Character Defects: By the Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
Naming and Listing Them . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333
Pride . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .336
Evolving Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .336
Linguistic Ambiguity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
Pride as a Defective Concern for Self-importance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .338
The Defects of Pride . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339
Regard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340
Privilege . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344
Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345
Superiority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
Greed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349
Envy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352
Sloth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .356
“Having discussed in general terms what is understood by character and distinguished it from temperament and personality, we now turn to the matter of its defects, which together with those of emotions is the principal focus of Step 4.
First, we will review our discussion of what the Big Book and the 12&12 tell us about character defects: what they are, how we acquire them, how they relate to our emotions, and how, together with these, they drive us to do wrong and cause harm. Having gone over this, we then turn our attention to how it applies to specific defects, zeroing in on four that our two texts suggest would be central to any inventory.
. . .
Where the 12&12 departs from the Big Book is in adding a psychobiological conceptualization of character defects which links our concerns to natural or innate “instincts” (“motivational drives” today) and the natural desires which flow from them. The defects result from these instincts and desires having “warped” us by being misdirected (1), running wild (2), going astray (3), and exceeding their intended purpose (6). Unlike the case with temperament and personality, however, this conceptualization is not a reductively scientific and secular one. As we have seen (cf. chapter 6), such instincts and natural desires are wholly necessary and right and surely given us by God (S4, p. 43). What warps them is excess and disorder. That is what causes us to “depart” from the degree of perfection which God wants for us here in this world (S6, p. 65). This departure or deviation, this moving away from God’s will for us, is the very “measure” of our defects of character. Thus, we have again the identification of character defects with self-will and the reaffirmation of their essentially moral and spiritual nature.
In short, character defects result from what we have described as disordered concerns or, as we might recall Augustine describes them, disordered loves. We care for the wrong things, for the wrong reasons, at the wrong time, in the wrong order, to the wrong extent, and for the wrong duration. Excess constitutes the typical form of the disease: we place an inordinate value on something; we want it too badly. This is a disorder of degree. But the excess typically hides a deficiency: there is something else which we don’t value or want badly enough—but which we ought to. When we put our job ahead of our family or our health (physical, mental, spiritual), we are also putting these things after our job. What should be first is second and what second first. Here we have a disorder, a wrong ordering of our moral priorities.
These disorders of the heart in turn distort our vision, generating disordered emotions. We experience anger, fear, guilt, shame, regret, and the other moral emotions in all the wrong ways: for the wrong reason, toward the wrong object, with the wrong motive, at the wrong time, in the wrong manner, to the wrong degree, and for the wrong duration. (cf. chapter 7). Disordered emotions then devolve into disordered words and deeds.
. . .
As it should be only too clear from everything we have said so far in this chapter and throughout this book, making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves is no easy task. The obstacles we face are many. To begin with, we are not sure what moral means. We are not sure we like the word either. Nor are we sure what character is. We confuse it with temperament and personality and are unable to tell how these three fundamental aspects of our person interact in us. Being unclear about character, we are unclear about its defects. We confuse them with defects of emotion and are at a loss to understand their particular interaction as well. We may also confuse them with mistakes or errors in judgment. If we are religious, we may confuse them with sins. If we are psychologically inclined, we may confuse them with neuroses or other categories we may happen to subscribe to. We may also confuse cause and effect, thinking that our defects are the things we did wrong, rather than the things within us which led us to do them. We may even think that the cause is not in us at all, but outside, in people, places, and things.
These difficulties may result in putting off or never working Step 4, or in doing something other than what the Step intends. In the chapter on the concept of character we noted the three possibilities the 12&12 mentions, according to whether temperamentally we are on the depressive or the self-promoting side. Additional dispositional impediments were noted in the chapters on temperament and personality. But none of these natural tendencies function independently of character. Our character either mitigates or exacerbates them. Thus, it is our character flaws—the very things we are supposed to examine—that constitute the greatest stumbling blocks to our inventory.”