The Moralist's Gamble

...About 85 percent of all public school parents want moral values taught in schools," and in response, state departments of education have earnestly set about defining the "core values" that schools should teach...

...Our condition is, in large part, the product of "sociological and historical" causes: Any number of large, impersonal forces—multinational capitalism, pluralism, social mobility, and popular culture—have made it impossible to maintain moral meaning...

...But even if educators succeed in finding any common Judeo-Catholic-Protestant-Greek-Roman-European-American-Chinese morality, Hunter argues, it is bound to consist of "the thinnest of platitudes...

...Attempts to revive it will yield little...

...Hunter rightly faults the communitarians for wanting exalted virtues without strong communities, but it is not so clear that he scores against the neoclassicists...

...Where the communitarians tend to look down on such "bourgeois virtues" as thrift, industry, diligence, and self-discipline, Hunter's neoclassi-cists tend to be most concerned with precisely these low but solid virtues, so closely connected to self-interest...

...That book's success owed much to Hunter's rare ability to engage our most heated controversies seriously and passionately but without rancor...

...By accepting the doctrine of self-interest, the moralist accepted modern individualism, confident of controlling it and using it to shape "orderly, temperate, moderate, careful, and self-controlled citizens...

...Institutions devoted to character education proliferate on both the left and the right...

...When it comes to the moral life of children, the vocabulary of the psychologist frames virtually all public discussion...

...Similarly, "neoclassical" critics like William Bennett and James Q. Wilson are right to insist that character development requires the support of powerful stories that fill the moral imagination of children...

...Hunter, however, offers a sometimes very amusing demonstration of the pervasiveness of what he calls the psychological regime...

...Individualism has advanced against all the institutions that Tocqueville depended on to restrain it...

...Communitarians are right to attack the radical individualism of the psychological regime...

...He knows how to support bold and surprising conclusions with measured and fair-minded observations that few can dismiss...

...Their "Learning for Life" curriculum offers this justification for making moral decisions: "We feel good about ourselves, others feel good about us, and we don't have to worry about negative consequences...

...To help, we have called in the psychologists...

...There are many reasons to be critical of the psychological regime in character education, but Hunter offers the most devastating: It doesn't work...

...There has been some backlash against the psychological regime, but Hunter does not think such a backlash can resurrect character...

...Since they do not ask for very exalted virtues, it may be enough for them to concern themselves with families, neighborhoods, voluntary associations, and the religion, however thin, that many Americans share...

...Today, too, many commentators on American civic morality believe that individualism can be directed onto a virtuous path, building out of our private choices a moral character for the Jonathan Marks is a visiting assistant professor at James Madison College at Michigan State University...

...We had better abandon the quest for an inclusive American moral vocabulary and instead "create greater space in our public culture for different moral communities to exist...

...Even the famously out-of-step Boy Scouts are not immune...

...In our fragmented moral culture, psychology is a natural authority because it appears to speak not for any one moral position but for science...

...It will come as a surprise, however, that Hunter does not round up the usual suspect, moral relativism, to explain this failure...

...nation...

...Its time has passed...

...But character, Hunter argues, cannot grow in abstract communities that make no one uncomfortable...

...The emergence of therapeutic culture and the shift from theistic and republican to the utilitarian and expressive are admittedly old, old tales...

...Whatever the encouraging recent signs in our leading moral indicators, one does not have to be a pessimist to wonder whether today's American cultural soil is rich enough to support even the bourgeois virtues...

...Unlike the communitarians, thinkers like Bennett and Wilson are not inconsistent when they advocate morality without advocating the distinctive communities Hunter champions...

...Hunter uses the moral education of children as a window into the moral world of adults, and his claim that America is failing at character education will surprise almost no one...

...And in The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil, James Davison Hunter concludes that the moralist's gamble has failed: "Character is dead...

...They seek to cultivate a kind of universal, or "natural" morality that can be teased out of the Western experience and parts of the non-Western experience, too...

...Indeed, Hunter draws on their view that "individuals are social creatures inextricably embedded in their communities," so that identity and morality must be grounded in "shared ideals, sacred obligations, and collective memories...

...But the neoclassicists, too, neglect particularity, claims Hunter...

...Character has died, in spite of our best attempts to save it, because its cultural preconditions have disintegrated...

...The Death of Character addresses the question of how we can order our lives in late modernity, whose conditions are singularly inhospitable to moral certainties and the institutions that transmit them...

...But contemporary America no longer has a robust common cul-ture—and "there have never been 'generic' values...

...Morality and character are always rooted in a shared culture, in common institutions, traditions, stories, and memories...

...The problem, Hunter claims, is not moral relativism but moral fragmentation: "We Americans see all around us the fragmentation of our public life, our increasing inability to speak to each other through a common moral vocabulary...

...BY JONATHAN MARKS Back in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville praised American moralists for adjusting to the hard fact that in the democratic future, "private interest will become the chief if not the only force behind all behavior...

...All the same, it is hard to be as confident as Tocqueville was in self-interest rightly understood...

...We are hardly in a position to dismiss Hunter's suggestion that it is time to face the death of character...

...Character education that attempts to found itself on the morality that all Americans share inadvertently empties character of meaning...

...Do a weekly inventory of positive traits you see in yourself" and "Become your best friend": The source of these suggestions is not Barney the purple dinosaur but Charles Gerber, the evangelical author of Christ-Centered Self-Esteem...

...Psychological pedagogy reflects and reinforces a series of changes in our moral culture that have been underway for a long time: from authority to autonomy, from appeals to God and the community to appeals to the needs of the self, and from talk of right and wrong to talk of what is useful for self-esteem...

...But the individualism of Tocqueville's time is nothing compared with the individualism of our own...

...He is perhaps best known for making the phrase "culture wars" ubiquitous and even respectable with his 1992 book, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America...

...Hunter is a professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of Virginia and directs the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture...

...He emphasizes instead the sincerity of our character education efforts...