In a world that celebrates chicken nuggets, snack puffs and french fries, how do you convince a child to choose better foods like broccoli, fresh fish or apple slices?
HAL 9000 background source: Warner Bros
Future Apple devices may be able to use motion detection to read lips, and so trigger Siri without needing a microphone to constantly listen out for commands.
If you're old enough, the notion of Siri being able to read lips in any way has immediately and worryingly brought Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" to mind. Hopefully if Apple is channeling that 1968 film, it is because the computer HAL 9000 had superb voice recognition skills.
In comparison, Siri has much more difficulty reliably and consistently understanding spoken commands, but to be fair it also hasn't yet tried to kill the crew of a spaceship. It's swings and balances.
Conceivably, though, giving Siri an extra aspect such as detecting mouth and head movements could Boost its accuracy. A newly-revealed patent application called "Keyword Detection Using Motion Sensing," aims to do that — but then something more.
"[Data] is received from a motion sensor, for instance, recording the motion of a user as the user utters a spoken input," says the patent application. "A determination is made whether a portion of the motion data matches reference data for a set of one or more words (e.g., a word or phrase)."
"Additionally, voice [only] control systems can result in false positive responses ," mentioned Apple, "if the audio sensor picks up ambient noise or speech from an unintended user."
The patent application details how mouth movements can be compared against previous data as Siri or a device attempts to find a match.
Detail from the patent showing how motion detection can be compared against previous data to determine what someone is saying
But this is not really for improving Siri, and it's not a sign that Apple is planning some devices without microphones. Instead, Apple proposes that such motion detection could mean being able to switch off the microphones that a device uses to constantly listen for "Siri," or "Hey, Siri."
"[Continuously] detecting and processing audio data expends power and processing capacity even when the user is not actively using voice control," says Apple.
"When a user speaks, the user's mouth, face, head, and neck move and vibrate," it continues. "Motion sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes can detect these motions, while expending relatively little power compared to audio sensors such as microphones."
Detecting motion now and comparing it to previous records seems clearly able to work when what's being said is "Hey, Siri," or some other regular command. like "Next track." When the spoken command is less common, such as "Hey, Siri, open the pod bay doors," then surely motion detection won't work.
But as long as motion detection is fast enough, spotting that a user has said "Siri" should mean the device being able to turn on the microphones in time to catch the rest vocally.
Other than referring to accelerometers and gyroscopes, Apple's patent application doesn't spend much time discussing the devices that could be used to implement this proposal.
However, it is lip reading by motion detection, rather than through cameras and line of sight. So, especially in conjunction with an iPhone, this motion detection could theoretically work with AirPods as well as, for instance, Apple Vision Pro.
This patent application is credited to two inventors, including Madhu Chinthakunta. Chinthakunta's previous work for Apple includes a patent for having Siri automatically make arrangements and calls on your behalf.
Four Kansas City Public Schools received grants worth about $2.3 million each as part of a national effort to bridge technological gaps in urban schools.
Two high schools — Central and Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts — and two middle schools — Central and Foreign Language Academy — are among 31 schools nationwide benefiting in the latest round of the Verizon Innovative Learning Schools program.
The district celebrated the program with an event on Monday, the first day of school.
“The best thing about technology is it doesn’t care about age, race, nationality, anything like that,” says Stephanie Kimbrough, digital technology mentor at Paseo. “The best thing is that it’s there and if you want to learn, it will be there for you.”
Every student at the four schools receives an Apple iPad and 30 gigabytes of data per month from Verizon. A technology coach at each school is helping bring new methods to the classrooms.
The program began in 2014 to target schools in urban and rural areas that face poor internet. Though schools in St. Louis and Wichita previously joined the program, the four KCPS schools are the first in the KC area.
Schools are chosen from factors such as socioeconomic circumstance, graduation rate and teacher retention.
“It’s not just doing your problems on a piece of paper or a workbook,” says Joe Jarrett, KCPS director of digital learning. “It’s going to that next level of not only just consuming it but they’re also able to actually show you what they learned and get their creative processes into play.”
As is standard practice in schools, the iPads come equipped with precautions.
“We have web filters that keep students away from bad things and management software where they’re not just watching YouTube all day,” Jarrett says. “Teachers could send them to apps or make them stay in certain apps. We got cards built in to ensure safety, privacy and security.”
For educators like Kimbrough, the new challenge in the classroom will be teaching students how to use the device effectively and responsibly.
“One of the things that we have to do as educators and as good parents will be to make sure that we’re using it for the right purposes and sometimes when you don’t know the reason for a thing, abuse is inevitable,” says Kimbrough, who has taught at Paseo for 13 years. “What we’re going to try to do is make sure that we understand that this is not just something for entertainment but it’s also for information and learning.”
For district officials like Jarrett, the pandemic was the biggest realization of the technological divide. When classes switched to digital learning, some families needed help ensuring their children had the online resources and equipment.
“I think this will really move the needle with anybody who may have been kind of behind before that,” he says.
The district hopes to add additional schools in subsequent years into the program.
At Paseo’s celebration, crowds of parents and students filled the cafeteria on Monday to receive their iPads for the school year. Faculty, district representatives and members of the Verizon team spoke about the program and their excitement at adding KCPS to the nationwide initiative.
“During the pandemic we were able to issue either a laptop or a tablet,” says Scott Jones, chief technology officer for KCPS. “The difference between this and that is the hotspots and the main complaint we heard are that students ran out of data.”
Jones says that upgrading to an iPad operating system is a “game changer” and that in three years the district plans on converting all devices to Apple products.
“These devices are state of the art, new, user friendly and very reliable,” says Jones, who has held his position since January. “We’re going to be rolling out even more technology, and we have a very aggressive three-year technology plan.”
Kimbrough feels that Paseo will have an added layer of benefit with the devices, given the performing arts focus of the school. Students can use applications for music production, photography, videography, editing and design.
While she understands some teachers may be apprehensive about adding a possible distraction into the classroom, it will be the job of educators to challenge students in new ways.
“When it comes to professional development, I’m going to maximize usage of this device,” says Kimbrough. “It’s a wonderful tool, but nothing will replace a teacher. What this can do is change what teaching looks like, and it’s our job as teachers to rewrite the narrative.”
