[Erin] Character

Peggy Noonan's WSJ column today about the lessons of Tim Russert's life and death is a must read. Excerpt:

In a way, the world is a great liar. It shows you it worships and admires money, but at the end of the day it doesn't. It says it adores fame and celebrity, but it doesn't, not really. The world admires, and wants to hold on to, and not lose, goodness. It admires virtue. At the end it gives its greatest tributes to generosity, honesty, courage, mercy, talents well used, talents that, brought into the world, make it better. That's what it really admires. That's what we talk about in eulogies, because that's what's important. We don't say, "The thing about Joe was he was rich." We say, if we can, "The thing about Joe was he took care of people."

The young are told, "Be true to yourself." But so many of them have no idea, really, what that means. If they don't know who they are, what are they being true to? They're told, "The key is to hold firm to your ideals." But what if no one bothered, really, to teach them ideals?

After Tim's death, the entire television media for four days told you the keys to a life well lived, the things you actually need to live life well, and without which it won't be good. Among them: taking care of those you love and letting them know they're loved, which involves self-sacrifice; holding firm to God, to your religious faith, no matter how high you rise or low you fall. This involves guts, and self-discipline, and active attention to developing and refining a conscience to whose promptings you can respond. Honoring your calling or profession by trying to do within it honorable work, which takes hard effort, and a willingness to master the ethics of your field. And enjoying life. This can be hard in America, where sometimes people are rather grim in their determination to get and to have. "Enjoy life, it's ungrateful not to," said Ronald Reagan.

Tim had these virtues. They were great to see. By defining them and celebrating them the past few days, the media encouraged them. This was a public service, and also what you might call Tim's parting gift.

Read the whole thing, if you can--it's a wonderful reminder of the fact that some of the best qualities of a good life are the intangible virtues a person carries with him throughout his life, such that some people seem like a success regardless of the financial or material heights to which they rise, while other people, at the pinnacle of their fields or the top of their games, do not inspire us with admiration or a desire to emulate them.

What causes the difference? Why is one person good, honest, wise, kind, and humble, while another is bad, a liar, foolish, selfish, and vain? A lot of it has to do with the choices we make in our lives, to be sure. But there's an aspect of it that has to do with the formation of character, the deliberate instilling into children of the notion that such concepts as good and evil matter, that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and that, whatever we may believe about eternity, there will be consequences even in the here and now for deliberate acts of evil.

This process, the forming of character, is a mysterious one. Historical examples abound of two children raised in the same family, one of whom is virtuous, and one of whom is not. We can look all the way back to the story of Cain and Abel in the Bible for the earliest example of the kind of thing I'm talking about.

But does that mean that character is some kind of a gamble, that the actions of wise and loving parents will have no effect on a child's eventual nature? No. Parents must accept that they may, in the end, not be able to keep a child from making bad choices and ending up as the sort of person who sees no point in goodness; but that doesn't mean that they're absolved from the responsibility of even trying to instill goodness in their little ones, and teaching them that selfishness, lying, unkindness to friends, greediness, or the other faults young children display are neither cute nor clever, but ultimately destructive.

How does a parent teach these things? How does a parent raise up a child to seek the kind of goodness and nobility that Noonan describes as characteristic of Tim Russert?

There is only one way: the parent must model the virtues he wishes his children to adopt. Children are quicker than anybody to pick up on hypocrisy, and they observe everything. The parent who punishes them for lying, for example, but who frequently tells obvious lies to get out of work responsibilities or family functions or inconvenient social obligations will not escape his or her children's notice; the message learned will then not be "Don't lie," but "don't let anyone catch you lying," a fundamentally different precept.

Earlier this week Rod posted a video clip of Luke Russert at his father's memorial service. The dignity, grace, and poise of that young man at a most difficult hour in his young life were impossible to ignore, and impossible not to find moving. But when you've been raised by someone who himself is of good character and who isn't negligent in imparting those character lessons to you, you will quite likely be able to model them yourself, even at a time of darkness.