The (empty) content of our Characters

What I learned from former Premier Jay Weatherill

The incipient nihilism of low expectations

In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre offers a two-stage account of the way in which the modern West became ethically disoriented - lost. A late chapter elaborates on the idea of the character. The English Gentleman is one such character: a figure of restraint, honour, and public service. Shaped by elite education and institutional affiliation, he personified the civic and moral ideals of a Protestant, imperial society. His virtue was practical rather than speculative, exercised through behaviour, not argument.

In Germany, the Professor or Bildungsbürger played a parallel role: the custodian of intellectual and moral culture. His task was to sustain the philosophical and literary traditions that defined German identity, and to do so with seriousness and public purpose. He was not merely an academic, but a guide to ethical development.¹

The Statesman was another key figure—a politician whose purpose was not merely to wield power but to judge wisely in pursuit of national interest understood within some notion of justice. Such figures were judged by their wisdom and rhetorical integrity, not just their outcomes. Finally, the Poet or Cultural Voice played a prophetic role: articulating the aspirations of a people, giving language to their hopes, and bearing the burden of moral imagination.

What unites these figures is their embodiment of roles which align personal aspiration and public expectation. People knew what to expect of a gentleman or a statesman because they shared in the tradition that defined those roles. These characters were resources to help a person not just understand and interact with others, but to forge their own aspirations for their life project.

II. The Hollowing Out: Modernity and the Character as Functional Role

MacIntyre’s central thesis is that the Enlightenment severed ethics from tradition and teleology, leaving a fragmented moral landscape. The result was not the disappearance of characters, but their transformation into roles with diminished moral gravity.

The Manager embodies this shift: a figure of technical competence who claims neutrality in pursuit of efficiency. The Therapist grounds improved personal well-being in self-management rather than the cultivation of character. The Aesthetic Individualist performs identity without commitment to virtue.

These roles are not immoral but pragmatic. They operate within systems that no longer ask what kind of person one should become—only how effectively one performs various roles. Though moral language persists, it floats largely free of character development, reduced to branding and posture.

Yet these roles still mediate cooperation. There remains some trust in expertise, governance, and psychological support. The characters may no longer inspire, but they still work—to keep the system functional, even as deeper commitments within the culture that once gave it meaning continue to fade.

III. Incipient Nihilism: When Characters Become Caricatures

But what if the expectations that once called people to virtue are replaced by expectations of failure, incompetence, or self-interest? That idea - that we are living in an age already foreshadowed by MacIntyre - jumped out at me as South Australia’s former Premier Jay Weatherill put it to me:

The jaundiced view about each of the actors in the policy world looks like this.

• If you're an expert, you're out of touch;

• If you're a punter, then you're ignorant and don't understand;

• If you're a politician, you're power-hungry, self-interested and grasping;

• If you’re a bureaucrat, you’re a cardigan-wearing lazy featherbedder.

These are the caricatures each group have of the other in the system. And they're well established. But the truth is, all of the players have a crucial role in the system, and each needs to respect the others’ role.

If the system is to work, it applies the values and commonsense judgment of ordinary, everyday citizens. It has regard to the evidence including from experts who seek to serve the public. Bureaucrats advise on practicability and then implement what’s decided. And the politicians must try to it all together, to shepherd and shape the debate to resolve matters with all the trade-offs and complexities they entail.

It is hard to say how much better or worse those in public life are behaving, but public understanding of how they’re behaving has changed profoundly. We no longer expect public figures to act nobly, or even competently. Instead, we look on with suspicion and brace for betrayals. And accompanying that suspicion comes a new form of managerialism: Rather than trusting expertise, it seeks to constrain damage through performance metrics and externalised standards of accountability.

Public life is framed less and less in terms of building the skills and appetite to advance the public good and more and more in terms of containing opportunism and self-interest. The spirit of such a system is not to expand human possibilities and to elevate, but to protect against further decline. And this atmosphere is self-reinforcing. The less we expect of public actors, the less they can expect of themselves. Virtue becomes a kind of eccentricity. This is the incipient nihilism of low expectations.

Conclusion: From Expectation to Aspiration

The stereotypical characters of modern life are not exemplars of moral seriousness, nor even of practical efficiency. Our media inures us to the venality of the apparatchik, the individual who pays lipservice to their formal role, but who operates as a parasite, turning the environment, often subtly towards their own ends. And without the ability to aspire—to become something worthy of the roles we occupy—public life collapses into performative nihilism. As MacIntyre puts it in After Virtue.

In any society which recognized only external goods, competitiveness would be the dominant and even exclusive feature… We should therefore expect that, if in a particular society the pursuit of external goods were to become dominant, the concept of the virtues might suffer first attrition and then perhaps something near total effacement, although simulacra might abound.²

The irony is that the self-interest of those within such structures is itself a parody of actual self-interest. Each Janus-faced operative lives a life of quiet misery and desperation—at once self-interested and self-alienated. At best such a system can function, but not well; at worst, it enables crimes at scale such as RoboDebt in Australia, the Post Office Horizon scandal in the UK, and the injustices now burgeoning in the United States.

1. This essay was drafted by me and ChatGPT. I told it what I wanted to argue and input the Jay Weatherill quote and and then wrestled with numerous outputs till I was reasonably happy with it. But going back to MacIntyre having written the essay, I find he has explained what he means by ‘characters’ and their significance for his argument rather better than we have done.

In the case of a character role and personality fuse in a more specific way than in general; in the case of a character the possibilities of action are defined in a more limited way than in general. One of the key differences between cultures is in the extent to which roles are characters; but what is specific to each culture is in large and central pan what is specific to its stock of characters. So the culture of Victorian England was partially defined by the characters of the Public School Headmaster, the Explorer and the Engineer; and that of Wilhelmine Germany was similarly defined by such characters as those of the Prussian Officer, the Professor and the Social Democrat.

Characters have one other notable dimension. They are, so to speak, the moral representatives of their culture and they are so because of the way in which moral and metaphysical ideas and theories assume through them an embodied existence in the social world. Characters are the masks worn by moral philosophies.

After Virtue, Original edition, p. 28.

What ChatGPT wrote about MacIntyre that I’ve included checked out with my reading of it a good while back, but I’ve not been through it with a fine-tooth comb to guard against hallucinations.

2. External goods are rewards such as money, power, or status that lie outside the activity itself and can be achieved through various means. By contrast, internal goods are intrinsic to a particular practice and can only be fully realized through a deep, skillful engagement with that practice including the sincere buying into its values. They include the excellence, insight, or achievement made possible only by participating in the activity well—such as the elegance, integrity and/or power of a mathematical proof or a legal argument, or the collaborative beauty of ensemble performance. Unlike external goods, internal goods are not zero-sum: one person’s achievement does not diminish another’s, and they help sustain the shared standards of the practice itself.