The Road to Character

CHAPTER 10

THE BIG ME

In January 1969, two great quarterbacks faced each other from opposite sidelines in Super Bowl III. Both Johnny Unitas and Joe Namath were raised in the steel towns of western Pennsylvania. But they had grown up a decade apart and lived in different moral cultures.

Unitas grew up in the old culture of self-effacement and self-defeat. His father died when he was five and his mother took over the family coal delivery business, supervising its one driver. Unitas went to a strict Catholic school in the old tradition. The teachers were morally demanding and could be harsh and cruel. The domineering Father Barry would hand out report cards personally, flipping them at one boy after another, remarking cruelly, “You’ll make a good truck driver some day. You’ll be digging ditches.” The prophecies terrified the boys.¹

Football players in Western Pennsylvania gloried in their ability to endure pain.² Unitas weighed 145 pounds while playing quarterback for his high school team, and he took a beating during every game. He went to church before every game, deferred to the authority of his coaches, and lived a football-obsessed life.³ Turned down by Notre Dame, Unitas then played quarterback at a basketball school, the University of Louisville. He had a brief tryout with the Pittsburgh Steelers but was cut. He was back working on a construction gang, playing semipro football, when he got a long-shot call from the Baltimore Colts. He made the team and spent many of his early years with the Colts steadily losing.

Unitas was not an overnight sensation in the NFL, but he was steadily ripening, honing his skills and making his teammates better. When his pro career looked secure, he bought a split-level house in Towson, Maryland, and also took a job with the Columbia Container Corporation that paid him $125 a week throughout the year.⁴ He was a deliberately unglamorous figure with his black high-top sneakers, bowed legs, stooped shoulders, and a crew cut above his rough face. If you look at photos of him traveling with the team you see a guy who looks like a 1950s insurance salesman, with his white short-sleeved button-down shirt and narrow black tie. He and his buddies would sit on the buses and planes, dressed almost exactly the same, haircuts the same, playing bridge.

He was unflamboyant and understated. “I always figured being a little dull was part of being a pro. Win or lose, I never walked off a football field without first thinking of something boring to say to [the press],” he would say later. He was loyal to his organization and to his teammates. In the huddle he’d rip into his receivers for screwing up plays and running the wrong routes. “I’ll never throw to you again if you don’t learn the plays,” he’d bark. Then, after the game, he’d lie to the reporter: “My fault, I overthrew him” was his standard line.

Unitas was confident in his football abilities but unprepossessing in the way he went about his job. Steve Sabol of NFL Films captured some of his manner: “It’s always been my job to glorify the game. I’m such a romantic anyway. I’ve always looked at football in dramaturgical terms. It wasn’t the score; it was the struggle, and what kind of music could we use? But when I met Unitas I realized he was the antithesis of all that. Football to him was no different than a plumber putting in a pipe. He was an honest workman doing an honest job. Everything was a shrug of the shoulders. He was so unromantic that he was romantic, in the end.”⁵ Unitas, like Joe DiMaggio in baseball, came to embody a particular way of being a sports hero in the age of self-effacement.

Namath, who grew up in the same area but a half generation later, lived in a different moral universe. Joe Namath was the flamboyant star, with white shoes and flowing hair, brashly guaranteeing victory. Broadway Joe was outrageously entertaining and fun to be around. He made himself the center of attention, a spectacle off the field as much as on it, with $5,000 fur coats, long sideburns, and playboy manners. He didn’t care what others thought of him, or at least said he didn’t. “Some people don’t like this image I got myself, being a swinger,” Namath told Jimmy Breslin in a famous 1969 piece, “Namath All Night,” for New York magazine. “But I’m not institutional. I swing. If it’s good or bad, I don’t know, but it’s what I like.”

Namath grew up in Unitas’s shadow in poor Western Pennsylvania, but into a different way of being. His parents divorced when he was seven and he rebelled against his immigrant family by being cool, hanging around the pool hall and adopting a James Dean leather-jacketed swagger.

Namath’s football talents were flamboyantly obvious. He was one of the most highly recruited players in the country that year. He wanted to go to college in Maryland, thinking it was in the South, but his SATs weren’t high enough. So he went to the University of Alabama, where he went on to become one of the nation’s best collegiate quarterbacks. He was given a gigantic signing bonus to play with the New York Jets and was immediately making much more than any of his teammates.

He cultivated a personal brand that was bigger than the team. He was not just a football star but a lifestyle star. He paid a fine so he could wear a Fu Manchu mustache on the field. He starred in pantyhose commercials, challenging old-fashioned notions of masculinity. He famously had six-inch shag carpets in his bachelor pad, and he popularized the use of the word “foxes” for women. He wrote an autobiography titled I Can’t Wait Until Tomorrow ’Cause I Get Better Looking Every Day. This is not a title Johnny Unitas would have chosen.

Namath came to stardom at a time when New Journalism was breaking the mold of the old reporting. Namath was the perfect subject. Without a reticent bone in his body, he’d bring reporters along as he worked his way through bottles of scotch the night before games. He openly bragged about what a great athlete he was, how good-looking he was. He cultivated a brashly honest style. “Joe! Joe! You’re the most beautiful thing in the world!” he shouted to himself in the bathroom mirror of the Copacabana one night in 1966, as a reporter from The Saturday Evening Post tagged along.⁶

Fiercely independent, he did not want to make a deep commitment to any woman. He created an early version of what we would now call the hook-up culture. “I don’t like to date so much as I just like to kind of, you know, run into something, man,” he told a reporter for Sports Illustrated in 1966. He embodied the autonomy ethos that was beginning to sweep through the country. “I believe in letting a guy live the way he wants to if he doesn’t hurt anyone. I feel that everything I do is okay for me and doesn’t affect anybody else, including the girls I go out with. Look, man, I live and let live. I like everybody.”⁷

Namath heralded a new mode for being a professional athlete—a mode of personal branding, lavish endorsements, in which the star expressed his own vibrant personality and outshone the team.

Cultural Change

Cultures change in ways that are both superficial and profound. When the essayist Joseph Epstein was young, he observed that when you went into the drugstore the cigarettes were in the open shelves and the condoms were behind the counter. But now when you go to the drugstore, the condoms are in the open shelves and the cigarettes are behind the counter.

The conventional view of the shift from the humility of Unitas to the brash flamboyance of Namath is that it happened in the late 1960s. The conventional story goes something like this. First there was the Greatest Generation, whose members were self-sacrificing, self-effacing, and community-minded. Then along came the 1960s and the Baby Boomers, who were narcissistic, self-expressive, selfish, and morally lax.

