,” Child, or Deleuzian is someone who can “leap” into a story/character and fully “become” that story/character, forgetting in this very “leap” that the story/character was created and not “realized” (out of deepest reality or something). In Nietzsche, we could say that we must write our own story and then become “method actors” who literally “become” that story, treating it just as real as the world into which we found ourselves born. Even more difficult, could we jump in and out of the story at will, changing plot directions here and there, submitting the story to revisions, etc., and then suddenly “leap” back into it, fully as a character, never doubting the reality and authority of the story, even when it costs us (which is the most important test)? As strange as this description is, there might be no other way to restore character/story (which suggests the importance of studying “The Phenomenology of the Artist”), but even if we could gain this rare ability, how could we maintain community? Won’t everyone atomize into their own story/character? Is that only avoidable if there is a transcendent God unifying all the differences beyond contingency? Hard to say.
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Notes
¹Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: xv.
²Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: xv.
³Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: xiv.
⁴Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 7.
⁵Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 11.
⁶Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 12.
⁷Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 15.
⁸Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 16.
⁹A balancing act similar to “State size,” we should note that if this schema demands too much “fitting’ of its members, they are likely to rebel; if it asks too little, it is likely to be meaningless and fail to provide any “givenness,” causing anxiety.
¹⁰Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 17.
¹¹Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 61.
¹²Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 24.
¹³Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 200.
¹⁴Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 201.
¹⁵Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 71.
¹⁶Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 77.
¹⁷Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 146.
¹⁸Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 220.
¹⁹Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 226.
²⁰Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 229.
²¹Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 227.
²²Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 214.
²³Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 216.
²⁴Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 222.
²⁵Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 222.
²⁶Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 226.
²⁷Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 223.
²⁸Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 223.
²⁹Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 225.
³⁰Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 194.
³¹Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 226.
³²Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 13.
³³Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000: 200.
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