It’s a common perception that children are young, healthy, active and thin, and bad food choices won’t have a big effect. But the reality is that lifelong eating habits are being formed at an early age. And studies show that adult health problems like heart disease, diabetes and obesity begin in early childhood. Fatty streaks start forming on the aorta, and coronary arteries can show signs of damage in children younger than 10.
“It’s such a challenge for parents,” said Julie Mennella, a developmental psychobiologist who studies childhood taste preferences. “The food environment is so abundant with these nutrient poor foods. And we’ve got a brain that finds these tastes extremely palatable.”
But parental concerns about the importance of healthy eating can sometimes backfire, causing children to reject foods or develop preferences for less healthy options. While you can’t always control what your child eats, you can learn from the research and avoid what experts say are six common food mistakes.
Creating forbidden foods
Studies show that food restrictions backfire. When sweets and sodas are in the home and placed out of reach or restricted, it results in a “forbidden food” effect and just makes children want those foods more.
In a seminal study at Pennsylvania State University, children in day care were allowed to eat as many apple or peach cookie bars as they wanted. (In earlier taste tests, the kids had rated the cookies as “just okay” and certainly not binge-worthy.) Another batch of the fruit cookies was put in a clear jar on the table, and the children were told they could have those cookies later.
Although the children already had free access to similar cookies, they couldn’t stop thinking about the cookies in the forbidden jar. When it was finally opened, they binged, eating three times as many cookies as they did when they were freely available.
The research is one of many studies to show the downside of restricting foods and trying to control what a child eats. Children raised in highly restrictive homes are more likely to be overweight and crave sweet and fatty foods.
The findings don’t mean you should supply children unlimited access to cookies and soda. Keep junk food out of the house and keep healthier snacks — apple slices, cheese and crackers or carrot sticks and ranch dressing — on hand. The goal should be for the parent to control the quality of the food in the house, and for a child to take it from there.
Keeping kids on a regular meal and snack schedule can help. “It’s not laissez faire,” said Isobel Contento, emerita professor of nutrition and education, Teachers College, Columbia University. “It should be on some kind of schedule. You can offer healthy food and sometimes not-so-healthy food. They get to choose what they eat.”
Hiding vegetables in foods
Some cookbooks and parenting websites tout making macaroni and cheese with pureed butternut squash or hiding zucchini and beets in a brownie. It’s fine to add healthful ingredients to foods, but it’s not going to help a child learn to eat a more varied diet.
Feeding a child a squash brownie doesn’t teach them to like squash — it just teaches them to like a brownie.
A better approach to teaching kids to eat more vegetables is to create “food bridges.” If you know your child likes carrots, for instance, try introducing other orange foods like sweet potatoes or pumpkin. Mashed potatoes are a short food bridge to mashed cauliflower. If your child likes corn, add a few peas or carrots into the mix. Even if your child picks them out, it’s still a way to introduce them to a new food.
Treating fat and thin children differently
Sometimes siblings in the same home can have different eating habits and body development. But the solution isn’t to restrict the eating of the overweight child, pediatric obesity experts say. The household food rules for both children should be the same. (An exception might be if a child has diabetes or a food allergy.)
A thin child shouldn’t have access to processed foods and soda just because they aren’t overweight. Parents should set the example, and both children should have equal access to healthful food options. And it’s okay for everyone in the family to have dessert or a birthday cupcake from time to time.
“The same foods that are healthy for one child are healthy for another child,” said David Ludwig, professor at Harvard Medical School and co-director of obesity prevention at Boston Children’s Hospital. “And what’s going to treat a weight problem in a child with obesity will also help prevent the problem from developing in a sibling who is thin.”
Not giving children input
Parents can control the quality of the food in the house, but children should still be part of the decision-making. Taking kids grocery shopping or to a farm stand allows them to pick the vegetables they want. (But be warned: Grocery stores often display junk food at a child’s eye level.) Bring children into the kitchen to take part in food preparation. Sometimes you can cook vegetables together; sometimes dessert. If you have the room and time to garden, involving children in growing their own food has been shown to help with food acceptance.
Researchers at Teachers College studied nearly 600 children from kindergarten to sixth grade. Most of the children took nutrition classes, and some of the children were given cooking lessons. The children who learned to cook their own foods were later more likely to choose those foods from the school cafeteria.
“Including children with the food preparation is considered a good way to help them become familiar with a food and be willing to try it,” said Contento, a co-author of the study.
Giving up
Studies show it can take 15 or more tries to get a child to like a new food, so it’s a mistake to supply up. While you can “gently” encourage a child to try a new food, don’t force, cajole or offer a reward. (Some research suggests children start liking foods even less if they are bribed to eat them.)
And even if your child is a champion of picky eating, breakthroughs can still happen. If your child has a friend who is an adventurous eater, invite them over for dinner. Studies show that children can learn good and bad eating habits from friends. (But don’t make a big deal about it.)
When your fussy preschoolers leaves the green beans on the plate, make an example of enjoying them yourself. And don’t be afraid to make foods more tasty. If your child likes cheese, put cheese on the broccoli. Ranch dressing and peanut butter can be great dips for carrot and celery sticks.
“Most kids eventually do come to like the foods we eat,” Contento said. “Try different ways of cooking the food, change how it’s presented. I have great empathy for parents these days, but keep trying.”
Forgetting to enjoy the family table
Don’t let meals be a source of stress, and avoid food battles. As your children grow, they will remember more than just the food. Food traditions — a special ritual at Thanksgiving or popcorn night watching a movie — last in our memories and create positive associations with food.
“Food habits can define the family,” said Mennella, a member of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, a scientific institute focused on taste and smell. “It’s not just about the foods you eat every night. It’s the time to shape what you want your family to be. What are the special foods that define who you are as a family? It’s looking at food in a different way, as an identity that bonds people and triggers memories of childhood.”
Do you have a question about healthy eating? Email EatingLab@washpost.com and we may answer your question in a future column.
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At Black Hat 2023, Maria Markstedter, CEO and founder of Azeria Labs, led a keynote on the future of generative AI, the skills needed from the security community in the coming years, and how malicious actors can break into AI-based applications today.
Jump to:
The generative AI age marks a new technological boom
Both Markstedter and Jeff Moss, hacker and founder of Black Hat, approached the subject with cautious optimism rooted in the technological upheavals of the past. Moss noted that generative AI is essentially performing sophisticated prediction.
