The Faith Angle Forum is a semi-annual conference which brings together a select group of 20 nationally respected journalists with 3-5 distinguished scholars on areas of religion, politics & public life.
"Character and Public Life"
South Beach Miami, Florida
Speakers:
Dr. James Davison Hunter, LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture and Social Theory, University of Virginia
David Brooks, Columnist, New York Times
Hunter presentation audio | Brooks presentation audio
Q & A audio part 1 | Q & A audio part 2
List of participants found here:
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Michael Cromartie, Moderator[/caption]
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Ladies and gentlemen, our session now, is on Character and Public Life, and one of our speakers, is David Brooks. He has written a bestselling New York Times book now, called The Road to Character. But before that book came out, James Davidson Hunter, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, wrote a book on character called, The Death of Character; A Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil that came out in the year 2000.
Professor Hunter is most well-known for his earlier book over 20 years ago, called Culture Wars, where he diagnosed the battles that were coming and occurring in American culture. And so we've had James here before, talking about Culture Wars, but now we have him, going first, to talk about this question of character and public life.
And we couldn't have two better people to address the question for us, so we're really grateful to have Dr. Hunter and David Brooks, joining us. James, you're on. Thank you.
JAMES HUNTER: Thank you, Michael. I've said before that as an academic, coming to the Faith Angle Conference, one of the best seminars in America, that it's like being invited to host Saturday Night Live --
(Laughter)
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Dr. James Davison Hunter, University of Virginia[/caption]
JAMES HUNTER: And you count the number of times you do it, and there's a kind of status system, by being invited a lot. So this is my, I think, third or fourth time. So anyway, I'm very grateful to be here. Thank you.
I have been asked to reflect on David's new book, The Road to Character, among other things. So I've been in academia too long, to assume that students ever fully prepare for my seminars, and given the busy-ness of your lives, I don't assume that all of you have read and fully digested David's book.
Now, I hope that David will correct me, and fill out, but to get us on the same page, let me just recap the very broad contours of his argument. The Road to Character is a book about the tensions between what he cleverly calls, "resume virtues" and "eulogy virtues," between the virtues of performance and accomplishment and the virtues of transcendence and enduring ideals.
The tension is not new, but ancient, and it is reflected in two sides of our nature; what Rabbi Soloveitchik called "Adam 1" and "Adam 2:" the active building creative vs the contemplative and more spiritual. This binary is not only old, but also deep, for it roughly maps onto other classical dualisms in Western thought: mind vs soul, materiality vs spirituality, the vita activa vs vita contemplative, the sacred vs the profane, and as you got a foretaste this morning from my comments, or my question to Jamie, not insignificantly, again, for my own reflections here, the dualism between public and private.
The Road to Character is not an argument about the unimportance or meaninglessness of Adam 1 or resume virtues, but rather it's an account of the way in which Adam 1 virtues have come to displace Adam 2 virtues. In turn, it is an account of the insufficiency of the resume virtues, absent the guiding, chastening vitality of the eulogy virtues. Inevitably, this is a story about the impoverishment of life and sociality that follow in its wake in the Late Modern period.
This account is brought to life by the biographies of eight extraordinary people. The hardship they faced, the suffering they endured; their failure, disappointments, but also, their triumphs, all often enough hidden from public view. At the same time, it is a recounting of the reservoirs of humility, courage, and vision; in short, their strength of character that they drew upon to lead such exemplary lives.
The Road to Character is not without its implications toward practice, either; applications that David gestures toward in suggesting ways in which we might recover this older way of understanding and living. Despite a few snarky reviews from the literati, The Road to Character has struck a chord, no question about it. There is a palpable hunger for the moral depth and idealism he has written about, a hunger made all the more ravenous by the shocking debasements of public virtue by our political class.
For my own part, recognizing what I think are limitations to the book, it doesn't keep me from acknowledging that this is a beautiful book, a courageous book, a thought-provoking book, and at nearly every page, an inspiring book. Part of what makes The Road to Character distinctive, is that it is simultaneously an expression of personal yearning, an act of collective memory tinged with lament, an exercise in cultural analysis, and a work of self-help, filled with insight and wisdom.
The combination makes the book perplexing at times, but it also makes it rich and compelling. This combination is undoubtedly why it has struck a chord. At the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at UVA, we say that apart from the joys of inquiry and scholarship, pursuits that have their own integrity and that possess their own justification, the way you know you're succeeding in your work, is when you are changing the conversation.
Against the cynicism of some of his critics, David's book, along with so much of his other writing at The New York Times, has gone a long way toward changing the conversation about the nature and possibilities of the moral life in America at the start of the 21st century. This is long overdue, and I, for one, am most grateful.
My comments this afternoon are, at this point, not so much about David's book, but about the larger conversation he has helped to start. In the ways of a somewhat old-fashioned form of literary criticism, I would like to use The Road to Character as a jumping-off point for thinking about the nature of the predicament he talks about and that I agree we are in. My reflections are not only, but they're mainly about language.
So let me launch in by talking a little bit about the nature of the predicament, and I want to begin with a story. I taught a graduate seminar this past fall on culture and morality, and at one point at the beginning of a seminar, I laid out this scenario. This is actually a scenario that comes from some research I did a few years back: I'm from a tough and impoverished neighborhood and I'm selling drugs, some of them to kids.
And so I asked the class, "Tell me, is this right or wrong?"
And the class, of course, in unison, said "Yes."
And I said, "So tell me, why is it wrong?"
And one student pipes up and said, "Well, it's against the law. You'll likely get caught."