But this story doesn’t fit the facts. What really happened goes like this: Starting in biblical times there was a tradition of moral realism, the “crooked-timber” school of humanity. This tradition, or worldview, put tremendous emphasis on sin and human weakness. This view of humanity was captured in the figure of Moses, the meekest of men who nonetheless led a people, and by biblical figures like David, who were great heroes, but deeply flawed. This biblical metaphysic was later expressed by Christian thinkers such as Augustine, with his emphasis on sin, his rejection of worldly success, his belief in the necessity of grace, of surrendering oneself to God’s unmerited love. This moral realism then found expression in humanists like Samuel Johnson, Michel de Montaigne, and George Eliot, who emphasized how little we can know, how hard it is to know ourselves, and how hard we have to work on the long road to virtue. “We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves,” Eliot wrote.⁸ It was also embodied, in different ways and at different times, in the thought of Dante, Hume, Burke, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Isaiah Berlin. All of these thinkers take a limited view of our individual powers of reason. They are suspicious of abstract thinking and pride. They emphasize the limitations in our individual natures.

Some of these limitations are epistemological: reason is weak and the world is complex. We cannot really grasp the complexity of the world or the full truth about ourselves. Some of these limitations are moral: There are bugs in our souls that lead us toward selfishness and pride, that tempt us to put lower loves over higher loves. Some of the limitations are psychological: We are divided within ourselves, and many of the most urgent motions of our minds are unconscious and only dimly recognized by ourselves. Some of them are social: We are not self-completing creatures. To thrive we have to throw ourselves into a state of dependence—on others, on institutions, on the divine. The place that limitation occupies in the “crooked timber” school is immense.

Around the eighteenth century, moral realism found a rival in moral romanticism. While moral realists placed emphasis on inner weakness, moral romantics like Jean-Jacques Rousseau placed emphasis on our inner goodness. The realists distrusted the self and trusted institutions and customs outside the self; the romantics trusted the self and distrusted the conventions of the outer world. The realists believed in cultivation, civilization, and artifice; the romanticists believed in nature, the individual, and sincerity.

For a while, these two traditions lived side by side in society, in creative tension and conversation. Except in artistic circles, realism had the upper hand. If you grew up in early twentieth century America, you grew up with the vocabulary and categories of moral realism, translated into a practical secular or religious idiom. Perkins grew up with the vocabulary of vocation, the need to suppress parts of yourself so you can be an instrument in a larger cause. Eisenhower grew up with the vocabulary of self-defeat. Day learned as a young woman the vocabulary of simplicity, poverty, and surrender. Marshall learned institutional thinking, the need to give oneself to organizations that transcend a lifetime. Randolph and Rustin learned reticence and the logic of self-discipline, the need to distrust oneself even while waging a noble crusade. These people didn’t know they were exemplifying parts of the realist tradition. This ethos was just in the air they breathed and the way they were raised.

But then moral realism collapsed. Its vocabulary and ways of thinking were forgotten or shoved off into the margins of society. Realism and romanticism slipped out of balance. A moral vocabulary was lost, and along with it a methodology for the formation of souls. This shift did not happen during the 1960s and 1970s, though that period was a great romantic flowering. It happened earlier, in the late 1940s and 1950s. It was the Greatest Generation that abandoned realism.

By the fall of 1945, people around the world had endured sixteen years of deprivation—first during the Depression, then during the war. They were ready to let loose, to relax, to enjoy. Consumption and advertising took off as people rushed to the stores to buy things that would make life easier and more fun. People in the postwar years wanted to escape from the shackles of self-restraint and all those gloomy subjects like sin and depravity. They were ready to put the horrors of the Holocaust and the war behind them.

People right after the war were ready to read any book that offered a more upbeat and positive vision of life and its possibilities. In 1946, Rabbi Joshua L. Liebman published a book titled Peace of Mind that urged people to engrave a new morality on their hearts, one based on setting aside the idea that you should repress any part of yourself. Instead, thou shalt “love thyself properly…thou shalt not be afraid of thy hidden impulses…respect thyself…trust thyself.” Liebman had an infinite faith in the infinite goodness of men and women. “I believe that man is infinitely potential, and that given the proper guidance there is hardly a task he cannot perform or a degree of mastery in work and love he cannot attain.”⁹ He struck a chord. His book remained on the top of the New York Times bestseller list for an astounding fifty-eight weeks.

That same year, Benjamin Spock came out with his famous baby book. That book was complex and is often unfairly maligned, but it did, especially in early editions, express a notably rosy view of human nature. Spock said that if your child steals something, you should give him as a present something similar to the item that he stole. That will show that you care for your child and that “he should have his heart’s desire if it is reasonable.”¹⁰

In 1949, Harry Overstreet published a wildly popular book titled The Mature Mind, which pushed the point a little further. Overstreet argued that those like Saint Augustine who emphasized human sinfulness had “denied to our species the healthy blessing of self-respect.”¹¹This emphasis on internal weakness encouraged people to “distrust himself and malign himself.”

Then, in 1952, Norman Vincent Peale came out with the mother of all optimistic books, The Power of Positive Thinking, urging readers to cast negative thoughts from mind and pep-talk themselves into greatness. That book rested atop the Times list for an astounding ninety-eight weeks.

Then came humanistic psychology led by people like Carl Rogers, the most influential psychologist of the twentieth century. The humanistic psychologists shifted away from Freud’s darker conception of the unconscious and promoted a sky-high estimation of human nature. The primary psychological problem, he argued, is that people don’t love themselves enough, and so therapists unleashed a great wave of self-loving. “Man’s behavior is exquisitely rational,” Rogers wrote, “moving with subtle and ordered complexity toward the goal his organism is endeavoring to achieve.”¹² The words that best describe human nature, he continued, are “positive, forward moving, constructive, realistic and trustworthy.” People don’t need to combat themselves, they only need to open up, to liberate their inner selves, so that their internalized drive to self-actualize can take over. Self-love, self-praise, and self-acceptance are the paths to happiness. To the extent that a person “can be freely in touch with his valuing process in himself, he will behave in ways that are self-enhancing.”¹³

Humanistic psychology has shaped nearly every school, nearly every curriculum, nearly every HR department, nearly every self-help book. Soon there were “IALAC” posters on school walls everywhere—I AM LOVABLE AND CAPABLE. The self-esteem movement was born. Our modern conversation lives in this romantic vision.