“It’s forcing us for economic reasons to take all of our problems and turn them into prediction problems,” Moss said. “The more you can turn your IT problems into prediction problems, the sooner you’ll get a benefit from AI, right? So start thinking of everything you do as a prediction issue.”
He also briefly touched on intellectual property concerns, in which artists or photographers may be able to sue companies that scrape training data from original work. Authentic information might become a commodity, Moss said. He imagines a future in which each person holds ” … our own boutique set of authentic, or should I say uncorrupted, data … ” that the individual can control and possibly sell, which has value because it’s authentic and AI-free.
Unlike in the time of the software boom when the internet first became public, Moss said, regulators are now moving quickly to make structured rules for AI.
“We’ve never really seen governments get ahead of things,” he said. “And so this means, unlike the previous era, we have a chance to participate in the rule-making.”
Many of today’s government regulation efforts around AI are in early stages, such as the blueprint for the U.S. AI Bill of Rights from the Office of Science and Technology.
The massive organizations behind the generative AI arms race, especially Microsoft, are moving so fast that the security community is hurrying to keep up, said Markstedter. She compared the generative AI boom to the early days of the iPhone, when security wasn’t built-in, and the jailbreaking community kept Apple busy gradually coming up with more ways to stop hackers.
“This sparked a wave of security,” Markstedter said, and businesses started seeing the value of security improvements. The same is happening now with generative AI, not necessarily because all of the technology is new, but because the number of use cases has massively expanded since the rise of ChatGPT.
“What they [businesses] really want is autonomous agents giving them access to a super-smart workforce that can work all hours of the day without running a salary,” Markstedter said. “So our job is to understand the technology that is changing our systems and, as a result, our threats,” she said.
New technology comes with new security vulnerabilities
The first sign of a cat-and-mouse game being played between public use and security was when companies banned employees from using ChatGPT, Markstedter said. Organizations wanted to be sure employees using the AI chatbot didn’t leak sensitive data to an external provider, or have their proprietary information fed into the black box of ChatGPT’s training data.
SEE: Some variants of ChatGPT are showing up on the Dark Web. (TechRepublic)
“We could stop here and say, you know, ‘AI is not gonna take off and become an integral part of our businesses, they’re clearly rejecting it,'” Markstedter said.
Except businesses and enterprise software vendors didn’t reject it. So, the newly developed market for machine learning as a service on platforms such as Azure OpenAI needs to balance rapid development and conventional security practices.
Many new vulnerabilities come from the fact that generative AI capabilities can be multimodal, meaning they can interpret data from multiple types or modalities of content. One generative AI might be able to analyze text, video and audio content at the same time, for example. This presents a problem from a security perspective because the more autonomous a system becomes, the more risks it can take.
SEE: Learn more about multimodal models and the problems with generative AI scraping copyrighted material (TechRepublic).
For example, Adept is working on a model called ACT-1 that can access web browsers and any software tool or API on a computer with the goal, as listed on their website, of ” … a system that can do anything a human can do in front of a computer.”
An AI agent such as ACT-1 requires security for internal and external data. The AI agent might read incident data as well. For example, an AI agent could obtain malicious code in the course of trying to solve a security problem.
That reminds Markstedter of the work hackers have been doing for the last 10 years to secure third-party access points or software-as-a-service applications that connect to personal data and apps.
“We also need to rethink our ideas around data security because model data is data at the end of the day, and you need to protect it just as much as your sensitive data,” Markstedter said.
Markstedter pointed out a July 2023 paper, “(Ab)using Images and Sounds for Indirect Instruction Injection in Multi-Modal LLMs,” in which researchers determined they could trick a model into interpreting a picture of an audio file that looks harmless to human eyes and ears, but injects malicious instructions into code an AI might then access.
Malicious images like this could be sent by email or embedded on websites.
“So now that we have spent many years teaching users not to click on things and attachments in phishing emails, we now have to worry about the AI agent being exploited by automatically processing malicious email attachments,” Markstedter said. “Data infiltration will become rather trivial with these autonomous agents because they have access to all of our data and apps.”
One possible solution is model alignment, in which an AI is instructed to avoid actions that might not be aligned with its intended objectives. Some attacks target modal alignment specifically, instructing large language models to circumvent their model alignment.
“You can think of these agents like another person who believes anything they read on the internet and, even worse, does anything the internet tells it to do,” Markstedter said.
Will AI replace security professionals?
Along with new threats to private data, generative AI has also spurred worries about where humans fit into the workforce. Markstedter said that while she can’t predict the future, generative AI has so far created a lot of new challenges the security industry needs to be present to solve.
“AI will significantly increase our market cap because our industry actually grew with every significant technological change and will continue growing,” she said. “And we developed good enough security solutions for most of our previous security problems caused by these technological changes. But with this one, we are presented with new problems or challenges for which we just don’t have any solutions. There is a lot of money in creating those solutions.”
Demand for security researchers who know how to handle generative AI models will increase, she said. That could be good or bad for the security community in general.
“An AI might not replace you, but security professionals with AI skills can,” Markstedter said.
She noted that security professionals should keep an eye on developments in the area of “explainable AI,” which helps developers and researchers look into the black box of a generative AI’s training data. Security professionals might be needed to create reverse engineering tools to discover how the models make their determinations.
What’s next for generative AI from a security perspective?
Generative AI is likely to become more powerful, said both Markstedter and Moss.
“We need to take the possibility of autonomous AI agents becoming a reality within our enterprises seriously,” said Markstedter. “And we need to rethink our concepts of identity and asset management of truly autonomous systems having access to our data and our apps, which also means that we need to rethink our concepts around data security. So we either show that integrating autonomous, all-access agents is way too risky, or we accept that they become a reality and develop solutions to make them safe to use.”
She also predicts that on-device AI applications on mobile phones will proliferate.
“So you’re going to hear a lot about the problems of AI,” Moss said. “But I also want you to think about the opportunities of AI. Business opportunities. Opportunities for us as professionals to get involved and help steer the future.”
Disclaimer: TechRepublic writer Karl Greenberg is attending Black Hat 2023 and recorded this keynote; this article is based on a transcript of his recording. Barracuda Networks paid for his airfare and accommodations for Black Hat 2023.