I said, "Okay. That's a utilitarian logic. I get that, but let's say I respond, and say 'I don't care, my life is shit. I'll take my chances.'"
Another student said, "Well, then how does it make you feel when you do this?"
Playing the role, I said, "Well, actually pretty good. It gives me money, influence, and respect."
And the student came back and said, "Yes, but it's harmful to people."
And I, continuing to play the role, said, "Sure. Maybe so, but we live in a free country. People have the right to choose. If they choose to buy this stuff, it's not my problem."
And then there was silence.
On another day, I asked a question: "Is it wrong to disparage people on the basis of their race or gender?"
And the class, of course, said, "Yes. Of course it's wrong."
And I said, "So tell me why."
And I think they were taken aback by the question. And a student finally said, "Well, it just is. It's obvious."
And I said, "No, no, tell me why it's wrong."
And the student said, "Well, it's unfair."
And I said, "Well, explain. How is it unfair?"
There was silence. And then finally a student said, "Well, how would you like it if you were treated this way?"
And I said, "Well, so that's an ethic of reciprocity based on empathy."
"But, then I could say, 'Well, I wouldn't like it at all, but I'm in a position of power and privilege, so it doesn't matter how I would feel.'"
"Tell me why it's wrong now. Give me a compelling reason."
And again, silence. But then, just as the conversation was trailing off, a Catholic kid from Louisiana, who rarely said anything in class, yells out, "It's wrong because all people are made in the image of God. People of other races and genders are our neighbors and we will be held to account for how we loved them."
I said, "Okay. Now, that's interesting. We'll come back to that."
Both of these exchanges reflect something important. It isn't as though there is no morality at play in our culture. Conservatives are wrong when they speak about our culture being "amoral." They're just wrong about that.
You could hear moral logics at play: a utilitarian logic, a therapeutic expressivist logic, the logic of empathy based upon reciprocity. Moral judgments are made all the time, and they were here, as well. Rather, the problem is that our moral languages are thin and the moral resources that we have to draw from, to make sense of the moral complexities of life are sparse.
David says on page 15, and I quote:
"We are morally inarticulate. We are not more selfish or venal than people in other times, but we've lost the understanding of how character is built."
I agree. And the consequences of this are as problematic as he says they are.
As individuals and as a society, the moral language available to us is simply not adequate for the challenges that we face. But leading into this observation, David says something that I did balk at. He says, and I quote:
"My general belief is that we've accidentally left this moral tradition" -- what he calls, quoting -- "the crooked-timber moral tradition, behind. Over the last several decades, we've lost this language, this way of organizing life."
But my question, is and sort of the lead into what I'd like to say, mainly like to say, is but is it accidental? Are we culpable for losing this language? Now, I don't want to make too much of that sentence or that word "accidental," except to use it as a rhetorical hook for the major point that I want to make.
I think that the story is more complicated. Later on in the book, Chapter 10, the chapter entitled "The Big Me," David talks about the turn toward narcissism, as embedded in the cultural shift from moral realism to moral romanticism. That this cultural shift was reinforced by economic and technological changes, communications, social media, self-referencing, and information environment, the meritocracy and so on.
This is entirely true. No disagreement here. But it is on this point of how we got here, that I'd like to push the argument and suggest that the problem goes deeper; that the road to character is actually much more arduous, particularly under the conditions of modernity and late modernity.
In putting forth this suggestion, I'd like to frame the problem in light of some theoretical considerations. Okay. I apologize. This is sort of the academic dues that you have to pay to hear this. This may seem like a descent into jargon, but I promise you it's not.
So I want to begin with something about the nature of institutions. Now, there's lot's to say about this, but I want to begin with a philosophical anthropology that underwrites a theory of institutions. Human beings are distinguished from other species by virtue of the fact that we are instinctually deprived.
Now, there may be other things as well, but this we know: unlike other species, we are instinctually deprived. Birds know how to fly, fish know how to swim; giraffes know what to eat, what not to eat. We humans, by contrast, don’t know the things we need to survive; we are unfinished at birth.
It's against the backcloth of our biology that we see the significance of institutions. You see, institutions, which are merely deeply embedded patterns of thought, behavior, and relationship, are human constructions that provide for us what our biology does not. Institutions function like instincts, in that they pattern individual conduct and social relationship and our thinking in a habitual and socially-predictable manner.
Not only do they establish behavior with a stable pattern, but institutions also provide human experience at the cognitive level, with intelligibility and a sense of continuity. By living within the well-defined parameters of an ecosystem of such institutions, we humans need not reflect on our actions. We can take our social world for granted.
In this sense, they exist as a background against which a foreground of deliberation, thought, and choice can occur. I just want you to have this image in your mind. Basically, what I'm arguing, is that the human experience at some level, is divided between foreground and background. Okay?
[caption id="attachment_27106" align="alignright" width="150"] Dr. James Davison Hunter[/caption]
The background is that part of human experience that is embedded within institutions. This is part of our world, our experience that is taken for granted. We don’t have to think about it. It seems natural to us.
So when I stick out my hand, Michael and David, they don't think I'm attacking them. They probably don't think I'm asking them for money. They know immediately what to do. They reach out and shake my hand.
It's the way, we in the West, greet each other. Right? It's taken for granted. It's not thought about. And they never saw a YouTube video about how to do it. They were socialized into it. It has become part of the background of their experience. Think about clothing. When we wake up in the morning, we don't think gee whiz, I wonder if I'm going to get dressed this morning.
It's awfully hot in Miami, maybe I won't wear a thing. Of course you're going to get dressed, and the only real question is what, are you going to wear, and that deliberation happens in the foreground. So foreground and background, I'm going to come back to that in a minute.