The Age of Self-Esteem

The shift from one moral culture to another is not a crude story of decline, from noble restraint to self-indulgent decadence. Each moral climate is a collective response to the problems of the moment. People in the Victorian era were faced with a decline in religious faith and adopted a strict character morality as a way to compensate. People in the 1950s and 1960s confronted a different set of problems. When people shift from one moral ecology to another, they are making a trade-off in response to changing circumstances. Since legitimate truths sit in tension with one another, one moral climate will put more emphasis here and less emphasis there, for better or worse. Certain virtues are cultivated, certain beliefs go too far, and certain important truths and moral virtues are accidentally forgotten.

The shift in the 1950s and 1960s to a culture that put more emphasis on pride and self-esteem had many positive effects; it helped correct some deep social injustices. Up until those years, many social groups, notably women, minorities, and the poor, had received messages of inferiority and humiliation. They were taught to think too lowly of themselves. The culture of self-esteem encouraged members of these oppressed groups to believe in themselves, to raise their sights and aspirations.

For example, many women had been taught to lead lives so committed to subservience and service that it led to self-abnegation. Katharine Meyer Graham’s life illustrates why so many people embraced the shift from self-effacement to self-expression.

Katharine Meyer grew up in a wealthy publishing family in Washington, D.C. She attended the Madeira School, a progressive but genteel private school in which young ladies were raised amid mottoes such as “Function in disaster. Finish in style.” At home, she was thoroughly dominated by a father who was awkward and distant and by a mother who demanded Stepford Wife perfection: “I think we all felt we somehow hadn’t lived up to what she expected or wanted of us, and the insecurities and lack of self-confidence she bred were long lasting,” she would write years later in her superb memoir.¹⁴

Girls were expected to be quiet, reserved, and correct, and Katharine grew up painfully self-conscious. “Had I said the right thing? Had I worn the right clothes? Was I attractive? These questions were unsettling and self-absorbing, even overwhelming at times.”

In 1940, Katharine married a charming, witty, mercurial man named Philip Graham, who had a subtle or not so subtle way of belittling her views and abilities. “I increasingly saw my role as the tail to his kite—and the more I felt overshadowed, the more it became a reality.”¹⁵ Graham had a series of affairs, which Katharine discovered and was devastated by.

Graham, who suffered from depression, committed suicide on August 3, 1963. Six weeks later, Katharine was elected president of the Washington Post Company. At first she saw herself as a bridge between her dead husband and her children who would eventually inherit it. But she shut her eyes, took a step as manager, took another step, and found she could do the job.

Over the next few decades the surrounding culture encouraged Katharine to assert herself and to develop the full use of her capacities. The year she took over the Post, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, which embraced Carl Rogers’s humanistic psychology. Gloria Steinem later wrote a bestselling book, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem. Dr. Joyce Brothers, a prominent advice columnist at the time, put the ethos bluntly: “Put yourself first—at least some of the time. Society has brainwashed women into believing that their husbands’ and children’s needs should always be given priority over their own. Society has never impressed on women as it has on men the human necessity of putting yourself first. I am not advocating selfishness. I’m talking about the basics of life. You have to decide how many children you want, what kind of friends you want, what kind of relationships you want with your family.”¹⁶

The emphasis on self-actualization and self-esteem gave millions of women a language to articulate and cultivate self-assertion, strength, and identity. Graham eventually became one of the most admired and powerful publishing executives in the world. She built the Post into a major and highly profitable national newspaper. She stood up to the Nixon White House and storm of abuse during the Watergate crisis, maintaining steadfast support for Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and the rest of the journalists who broke that story. She never fully overcame her insecurities, but she did learn to project a formidable image. Her memoir is a masterwork, understated but also honest and authoritative, without a hint of self-pity or false sentiment.

Katharine Graham, like many women and members of minority groups, needed a higher and more accurate self-image—needed to move from Little Me to Big Me.

Authenticity

The underlying assumptions about human nature and the shape of human life were altered by this shift to the Big Me. If you were born at any time over the last sixty years, you were probably born into what the philosopher Charles Taylor has called “the culture of authenticity.” This mindset is based on the romantic idea that each of us has a Golden Figure in the core of our self. There is an innately good True Self, which can be trusted, consulted, and gotten in touch with. Your personal feelings are the best guide for what is right and wrong.

In this ethos, the self is to be trusted, not doubted. Your desires are like inner oracles for what is right and true. You know you are doing the right thing when you feel good inside. The valid rules of life are those you make or accept for yourself and that feel right to you.

“Our moral salvation,” Taylor writes, describing this culture, “comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.” It is important to stay true to that pure inner voice and not follow the conformities of a corrupting world. As Taylor puts it, “There is a certain way of being that is my way. I am called to live my life in this way and not in imitation of anyone else’s…. If I am not, I miss the point of my life. I miss what being human is for me.”¹⁷

From an older tradition of self-combat we move to self-liberation and self-expression. Moral authority is no longer found in some external objective good; it is found in each person’s unique original self. Greater emphasis is put on personal feelings as a guide to what is right and wrong. I know I am doing right because I feel harmonious inside. Something is going wrong, on the other hand, when I feel my autonomy is being threatened, when I feel I am not being true to myself.

In this ethos, sin is not found in your individual self; it is found in the external structures of society—in racism, inequality, and oppression. To improve yourself, you have to be taught to love yourself, to be true to yourself, not to doubt yourself and struggle against yourself. As one of the characters in one of the High School Musical movies sings, “The answers are all inside of me / All I’ve got to do is believe.”

Status Updates

This intellectual and cultural shift toward the Big Me was reinforced by economic and technological changes. All of us today live in a technological culture. I’m not a big believer that social media have had a ruinous effect on the culture, as many technophobes fear. There is no evidence to support the idea that technology has induced people to live in a fake online world while renouncing the real one. But information technology has had three effects on the moral ecology that have inflated the Big Me Adam I side of our natures and diminished the humbler Adam II.

First, communications have become faster and busier. It is harder to attend to the soft, still voices that come from the depths. Throughout human history, people have found that they are most aware of their depths when they are on retreats, during moments of separation and stillness, during moments of quiet communion. They have found that they need time, long periods of stillness, before the external Adam quiets and the internal Adam can be heard. These moments of stillness and quiet are just more rare today. We reach for the smartphone.

