Suppose you saved the life of a leprechaun, and in gratitude, he said he would give the man your daughter will marry one exceptional quality of your choosing. This man could be very smart, enormously rich, remarkably good-looking, unusually strong and athletic, highly creative and artistic, or singularly competent — or he could possess extraordinary character. What would you choose? Now suppose you were picking a principal for your kid’s school, or a business partner, or your own boss: what quality would you choose?
I would pick character every time. When we have to relate to, work with, and depend upon someone, nothing is more important than personal ethical virtues like honor, reliability, trustworthiness, and kindness.
But what if you were choosing a surgeon to save your life, a general to save your city, or a president to lead you through a depression or a war? I would still pick character, but I would place heavier emphasis on a different set of virtues, virtues like courage, tenacity, integrity — and, of course, competence.
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus tipped us off more than 2,500 years ago that “character is destiny.” A person’s true self — that enigmatic bundle of habits, dispositions, and attitudes called character — can influence more than that person’s own life, of course, and this too has been known for millennia. History is largely known to us, after all, through the acts and thoughts of great heroes and villains whose character shaped their times. But as important as it is to understand how powerful character is in influencing events, it is more important to recognize how powerful we are in molding our own character and, therefore, in controlling our destiny. Character may determine our fate, but character is not determined by fate.
Character is often thought of as something fully formed and permanently fixed very early in life. This implies that we have little to do with who we are, that what we call character is essentially a composite of hereditary traits, tendencies and temperaments, and environmentally imposed values and attitudes. Psychoanalytic claims that the personality (a concept related to but different than character) is essentially formed by the age of six and old aphorisms such as “A leopard can’t change its spots” and “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” depict character as etched in stone, something to understand and accept, not something that can be altered or improved. Even Popeye says, “I am what I am.” The hidden message: don’t expect me to be more, better, or different.
There is no doubt that the good and bad habits that become our virtues and vices are strongly influenced by both heredity and environment. But in no sense is anyone predestined to be good or bad, nor is a person’s character permanently fixed by external circumstances.
Describing a person’s character is like taking an inventory of that person’s dominant habits of thought and action at a particular time.
Of course it’s not easy to change our ways. Our habits of heart and mind are well entrenched, rooted in durable dispositions and beliefs. Yet just as a mountain is constantly being reshaped by weather, our character can be reformed by our choices. Our human capacity to reason and choose makes the formation of our character an ongoing process. Each day we can decide to be different. Each day we can decide to change our attitudes, reevaluate and rerank our values, and exercise a higher level of self-control to modify our behavior. Yes, character is the cause of our actions, but it’s also the result of our actions. As Aristotle said, “we are what we repeatedly do.” Hence the power to control our actions is the power to control our character, and the power to control our character is the power to control our lives.
To better understand the power of character, however, it’s important to understand the nature of character and the central role it plays in our everyday lives. Everything we do and say ultimately arises from and reveals our character. In addition to a proper concern for improving our character, we should care about the character of others. If we know a person’s character, we can better predict how he or she is likely to respond to temptation, adversity, and success. It helps us make better judgments when we know about the character of the people we date and marry, do business with, and elect as our political leaders.
In recent years, public discussion about the character of various politicians, business executives, journalists, sports stars, and even children has dominated national media coverage. It would be a mistake to underestimate the profound impact on our national consciousness of stories of unspeakable acts of violence and callousness by youngsters and of the never-ending barrage of scandals among high-profile leaders and celebrities. More and more we are called upon to evaluate individuals and understand events in terms of character.
So we must be careful to recognize the different ways that the word character is used. Sometimes we use the term strictly in a descriptive sense, as if we were describing a particular “nature” or established pattern. Although we can talk about a person’s character without making moral judgments, most of the time we use the term in the context of praising or scorning a person.
When we say a person “has character” or that we want to “build character” in youngsters, the idea of good character is implied. A person who has character is thought to be especially worthy, virtuous, or admirable in terms of moral qualities.
There are three qualities that are essential to good character. First, people of character have good principles. They believe in honor, integrity, duty, compassion, justice, and other ethical values. People of character also possess two emotional or psychological qualities that help them live up to their values: conscience and courage. Conscience is an internalized sense of right and wrong, a virtuous inner voice that unceasingly reminds us of our moral obligations and urges us to live up to them. A strong conscience will not he denied. It enforces its moral judgments by rewarding good behavior with good feelings of pride and self-esteem, and it imposes penalties for bad behavior, in the form of shame and guilt. But even good principles and a vigilant conscience aren’t always enough. Many of us know when we are doing something wrong, and we know we’ll feel bad afterward — but we still do it. Thus, the third quality possessed by people of good character is moral courage, or willpower, something to help us do the right thing even when it’s costly, risky, or unpleasant.
Character, then, is moral, or ethical, strength. Your strength. And your future.