OUR teaching professionals are the foundations of our children’s development.
After teaching methods were revised with urgency when the Covid pandemic struck, our education establishments sought to ensure parents that their young ones would not miss out on vital lessons.
The Best Teaching Professional category has three people that stood out within their roles.
One of the three shortlisted is John Crook from Lakes College, whose selfless approach to his job and life landed him as a finalist in this category.
John’s day-to-day routine alone makes him a worthy finalist but his work outside of teaching proves just how generous he is, from sponsoring Workington Reds Ladies and volunteering at the local parkrun.
Inside of education, John hands out hampers to employers and staff and always has his students' interests at heart.
John's plans for the future are to simply continue doing exactly what he is doing now and get his students to achieve the best they can. 'Don’t fix something that isn’t broken!'
John spoke about his reaction to the nomination, saying: “It is very, very humbling. I just do what I normally do and I do not expect anything back, it is not what I am about.
"It is very exciting and nice to be recognised, but it is for my students. It is an honour for us all.”
Also shortlisted is Sarah Graham from Lakes College.
Sarah has worked at Lakes College for 15 years after only initially coming for 10 weeks. She teaches GCSE maths and works with the Centre for Excellence in Maths as one of ten lead trial teachers across the country, developing the concept of 'mastery in maths'.
Sarah’s goal in her teaching is to find out a lot of information about her students so that she can break that down and pinpoint any gaps in their learning.
Sarah said: “I just love teaching and I love teaching maths because I think it’s a beautiful subject.”
Sarah is already working with the exam board to try and get more data from schools and know more about children when they start - as well as looking to increase the use of mastery in maths.
Sarah spoke about the build up to the awards night, saying: “It’s quite exciting but I don’t do anything for the reward.
"I love getting up on a morning and thinking that I can make a difference to people’s lives, so it is nice to be recognised for that.
"I’ve been before and I’m looking forward to it, even if it is a little bit scary.”
Laura Reid, from Ormsgill School in Barrow, is the third finalist. Laura is the school’s lead for maths and ICT, and shares her passion for literature to inspire all her students to read.
She's described by her school as a book-loving teacher who has gone above and beyond her own specialist subject of maths to Boost literacy levels across her school and community.
Laura led a series of 'virtual author events' that has led to virtual school visits from internationally-renowned authors including Michael Rosen, Alex T Smith and Lenny Henry - with further visits planned in the summer.
In December, her Year 3 pupils enjoyed national reach when they sent Christmas cards to their favourite author and got lots of letters, cards and books back, including from the likes of Julia Donaldson, Philip Reeve and Nick Sharratt.
With the help of other school staff, she helped set up a special reading area for the children to enjoy.
Laura’s pupils wanted to nominate her for the Golden Apple Award saying: “Mrs Reid helped me write a letter to Clara Vulliamy - she's my favourite author - and she wrote back and even sent me one of her new books, it was so exciting!”
And…
“Mrs Reid has introduced us to lots of new books. My favourite author is Steven Lenton. I love reading. When I read, I feel happy and calm”
READ MORE: Your Golden Apple finalists for Best Inclusion Initiative are...
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Over the past eight years or so, I’ve been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. But other statistics are similarly troubling. The percentage of people who say they don’t have close friends has increased fourfold since 1990. The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who weren’t married or living with a romantic partner went up to 38 percent in 2019, from 29 percent in 1990. A record-high 25 percent of 40-year-old Americans have never married. More than half of all Americans say that no one knows them well. The percentage of high-school students who report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” shot up from 26 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2021.
Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
My second, related question is: Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. Same with gun sales. Social trust is plummeting. In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity; in 2018, fewer than half did. The words that define our age reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.
We’re enmeshed in some sort of emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis, and it undergirds our political dysfunction and the general crisis of our democracy. What is going on?
Over the past few years, different social observers have offered different stories to explain the rise of hatred, anxiety, and despair.
The technology story: Social media is driving us all crazy.
The sociology story: We’ve stopped participating in community organizations and are more isolated.
The demography story: America, long a white-dominated nation, is becoming a much more diverse country, a change that has millions of white Americans in a panic.
The economy story: High levels of economic inequality and insecurity have left people afraid, alienated, and pessimistic.
I agree, to an extent, with all of these stories, but I don’t think any of them is the deepest one. Sure, social media has bad effects, but it is everywhere around the globe—and the mental-health crisis is not. Also, the rise of despair and hatred has engulfed a lot of people who are not on social media. Economic inequality is real, but it doesn’t fully explain this level of social and emotional breakdown. The sociologists are right that we’re more isolated, but why? What values lead us to choose lifestyles that make us lonely and miserable?
The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to supply their selfishness free rein. The story I’m going to tell is about morals. In a healthy society, a web of institutions—families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces—helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation.
Moral formation, as I will use that stuffy-sounding term here, comprises three things. First, helping people learn to restrain their selfishness. How do we keep our evolutionarily conferred egotism under control? Second, teaching basic social and ethical skills. How do you welcome a neighbor into your community? How do you disagree with someone constructively? And third, helping people find a purpose in life. Morally formative institutions hold up a set of ideals. They provide practical pathways toward a meaningful existence: Here’s how you can dedicate your life to serving the poor, or protecting the nation, or loving your neighbor.
For a large part of its history, America was awash in morally formative institutions. Its Founding Fathers had a low view of human nature, and designed the Constitution to mitigate it (even while validating that low view of human nature by producing a document rife with racism and sexism). “Men I find to be a Sort of Beings very badly constructed,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “as they are generally more easily provok’d than reconcil’d, more dispos’d to do Mischief to each other than to make Reparation, and much more easily deceiv’d than undeceiv’d.”
If such flawed, self-centered creatures were going to govern themselves and be decent neighbors to one another, they were going to need some training. For roughly 150 years after the founding, Americans were obsessed with moral education. In 1788, Noah Webster wrote, “The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities ; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.” The progressive philosopher John Dewey wrote in 1909 that schools teach morality “every moment of the day, five days a week.” Hollis Frissell, the president of the Hampton Institute, an early school for African Americans, declared, “Character is the main object of education.” As late as 1951, a commission organized by the National Education Association, one of the main teachers’ unions, stated that “an unremitting concern for moral and spiritual values continues to be a top priority for education.”