So how is this relevant? Let me make three observations, more of a historical nature as it bears upon our contemporary moment. The first observation is this. To make a long story short, under the conditions of modernity and late modernity, the background of stable institutional patterns is receding, and the foreground of choice is growing.
So under the conditions of modernity and late modernity, the realm in which we have to deliberate, think about, choose, is expanding. That area that is taken for granted in the background of our experience is receding. Okay. This is what social theorists call "deinstitutionalization."
Now that does sound like jargon, but it's useful, and it's certainly not referring to the mainstreaming of mental patients, for example. Deinstitutionalization. Things that were in the background that we used to take for granted, are now matters of choice and deliberation.
But here is an important qualification. The foreground expends primarily in the private sphere. The realm of personal identity, intimacy, sexuality, courtship, marriage, parenting, religious belief, consumption patterns, and to the point of our conversation this afternoon, it extends to the realm of the language of morality, of virtue, of the good, and thus of character.
All of these things have been radically deinstitutionalized. Deinstitutionalization spills into the public sphere, but it's mainly operating in the private sphere. What this means, is that the moral inarticulacy that David speaks of, and is not so much a function of moral failure or forgetfulness, but rather it is built into the very nature of the contemporary world.
Now, please it's really important here in this qualification that you not hear a story of decline. This phenomenon that I’m describing is double-edged. Deinstitutionalization of rules and habits surrounding race and gender, is liberation that all of us would celebrate.
But deinstitutionalization is also, as a general rule, confusing, especially as it bears on identity and the moral life. So that's my first observation that deinstitutionalization is a structural characteristic of the modern age. It is built in to the world that we live in. We have to think about, deliberate, and choose, in ways that we didn't have to, and that's both good and bad.
The second observation is this: that if deinstitutionalization mainly takes place in the private sphere, what of the public sphere? Well, you got a flavor for, a foretaste from my question this morning. The public sphere, the sphere of massive bureaucracies of government and law, business and commerce, labor, education, health care, communications, and sometimes religion, is defined by a culture of instrumentalization, utility, efficiency, what Max Weber called "functional rationality."
Indeed, one of the ways in which elite higher education distinguishes itself is in the extraordinary refinement of this kind of instrumental rationality and practice. The meritocratic elite is reproduced by virtue of the fact that it understands that culture and operates within it better than others. This is the “organizational kid” that David has written about.
Thus, the dilemma of late modernity takes shape as a familiar duality. On the one hand, you have a powerful public sphere, organized around a culture of instrumental and technical rationality, which on its own terms is largely incapable of providing individuals with meaning and purpose.
On the other hand, a relatively private sphere, which is sometimes distressingly under-institutionalized, and which is structurally unable to provide the reliable guideposts for meaning, purpose, identity, moral direction. So that's my second observation.
The third observation is this, and it adds one more layer of complication. When stable institutional patterns, habits, routines, are rendered implausible or inconceivable, when older moral codes can no longer be taken for granted, what do we do?
We moderns have no choice, but to turn inward, into our subjectivity. In other words, if there are no longer reliable guideposts out there that are institutionalized and repeated by others in the social world, what do we do?We have to turn inward to find the answers. To reflect, ponder, and probe our newfound choices. This is what is called "subjectivization." A mid-century German theorist called this phenomenon, "permanent reflectiveness."
In short, subjectivization that is the turning inward to our subjectivity, to find answers to life's most important questions necessarily follows deinstitutionalization. And subjectivization cannot help but foster subjectivism within the culture, an orientation marked not so much by vanity and egoism, as it is by an incessant preoccupation with the complexities of one's individual subjectivity.
Subjectivism then, is an orientation built into the late modern world. These constitute some of the deep structures of late modernity. It is on top of these historical dynamics that we find a philosophical and political liberalism that celebrates the autonomy of the individual and the authority of their intuitions, and ideologies of market rationality that celebrate the freedom of individuals and other actors, to initiate, build, consume, as market actors.
So if this is correct, it's not at all an accident that we find ourselves in the spot that we are in vis a vis character, and it is not merely forgetfulness that we have experienced for which we simply need to be reminded. A transition David talks about, "from the culture of humility to a culture of the big me," is not merely a matter of moral failure.
But the quandary David talks about instead, is in fact built into the nature of the modern world we live in, and it is reinforced by the ideological dynamics of late modernity. And those larger historical and structural forces operate in ways over which the individual has little knowledge and less influence.
I want to give an illustration that has been fairly close to home, about how some of these things all come together. In a controversial illustration, I think it helps to illustrate the moral impoverishment, the impoverishment of our language that David calls our attention to. And it plays out, both in public and private life.
[caption id="attachment_27290" align="alignright" width="150"] Dr. James Davison Hunter[/caption]
This is the case of sexual assault—something that has been on the minds of many of us at the University of Virginia in the last couple of years. Needless to say, the dynamics of sexual assault operate in a larger cultural context, one in which the dynamics of instrumental power pervade public, and to a large extent, the private spheres.
At the heart of this culture and at the heart of sexual assault, is an implicit anthropology that conceives of human beings as objects for instrumental ends. When we see human beings as mere objects that have more or less utility, we cannot help but use them, consume them, instrumentalize them, in the ways that we consume, use, and instrumentalize other objects and experiences.
While objectification and instrumentalization and the anthropology that underwrites them are far from cultural novelties, they are, as I have said, pervasive in the public sphere. They are embedded in the most powerful institutions of our society. The market economy, first and foremost, but not least, the university.
