In the contemporary cultural climate, ‘identity’ has become a dominant organising principle. It is celebrated as fluid, self-defined, and often disconnected from the deep, rooted qualities once associated with character. Yet in pursuing this freedom, we may have inadvertently lost something crucial: the grain of human nature that grounds a person in reality, history, and moral substance.
David Brooks, in The Road to Character, traces this shift with acute concern. He argues that modern society has privileged the self-constructed, performative identity over the hard-won development of inner character. Instead of cultivating what he calls “eulogy virtues” — humility, courage, fidelity — we are increasingly trained to curate an outward-facing identity, chasing autonomy, self-esteem, and personal brand. This results in individuals who, despite surface vibrancy, are inwardly fragile, restless, and untethered from any enduring moral framework.
Brooks’ diagnosis finds an echo in the work of Carl Jung. For Jung, the persona — the social mask — is a necessary adaptation to collective life but should never be mistaken for the totality of the self. True character, for Jung, is formed through the individuation process, a slow, often painful journey that requires the integration of unconscious depths with conscious intentions. It demands a confrontation with one’s shadow, one’s limits, and the eternal truths that shape human life across cultures and eras. Character, in this sense, is not invented but discovered and shaped through discipline, self-awareness, and faithful adherence to realities greater than the ego.
Both Brooks and Jung, therefore, stand within an essentialist tradition: they affirm that there is something in human nature — flawed, complex, yet enduring — that must be acknowledged and worked with, rather than endlessly reimagined or denied.
This essentialist view stands sharply at odds with the existentialist model of selfhood that has gained prominence today. In the existentialist (and now postmodern) framework, identity is self-authored, meaning is subjective, and authenticity lies in personal feeling rather than adherence to external moral truths. The rise of the Gender Identity movement illustrates this shift vividly: individuals are encouraged to define their essence purely by inner sense or feeling, regardless of biological, historical, or social realities. Identity becomes a subjective declaration, with little or no reference to stable human nature or the shared conditions of embodied life.
This move has profound consequences. When identity is detached from any rooted sense of character or nature, it risks becoming a free-floating signifier — a label whose content is determined by personal will alone. Brooks warns that without the anchoring effect of enduring virtues and traditions, the modern individual becomes an approval-seeking machine, dependent on external affirmation, yet fundamentally adrift.
Carl Jung would recognise this danger immediately: a life lived solely through the persona, mistaking social performance for inner substance, leads not to wholeness but to neurosis, fragmentation, and alienation from the Self.
Franz Kafka, whose nightmarish visions often explored the hollowing of personal identity under bureaucratic and existential pressures, did not celebrate the dissolution of character. He warned of it. In works like The Trial and The Castle, Kafka portrayed individuals crushed and bewildered by impersonal systems in which personal dignity and moral agency had been replaced by arbitrary roles and meaningless labels. His world is one where the hollowing of character leads to despair, absurdity, and dehumanisation.
Today’s rush to affirm subjective identities without regard for the deeper moral and psychological structures of the person risks creating precisely the condition Kafka warned against: a world where character dissolves, and what remains is an endless, anxious performance, lacking true centre or substance.
Recovering a true sense of character — as Brooks and Jung advocate — does not mean returning to rigid, oppressive norms. It means recognising that human beings flourish not when they invent themselves endlessly, but when they wrestle faithfully with the givens of their nature: with their limitations, their moral struggles, their responsibilities to others and to time-tested traditions.
Freedom, rightly understood, is not the ability to declare oneself anything at will. It is the freedom to grow into the person one is called to become, shaped by forces deeper and more enduring than personal feeling alone.
In a culture obsessed with fluid identity, the call to cultivate solid character may seem old-fashioned. Yet it may be the very antidote we need — not to imprison the self, but to rescue it from the despair of hollowness, and to re-anchor it in the enduring mysteries of what it means to be fully human.
If we are to navigate this moment wisely, we must recall that the project of becoming is not a blank canvas, but a careful apprenticeship to reality. True individuality is not forged by unmoored declarations of selfhood, but by a disciplined, patient engagement with the enduring structures of meaning — the “crooked timber” of our nature, as Kant described it. To cultivate character is not to deny freedom, but to deepen it — to exchange restless self-invention for a life of rooted dignity, complexity, and grace.
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