The moral-education programs that stippled the cultural landscape during this long stretch of history came from all points on the political and religious spectrums. School textbooks such as McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers not only taught students how to read and write; they taught etiquette, and featured stories designed to illustrate right and wrong behavior. In the 1920s, W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine for Black children, The Brownies’ Book, had a regular column called “The Judge,” which provided guidance to young readers on morals and manners. There were thriving school organizations with morally earnest names that sound quaint today—the Courtesy Club, the Thrift Club, the Knighthood of Youth.
Beyond the classroom lay a host of other groups: the YMCA; the Sunday-school movement; the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts; the settlement-house movement, which brought rich and poor together to serve the marginalized; Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, which extended our moral concerns to include proper care for the natural world; professional organizations, which enforced ethical codes; unions and workplace associations, which, in addition to enhancing worker protections and paychecks, held up certain standards of working-class respectability. And of course, by the late 19th century, many Americans were members of churches or other religious communities. Mere religious faith doesn’t always make people morally good, but living in a community, orienting your heart toward some transcendent love, basing your value system on concern for the underserved—those things tend to.
An educational approach with German roots that was adopted by Scandinavian societies in the mid-to-late 19th century had a wide influence on America. It was called Bildung, roughly meaning “spiritual formation.” As conceived by Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Bildung approach gave professors complete freedom to put moral development at the center of a university’s mission. In schools across Scandinavia, students studied literature and folk cultures to identify their own emotions, wounds, and weaknesses, in order to become the complex human beings that modern society required. Schools in the Bildung tradition also aimed to clarify the individual’s responsibilities to the wider world—family, friends, nation, humanity. Start with the soul and move outward.
The Bildung movement helped inspire the Great Books programs that popped up at places like Columbia and the University of Chicago. They were based on the conviction that reading the major works of world literature and thinking about them deeply would provide the keys to living a richer life. Meanwhile, discipline in the small proprieties of daily existence—dressing formally, even just to go shopping or to a ball game—was considered evidence of uprightness: proof that you were a person who could be counted on when the large challenges came.
Much of American moral education drew on an ethos expressed by the headmaster of the Stowe School, in England, who wrote in 1930 that the purpose of his institution was to turn out young men who were “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.” America’s National Institute for Moral Instruction was founded in 1911 and published a “Children’s Morality Code,” with 10 rules for right living. At the turn of the 20th century, Mount Holyoke College, an all-women’s institution, was an example of an intentionally thick moral community. When a young Frances Perkins was a student there, her Latin teacher detected a certain laziness in her. She forced Perkins to spend hours conjugating Latin verbs, to cultivate self-discipline. Perkins grew to appreciate this: “For the first time I became conscious of character.” The school also called upon women to follow morally ambitious paths. “Do what nobody else wants to do; go where nobody else wants to go,” the school’s founder implored. Holyoke launched women into lives of service in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. Perkins, who would become the first woman to serve in a presidential Cabinet (Franklin D. Roosevelt’s), was galvanized there.
These various approaches to moral formation shared two premises. The first was that training the heart and body is more important than training the reasoning brain. Some moral skills can be taught the way academic subjects are imparted, through books and lectures. But we learn most virtues the way we learn crafts, through the repetition of many small habits and practices, all within a coherent moral culture—a community of common values, whose members aspire to earn one another’s respect.
The other guiding premise was that concepts like justice and right and wrong are not matters of personal taste: An objective moral order exists, and human beings are creatures who habitually sin against that order. This recognition was central, for example, to the way the civil-rights movement in the 1950s and early 1960s thought about character formation. “Instead of assured progress in wisdom and decency man faces the ever present possibility of swift relapse not merely to animalism but into such calculated cruelty as no other animal can practice,” Martin Luther King Jr. believed. Elsewhere, he wrote, “The force of sinfulness is so stubborn a characteristic of human nature that it can only be restrained when the social unit is armed with both moral and physical might.”
At their best, the civil-rights marchers in this prophetic tradition understood that they could become corrupted even while serving a noble cause. They could become self-righteous because their cause was just, hardened by hatred of their opponents, prideful as they asserted power. King’s strategy of nonviolence was an effort simultaneously to expose the sins of their oppressors and to restrain the sinful tendencies inherent in themselves. “What gave such widely compelling force to King’s leadership and oratory,” the historian George Marsden argues, “was his bedrock conviction that moral law was built into the universe.”
A couple of obvious things need to be said about this ethos of moral formation that dominated American life for so long. It prevailed alongside all sorts of hierarchies that we now rightly find abhorrent: whites superior to Blacks, men to women, Christians to Jews, straight people to gay people. And the emphasis on morality didn’t produce perfect people. Moral formation doesn’t succeed in making people angels—it tries to make them better than they otherwise might be.
Furthermore, we would never want to go back to the training methods that prevailed for so long, rooted in so many thou shall nots and so much shaming, and riddled with so much racism and sexism. Yet a wise accounting should acknowledge that emphasizing moral formation meant focusing on an important question—what is life for?—and teaching people how to bear up under inevitable difficulties. A culture invested in shaping character helped make people resilient by giving them ideals to cling to when times got hard. In some ways, the old approach to moral formation was, at least theoretically, egalitarian: If your status in the community was based on character and reputation, then a farmer could earn dignity as readily as a banker. This ethos came down hard on self-centeredness and narcissistic display. It offered practical guidance on how to be a good neighbor, a good friend.
And then it mostly went away.
The crucial pivot happened just after World War II, as people wrestled with the horrors of the 20th century. One group, personified by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, argued that accurate events had exposed the prevalence of human depravity and the dangers, in particular, of tribalism, nationalism, and collective pride. This group wanted to double down on moral formation, with a greater emphasis on humility.
Another group, personified by Carl Rogers, a founder of humanistic psychology, focused on the problem of authority. The trouble with the 20th century, the members of this group argued, was that the existence of rigid power hierarchies led to oppression in many spheres of life. We need to liberate individuals from these authority structures, many contended. People are naturally good and can be trusted to do their own self-actualization.