Indeed, as I said, one of the ways in which elite higher education distinguishes itself, is in the refinement of this kind of instrumental rationality and practice. So if it's true that anthropology rooted in objectification, and given expression and instrumentalization pervades our public, and to a certain extent private culture, then it has three implications.
First, the crime of sexual assault is an extreme, violent, and criminal extension of the very logic that plays out in the university and in late modern culture. It is a logic that we professors and our students share and perpetuate in practice, even if we repudiate it in theory.
Second, it's essential that there be some minimum standard for determining what is lawful and unlawful with regard to human sexuality. The language of consent has become such a standard. No matter the context, sex can never be forced.
Yet sexuality is historically and cross culturally one of the most symbolically freighted phenomenon of human experience. Against this, our public vocabulary for making sense of it and determining what's right and wrong, good and bad, healthy and unhealthy, about it, tends to come down to that single word. It's a word that bears a lot of weight.
When activists chant, "Yes, means yes" and "No, means no," we're giving political articulation to that concept, to that boundary. Now, believe me, something is better than nothing at all. At least the language of consent and non-consent is a moral boundary. But we should recognize that the consent is by itself, absent anything else, a rather impoverished concept; one that is incapable of accounting for nuance, depth, and complexity in human sexuality. What about beauty? Intimacy? Commitment? Not to mention covenant?
What's most problematic about the language of consent, is that it's the language of transaction, of contract. That means the language of consent is also of a fabric with a larger culture of instrumentality and utility, and therefore incapable of offering an alternative to the very thing it claims to resist.
The final irony, often times tragic, is that even the moral vocabulary of consent, as simple and as straightforward as it sounds, turns out not to be so straightforward in the actual encounter of two people moving toward an intimate sexual encounter. It turns out consent has no clear application. This word also has been deinstitutionalized.
So at this point, I just want to say that I think that the problem that David has laid out for us that we live in a moment when our moral vocabularies are impoverished and that we are inarticulate about the most important questions of our day, is exactly right. The practical question for parents, for educators, for citizens, for all of us, is what we do about it. For me, this is less a question of individual will, as it is a question of space and resources.
I'm fond of quoting Charles Taylor on this point, and he says, "The issue is what sources can support our far reaching moral commitments to benevolence and justice?"
As I've said, the public sphere, dominated as it is, by instrumental rationality and utilitarian ethics, provides the thinnest of moral languages. It's something, but it's relatively thin. There are few resources there. Its own impoverishment is reinforced by a tendency to deny particularity in community and creed, and its tendency to deny sacredness. The private sphere is the only place at this point where there's a possibility of deepening the resources for the cultivation of eulogy virtues, of thickening the moral languages and practices that make for good character. But here too, the instrumentalism of the public sphere encroaches.
It does so in many ways, but not least in our consumerism and in the educational establishment through the utilitarian ethics of positive psychology. What we end up with, is not again the absence of morality, but a thin, mostly bland generic morality that in my view, cannot carry the ethical burden of a world like ours and the existential and ethical burdens we carry as individuals.
The title of David's book, The Road to Character is reminiscent of another book about a road to moral improvement, "Pilgrims Progress." We may or may not be heading toward the celestial city, but like Bunyan's pilgrim, we encounter enumerable difficulties and challenges in our effort to live a good life. We invariably come upon the “Slough of Despond,” of “Hill Difficulty,” the “Wicked Gate,” the “Valley of Humiliation,” and are tempted by a considerable expanded “Vanity Fair.”
But unlike Bunyan's pilgrim, we have to find our way through the “Labyrinths of Modernity.” The path to the celestial city, or if you will, the road to character, is still possible, of course. It's just a hell of a lot more difficult than we imagine. Thank you.
(Applause)
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Thank you, James.
Well, you all have known David for a long time; you're friends. And if you've never met David, or don't know him, the bio is in your packet. But as you heard from James, he's just written a very important book called The Road to Character that's become a bestseller, and I highly recommend it to you. We're delighted that he is here today.
One of our favorite participants at the Faith Angle Forum, is David Brooks. Now, not just a participant, but a speaker. So David, thank you for fitting us into your very, very busy schedule. David, you're on.
[caption id="attachment_27114" align="alignright" width="150"] David Brooks, New York Times[/caption]
DAVID BROOKS: Thank you. I may not be cogent, but I will be vulnerable. I didn't know my book would play such a central role here. I wrote a book about commitment so I could be the center of attention, though; so whatever.
So of course I agree that there is social chaos. My students, I teach at Yale, their social lives are anarchy and brutal and so, I drew on that. I also agree about the moral inarticulacy and the poverty of our language. But I'm a journalist not a sociologist, so I guess what I'm going to respond with, is first that individuals have the agency to find their way out of this problem. That we have wisdom of the heart that is still latent within us, and that if we educate our emotions we can find our way home.
Essentially, we still have the power to pick our own background and we don't have to be turned inward into subjectivism. We can commit outward to something real and transcendent. Souls are not saved in bundles, we do it individually and we can receive salvation. So that's going to be my core optimistic argument: the way out of this predicament, individually.
So I'm just going to tell you quickly the journey to the book. And actually my critique of the book is much more comprehensive than James'. So the book starts with moments and they are emotional moments they're not cognitive moments.
I was driving home from the News Hour. I do this thing called "Shields and Brooks" with Mark Shields. We wanted to call it "Brooks Shields," but they didn't go for that.
(Laughter)
And I'm coming home on a Sunday night, and this was really one of the gestations of the book. It was about 10 years ago. And I drive into my driveway in Bethesda, and I pull around the side. And I look in the backyard.