Second, social media allow a more self-referential information environment. People have more tools and occasions to construct a culture, a mental environment tailored specifically for themselves. Modern information technology allows families to sit together in a room, each absorbed in a different show, movie, or game in the privacy of their own screen. Instead of being a peripheral star in the mass-media world of the Ed Sullivan show, each individual can be the sun at the center of his or her own media solar system, creating a network of programs, apps, and pages oriented around their own needs. A Yahoo advertising campaign vowed, “Now the Internet has a personality—It’s You!” Earthlink’s slogan was “Earthlink revolves around you.”

Third, social media encourages a broadcasting personality. Our natural bent is to seek social approval and fear exclusion. Social networking technology allows us to spend our time engaged in a hypercompetitive struggle for attention, for victories in the currency of “likes.” People are given more occasions to be self-promoters, to embrace the characteristics of celebrity, to manage their own image, to Snapchat out their selfies in ways that they hope will impress and please the world. This technology creates a culture in which people turn into little brand managers, using Facebook, Twitter, text messages, and Instagram to create a falsely upbeat, slightly overexuberant, external self that can be famous first in a small sphere and then, with luck, in a large one. The manager of this self measures success by the flow of responses it gets. The social media maven spends his or her time creating a self-caricature, a much happier and more photogenic version of real life. People subtly start comparing themselves to other people’s highlight reels, and of course they feel inferior.

The Soul of Man Under Meritocracy

The purification of the meritocracy has also reinforced the idea that each of us is wonderful inside. It has also encouraged self-aggrandizing tendencies. If you have lived through the last sixty or seventy years, you are the product of a more competitive meritocracy. You have, like me, spent your life trying to make something of yourself, trying to have an impact, trying to be reasonably successful in this world. That’s meant a lot of competition and a lot of emphasis on individual achievement—doing reasonably well in school, getting into the right college, landing the right job, moving toward success and status.

This competitive pressure meant that we all have to spend more time, energy, and attention on the external Adam I climb toward success and we have less time, energy, and attention to devote to the internal world of Adam II.

I’ve found in myself, and I think I’ve observed in others, a certain meritocratic mentality, which is based on the self-trusting, self-puffing insights of the Romantic tradition, but which is also depoeticized and despiritualized. If moral realists saw the self as a wilderness to be tamed, and if people in the New Age 1970s saw the self as an Eden to be actualized, people living in a high-pressure meritocracy are more likely to see the self as a resource base to be cultivated. The self is less likely to be seen as the seat of the soul, or as the repository of some transcendent spirit. Instead, the self is a vessel of human capital. It is a series of talents to be cultivated efficiently and prudently. The self is defined by its tasks and accomplishments. The self is about talent, not character.

The meritocracy liberates enormous energies, and ranks people in ways good and bad. But it also has a subtle effect on character, culture, and values. Any hypercompetitive system built upon merit is going to encourage people to think a lot about themselves and the cultivation of their own skills. Work becomes the defining feature of a life, especially as you begin to get social invitations because you happen to inhabit a certain job. Subtly, softly, but pervasively, this system instills a certain utilitarian calculus in us all. The meritocracy subtly encourages an instrumental ethos in which each occasion—a party, a dinner—and each acquaintance becomes an opportunity to advance your status and professional life project. People are more likely to think in commercial categories—to speak about opportunity costs, scalability, human capital, cost-benefit analysis, even when it comes to how they spend their private time.

The meaning of the word “character” changes. It is used less to describe traits like selflessness, generosity, self-sacrifice, and other qualities that sometimes make worldly success less likely. It is instead used to describe traits like self-control, grit, resilience, and tenacity, qualities that make worldly success more likely.

The meritocratic system wants you to be big about yourself—to puff yourself, to be completely sure of yourself, to believe that you deserve a lot and to get what you think you deserve (so long as it is good). The meritocracy wants you to assert and advertise yourself. It wants you to display and exaggerate your achievements. The achievement machine rewards you if you can demonstrate superiority—if with a thousand little gestures, conversational types, and styles of dress you can demonstrate that you are a bit smarter, hipper, more accomplished, sophisticated, famous, plugged in, and fashion-forward than the people around you. It encourages narrowing. It encourages you to become a shrewd animal.

The shrewd animal has streamlined his inner humanity to make his ascent more aerodynamic. He carefully manages his time and his emotional commitments. Things once done in a poetic frame of mind, such as going to college, meeting a potential lover, or bonding with an employer, are now done in a more professional frame of mind. Is this person, opportunity, or experience of use to me? There just isn’t time to get carried away by love and passion. There is a cost to making a soul-deep commitment to one mission or one love. If you commit to one big thing you will close off options toward other big things. You will be plagued by a Fear of Missing Out.

The shift from the Little Me culture to the Big Me culture was not illegitimate, but it went too far. The realist tradition that emphasized limitation and moral struggle was inadvertently marginalized and left by the side of the road, first by the romantic flowering of positive psychology, then by the self-branding ethos of social media, finally by the competitive pressures of the meritocracy. We are left with a moral ecology that builds up the exterior Adam I muscles but ignores the internal Adam II ones, and that creates an imbalance. It’s a culture in which people are defined by their external abilities and achievements, in which a cult of busyness develops as everybody frantically tells each other how overcommitted they are. As my student Andrew Reeves once put it, it cultivates an unrealistic expectation that life will happen on a linear progression, a natural upward slope toward success. It encourages people to “satisfice,” to get by on talent and just enough commitment to get the job done on time, without full soul commitment to any task.

This tradition tells you how to do the things that will propel you to the top, but it doesn’t encourage you to ask yourself why you are doing them. It offers little guidance on how to choose among different career paths and different vocations, how to determine which will be morally highest and best. It encourages people to become approval-seeking machines, to measure their lives by external praise—if people like you and accord you status, then you must be doing something right. The meritocracy contains its own cultural contradictions. It encourages people to make the most of their capacities, but it leads to the shriveling of the moral faculties that are necessary if you are going to figure out how to point your life in a meaningful direction.

Conditional Love

Let me just describe one way the meritocracy’s utilitarian, instrumentalist mindset can, in some cases, distort a sacred bond: parenthood.