A cluster of phenomenally successful books appeared in the decade after World War II, making the case that, as Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman wrote in Peace of Mind (1946), “thou shalt not be afraid of thy hidden impulses.” People can trust the goodness inside. His book topped the New York Times best-seller list for 58 weeks. Dr. Spock’s first child-rearing manual was published the same year. That was followed by books like The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). According to this ethos, morality is not something that we develop in communities. It’s nurtured by connecting with our authentic self and finding our true inner voice. If people are naturally good, we don’t need moral formation; we just need to let people get in touch with themselves. Organization after organization got out of the moral-formation business and into the self-awareness business. By the mid‑1970s, for example, the Girl Scouts’ founding ethos of service to others had shifted: “How can you get more in touch with you? What are you thinking? What are you feeling?” one Girl Scout handbook asked.
Schools began to abandon moral formation in the 1940s and ’50s, as the education historian B. Edward McClellan chronicles in Moral Education in America : “By the 1960s deliberate moral education was in full-scale retreat” as educators “paid more attention to the SAT scores of their students, and middle-class parents scrambled to find schools that would supply their children the best chances to qualify for elite colleges and universities.” The postwar period saw similar change at the college level, Anthony Kronman, a former dean of Yale Law School, has noted. The “research ideal” supplanted the earlier humanistic ideal of cultivating the whole student. As academics grew more specialized, Kronman has argued, the big questions—What is the meaning of life? How do you live a good life?—lost all purchase. Such questions became unprofessional for an academic to even ask.
In sphere after sphere, people decided that moral reasoning was not really relevant. Psychology’s purview grew, especially in family and educational matters, its vocabulary framing “virtually all public discussion” of the moral life of children, James Davison Hunter, a prominent American scholar on character education, noted in 2000. “For decades now, contributions from philosophers and theologians have been muted or nonexistent.” Psychology is a wonderful profession, but its goal is mental health, not moral growth.
From the start, some worried about this privatizing of morality. “If what is good, what is right, what is true is only what the individual ‘chooses’ to ‘invent,’ ” Walter Lippmann wrote in his 1955 collection, Essays in the Public Philosophy, “then we are outside the traditions of civility.” His book was hooted down by establishment figures such as the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.; the de-moralization of American culture was under way.
Over the course of the 20th century, words relating to morality appeared less and less frequently in the nation’s books: According to a 2012 paper, usage of a cluster of words related to being virtuous also declined significantly. Among them were bravery (which dropped by 65 percent), gratitude (58 percent), and humbleness (55 percent). For decades, researchers have asked incoming college students about their goals in life. In 1967, about 85 percent said they were strongly motivated to develop “a meaningful philosophy of life”; by 2000, only 42 percent said that. Being financially well off became the leading life goal; by 2015, 82 percent of students said wealth was their aim.
In a culture devoid of moral education, generations grow up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world. The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and a team of researchers asked young adults across the country in 2008 about their moral lives. One of their findings was that the interviewees had not given the subject of morality much thought. “I’ve never had to make a decision about what’s right and what’s wrong,” one young adult told the researchers. “My teachers avoid controversies like that like the plague,” many teenagers said.
The moral instincts that Smith observed in his demo fell into the pattern that the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called “emotivism”: Whatever feels good to me is moral. “I would probably do what would make me happy” in any given situation, one of the interviewees declared. “Because it’s me in the long run.” As another put it, “If you’re okay with it morally, as long as you’re not getting caught, then it’s not really against your morals, is it?” Smith and his colleagues emphasized that the interviewees were not bad people but, because they were living “in morally very thin or spotty worlds,” they had never been given a moral vocabulary or learned moral skills.
Most of us who noticed the process of de-moralization as it was occurring thought a bland moral relativism and empty consumerism would be the result: You do you and I’ll do me. That’s not what happened.
“Moral communities are fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy,” the psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind. When you are raised in a culture without ethical structure, you become internally fragile. You have no moral compass to supply you direction, no permanent ideals to which you can swear ultimate allegiance. “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” the psychiatrist (and Holocaust survivor) Viktor Frankl wrote, interpreting a famous Nietzsche saying. Those without a why fall apart when the storms hit. They begin to suffer from that feeling of moral emptiness that Émile Durkheim called “anomie.”
Expecting people to build a satisfying moral and spiritual life on their own by looking within themselves is asking too much. A culture that leaves people morally naked and alone leaves them without the skills to be decent to one another. Social trust falls partly because more people are untrustworthy. That creates crowds of what psychologists call “vulnerable narcissists.” We all know grandiose narcissists—people who revere themselves as the center of the universe. Vulnerable narcissists are the more common figures in our day—people who are also addicted to thinking about themselves, but who often feel anxious, insecure, avoidant. Intensely sensitive to rejection, they scan for hints of disrespect. Their self-esteem is wildly in flux. Their uncertainty about their inner worth triggers cycles of distrust, shame, and hostility.
“The breakdown of an enduring moral framework will always produce disconnection, alienation, and an estrangement from those around you,” Luke Bretherton, a theologian at Duke Divinity School, told me. The result is the kind of sadness I see in the people around me. Young adults I know are spiraling, leaving school, moving from one mental-health facility to another. After a talk I gave in Oklahoma, a woman asked me, “What do you do when you no longer want to be alive?” The very next night I had dinner with a woman who told me that her brother had died by suicide three months before. I mentioned these events to a group of friends on a Zoom call, and nearly half of them said they’d had a brush with suicide in their family. Statistics paint the broader picture: Suicide rates have increased by more than 30 percent since 2000, according to the CDC.
Sadness, loneliness, and self-harm turn into bitterness. Social pain is ultimately a response to a sense of rejection—of being invisible, unheard, disrespected, victimized. When people feel that their identity is unrecognized, the experience registers as an injustice—because it is. People who have been treated unjustly often lash out and seek ways to humiliate those who they believe have humiliated them.
Lonely eras are not just sad eras; they are violent ones. In 19th-century America, when a lot of lonely young men were crossing the western frontier, one of the things they tended to do was shoot one another. As the saying goes, pain that is not transformed gets transmitted. People grow more callous, defensive, distrustful, and hostile. The pandemic made it worse, but antisocial behavior is still high even though the lockdowns are over. And now we are caught in a cycle, ill treatment leading to humiliation and humiliation leading to more meanness. Social life becomes more barbaric, online and off.