And my kids, who were then 12, 9, and 4, are in the backyard with one of these balls you get at the supermarket. And they're kicking it up in the air, and they're running across the yard, and they're chasing it down, and they're tumbling all over each other, and they're laughing, and they're having the greatest possible time. And it's just a perfect summer evening; the sun is through the trees, the grass looks perfect.
And I'm just confronted with this scene of perfect family happiness. And at moments like that, you know life and time seem to be suspended. Reality spills outside its boundaries, and you become gracious of the happiness you haven't earned. You become conscious of grace.
And so the first thing you want, is to be worthy of such moments. And the second thing that you want, is to have a desire for such moments, that you become aware of a higher joy than you get at work or in the normal course of life, and you want to stay longing for that thing, even if you can't really get it a lot. So you have that sort of a spiritual uplift.
The second thing that sort of occasioned the book was running into people who radiated an inner light. You run into some people who just radiate joy. And I'll tell this story:
I was at AEI of all places and I get a seat next to the Dalai Lama. And he's a guy who just radiates joy. And so he starts laughing for no apparent reason.
And so he's laughing and I’m sitting next to him. So I want to be polite so I start laughing. And then he laughs and I laugh. He laughs, and I try to insert some jokes to sort of rationalize the laughter.
(Laughter)
And so I'm nervous, so I say to him, "Do you have any" -- he had the little canvas Dalai Lama bag and I say, "You got any candy in your bag?" And he starts pulling out all this stuff, he's got in the bag. And basically, it's everything you get in the First Class cabin on an international flight.
It's like a little razor, earplugs, eye patch, and a big Toblerone bar, but he radiated that joy. And so you say to yourself, or at least I did, "I have achieved way more career success in my life than I ever thought I would, but that I do not have." And you just want to get it, and in that moment -- and this occurred to me two nights ago.
We were in D.C. with a guy named Richard Mouw who spoke after dinner so graciously and so beautifully about conversation and how to treat other people that I at once was inspired by him. I wanted to get that inner light. I was also humiliated at the same time at how far you fall from that.
And so all these things are pushing you in a direction of trying to achieve or long for a higher joy. And so you know I came across, this is Catholic theology, that there are four levels of happiness. There's material pleasure: good food, good sex; there's ego comparative pleasure: being better than other people at things; third: there's generativity, the pleasure you get from giving back; and fourth: transcendence and awareness of one's place in the cosmic order, a connection to a love that goes beyond the physical realm, feeling a connection to ultimate love and absolute truth.
And so one and two come naturally to us, three and four you have to work at. And yet, I think to get that inner light, you've got to hit four, you've got to have three and four. And so the book was an attempt to go from the shallowness of my life, to how people get to four.
How do they get to the inner life? How do they get to transcendence? And the basic argument of the book, is that to build character, to achieve inner tranquility, peace, and joy, you have to become strong in your broken places. You have to confront your core sin and defeat it.
And the story I tell, is of Dwight Eisenhower. He's 9, he goes out trick-or-treating -- he wants to go out trick-or-treating, and his mom, who is an amazing woman named Ida, won't let him.
He throws a temper tantrum, punches his tree in the front yard and he punches it so bad, he rubs all the skin off his fingers. Ida sends him to his room, has him cry for an hour and then comes up to bind his wounds. And she recites a verse from Proverbs: "He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who takes a city."
And 60 years later, when Eisenhower wrote his memoirs, he said that was the most important conversation of his life because it taught him, that he was broken. He had this problem, which is anger, and temper, and passion. And if he was going to be worth anything, he had to confront that.
And he did confront it for the rest of his life. He'd do little things. He was a big hater internally, and so he'd write the names of the people he hated on pieces of paper and rip them up and throw them in the garbage can, just as a tool for conquering his hatreds.
And he became a man of solidity, and we think of him now as this cheerful, garrulous, country club guy, but that was total creation. That was not him. And so I wrote about conquering your own soul, having humility, which is radical self-awareness, from the position of other's centeredness, to see your brokenness.
[caption id="attachment_27112" align="alignright" width="150"] David Brooks[/caption]
And then the exercises that people went through to conquer their brokenness and to become whole. But then I came to realize that was too individualistic. That what I missed about my characters was (a) they all had amazing moms. Their dads were eh, but their moms were all amazing.
And I'm reminded of a study done after World War II. All these people are drafted in the Army, and some people rose up to become majors. Some people stayed privates. What trait correlated with those who rose?
It wasn't intelligence. It wasn't physical courage. It was relationship with mother. They had good relationships with mom.
And those who could receive vast floods of unconditional love could then give it to their men. So that was one thing they had. The second thing they had was an amazing capacity to make commitments, to choose backgrounds, which they then could anchor themselves in.
So we talked about Dorothy Day earlier. She was the young woman, who, when she read novels, she couldn't just read them, she acted out the characters she was reading. And unfortunately, she read a lot of Dostoyevsky, and so she, like drank a ton, carousing, sleeping around, had two abortions, two suicide attempts. But then she had a moment, which transfigured her, which was the birth of her child.
And she wrote an amazing essay, which was in the New Masses about what it felt like to give birth. And it ends with this sentence: "If I'd written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting, or carved the most exquisite figure, I could not have felt the more exalted Creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms. No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy, as I felt after the birth of my child."
With that came a need to worship and to adore. She needed somebody to thank. She found God.
She became a Catholic. She founded the Catholic Social Worker Movement, homeless shelters, soup kitchens. She spent the next 50 years of her life not only serving the poor, but living with the poor, along obedience in the same direction, a total commitment to a whole system of belief; not only the Church, but the practice of poverty.
