I want to be clear upfront: I don’t agree with Brooks’ perspectives on character and virtue.Knowing a little (but not much) about Brooks before reading his new book, I was skeptical, but I wanted to take seriously his ideas and think through his approach to virtue ethics and moral character. So I read through the entire book and I took the time in this post to type up a summary of his conclusion. I suppose that I should say more about my assessment of his book, and I might. But not right now.
David Brooks has a new book this spring (2015) in which he argues for the recovery of a lost language and ecology of “moral realism.” Central to this moral realism is a recognition that we are “crooked timber” (read: sinful, flawed, weak) and need to prioritize building up our character over building up our résumé. I’ve since read/skimmed the book, The Road to Character, but I first encountered his ideas on character in his NY Time’s op-ed, “The Moral Bucket List.”
Here’s a list of his virtues from that article:
HUMILITY
Stop promoting yourself so much. Become aware of your limits.
SELF-DEFEAT
Stop competing with others. Confront yourself and your deepest weaknesses.
DEPENDENCY
Stop pretending self-mastery is possible. We need others to help us in our struggles. We need connections for a meaningful life.
ENERGIZING LOVE
Stop focusing only your self. Loving/the love of others energizes us, helps give us focus, and reminds us that life is about more than ourselves.
BEING CALLED
Stop working for money, status, success. Be called to a profession.
And here’s a summary of his main points, in his concluding chapter to The Road to Character:
1. We don’t live for happiness, we live for holiness.
“the meaningful life is the combination of some set of ideals and some man or woman’s struggle for those ideals” (262).
2. The goal of life is to engage in moral struggle, to recognize and take seriously that we are flawed—selfish, self-centered, over-confident, motivated by status/material things, weak-willed.
3. Even as we are flawed, we also have the capacity for inner-struggle and for overcoming our sins/limits. We must sacrifice worldly success for inner victory.
4. Humility is the most important virtue. Humility = having accurate assessment of self and place in cosmos; an awareness that we are underdogs in struggle, that our individual talent alone are inadequate and recogntion that we are not the center and that we “serve a larger order” (263).
5. Pride is our central vice. Pride blinds us to our own weaknesses and misleads us into thinking we’re better than we are. It makes us too certain and close-minded and unwilling to show our vulnerability. “Pride deludes us into thinking we are the authors of our own lives” (263).
6. Once our basic needs are met, the struggle against sin and for virtue is our primary task. “No external conflict is as consequential or as dramatic as the inner campaign against our own deficiencies” (263). “The purpose of the struggle against sin and weakness is not to “win,” because that is not possible; it is to get better at waging it” (263).
7. Character is built in the course of your inner confrontation. “Character is a set of dispositions, desires and habits that are slowly engraved during the struggle against your own weaknesses” (263-264).
8. Character (courage, honesty, humility) endure over time; weaknesses/temptations (list, fear, vanity) are short term.
9. No one can achieve self-mastery on their own. We need others: “You have to draw on something outside yourself to cope with the forces inside yourself” (264-265). “We wage our struggles in conjunction with others waging theirs, and the boundaries between us are indistinct” (265).
10. We are ultimately saved by grace. Grace can come in form of love from friends, family, a stranger, God. Grace = acceptance by others.
11. Defeating weakness means quieting the self. Muting the sound of our own ego and practicing habits of self-effacement: reticence, modesty, obedience to something bigger than us (265).
12. Wisdom starts with epistemological modesty. We’re not as smart as we think; there’s so much we don’t know. We need to skeptical of reason, relying more on experience and the “collective knowledge (practical wisdom, traditions, habits, manners, moral sentiments, practices) of our ancestors (266).
13. The good life is only possible when organized around a vocation. Don’t look for your calling from within, look for it outside of yourself. Don’t try to answer, “What do I want from life?” but “What is life asking of me?” (266).
14. The best leaders try to lead with the grain, not against it. “The goal of leadership it to find a must balance between competing values and competing goals” (266).
15. The person who successfully struggles against weakness and sin may or may not become rich and famous, but that person will become mature. Maturity = being better than you used to be, dependable, developing a “unity of purpose” (267).
In the final paragraph of his book, Brooks defines joy:
JOY is not produced because others praise you. Joy emanates unbidden and unforced. Joy comes as a gift when you least expect it. As those fleeting moments you know why you were put here and what truth you see. You may not feel giddy at those moments, you may not not hear the orchestra’s delirious swell or see flashes of crimson and gold, but you will feel a satisfaction, a silence, a peace—a hush. Those moments are the blessings and the signs of a beautiful life (276).
Sometime soon, I want to put Brooks’ version of joy beside/s Audre Lorde’s expression/description of it in Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.