If you put people in a moral vacuum, they will seek to fill it with the closest thing at hand. Over the past several years, people have sought to fill the moral vacuum with politics and tribalism. American society has become hyper-politicized.
According to research by Ryan Streeter, the director of domestic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, lonely young people are seven times more likely to say they are active in politics than young people who aren’t lonely. For people who feel disrespected, unseen, and alone, politics is a seductive form of social therapy. It offers them a comprehensible moral landscape: The line between good and evil runs not down the middle of every human heart, but between groups. Life is a struggle between us, the forces of good, and them, the forces of evil.
The Manichaean tribalism of politics appears to supply people a sense of belonging. For many years, America seemed to be awash in a culture of hyper-individualism. But these days, people are quick to identify themselves by their group: Republican, Democrat, evangelical, person of color, LGBTQ, southerner, patriot, progressive, conservative. People who feel isolated and under threat flee to totalizing identities.
Politics appears to supply people a sense of righteousness: A person’s moral stature is based not on their conduct, but on their location on the political spectrum. You don’t have to be good; you just have to be liberal—or you just have to be conservative. The stronger a group’s claim to victim status, the more virtuous it is assumed to be, and the more secure its members can feel about their own innocence.
Politics also provides an easy way to feel a sense of purpose. You don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow to be moral; you just have to experience the right emotion. You delude yourself that you are participating in civic life by feeling properly enraged at the other side. That righteous fury rising in your gut lets you know that you are engaged in caring about this country. The culture war is a struggle that gives life meaning.
Politics overwhelms everything. Churches, universities, sports, pop culture, health care are swept up in a succession of battles that are really just one big war—red versus blue. Evangelicalism used to be a faith; today it’s primarily a political identity. College humanities departments used to study literature and history to plumb the human heart and mind; now they sometimes seem exclusively preoccupied with politics, and with the oppressive systems built around race, class, and gender. Late-night comedy shows have become political pep rallies. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily during the pandemic because people saw a virus through the lens of a political struggle.
This is not politics as it is normally understood. In psychically healthy societies, people fight over the politics of distribution: How high should taxes be? How much money should go to social programs for the poor and the elderly? We’ve shifted focus from the politics of redistribution to the politics of recognition. Political movements are fueled by resentment, by feelings that society does not respect or recognize me. Political and media personalities gin up dramas in which our side is emotionally validated and the other side is emotionally shamed. The person practicing the politics of recognition is not trying to get resources for himself or his constituency; he is trying to admire himself. He’s trying to use politics to fill the hole in his soul. It doesn’t work.
The politics of recognition doesn’t supply you community and connection, certainly not in a system like our current one, mired in structural dysfunction. People join partisan tribes in search of belonging—but they end up in a lonely mob of isolated belligerents who merely obey the same orthodoxy.
If you are asking politics to be the reigning source of meaning in your life, you are asking more of politics than it can bear. Seeking to escape sadness, loneliness, and anomie through politics serves only to drop you into a world marked by fear and rage, by a sadistic striving for domination. Sure, you’ve left the moral vacuum—but you’ve landed in the pulverizing destructiveness of moral war. The politics of recognition has not produced a happy society. When asked by the General Social Survey to rate their happiness level, 20 percent of Americans in 2022 rated it at the lowest level—only 8 percent did the same in 1990.
America’s Founding Fathers studied the history of democracies going back to ancient Greece. They drew the lesson that democracies can be quite fragile. When private virtue fails, the constitutional order crumbles. After decades without much in the way of moral formation, America became a place where more than 74 million people looked at Donald Trump’s morality and saw presidential timber.
Even in dark times, sparks of renewal appear. In 2018, a documentary about Mister Rogers called Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was released. The film showed Fred Rogers in all his simple goodness—his small acts of generosity; his displays of vulnerability; his respect, even reverence, for each child he encountered. People cried openly while watching it in theaters. In an age of conflict and threat, the sight of radical goodness was so moving.
In the summer of 2020, the series Ted Lasso premiered. When Lasso describes his goals as a soccer coach, he could mention the championships he hopes to win or some other conventional metric of success, but he says, “For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It’s about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves on and off the field.”
That is a two-sentence description of moral formation. Ted Lasso is about an earnest, cheerful, and transparently kind man who enters a world that has grown cynical, amoral, and manipulative, and, episode after episode, even through his own troubles, he offers the people around him opportunities to grow more gracious, to confront their vulnerabilities and fears, and to treat one another more gently and wisely. Amid lockdowns and political rancor, it became a cultural touchstone, and the most watched show on Apple TV+.
Even as our public life has grown morally bare, people, as part of their elemental nature, yearn to feel respected and worthy of respect, need to feel that their life has some moral purpose and meaning. People still want to build a society in which it is easier to be good. So the questions before us are pretty simple: How can we build morally formative institutions that are right for the 21st century? What do we need to do to build a culture that helps people become the best versions of themselves?
A few necessities come immediately to mind.
A modern vision of how to build character. The old-fashioned models of character-building were hopelessly gendered. Men were supposed to display iron willpower that would help them achieve self-mastery over their unruly passions. Women were to sequester themselves in a world of ladylike gentility in order to not be corrupted by bad influences and base desires. Those formulas are obsolete today.
The best modern approach to building character is described in Iris Murdoch’s book The Sovereignty of Good. Murdoch writes that “nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous.” For her, moral life is not defined merely by great deeds of courage or sacrifice in epic moments. Instead, moral life is something that goes on continually—treating people considerately in the complex situations of daily existence. For her, the essential moral act is casting a “just and loving” attention on other people.
Normally, she argues, we go about our days with self-centered, self-serving eyes. We see and judge people in ways that satisfy our own ego. We diminish and stereotype and ignore, reducing other people to bit players in our own all-consuming personal drama. But we become morally better, she continues, as we learn to see others deeply, as we learn to envelop others in the kind of patient, caring regard that makes them feel seen, heard, and understood. This is the kind of attention that implicitly asks, “What are you going through?” and cares about the answer.
I become a better person as I become more curious about those around me, as I become more skilled in seeing from their point of view. As I learn to perceive you with a patient and loving regard, I will tend to treat you well. We can, Murdoch concluded, “grow by looking.”