And so when you go back -- and I didn't realize it at the time -- when you look at my characters, they were all capable of that; choosing a background, making a covenant, making a promise. And I came to believe that character is really the outcome of the promises we make and the covenants we make.
The kind that Ruth made to Naomi: "Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people and your God my God; and where you die, there I will be buried."
Our inner nature is formed by the promises we make. Our very identity is formed by these commitments and these promises.
She wrote: "Without being bound to the fulfillment of our promises, we would never be able to keep our identities. We would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction, in the darkness of each person's lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocality's."
So I came to see -- and this is not original at all -- that we make four big commitments in life: to a spouse and family, to a location, to a philosophy or faith, to a community. And achieving the highest level of joy means making those commitments well, and then living them out faithfully.
Now, we live in a culture -- in here James and I are on the same ground -- that makes commitment making phenomenally hard. First, there's the Internet. How do you make a decades-long commitment when it's hard to control your attention span for 30 seconds? There's fear you're missing out, there's so many options for affluent people, you don't want to close them off.
There's worship in our culture of perpetual choice. There's a terrible fear of making bad choices. As Jamie Smith said, there's the valorization of autonomy as the ultimate value, which undermines commitment making.
There's the definition of freedom, as freedom from, rather than freedom for. There's the definition of human nature as purely thinking creatures -- this is Jamie's territory -- that we're always making decisions rather than feeling, creatures. And the research university has such specialization it makes it very hard to step back and look at your life as a whole.
And then the culture, as James said, is inarticulate about level four. It's easy to forget the highest joys, just because it's not in the common currency a lot. And so we're very individualistic.
But I do think it's possible, and one sees around one all the time, people who make commitments. And to me, a commitment means falling in love with something and building a structure or a behavior around it for those moments when love falters.
And so I began thinking since the book came out, about, what is commitment. How do you do it? What's the content of it?
The first thing to say about it, is that it's a really hard thing. It's what a philosopher I read calls a "vampire problem." Suppose you were asked, "Would you like to become a vampire? You could live forever, you could fly around, you wouldn't have to drink human blood. You could drink donated cow's blood or something, and it would be cool."
But the problem, is once you make the commitment to become a vampire, you can't go back. And you don't know what your future vampire self will feel like. So you have to make a decision as a human about, whether you want to be a vampire, something you are not, and which you know nothing about.
And she said that a lot of the problems we make are vampire problems, we're trying to imagine a future self, which is different. So when you get married, you turn into a different person. When you go to the Marine Corps, you turn into a different person. I guarantee you, when you have kids, you turn into a different person.
These are all vampire problems. How do you make that commitment? And my belief is you can't think your way through it. The only way you can do it, is by loving your way through it, by falling deeply in love with something.
And so what love does, it humbles you, it reminds you, you're not in control of your own brain, you have obsessive thinking. It opens up new and hard ground, opening up the crust of your life, and revealing soft flesh below. It decenters the self, or it reminds you, your riches are another thing not in yourself, and it unifies, it binds you so that you are unity with the thing you love.
There's a passage in a novel called "Captain Corelli's Mandolin," by Louis Devergie, where there's an old guy talking to his daughter about the marriage he had with his late wife. And he says:
"Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away. And this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it. We had roots that grew toward each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches, we found that we were one tree and not two."
[caption id="attachment_27109" align="alignright" width="150"] David Brooks[/caption]
It's that union with a person, or a cause, or a belief system. That's what love does, it binds. And it binds over the long-term, a period of particularity and damage and realism.
There is, like the first phase of love, which is the Taylor Swift phase, but then there's the second, love for people who are older and broken, and damaged, and have to deal with real life as it actually happens. And I love this quote from a friend, of a lot of ours.
This was Leon Wieseltier at Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein's wedding, and he describes this enduring realistic love:
"This love" he wrote "is private and it is particular. Its object is the specificity of this man and that woman, the distinctiveness of this spirit and that flesh. This love prefers deep to wide, and here to there, the grasp to the reach.
When the day is done, the lights are out, there's only this other heart, this other mind, this other face, to assist in repelling ones demons, or in greeting ones angels. It does not matter who the President is, when one consents to marry, one consented to be truly known, which, is an ominous prospect.
And so one bets on love to correct the ordinariness and the impression, and to call forth the forgiveness that is invariably required. Marriages are exposures. We may be heroes to our spouses, but we may not be idols."
So the first thing that only motivates you to get across the threshold of a vampire decision, is the capacity, done by education and by poetry and by art, to be vulnerable and capable of great love. But when we look at people and (inaudible) it's not just love, it is love that has been morally ratified.
We need to feel that our commitments, that the things we fall in love with are not just because they make us feel fluttery, but they serve some good. We have a yearning for meaning, we have a moral imagination and so we have you know what the Greeks used to call "Eros." I think Jamie makes this point in his new book that Eros, we now think of it as sex and pornography, but originally it meant this yearning for excellence.
And we don't have a word for that, that yearning for ultimate meaning. Dorothy Day, she chose the word "loneliness." Loneliness wasn't solitude for her, it was the yearning for God.
C.S. Lewis used the word "joy." Joy wasn't the fulfillment of desire for joy; joy was the desire you want to have, for Lewis. And so it has to be morally ratified.
And so a love affair, is never just about itself. It's to serve some moral purpose, whether it's any of those four commitments. I hope some of you have read Tim Keller's book, "The Meaning of Marriage," which is, to me, religious or secular, the best book on marriage. And he says:
"A marriage is not just about itself, it's for something. It serves some cause. It could be you love your partner in a way that'll bring out his or her loveliness."