There are two great defining features of child rearing today. First, children are now praised to an unprecedented degree. Dorothy Parker quipped that American children aren’t raised, they are incited—they are given food, shelter, and applause. That’s much more true today. Children are incessantly told how special they are. In 1966, only about 19 percent of high school students graduated with an A or A– average. By 2013, 53 percent of students graduated with that average, according to UCLA surveys of incoming college freshmen. Young people are surrounded by so much praise that they develop sky-high aspirations for themselves. According to an Ernst & Young survey, 65 percent of college students expect to become millionaires.¹⁸

The second defining feature is that children are honed to an unprecedented degree. Parents, at least in the more educated, affluent classes, spend much more time than in past generations grooming their children, investing in their skills, and driving them to practices and rehearsals. As Richard Murnane of Harvard found, parents with college degrees invest $5,700 more per year per child on out-of-school enrichment activities than they did in 1978.¹⁹

These two great trends—greater praise and greater honing—combine in interesting ways. Children are bathed in love, but it is often directional love. Parents shower their kids with affection, but it is not simple affection, it is meritocratic affection—it is intermingled with the desire to help their children achieve worldly success.

Some parents unconsciously shape their expressions of love to steer their children toward behavior they think will lead to achievement and happiness. Parents glow with extra fervor when their child studies hard, practices hard, wins first place, gets into a prestigious college, or joins the honor society (in today’s schools, the word “honor” means earning top grades). Parental love becomes merit-based. It is not simply “I love you.” It is “I love you when you stay on my balance beam. I shower you with praise and care when you’re on my beam.”

Parents in the 1950s were much more likely to say they expected their children to be obedient than parents today, who tell pollsters they want their children to think for themselves. But this desire for obedience hasn’t vanished, it’s just gone underground—from the straightforward system of rules and lectures, reward and punishment, to the semihidden world of approval or disapproval.

Lurking in the shadows of merit-based love is the possibility that it may be withdrawn if the child disappoints. Parents would deny this, but the wolf of conditional love is lurking here. This shadowy presence of conditional love produces fear, the fear that there is no utterly safe love; there is no completely secure place where young people can be utterly honest and themselves.

On the one hand, relationships between parents and children may be closer than ever before. Parents and children, even college-age children, communicate constantly. With only quiet qualms young people have accepted the vast achievement system that surrounds them. They submit to it because they long for the approval they get from the adults they love.

But the whole situation is more fraught than it appears at first glance. Some children assume that this merit-tangled love is the natural order of the universe. The tiny blips of approval and disapproval are built into the fabric of communication so deep that it is below the level of awareness. Enormous internal pressure is generated by the growing assumption that it is necessary to behave in a certain way to be worthy of another’s love. Underneath, the children are terrified that the deepest relationship they know will be lost.

Some parents unconsciously regard their children as something like an art project, to be crafted through mental and emotional engineering. There is some parental narcissism here, the insistence that your children go to colleges and lead lives that will give the parents status and pleasure. Children who are uncertain of their parents’ love develop a voracious hunger for it. This conditional love is like acid that dissolves children’s internal criteria, their capacity to make their own decisions about their own interests, careers, marriages, and life in general.

The parental relationship is supposed to be built upon unconditional love—a gift that cannot be bought and cannot be earned. It sits outside the logic of meritocracy and is the closest humans come to grace. But in these cases the pressure to succeed in the Adam I world has infected a relationship that should be operating by a different logic, the moral logic of Adam II. The result is holes in the hearts of many children across this society.

The Age of the Selfie

This cultural, technological, and meritocratic environment hasn’t made us a race of depraved barbarians. But it has made us less morally articulate. Many of us have instincts about right and wrong, about how goodness and character are built, but everything is fuzzy. Many of us have no clear idea how to build character, no rigorous way to think about such things. We are clear about external, professional things but unclear about internal, moral ones. What the Victorians were to sex, we are to morality: everything is covered in euphemism.

This shift in culture has changed us. In the first place, it has made us a bit more materialistic. College students now say they put more value on money and career success. Every year, researchers from UCLA survey a nationwide sample of college freshmen to gauge their values and what they want out of life. In 1966, 80 percent of freshmen said that they were strongly motivated to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. Today, less than half of them say that. In 1966, 42 percent said that becoming rich was an important life goal. By 1990, 74 percent agreed with that statement. Financial security, once seen as a middling value, is now tied as students’ top goal. In 1966, in other words, students felt it was important to at least present themselves as philosophical and meaning-driven people. By 1990, they no longer felt the need to present themselves that way. They felt it perfectly acceptable to say they were primarily interested in money.²⁰

We live in a more individualistic society. If you humbly believe that you are not individually strong enough to defeat your own weaknesses, then you know you must be dependent on redemptive assistance from outside. But if you proudly believe the truest answers can be found in the real you, the voice inside, then you are less likely to become engaged with others. Sure enough, there has been a steady decline in intimacy. Decades ago, people typically told pollsters that they had four or five close friends, people to whom they could tell everything. Now the common answer is two or three, and the number of people with no confidants has doubled. Thirty-five percent of older adults report being chronically lonely, up from 20 percent a decade ago.²¹ At the same time, social trust has declined. Surveys ask, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” In the early 1960s, significant majorities said that people can generally be trusted. But in the 1990s the distrusters had a 20-percentage-point margin over the trusters, and those margins have increased in the years since.²²

People have become less empathetic—or at least they display less empathy in how they describe themselves. A University of Michigan study found that today’s college students score 40 percent lower than their predecessors in the 1970s in their ability to understand what another person is feeling. The biggest drop came in the years after 2000.²³

Public language has also become demoralized. Google ngrams measure word usage across media. Google scans the contents of books and publications going back decades. You can type in a word and see, over the years, which words have been used more frequently and which less frequently. Over the past few decades there has been a sharp rise in the usage of individualist words and phrases like “self” and “personalized,” “I come first” and “I can do it myself,” and a sharp decline in community words like “community,” “share,” “united,” and “common good.”²⁴ The use of words having to do with economics and business has increased, while the language of morality and character building is in decline.²⁵ Usage of words like “character,” “conscience,” and “virtue” all declined over the course of the twentieth century.²⁶Usage of the word “bravery” has declined by 66 percent over the course of the twentieth century. “Gratitude” is down 49 percent. “Humbleness” is down 52 percent and “kindness” is down 56 percent.