Mandatory social-skills courses. Murdoch’s character-building formula roots us in the simple act of paying attention: Do I attend to you well? It also emphasizes that character is formed and displayed as we treat others considerately. This requires not just a good heart, but good social skills: how to listen well. How to disagree with respect. How to ask for and offer forgiveness. How to patiently cultivate a friendship. How to sit with someone who is grieving or depressed. How to be a good conversationalist.
These are some of the most important skills a person can have. And yet somehow, we don’t teach them. Our schools spend years prepping students with professional skills—but offer little guidance on how to be an upstanding person in everyday life. If we’re going to build a decent society, elementary schools and high schools should require students to take courses that teach these specific social skills, and thus prepare them for life with one another. We could have courses in how to be a good listener or how to build a friendship. The late feminist philosopher Nel Noddings developed a whole pedagogy around how to effectively care for others.
A new core curriculum. More and more colleges and universities are offering courses in what you might call “How to Live.” Yale has one called “Life Worth Living.” Notre Dame has one called “God and the Good Life.” A first-year honors program in this vein at Valparaiso University, in Indiana, involves not just conducting formal debates on ideas gleaned from the Great Books, but putting on a musical production based on their themes. Many of these courses don’t supply students a ready-made formula, but they introduce students to some of the venerated moral traditions—Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, and Enlightenment rationalism, among others. They introduce students to those thinkers who have thought hard on moral problems, from Aristotle to Desmond Tutu to Martha Nussbaum. They hold up diverse exemplars to serve as models of how to live well. They put the big questions of life firmly on the table: What is the ruling passion of your soul? Whom are you responsible to? What are my moral obligations? What will it take for my life to be meaningful? What does it mean to be a good human in today’s world? What are the central issues we need to engage with concerning new technology and human life?
These questions clash with the ethos of the modern university, which is built around specialization and passing on professional or technical knowledge. But they are the most important courses a college can offer. They shouldn’t be on the margins of academic life. They should be part of the required core curriculum.
Intergenerational service. We spend most of our lives living by the logic of the meritocracy: Life is an individual climb upward toward success. It’s about pursuing self-interest.
There should be at least two periods of life when people have a chance to take a sabbatical from the meritocracy and live by an alternative logic—the logic of service: You have to supply to receive. You have to lose yourself in a common cause to find yourself. The deepest human relationships are gift relationships, based on mutual care. (An obvious model for at least some aspects of this is the culture of the U.S. military, which similarly emphasizes honor, service, selflessness, and character in support of a purpose greater than oneself, throwing together Americans of different ages and backgrounds who forge strong social bonds.)
Those sabbaticals could happen at the end of the school years and at the end of the working years. National service programs could bring younger and older people together to work to address community needs.
These programs would allow people to experience other-centered ways of being and develop practical moral habits: how to cooperate with people unlike you. How to show up day after day when progress is slow. How to do work that is generous and hard.
Moral organizations. Most organizations serve two sets of goals—moral goals and instrumental goals. Hospitals heal the sick and also seek to make money. Newspapers and magazines inform the public and also try to generate clicks. Law firms defend clients and also try to maximize billable hours. Nonprofits aim to serve the public good and also raise money.
In our society, the commercial or utilitarian goals tend to eclipse the moral goals. Doctors are pressured by hospital administrators to rush through patients so they can charge more fees. Journalists are incentivized to write stories that confirm reader prejudices in order to climb the most-read lists. Whole companies slip into an optimization mindset, in which everything is done to increase output and efficiency.
Moral renewal won’t come until we have leaders who are explicit, loud, and credible about both sets of goals. Here’s how we’re growing financially, but also Here’s how we’re learning to treat one another with consideration and respect; here’s how we’re going to forgo some financial returns in order to better serve our higher mission.
Early in my career, as a TV pundit at PBS NewsHour, I worked with its host, Jim Lehrer. Every day, with a series of small gestures, he signaled what kind of behavior was valued there and what kind of behavior was unacceptable. In this subtle way, he established a set of norms and practices that still lives on. He and others built a thick and coherent moral ecology, and its way of being was internalized by most of the people who have worked there.
Politics as a moral enterprise. An ancient brand of amoralism now haunts the world. Authoritarian-style leaders like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping embody a kind of amoral realism. They evince a mindset that assumes that the world is a vicious, dog-eat-dog sort of place. Life is a competition to grab what you can. Force is what matters. Morality is a luxury we cannot afford, or merely a sham that elites use to mask their own lust for power. It’s fine to elect people who lie, who are corrupt, as long as they are ruthless bastards for our side. The ends justify the means.
Those of us who oppose these authoritarians stand, by contrast, for a philosophy of moral realism. Yes, of course people are selfish and life can be harsh. But over the centuries, civilizations have established rules and codes to nurture cooperation, to build trust and sweeten our condition. These include personal moral codes so we know how to treat one another well, ethical codes to help prevent corruption on the job and in public life, and the rules of the liberal world order so that nations can live in peace, secure within their borders.
Moral realists are fighting to defend and modernize these rules and standards—these sinews of civilization. Moral realism is built on certain core principles. Character is destiny. We can either elect people who try to embody the highest standards of honesty, kindness, and integrity, or elect people who shred those standards. Statecraft is soulcraft. The laws we pass shape the kinds of people we become. We can structure our tax code to encourage people to be enterprising and to save more, or we can structure the code to encourage people to be conniving and profligate. Democracy is the system that best enhances human dignity. Democratic regimes entrust power to the people, and try to form people so they will be responsible with that trust. Authoritarian regimes seek to create a world in which the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Look, I understand why people don’t want to get all moralistic in public. Many of those who do are self-righteous prigs, or rank hypocrites. And all of this is only a start. But healthy moral ecologies don’t just happen. They have to be seeded and tended by people who think and talk in moral terms, who try to model and inculcate moral behavior, who understand that we have to build moral communities because on our own, we are all selfish and flawed. Moral formation is best when it’s humble. It means giving people the skills and habits that will help them be considerate to others in the complex situations of life. It means helping people behave in ways that make other people feel included, seen, and respected. That’s very different from how we treat people now—in ways that make them feel sad and lonely, and that make them grow unkind.
This article appears in the September 2023 print edition with the headline “How America Got Mean.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