In the course of a marriage, you have to regard your own selfishness as the key problem in the marriage. That you're going to want, you have a tendency to regard your partner's selfishness as the key problem, but the only selfishness you can control, is your own. And so it's about a marriage as sanctification.
And so to me, the things that motivate us to make these big commitments, even though they cause a problem, are first the love, and then the desire for, the yearning for righteousness and for meaning. And that's what motivates us; these commitments, and it's not a natural thing. It's a thing of the heart.
But then when we think about commitments, it's not just gushy yearning. It's also discipline and resilience. And so then I started asking myself, well what disciplines our commitments?
The first thing, is truth and honesty, the ability to see our world clearly and be brutally honest about it. As I mentioned, humility is radical self-awareness. It's radical honesty, and pride is radical dishonesty. And so the ability to see comes in many forms, but to see clearly is very hard.
We're all in this business, and most people see through filters. John Ruskin, this 19th Century art critic said:
"The more I think of it, I find this conclusion more pressed upon me that the greatest thing a human soul ever does, is to see something and to tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see."
And so when we think of the people who have been really good at our business, they have this ability to see clearly and to express it clearly. I think of George Orwell, or C.S. Lewis, or my hero, is Tolstoy. He really could just see crystal-y, purely.
So that's the first thing that disciplines us. The second thing, is craft. Every commitment, and every activity involves a craft. Surgeons have their tools, musicians have their scales, and we in our business, have a craft.
There's discipline to writing a story. My friend, Fred Barnes, used to say "The best quality a piece can have, is the quality of ‘doneness’." Turning it in on time.
But for me, my craft, is -- I have a really bad memory, so I take -- I write everything down. And then for each column, I'll get 100 or 200 pages of research and data and notes. And then, since I can't keep any of it in my mind, I lay it out in piles on my living room floor. And so for an 806-word column, I'll have 14 piles; each pile is a paragraph.
And so if you look at my floor, there are 14 piles stretched across there. And so to me, the writing process is not typing it in the keyboard, it's crawling around on my floor, laying out my piles. And that's the discipline and the craft, it's the organization of the thing.
And sometimes when it's going well, and like the thoughts are coming in, and I'm writing furiously, it's like prayer. It's like the best moment of my job. And so we're disciplined by our craft.
And then the final thing I think we're disciplined by, is community, the people we're doing the commitment with. And Jamie already mentioned Rod Dreher. Before he decided to drop out of society, and become a monk -- no, I'm just kidding -- he wrote a beautiful book about his sister, Ruthie, called "The Little Way of Ruthie Leming."
[caption id="attachment_27285" align="alignright" width="150"] David Brooks[/caption]
And Ruthie was one of these remarkable people that teach you, touched a lot of lives, who sadly died, I think in her early 40's or maybe in her 30's. And it was a little town, and I don't know, maybe there were 600 in the town, but there were 1200 people at the funeral.
She just touched a lot of people. And she was the sort of person who liked to go barefoot, so the firemen -- her husband was a fireman -- they carried her casket across the lawn barefoot. And one of the things she did, was she, to serve her community, one of the many things she did, is on Christmas Eve, she thought the dead should be remembered.
And so she would go to the cemetery, and she would put a candle on every gravestone, a lit candle on every gravestone on Christmas Eve. And so she died just before Christmas Eve, and Rod was at home, and he said to his mom that night, "You know, should we do what Ruthie did, put a candle on every gravestone?"
And his mom said, "You know maybe in future years, I’ll do it. This year, is just too tough. I just can't do it."
And so they didn't do it, but they drove to another family member's house for Christmas Eve. And they drove past the cemetery, and somebody else in the community had taken a candle and put it on every gravestone. And so that's community laying a standard, which other people then pick up, and that's how we're nurtured by these commitments.
And so, to me these commitments, making these four commitments are made gradually through life. And you do them one-by-one. You get married, you get a job, you find your vocation, you know you try on things, and then something occurs to you.
But it seems to me there's a point often, in people's lives, and especially the people we really admire, they find a point in the middle of their life, where everything becomes ferociously into focus. And maybe they got hit by life. One of my characters, Dorothy Day, watched the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and was so angered by the death of those seamstresses that her life came into this ferocious focus.
Sometimes they're just encaptured by en joie and they're so plagued by fragmentation en joie, they physically and spiritually rest their way into focus. I think Augustine is an example of that. And sometimes history descends upon them, Abraham Lincoln. And suddenly, they have what is called "the call within a call," that you're doing your thing, but then something happens, which turns your call into a ferocious commitment, or you're work with anybody, you'll do anything, and you become single-minded, and your life all comes to a point.
And I ran across a piece of how to think in that moment, when your four commitments come into one single unitary integrated piece. And the things to ask, he said: (1) "Is it big enough; is this problem big enough for me to devote my life to; (2) Am I uniquely positioned in the entire world, to deal with this problem; (3) Has God or history thrusted me with this responsibility, and does it keep me up nights?
And you see, in those people -- Lincoln, you know, he was a Whig. He had this weird semi-religious belief. He had a family, he had these professional gifts; and suddenly, history thrust him into this moment, where his whole life was opinioned around saving the Union and ending slavery.
And we tell our kids, college students, to discover your passion, but as many people have written, passion doesn't come first, before the vocation. Passion is a product of the vocation. And so telling them to find their passion is just crazy.
