These are additional musings from my viewing of The Manosphere. (Initial thoughts here.)
Moral Character We Stopped Pursuing
Something has disappeared from our cultural conversation, and I fear many have not noticed it is gone. The aspiration to moral character, the ancient and enduring conviction that becoming a person of genuine virtue, is a central project of a human life. Rather than an aspiration, it appears to me to be actively ridiculed, or dismissed as naive. What was once the definition of maturity has become an object of contempt.
And I’m not trying to be a moralist or even to impose a certain dogmatism. Rather I’m attempting to appeal to a basic sense of human decency that appears to have vanished.
The Disappearance
In 2012, researchers1 found a significant and consistent decline in the use of words related to moral excellence. General moral terms such as virtue, decency, and conscience appeared with diminishing frequency across the century. Of fifty specific virtue words examined, including honesty, patience, and compassion, seventy-four percent showed a statistically significant decline in usage. The overall finding was that moral ideals and virtues had largely waned from public conversation.
Language matters. When we stop using the vocabulary of virtue, we gradually lose the capacity to think in terms of said virtues, to recognize it, to aspire toward it, or to even name its absence. We do not simply misplace the words. We misplace the realities they represent.
Virtue ethics was a dominant moral framework for centuries, but as its popularity has waned they have been replaced by a preoccupation with productivity, achievement, status, which are the measurable skills one brings to the marketplace. In The Road to Character, David Brooks suggests we’ve replaces what he names the “eulogy virtues,” the qualities that define a person at the deepest level, the ones spoken of when a life is finally assessed in full.
The digital revolution added to the transformation. Social media provided narcissism with an architecture perfectly suited to its ambitions. Every platform rewards performance. The self is curated, not cultivated. The search for approval replaces the invisible work of becoming. Social media as a place for self-promotion, puts people under constant pressure to perform and compete, leaving no time to cultivate a character with depth.
The mental space once occupied by moral struggle has become occupied by the struggle to achieve.
Maturity Redefined
We once understood that maturity accompanied moral achievement. I was taught the mature person is not defined by wealth, status, or the accumulation of experience alone. The mature person is also evaluated by the degree to which they had cultivated a practical wisdom, the capacity to discern what is good in complex situations. This vision included human flourishing. Which is the development of virtue with deeply developed character traits. The wise elder, across virtually every traditional culture, was wise precisely because they had labored over their character. They had faced their failures, learned from moral struggle, and emerged with something solid and trustworthy. I recall this developmental value being highlighted with a citizenship grade in elementary school.
Maturity linked inner formation with outer life. A mature person was someone who had been shaped by years of integrity, compassion, courage, and humility. In a very real sense, our abandonment of character is illustrated by institutionalizing our wise elders.
Maturity today is defined by financial independence, social confidence, or professional achievement. The inner work, the slow and often painful cultivation of character, has no obvious metric and no obvious reward in the marketplace. So it has been set aside and today’s moral maturity is emulated by characters in movies like Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street.
When modern culture banishes words like virtue, character, evil, and vice, it does not make life any less moral. It merely obscures the inescapable moral reality of life with a new language.
The Ridicule of Seriousness
What is distinctive about our current moment is the active mockery of those who take moral character seriously. To speak of virtue in many spaces is to risk being labeled moralistic, judgmental, naive, or culturally retrograde.
Modern society can seem hostile to the concept of virtue because it challenges the hyper-individualism on which it runs, using the term “virtue signaling” as a pejorative. Genuine virtue appeals to a set of principles greater than the individual. In a culture that has made the self the final arbiter, any claim that character should be cultivated or that maturity involves adherence to standards, sounds like an imposition.
Men who speak of honor, integrity, gentleness, or the cultivation of virtue are often met with dismissal. The cultural spaces that present themselves as guides to masculinity tend to regard such language as weakness. Empathy is re-framed as manipulation. Humility is re-framed as defeat. The result is a generation of young men who have been handed an impoverished map that confuses dominance with strength and emotional flatness with maturity.
What’s Next
We must refuse to be embarrassed by the vocabulary of character. Using the language of virtue, of formation of the inner life, and of moral aspiration is needed. It is counter cultural in the most important sense. It keeps alive a way of speaking about human life that the dominant culture has largely abandoned, and which people, particularly young people, are starving for even if they do not know it.
It is important to model what needs to be taught. The insight that virtue is not just about the individual but about the integration of action, emotion, and understanding within a supportive social context remains foundational. The formation of character requires witness as much as instruction. People need to see the virtues lived, not just explained.
One must recover the connection between moral formation and genuine human flourishing. The great traditions understood that the cultivation of virtue was not a burden imposed but the path to the fullest human life. People need to understand that integrity, compassion, and humility are not constraints on flourishing. They are its substance.
Further, character does not develop in isolation. The virtuous person does not resist emotional responses but develops emotional responses appropriate to the situation, a process requiring practical wisdom within community support, exemplars, and cultural practices that reinforce virtuous behavior. This is where community and mentoring relationships carry important weight. The formation of character needs a community of practice, people who are committed to the same aspiration and who hold one another accountable to virtuous ways of living.
Finally, we have to be honest about the cost of this work. There are obligations in our relationships that require character. This is a harder message in a culture that has made the self its highest value. It requires guides who have walked this path long enough to speak of both its difficulties and rewards with honesty.
The Aspiration We Must Recover
Moral character as the aspiration of mature humanity does not need to be a relic of the past. I believe it is a perennial truth that we can honestly live with, understanding the consequences of having abandoned it.
The ridiculing of moral seriousness, the inversion of virtue and vice, the reduction of maturity to performance and achievement need not be the final condition.
My goal is not to moralize but to call people to an aspiration I believe they carry within them, even when they cannot name it. The hunger for integrity, for relationships, for a life of reflection, these do not disappear because the culture has stopped honoring it. It has gone underground, but surfaces as restlessness, as a sense that something essential is missing.
That restlessness is an invitation to the oldest and most serious work of being human.