This dwindling of the Adam II lexicon has further contributed to moral inarticulateness. In this age of moral autonomy, each individual is told to come up with his or her own worldview. If your name is Aristotle, maybe you can do that. But if it isn’t, you probably can’t. For his 2011 book Lost in Transition, Christian Smith of Notre Dame studied the moral lives of American college students. He asked them to describe a moral dilemma they had recently faced. Two thirds of the young people either couldn’t describe a moral problem or described problems that are not moral at all. For example, one said his most recent moral dilemma arose when he pulled in to a parking space and didn’t have enough quarters for the meter.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his coauthors wrote. They didn’t understand that a moral dilemma arises when two legitimate moral values clash. Their default position was that moral choices are just a question of what feels right inside, whether it arouses a comfortable emotion. One student uttered this typical response: “I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.”²⁷

If you believe that the ultimate oracle is the True Self inside, then of course you become emotivist—you make moral judgments on the basis of the 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. Of course you lose contact with the moral vocabulary that is needed to think about these questions. Of course the inner life becomes more level—instead of inspiring peaks and despairing abysses, ethical decision making is just gentle rolling foothills, nothing to get too hepped up about.

The mental space that was once occupied by moral struggle has gradually become occupied by the struggle to achieve. Morality has been displaced by utility. Adam II has been displaced by Adam I.

The Wrong Life

In 1886, Leo Tolstoy published his famous novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The central character is a successful lawyer and magistrate who one day is hanging curtains in his fancy new house when he falls awkwardly on his side. He thinks nothing of it at first, but then he develops an odd taste in his mouth and grows ill. Eventually he realizes that at age forty-five he is dying.

Ilyich had lived a productive upwardly mobile life. Tolstoy tells us he was “capable, cheerful, good-natured and sociable, though strict in the fulfillment of what he considered to be his duty: and he considered his duty to be what was so considered by those in authority.”²⁸ In other words, he was a successful product of the moral ecology and social status system of his time. He had a good job and a fine reputation. His marriage was cold, but he spent less time with his family and regarded this as normal.

Ilyich tries to go back to his former way of thinking, but the on-rushing presence of death thrusts new thoughts into his head. He thinks back on his childhood with special fondness, but the more he thinks about his adulthood, the less satisfactory it seems. He had rushed into marriage almost as an accident. He had been preoccupied with money year after year. His career triumphs now seem trivial. “Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done?” he suddenly asks himself.²⁹

The whole story plays with notions of up and down. The higher he goes externally, the farther he sinks internally. He begins to experience the life he had led as “a stone falling downward with increasing velocity.”³⁰

It occurs to him that he had felt small, scarcely noticeable impulses to struggle against what was thought good and proper by society. But he had not really attended to them. He now realizes that “his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend.”³¹

Tolstoy probably goes overboard in renouncing Ivan’s Adam I life. It had not all been false and worthless. But he starkly paints the portrait of a man without an inner world until the occasion of his death. In those final hours the man finally gets a glimpse of what he should have known all along: “He fell through the hole and there at the bottom was a light…. At that very moment Ivan Ilyich fell through and caught sight of the light, and it was revealed to him that though his life had not been what it should have been, this could still be rectified. He asked himself, ‘What is the right thing?’ and grew still, listening.”

Many of us are in Ivan Ilyich’s position, recognizing that the social system we are part of pushes us to live out one sort of insufficient external life. But we have what Ilyich did not have: time to rectify it. The question is how.

The answer must be to stand against, at least in part, the prevailing winds of culture. The answer must be to join a counterculture. To live a decent life, to build up the soul, it’s probably necessary to declare that the forces that encourage the Big Me, while necessary and liberating in many ways, have gone too far. We are out of balance. It’s probably necessary to have one foot in the world of achievement but another foot in a counterculture that is in tension with the achievement ethos. It’s probably necessary to reassert a balance between Adam I and Adam II and to understand that if anything, Adam II is more important than Adam I.

The Humility Code

Each society creates its own moral ecology. A moral ecology is a set of norms, assumptions, beliefs, and habits of behavior and an institutionalized set of moral demands that emerge organically. Our moral ecology encourages us to be a certain sort of person. When you behave consistently with your society’s moral ecology, people smile at you, and you are encouraged to continue acting in that way. The moral ecology of a given moment is never unanimous; there are always rebels, critics, and outsiders. But each moral climate is a collective response to the problems of the moment and it shapes the people who live within it.

Over the past several decades we have built a moral ecology around the Big Me, around the belief in a golden figure inside. This has led to a rise in narcissism and self-aggrandizement. This has encouraged us to focus on the external Adam I side of our natures and ignore the inner world of Adam II.

To restore the balance, to rediscover Adam II, to cultivate the eulogy virtues, it’s probably necessary to revive and follow what we accidentally left behind: the counter-tradition of moral realism, or what I’ve been calling the crooked-timber school. It’s probably necessary to build a moral ecology based on the ideas of this school, to follow its answers to the most important questions: Toward what should I orient my life? Who am I and what is my nature? How do I mold my nature to make it gradually better day by day? What virtues are the most important to cultivate and what weaknesses should I fear the most? How can I raise my children with a true sense of who they are and a practical set of ideas about how to travel the long road to character?

So far the propositions that define the crooked-timber tradition have been scattered across the many chapters that make up this book. I thought it might be useful to draw them together and recapitulate them here in one list, even if presenting them in numbered-list form does tend to simplify them and make them seem cruder than they are. Together these propositions form a Humility Code, a coherent image of what to live for and how to live. These are the general propositions that form this Humility Code:

1. We don’t live for happiness, we live for holiness. Day to day we seek out pleasure, but deep down, human beings are endowed with moral imagination. All human beings seek to lead lives not just of pleasure, but of purpose, righteousness, and virtue. As John Stuart Mill put it, people have a responsibility to become more moral over time. The best life is oriented around the increasing excellence of the soul and is nourished by moral joy, the quiet sense of gratitude and tranquillity that comes as a byproduct of successful moral struggle. The meaningful life is the same eternal thing, the combination of some set of ideals and some man or woman’s struggle for those ideals. Life is essentially a moral drama, not a hedonistic one.

2. Proposition one defines the goal of life. The long road to character begins with an accurate understanding of our nature, and the core of that understanding is that we are flawed creatures. We have an innate tendency toward selfishness and overconfidence. We have a tendency to see ourselves as the center of the universe, as if everything revolves around us. We resolve to do one thing but end up doing the opposite. We know what is deep and important in life, but we still pursue the things that are shallow and vain. Furthermore, we overestimate our own strength and rationalize our own failures. We know less than we think we do. We give in to short-term desires even when we know we shouldn’t. We imagine that spiritual and moral needs can be solved through status and material things.