And when people find that final midlife integrating moment, they try to pare everything back, so they can focus on this one obsession. And that process of paring and renouncing, is often a brutal process, and that's what happened to Augustine in the garden. He was in the process of, not really a conversion, but a renunciation for a higher love.
You can't beat a desire by saying no to it, you can only find a higher desire. And then the people who do that, I think, they're the ones who achieve what we would call "character," or "tranquility," or "joy." My favorite scene in Augustine's life, is his final conversation with his mom. His mom was Monica, a helicopter mom to beat all helicopter moms, and she's like bugging him all his life. Here's who you can talk to; here's who you can't. Here's what you can believe; here's what you can't. Here's who you can marry; here's who you can't. He leaves North Africa to run away from her. She's screaming at him. She takes the next boat over, tracks him down in Italy. And then at the end of her life, she basically says -- I think she's in her 50's -- and she says, "You know, all my life I wanted you to be a certain kind of Christian, and you are right now," and basically, "I'm ready to go," and she dies nine days later. And he describes their final conversation as this tranquil moment of harmony after all the conflict, and he has this sentence where he says, "The sound of the trees was hushed. The sound of the birds was hushed. The sound of our breathing was hushed. We rose into a realm of pure spirit." And that's sort of the peace and tranquility we're sort of shooting for. And we can be surrounded -- Augustine's culture was in the middle of the collapsing Roman Empire. Our culture is not that bad.
And so I agree with all the cultural critiques and I make them, but I do think the path out, is through this process of awesome commitment making. And then when you do that suddenly you're surrounded by all the things James talked about: the institutions, the standards, the belief, and you get redemptive assistance from outside. You aspire to have what we would call "character." Thank you.
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Thank you, David.
(Applause)
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Okay. Paul Edwards, pull the mic over.
[caption id="attachment_27113" align="alignright" width="150"] Paul Edwards, Deseret News[/caption]
PAUL EDWARDS, Deseret News: Well, thanks to both of you. This has been very inspiring. And we've gone much further than where I raised my hand in the queue.
But I was interested in the book, David, about how, you talk about these supportive, you know, institutions. And you talk a bit about friendship, as a particular source of strength. And C.S. Lewis has this great book on the four loves.
And has a long chapter in there about friendship. And it's occurred to me that this is somewhat under-theorized in our modern life. I mean we have shows like “Friends” on television. But we don't have a rich account of how to put together friendships somehow in the same way.
There are lots of advice books about marriage, right. There are lots of seminars and things to prepare one in that way. We think about family life, but friendship seems sort of serendipitous.
That we don't prepare ourselves for it somehow. I just wonder if you have any thoughts about how we can do a better job of making friendship a part of the formation of our character.
DAVID BROOKS: Well, I would say, if you want to get my students talking, there are two subjects set them off. One is vulnerability and how hard it is, they find, to be vulnerable, and the second is friendship. Where they sort of know it's important, but they don't have the skills or time to deal with it.
One of my students said, "My life is about putting out fires. And a test is a fire, a paper deadline is a fire, the LSAT is a fire, sometimes my girlfriend's a fire, my friends are never a fire and so they get left behind."
And in the last three months of senior year, they discover, oh, my God, I need my friends. And that's when they turn to it. And they really are, the first five years out of college, really suck: Bad bosses, unemployment, romantic breakups, and you need your friends, and they're under-institutionalized in thinking about that.
The thing I like about the Lewis essay about friendship, is what he ripped off from Montaigne. Montaigne has a beautiful essay on friendship. He was in love with a guy, I'm about to butcher his name, Estienne de la Boetie, somebody better educated than me, and he had this perfect intimate friendship, where he says:
"And, how can I explain how this friendship formed?" And he said, "There was not one thing, it was not five things; it was not 500 things. It was a thousand intimacies; and I would trust him to make decisions about my life, more than I would trust myself."
And he says, "Friendship illuminates the distinction between giving and receiving, because I am so much one with him, when I give to him I have more pleasure than when I receive a gift, because I'm giving to a piece of myself."
And Lewis steals that without attribution.
(Laughter)
But then he's still a friend. And this is the beauty of friendship. And as Lewis says, "Friendship serves no biological purpose." And so he's talking about la Boetie's death scene.
And the family all gathers, and la Boetie is making these beautiful speeches to each of them about what they meant to him. And then Montaigne says, "They were incredibly beautiful speeches. They went on a little too long."
And so even with a friend, you can be honest.
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Naomi, on this point?
[caption id="attachment_27286" align="alignright" width="150"] Naomi Schaefer Riley, New York Post[/caption]
NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY, New York Post: I mean there are all sorts of forces that would explain the lower levels are less interested in commitment to all these other things, but why do you think the friendship component has diminished so much? I mean what are the forces that are preventing one from committing, your students, for instance, to committing to friendships as much as they might have done in the past?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, first let's not over exaggerate. I mean people have done studies, does Facebook ruin friendship? And as I understand the evidence, you may know better than me, it doesn't have a big effect. It's not what Facebook is doing.
The people who are friends use Facebook to augment their friendship. The people who are lonely use Facebook to mask their loneliness. But the number of friends has not risen or declined particularly.
But for my students, I mean I teach at Yale, so it's a little unusual, but everything is about time management. Their whole life is time management. I often ask them, I teach them the last class of their senior year, so the final college class they'll ever have.
And I say, "What book has meant the most to you that you've been assigned here in the last four years?" And they say, "You've got to realize we don't really read that way" -- they're just trying to get through -- "and so no book has really meant much to me in these four years."
MICHAEL CROMARTIE: This is at Yale?
DAVID BROOKS: Yes. When they