ARE THINGS REALLY THIS BAD?

The Death of Character
Moral Education in an Age Without Good and Evil
James Davison Hunter
Basic Books, $25, 352 pp.

Americans, we are frequently told, no longer pay sufficient attention to those qualities of character praised by the epic poets of ancient Greece, the Old and New Testaments and the religious traditions they spawned, and the great ideas embedded in classic works of theology, philosophy, and literature. Some of those who share this concern write books or compile collections of moral stories, hoping to persuade Americans to change their ways. Others go even further. They seek to require states to emphasize character education in schools, to formulate new curricula, to elect politicians committed to restoring firm Christian values, or to seek to clothe the "naked public square" with religious symbols or copies of the Ten Commandments.

James Davison Hunter, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, thinks that all such efforts are futile. Character is dead, he maintains, and the corpse cannot be revived. "When it comes to the moral life of children," writes Hunter, seeking to identify character's assassin, "the vocabulary of the psychologist frames virtually all public discussion." Psychologists do not speak about sin, Satan, or evil. They talk about development, maturity, and cognitive competence. Through the ideas of psychologists such as Lawrence Kohlberg and others (Hunter provides an extensive list), a new "regime" has taken over the way our schools treat the students who attend them. "By regime, I simply mean the complex network of institutions, ideas, ideals, and interests whose collective purpose is to propagate a general strategy of moral understanding and learning." The psychological regime, "overwhelmingly therapeutic and self-referencing," now "pervades all of the mainstream institutions that mediate moral understanding to children."

And not just mainstream institutions. Hunter points out the degree to which even the presumed opponents of the psychological regime share its central assumptions. Conservative Christians may think they are at the cutting edge of a new moral majority, but, if one looks at the books their leaders write, Hunter argues, they are as committed to psychological assumptions as any secularist. So are communitarians who would like to see a moral revival in America, for their challenge is more "political in nature than educational" and their ideas are easily co-opted by their opponents. Hunter argues that even such stalwart conservatives as William Bennett and Gary Bauer adopt an inclusive strategy when discussing the restoration of virtue. They argue, not for the specific virtues of specific traditions, but for, in Bauer's words, "a common body of ethical knowledge that, even if it has a religious origin, serves the purpose of maintaining and strengthening devotion to our country, to democratic institutions, to fellow citizens, to family members, and finally to an ideal of human dignity."

The reason even determined moralists like Gary Bauer are doomed to fail, Hunter believes, is that any account of character is intimately tied to the moral culture of which it is a part. And our culture he finds hopelessly corrupt. "It is difficult to think of another age when the key socializing institutions for the cultivation of normative ideals and virtuous habit have been so reluctant to communicate to children their standards and the god-terms that give them sanction," Hunter writes. "It is difficult to remember another time when these same institutions have been so overwhelmed by the influence of other powerful forces in society."

The task of imagining a moral condition worse than those we have now may be difficult for Hunter, but it does not seem that hard to me. Once upon a time, and not long ago, children did not attend much school at all, and the ones they attended did not teach Homer as much as they smacked kids over the knuckles for even minor infractions. There are not many strong institutions pictured in Hogarth's Gin Lane. It was pretty hard to keep the family together in mining towns when fathers died in their thirties. On the big thermometer that measures moral health, America these days may not rank very high, but compared to other times and other places, neither does it rank very low.

Having misdiagnosed the American condition, Hunter has little to contribute to an effective remedy. At least Gary Bauer, who operates in the real world of politics, recognizes that the moral understandings of a diverse society will necessarily be diverse. Conservative Christians who use therapeutic language are doing what all successful religious movements have done, which is to develop an awareness of the needs of the audience to which they presume to speak. Those who are fed up with "values clarification" and other absurdities of the 1960s are doing their best to move schools toward an appreciation of the need to think about character.

None of this matters to Hunter. I could not find any theorist or activist of character education of whom he approves. He stands above the fray, telling everyone that because the Enlightenment happened, they might as well pack their bags.

The sin associated with standing above the fray is arrogance. Wanting to make the point that a virtue such as empathy will lose its meaning if it is applied indiscriminately, Hunter writes: "In a materialistic and hedonistic culture, empathy may lead a child to experience nothing more significant than the anguish of another child who didn't receive all the Christmas presents she wanted." I just hope that if my child comes across a crying classmate, he would have the character to make that child's anguish as significant as he can.

The 1960s spawned a host of books, thankfully now unreadable, which launched devastating criticisms against the establishment without ever bothering to root their critiques in reality or to offer any credible alternatives. The Death of Character, although not written from a left-wing viewpoint, brings those books to mind. If the state of our character is really so bad, and if efforts to reform it are so hopeless, what are we to do? James Hunter cannot be bothered to provide an answer.

Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. His most recent book is One Nation, after All (Viking).