3. Although we are flawed creatures, we are also splendidly endowed. We are divided within ourselves, both fearfully and wonderfully made. We do sin, but we also have the capacity to recognize sin, to feel ashamed of sin, and to overcome sin. We are both weak and strong, bound and free, blind and far-seeing. We thus have the capacity to struggle with ourselves. There is something heroic about a person in struggle with herself, strained on the rack of conscience, suffering torments, yet staying alive and growing stronger, sacrificing a worldly success for the sake of an inner victory.

4. In the struggle against your own weakness, humility is the greatest virtue. Humility is having an accurate assessment of your own nature and your own place in the cosmos. Humility is awareness that you are an underdog in the struggle against your own weakness. Humility is an awareness that your individual talents alone are inadequate to the tasks that have been assigned to you. Humility reminds you that you are not the center of the universe, but you serve a larger order.

5. Pride is the central vice. Pride is a problem in the sensory apparatus. Pride blinds us to the reality of our divided nature. Pride blinds us to our own weaknesses and misleads us into thinking we are better than we are. Pride makes us more certain and closed-minded than we should be. Pride makes it hard for us to be vulnerable before those whose love we need. Pride makes coldheartedness and cruelty possible. Because of pride we try to prove we are better than those around us. Pride deludes us into thinking that we are the authors of our own lives.

6. Once the necessities for survival are satisfied, the struggle against sin and for virtue is the central drama of life. No external conflict is as consequential or as dramatic as the inner campaign against our own deficiencies. This struggle against, say, selfishness or prejudice or insecurity gives meaning and shape to life. It is more important than the external journey up the ladder of success. This struggle against sin is the great challenge, so that life is not futile or absurd. It is possible to fight this battle well or badly, humorlessly or with cheerful spirit. Contending with weakness often means choosing what parts of yourself to develop and what parts not to develop. The purpose of the struggle against sin and weakness is not to “win,” because that is not possible; it is to get better at waging it. It doesn’t matter if you work at a hedge fund or a charity serving the poor. There are heroes and schmucks in both worlds. The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in this struggle.

7. Character is built in the course of your inner confrontation. Character is a set of dispositions, desires, and habits that are slowly engraved during the struggle against your own weakness. You become more disciplined, considerate, and loving through a thousand small acts of self-control, sharing, service, friendship, and refined enjoyment. If you make disciplined, caring choices, you are slowly engraving certain tendencies into your mind. You are making it more likely that you will desire the right things and execute the right actions. If you make selfish, cruel, or disorganized choices, then you are slowly turning this core thing inside yourself into something that is degraded, inconstant, or fragmented. You can do harm to this core thing with nothing more than ignoble thoughts, even if you are not harming anyone else. You can elevate this core thing with an act of restraint nobody sees. If you don’t develop a coherent character in this way, life will fall to pieces sooner or later. You will become a slave to your passions. But if you do behave with habitual self-discipline, you will become constant and dependable.

8. The things that lead us astray are short term—lust, fear, vanity, gluttony. The things we call character endure over the long term—courage, honesty, humility. People with character are capable of a long obedience in the same direction, of staying attached to people and causes and callings consistently through thick and thin. People with character also have scope. They are not infinitely flexible, free-floating, and solitary. They are anchored by permanent attachments to important things. In the realm of the intellect, they have a set of permanent convictions about fundamental truths. In the realm of emotion, they are enmeshed in a web of unconditional loves. In the realm of action, they have a permanent commitment to tasks that cannot be completed in a single lifetime.

9. No person can achieve self-mastery on his or her own. Individual will, reason, compassion, and character are not strong enough to consistently defeat selfishness, pride, greed, and self-deception. Everybody needs redemptive assistance from outside—from God, family, friends, ancestors, rules, traditions, institutions, and exemplars. If you are to prosper in the confrontation with yourself, you have to put yourself in a state of affection. You have to draw on something outside yourself to cope with the forces inside yourself. You have to draw from a cultural tradition that educates the heart, that encourages certain values, that teaches us what to feel in certain circumstances. We wage our struggles in conjunction with others waging theirs, and the boundaries between us are indistinct.

10. We are all ultimately saved by grace. The struggle against weakness often has a U shape. You are living your life and then you get knocked off course—either by an overwhelming love, or by failure, illness, loss of employment, or twist of fate. The shape is advance-retreat-advance. In retreat, you admit your need and surrender your crown. You open up space that others might fill. And grace floods in. It may come in the form of love from friends and family, in the assistance of an unexpected stranger, or from God. But the message is the same. You are accepted. You don’t flail about in desperation, because hands are holding you up. You don’t have to struggle for a place, because you are embraced and accepted. You just have to accept the fact that you are accepted. Gratitude fills the soul, and with it the desire to serve and give back.

11. Defeating weakness often means quieting the self. Only by quieting the self, by muting the sound of your own ego, can you see the world clearly. Only by quieting the self can you be open to the external sources of strengths you will need. Only by stilling the sensitive ego can you react with equipoise to the ups and downs of the campaign. The struggle against weakness thus requires the habits of self-effacement—reticence, modesty, obedience to some larger thing—and a capacity for reverence and admiration.

12. Wisdom starts with epistemological modesty. The world is immeasurably complex and the private stock of reason is small. We are generally not capable of understanding the complex web of causes that drive events. We are not even capable of grasping the unconscious depths of our own minds. We should be skeptical of abstract reasoning or of trying to apply universal rules across different contexts. But over the centuries, our ancestors built up a general bank of practical wisdom, traditions, habits, manners, moral sentiments, and practices. The humble person thus has an acute historical consciousness. She is the grateful inheritor of the tacit wisdom of her kind, the grammar of conduct and the store of untaught feelings that are ready for use in case of emergency, that offer practical tips on how to behave in different situations, and that encourage habits that cohere into virtues. The humble person understands that experience is a better teacher than pure reason. He understands that wisdom is not knowledge. Wisdom emerges out of a collection of intellectual virtues. It is knowing how to behave when perfect knowledge is lacking.

13. No good life is possible unless it is organized around a vocation. If you try to use your work to serve yourself, you’ll find your ambitions and expectations will forever run ahead and you’ll never be satisfied. If you try to serve the community, you’ll always wonder if people appreciate you enough. But if you serve work that is intrinsically compelling and focus just on being excellent at that, you will wind up serving yourself and the community obliquely. A vocation is not found by looking within and finding your passion. It is found by looking without and asking what life is asking of us. What problem is addressed by an activity you intrinsically enjoy?

