Long post after a long gap.
The week after Memorial Day, I heard David Brooks talking about his latest book, The Road to Character, twice in one day. Both times, cooking of course: first on WAMC, I caught the tail end of his Commonwealth Club address recorded in April, then that evening on C-Span, in a talk given at the Trinity Forum in Washington D.C. the same month. And no, I don’t usually watch C-Span.
The weeks preceding had again brought me a new wave of unbearable bits of family news. Unbearable, yet they are to be borne. So hearing ruminations on the need for a culture that says we don’t live for happiness, that we are endowed with moral imaginations and are willing to struggle for goodness, well it was timely for me.
While normally a book with this title from a conservative thinker would inspire me to run very fast the other way, this is Brooks, who’s known as the liberal’s conservative, a conservative thinker who by now is a tempered one, and a rarity in his civil, courteous intellectualism.
His book Bobos in Paradise came out in 2000; the following spring he published an article in The Atlantic, “The Organization Kid,” based on his time with students at Princeton. I was in graduate school there then, on a teaching fellowship, and recognized what Brooks was writing about: Students so brilliant but so overscheduled and überorganized, there was no room for much spontaneous creativity or fun or spontaneous much of anything. Or, for that matter, even at the height of a presidential campaign, no political engagement, either.
Now it’s spring 2015, Brooks on his book tour is speaking of eulogy vs. resume virtues, how we can achieve much success but lack inner light. That our culture teaches us to celebrate ourselves and values success, but that success leads to the greatest failure, pride, while failure can lead to the greatest success, humility and learning. How we plan for happiness, but we’re formed by hardship.
The book is Brooks’s search for sources of character, for deeper meaning and purpose through examining the lives of people who achieved good work despite having been basically messes at some point in life. Eisenhower’s in there, and Augustine, among others.
Fertile ground for grace.
To fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. To find yourself, you have to lose yourself. How humility is not a lack of self-esteem, but rather what Brooks calls “a radical self-awareness from a position of other centeredness.” Basically, the opposite of our big me culture that celebrates itself and claims personal happiness as birthright.
On Edmund Burke’s epistemological modesty: we should be modest about what we know, and respect the gifts handed down to us by our ancestors. Brooks quotes an email he received from a veterinarian who wrote that what a wise person teaches is the smallest part of what they give; what gets communicated is the totality of their life and the way they go about it, the small gestures of kindness and caring and honesty.
Brooks cites theologian Paul Tillich, that suffering reminds you you’re not who you thought you were, it drags you deeper into yourself, beneath the daily cares of life, it carves into the basement of your soul to reveal a new cavity, then finds the floor in that one and carves deeper still, and on. In the case of Samuel Johnson, who suffered pretty gruesome physical ailments, he “wrote his way to goodness;” for Brooks intellectual effort can lead to moral goodness . For Johnson grace came in the form of writing and intellectual application via crushing pain.
Ultimately we are saved not by our bootstraps, though they can help, or our precious self-esteem, overrated/overblown as it may be, but by grace. Michael Gerson, commentator at the Trinity talk, says grace may come in the form of love from friends and family, or in the assistance of an unexpected stranger, or from God. But the message is the same: you are accepted, you are not flailing alone, there are hands to grab and support you. And so it is indeed very amazing, this grace: all our mediocrity, terrible sins, and wretchedness, with grace is but preface to our next story.
In our achievement-based culture, we want to believe we can always earn our way, that no matter what we can make it on our own with spit and gumption. But grace is about surrender. Brooks admits the question of agency is crucial both for Christians and Jews– he is Jewish– and that for him, raised in the achievement culture, the question of how much can we get there our own, and how much is an act of surrender required, has no answer.
Brooks teaches at Yale now and says his students have not been given a moral vocabulary, and they’re aware of it. Students who, he only half-jokes, are already curing cancers and founding companies and are “perfect” tell him, “we’re so hungry.”
As I endeavor to do through this blog and other media, Brooks writes about grace in a non-religious manner. Using religious categories (we simply lack vocabulary otherwise), he seeks to reach believers and non, agnostic, atheist, other. He believes it’s time the public square, the agora, brings these words back into discourse. Humility, holiness, struggle, suffering, grace. I’d agree.