John Kekes on the ideal of a gentleman

Being a gentleman is not a matter of inheritance, wealth, or refinement. It needs to be earned by having a character with a sense of honor at its core. Character sets limits a gentleman will not cross and acknowledges responsibilities he will not shirk. It involves a commitment to a way of life that in some small or large way, by example or by action, contributes to making some lives better or protecting them from getting worse.

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In The Idea of a University (1852), Cardinal John Henry Newman links gentlemen’s sense of honor to a university education. In our fraught times, education unfortunately often needs to be self-education, acquired by sitting quietly and alone in a room—digital technology silenced—slowly reading and reflecting on what some classic work of history, literature, or philosophy says about the possibilities and limits of life. And sometimes, not very often, it may happen that those who educate themselves discover not just how they might live, but how they must live if they want to be true to the ideal they have learned to admire from reading imaginatively reconstructed examples of others.