14. The best leader tries to lead along the grain of human nature rather than go against it. He realizes that he, like the people he leads, is likely to be sometimes selfish, narrow-minded, and self-deceiving. Therefore he prefers arrangements that are low and steady to those that are lofty and heroic. As long as the foundations of an institution are sound, he prefers change that is constant, gradual, and incremental to change that is radical and sudden. He understands that public life is a contest between partial truths and legitimate contesting interests. The goal of leadership is to find a just balance between competing values and competing goals. He seeks to be a trimmer, to shift weight one way or another as circumstances change, in order to keep the boat moving steadily forward on an even keel. He understands that in politics and business the lows are lower than the highs are high. The downside risk caused by bad decisions is larger than the upside benefits that accrue from good ones. Therefore the wise leader is a steward for his organization and tries to pass it along in slightly better condition than he found it.

15. The person who successfully struggles against weakness and sin may or may not become rich and famous, but that person will become mature. Maturity is not based on talent or any of the mental or physical gifts that help you ace an IQ test or run fast or move gracefully. It is not comparative. It is earned not by being better than other people at something, but by being better than you used to be. It is earned by being dependable in times of testing, straight in times of temptation. Maturity does not glitter. It is not built on the traits that make people celebrities. A mature person possesses a settled unity of purpose. The mature person has moved from fragmentation to centeredness, has achieved a state in which the restlessness is over, the confusion about the meaning and purpose of life is calmed. The mature person can make decisions without relying on the negative and positive reactions from admirers or detractors because the mature person has steady criteria to determine what is right. That person has said a multitude of noes for the sake of a few overwhelming yeses.

Modes of Living

The characters in this book followed many different courses and had many different traits. Some, like Augustine and Johnson, were quite introspective. Others, like Eisenhower and Randolph, were not. Some, like Perkins, were willing to soil their hands in politics in order to get things done. Others, like Day, wanted not only to do good but to be good, to live a life that was as pure as possible. Some of these figures, like Johnson and Day, were very hard on themselves. They felt the need to arduously attack their own weaknesses. Others, like Montaigne, accepted themselves and had a lighter and more relaxed attitude toward life, trusting in nature to take care of life’s essential problems. Some, like Ida Eisenhower, Philip Randolph, and Perkins, were private people, a little detached and emotionally reticent. Others, like Augustine and Rustin, exposed themselves emotionally. Some, like Day, were saved by religion, while others, like Eliot, were harmed by religion or were, like Marshall, not religious. Some, like Augustine, surrendered agency and let grace flood in. Others, like Johnson, took control of life and built their soul through effort.

Even within the tradition of moral realism, there are many differences of temperament, technique, tactics, and taste. Two people who both subscribe to the “crooked timber” view may approach specific questions in different ways. Should you stay in your suffering or move on from it as soon as possible? Should you keep a journal to maximize self-awareness, or does that just lead to paralyzing self-consciousness and self-indulgence? Should you be reticent or expressive? Should you take control of your own life or surrender it to God’s grace?

Even within the same moral ecology, there’s a lot of room for each person to chart a unique path. But each of the lives in this book started with a deep vulnerability, and undertook a lifelong effort to transcend that vulnerability. Johnson was fragmented and storm-tossed. Rustin was hollow and promiscuous. Marshall was a fearful boy. Eliot was desperate for affection. And yet each person was redeemed by that weakness. Each person struggled against that weakness and used that problem to grow a beautiful strength. Each person traveled down into the valley of humility in order to ascend to the heights of tranquillity and self-respect.

Stumblers

The good news of this book is that it is okay to be flawed, since everyone is. Sin and limitation are woven through our lives. We are all stumblers, and the beauty and meaning of life are in the stumbling—in recognizing the stumbling and trying to become more graceful as the years go by.

The stumbler scuffs through life, a little off balance here and there, sometimes lurching, sometimes falling to her knees. But the stumbler faces her imperfect nature, her mistakes and weaknesses, with unvarnished honesty, with the opposite of squeamishness. She is sometimes ashamed of the perversities in her nature—the selfishness, the self-deceit, the occasional desire to put lower loves above higher ones.

But humility offers self-understanding. When we acknowledge that we screw up, and feel the gravity of our limitations, we find ourselves challenged and stretched with a serious foe to overcome and transcend.

The stumbler is made whole by this struggle. Each weakness becomes a chance to wage a campaign that organizes and gives meaning to life and makes you a better person. We lean on each other as we struggle against sin. We depend on each other for the forgiveness of sin. The stumbler has an outstretched arm, ready to receive and offer care. He is vulnerable enough to need affection and is generous enough to give affection at full volume. If we were without sin, we could be solitary Atlases, but the stumbler requires a community. His friends are there with conversation and advice. His ancestors have left him diverse models that he can emulate and measure himself by.

From the smallness of her own life, the stumbler commits herself to ideas and faiths that are nobler than any individual ever could be. She doesn’t always live up to her convictions or follow her resolutions. But she repents and is redeemed and tries again, a process that gives dignity to her failing. The victories follow the same arc: from defeat to recognition to redemption. Down into the valley of vision and then up into the highlands of attachment. The humble path to the beautiful life.

Each struggle leaves a residue. A person who has gone through these struggles seems more substantial and deep. And by a magic alchemy these victories turn weakness into joy. The stumbler doesn’t aim for joy. Joy is a byproduct experienced by people who are aiming for something else. But it comes.

There’s joy in a life filled with interdependence with others, in a life filled with gratitude, reverence, and admiration. There’s joy in freely chosen obedience to people, ideas, and commitments greater than oneself. There’s joy in that feeling of acceptance, the knowledge that though you don’t deserve their love, others do love you; they have admitted you into their lives. There’s an aesthetic joy we feel in morally good action, which makes all other joys seem paltry and easy to forsake.

People do get better at living, at least if they are willing to humble themselves and learn. Over time they stumble less, and eventually they 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 tranquillity and that feeling of flow—when moral nature and external skills are united in one defining effort.

Joy is not produced because others praise you. Joy emanates unbidden and unforced. Joy comes as a gift when you least expect it. At those fleeting moments you know why you were put here and what truth you serve. You may not feel giddy at those moments, you may not hear the orchestra’s delirious swell or see flashes of crimson and gold, but you will feel a satisfaction, a silence, a peace—a hush. Those moments are the blessings and the signs of a beautiful life.