I recently had a conversation with my oldest son that was both edifying and alarming. One Saturday morning, he said something like this: “school has taught me to argue well, to write good papers, and give speeches, but because they are afraid to offend they have not taught us much about right and wrong. Does that mean that I have just learned how to do rhetoric?” As you can imagine, this comment brought the ordinary chores of a Saturday morning to a complete halt.
Those who are familiar at all with classical philosophy will know that the interaction of philosophy and rhetoric was a major catalyst for the development of philosophy and logic in ancient Athens. In the Gorgias, Plato portrayed rhetoric as almost entirely evil: capable of effective persuasion but unconnected to truth. Aristotle took a more moderate view. Rhetoric is a tool that has its place, but only those with a virtuous character should use it. Interestingly, Plato and Aristotle agree that rhetoric on its own does not provide one with a fulsome understanding of what is really good. And, this is so important. Without knowledge of the good, one does not know what is really desirable and what is not. The upshot is that Plato condemns rhetoric in favor of philosophy — the true philosopher comes to see the good in itself — and Aristotle insists that a virtuous man should be well established in moral character before taking up rhetoric. With this background in mind, I can honestly say that my son’s comments were both encouraging and discouraging. His comments were encouraging because he had truly and rightly spotted a lacuna in his education: modern education (even in relatively good schools) remains largely silent on the question of virtuous character, and I was proud that my son had the intelligence to realize this truth. At the same time, the lack of character formation in contemporary education is lamentable.
To invoke the langue of T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis, men without character are men without chests — they are the hollow men.1 Without character, men lack the wisdom to know what to do and the strength to fulfill difficult duties. And it must be admitted that this characterization fits the men and women of our all too well — foolish, weak, and full hubris. Alisdair MacIntyre noticed this trend in his magnum opus, After Virtue, and identified it with the “character” of the manager.
In Macintyre’s view every cultural epoch has central “characters” who embody social norms and expectations. For example, medieval characters include the king, the knight, the saint, and even the fool. The contemporary era is embodied by the soulless manager; this character is devoid of deep moral commitments, but a master of efficiency. He is effective, impactful, and useful, for almost any project; to put it a different way, he is an effective means to almost any end, regardless of its virtue. Let that sink in. He is like an excellent marksman. He consistently kills enemy combatants, regardless of who is in the right or wrong. In this way, the manager is in the arena of practical action, like the sophist in the arena of speech. The sophist is a master of persuasion. He can convince almost any audience of almost anything. And in this way the sophist is useful. But the problem is this: mastery in persuasion is indifferent to truth and falsehood. It is all a matter of technique.
The “type” of the manager tells us something important about modern culture. He is useful, amoral, and technique driven. In saying these things, I do not mean to demean the manager — the effective use of resources is obviously useful. Every society needs effective agents. But the manager is amoral in this sense: he is not defined by a moral end, a substantive view of the good. Of course this could be said of many professions. So why is the case of the manager so important? The reason is this: it is not the mere existence of managers. Managers are necessary for effective organization. Rather the problem in our time is this the preeminence of managers. In other epochs, sages, kings, priests, artists, saints, and philosophers were preeminent. They developed a substantive ethos, a felt cultural pressure that oriented the community beyond the merely useful to what is really good for the community. Once ethos is at work and embodied in the leadership class, the managers become truly useful, as they organize resources for what is really good. But this structure is exactly what our society lacks, and it is revealed by the preeminence of the manager.
The preeminence of the managerial type indicates that a society lacks a mature and deep ethos; such a society is characterized by triviality, selfishness, superficiality, and ignorance. This sort of society is dysfunctional because it lacks a shared substantive spirit; it lacks Logos and Telos. In the managerial perspective, there is no set moral agenda for society, no common good, but only competing individual agendas. Each individual follows his own desires whether they are correct or not. This arrangement is conducive to selfishness, greed, lust, and so on — so it is no wonder that such an arrangement is popular. (More on this point below.) And of course in this scenario the manager is preeminent — he is valued because he is effective toward any end or agenda, without regard to virtue.
Ultimately, the ascendancy of the managerial type is the symptom of a spiritual malaise, namely, the technological attitude. In this perspective, technique and technology are preeminent because nothing is valuable in itself (there is no purpose in itself). Instead, everything becomes a mere instrument to the more craven appetites of humanity: greed, hubris, lust, and the cowardly avoidance of both death and transcendence. Use and use value dominates all evaluation. Technique reigns supreme in this way of being because it feeds the appetite and distracts the conscience. Of course, not all of humanity is so demonic, but this evil is real and pervasive in the hollowed out character of modern culture and education. Indeed, this is why we teach our students to be men without chests — men without ethos, logos, and telos. Such men are designed to be the technology of other men’s appetites.
How did we get to this point? One could provide several answers: the decline of the liberal arts in education, the hollowing out of religion, excessive diversity, debilitating demographic trends, et cetera. Of these options, the corruption of education may be the most damning, but I want to concentrate on something that comes before formal education.
Aristotle teaches us that before young men are educated they must already have the right forms of love and hatred, that is, they must already be animated by a love of God, family, country, ancestors, and virtue, and they must hate everything opposed to these values. To be sure, some may be repulsed by the claim that students should have the right forms of hatred. Regarding this point, Thomas Aquinas points out that the passion of hatred is usually rooted in a prior act of love. For Thomas, hatred is not arbitrary hostility; rather it consists in the ardent rejection (antipathy) of whatever is opposed to love. One who loves his family, hates (rejects) those things that threaten his children. Understood in this way, there should be no real objection to the notion of a “correct hatred.”
Moreover, when I speak of correct passions, I am not referring to a correct knowledge of what should be loved or what should be hated. Rather I am referring to concrete, living passions. Perhaps surprisingly these are the raw materials for forming virtuous character, especially prudence. The key insight here is to realize that virtue presupposes at least some ends that are already desired and intended. Indeed, When we desire and intend the right sort of objectives, we lay the foundation for a virtuous character.
The desire to create a family, worship God, and serve your nation are the forms of love that give rise to virtue, whereas the craven desires for endless wealth or unlimited praise set the stage for vice and decline. To put it another way, virtue presupposes well-tutored passions and inclinations. Men disciplined in this way do not lack chests, they do not lack character, and as such they can put their education to the proper use. They can use technique without giving in to the technological attitude, and doing so is of paramount importance for two reasons.
First, a society led by men without chests is lost, blind, and incapable of pursuing the common good; it gropes blindly into the future. Perhaps more importantly, the picture of the technological society that I have painted is deceptive in one important way. The technological society holds out the possibility of a society in which advanced techne empowers individuals in their pursuit of individual satisfaction. This image suggests that technological society facilitates the spontaneity and originality of the individual. It is every man for himself, but at least each man gets to do it his way through the power of technology. However, the truth is much darker. The technological society empowers some to dominate and use others; indeed those few who control technology, actually control everyone else. The preeminence of technology does not mean the liberation of man from natural boundaries, but the domination of the many by the few. If we would avoid the tyranny of techne, we need much more than democracy and the like. We need leaders with chests.[1]
[I did not mean to write such a dark essay; sometimes the words have a will of their own.]
[1] Many sources inspired this essay: Heidegger’s later philosophy, C. S. Lewis’s, Abolition of Man, and T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men” and to a lesser extent James Burnham. The idea of “men without chests” comes from C. S. Lewis.
The phrase “men without chests” is taken directly from C. S. Lewis.
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