The think tank Demos recently launched another eye-catching project with a speech from no-one less than leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron. Based on their report Building Character, Demos’ Character Inquiry will gather a range of academics, policy makers, think tankers and third sector worthies to explore the meaning and place of character in public policy and discourse. Running until June 2011, the inquiry will commission new research into character development in early years and parenting, through the school curriculum, voluntary sector organizations, the work place, social networks and the like.
The original report argued that the capacity for empathy, application and self-discipline has a significant impact on life chances, and it reflected on what role public policy might have in ensuring children develop these ‘character capabilities’. The report’s authors explicitly took an Aristotelian view of character, seeing it as the sum of those attributes, or virtues, which enable the individual to live ‘skilfully’ or well.
Three kinds of disadvantage inhibit the development of these attributes. First, the children of parents with low incomes and low educational achievement are less likely to develop these characteristics. Second, some children are naturally less resilient and more vulnerable to the ill-effects of poor parenting. These children are found across the socio-economic spectrum, though when they find themselves in poorer homes they end up doubly disadvantaged. Third, and most importantly, poor parenting negatively affects the development of good character traits, while parents exercising a ‘tough love’ approach of warmth plus strong discipline give their children the greatest opportunity to develop their best capabilities. The public policy priority, suggest the authors, should be support for parents in the crucial early years through programmes like Sure Start and the new Family Nurse Partnership.
In one respect, this is a statement of the blindingly obvious. Children do better when they are parented with love and discipline, and are not materially deprived. But it is also more than that.
Matthew Taylor, formerly Tony Blair’s adviser and now Chief Executive of the RSA, suggested in his 2009 RSA annual lecture that developments in neuroscience and behaviourism are increasingly influential for public policy, challenging the near-sacred assumption that, given the chance, we always make rational decisions. In light of this, politics should move away from the supposedly incontrovertible rules of economics and toward the messy minutiae of human psychology. And it should be prepared to ask the threatening question, how can the state influence you to do the things you ought? Demos’ Character Inquiry, along with Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s popular book, Nudge, are both firmly in this new ‘tradition’.
There is a problem, however. The Character Inquiry will revisit one of the most fundamental questions of political thought, albeit in psychological rather than philosophical language: what makes a good citizen, one capable of playing his or her part in a complex economic and political community? At first glance, it’s Aristotle for the age of behavioural economics and social psychology. Unlike Aristotle, however, who said that “every city-state is a sort of community and every community is established for the sake of some good”, the Demos work offers no reflection on what the good – the life lived for its own sake – should be.
Instead, the authors write in general terms about an individual fulfilling his or her potential, developing caring positive relationships, committing ourselves to our work and learning and educating ourselves. In other words, they opt for the late modern capitalist and individualist democracy as the given form of civil life. Get your grades, get a job, make sure you move up the ladder.
To talk of character capabilities, of virtues, without reflecting on the goods that might be worth achieving, seems deracinated “What is missing from contemporary debate [on well-being and happiness] is a clear idea of the character attributes underpinning a good life”, suggest the authors. No doubt they are right, but this is surely a problem that can’t be remedied without the broader context of moral and political reflection.
For example, we should not commit ourselves to any form of work, since all are not equally good. Will I have parented well if I have ensured my son will dedicate himself unstintingly to the work of an arms trader? It is a good to be able to commit ourselves to learning, but what is it good to learn? Is it only those things that will add ‘value’ in the economy – facts, facts, facts, in the words of Charles Dickens’ Thomas Gradgrind – or are the liberal arts still of use? These are not theoretical issues, but hard political questions about schools’ curricula, parenting education, and so on.
Building character is important. Hopefully, Demos’ Character Inquiry will highlight that. But reflection on character, on the virtues capable of moving us toward the good life, can’t be separated from a notion of what the good life consists of.
Paul Bickley is Senior Researcher at Theos.
