DAVID BROOKS, "THE ROAD TO CHARACTER"

On Tuesday morning, I listened to an NPR interview with conservative columnist David Brooks that I found interesting enough to purchase his most recent book on Kindle, titled The Road to Character. 

The book is about what Brooks coins “eulogy virtues, “ as opposed to “résumé virtues.”  Résumé virtues are those qualities that we list on our résumés: skills that we bring to the job market that contribute to our external success. Eulogy virtues, on the other hand, are deeper. They’re the virtues that get talked about at a person’s funeral, those qualities that exist at the core of our being—whether we are kind, brave, honest or faithful; what kind of relationships we formed, and so forth. Brooks continues, saying that “most of us would say that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé virtues,” then suggests that our education system focuses more on  cultivating résumé virtues than the eulogy virtues.

According to Brooks, we live in a society that encourages us to think about how to have a great career but leaves many of us inarticulate about how to cultivate the inner life. The competition to succeed and win admiration is so fierce that it becomes all-consuming. The consumer marketplace encourages us to live by a utilitarian calculus, to satisfy our desires and lose sight of the moral stakes involved in everyday decisions. The noise of fast and shallow communications makes it harder to hear the quieter sounds that emanate from the depths. 

We live in a culture that teaches us to promote and advertise ourselves and to master the skills required for success, but that gives little encouragement to humility, sympathy, and honest self-confrontation, which are necessary for building character. 

To give you a flavor of Brooks own writing, l close with a longer quote from the introduction to the book in which the author eloquently describes the kind of person he has in mind when he speaks of “character.”

“Occasionally, even today, you come across certain people   who seem to possess an impressive inner cohesion. They are not leading fragmented, scattershot lives. They have achieved inner integration. They are calm, settled, and rooted. They are not blown off course by storms. They don’t crumble in adversity. Their minds are consistent and their hearts are dependable. Their virtues are not the blooming virtues you see in smart college students; they are the ripening virtues you see in people who have lived a little and have learned from joy and pain.

Sometimes you don’t even notice these people, because while they seem kind and cheerful, they are also reserved. They possess the self-effacing virtues of people who are inclined to be useful but don’t need to prove anything to the world: humility, restraint, reticence, temperance, respect, and soft self-discipline.

They radiate a sort of moral joy. They answer softly when challenged harshly. They are silent when unfairly abused. They are dignified when others try to humiliate them, restrained when others try to provoke them. But they get things done. They perform acts of sacrificial service with the same modest  everyday spirit they would display if they were just getting the groceries. They are not thinking about what impressive work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all. They just seem delighted by the flawed people around them. They just recognize what needs doing and they do it.

They make you feel funnier and smarter when you speak with them. They move through different social classes not even aware, it seems, that they are doing so. After you’ve known them for a while it occurs to you that you’ve never heard them boast, you’ve never seen them self-righteous or doggedly certain. They aren’t dropping little hints of their own distinctiveness and accomplishments.

They have not led lives of conflict-free tranquility, but have struggled toward maturity. They have gone some way toward solving life’s essential problem, which is that, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it, ‘the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either— but right through every human heart.’

These are the people who have built a strong inner   character, who have achieved a certain depth. In these people, at the end of this struggle, the climb to success has surrendered to the struggle to deepen the soul. […] These are the people we are looking for. “