In the introduction to his new book, “The Road to Character,” David Brooks breaks the columnist’s fourth wall with a startling confession: “I was born with a natural disposition towards shallowness.” Brooks, who established a reputation for sometimes glib but often insightful cultural commentary with “Bobos in Paradise,” his 2000 best-seller, has more recently specialized in applying the latest in brain science and social psychology to larger questions of morality on the Op-Ed pages of the Times. He continues, “I’m paid to be a narcissistic blowhard, to volley my opinions, to appear more confident about them than I really am, to appear smarter than I really am, to appear better and more authoritative than I really am. I have to work harder than most people to avoid a life of smug superficiality.”
“The Road to Character” is an account of Brooks’s effort to find his way out of shallow punditry—or, as he puts it, to “cultivate character.” To make his case, Brooks—who likes to reach for the occasionally effortful neologism—has come up with a pair of clarifying terms: the “résumé virtues” and the “eulogy virtues.” Résumé virtues, he proposes, are those that are valued in the contemporary marketplace: the high test scores achieved by a student, the professional accomplishments pulled off by an adult. They are the skills that are met with bigger paychecks and public approbation. Eulogy virtues, on the other hand, are the aspects of character that others praise when a person isn’t around to hear it: humility, kindness, bravery. Our society exalts the résumé virtues, Brooks argues, but it overlooks the humbler eulogy virtues. Still, he writes, we know at our core that this second category of values is what matters more.
Or at least we come to realize this fact, often in midlife, perhaps while lost in the dark wood of insta-opinionizing. Such was Brooks’s course, he hints: he wrote “The Road to Character,” he declares, “to save my own soul.” Brooks does not dwell upon the specific depredations from which his soul was in need of rescue. Instead, he offers brief biographies of a range of historical figures whose lives illustrate the eulogy virtues he seeks to recover, and whose example may prove inspirational. He illuminates his case studies by quoting authorities as diverse as Aristotle, Kierkegaard, and Tina Brown. “I’m hoping you and I will both emerge from the next nine chapters slightly different and slightly better,” Brooks writes, slightly modestly.
Brooks gives us Dwight Eisenhower, raised by a loving mother who nonetheless stressed discipline, as an exemplar of self-restraint. There is George Marshall, whose outward reserve was the expression of inward judiciousness. “Very rarely did he call anyone by their first name,” Brooks observes of Marshall, and then goes on to make a larger point about reticence: “The contents of the private world should not instantly be shared online or in conversation. They should not be tweeted.” The novelist George Eliot is included; her extramarital but deeply committed relationship with George Henry Lewes is given as an illustration of the redemptive, creative power of reciprocal, selfless love. (My own book about George Eliot, “My Life in Middlemarch,” is approvingly referenced in this chapter.)
It would be a hard-hearted critic who dismisses another writer’s sincere attempt at midlife self-examination, or his efforts at moral and ethical improvement. (That being said, Brooks does so, snarking at Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling memoir, “Eat, Pray, Love.” “I am the only man ever to finish this book,” he writes, thereby insulting the author and more than ten million readers in one fell swoop.) There is something affecting in the diligence with which Brooks seeks a cure for his self-diagnosed shallowness by plumbing the depths of others, each of whom—while achieving greater fame and sometimes even greater fortune than that accrued by a successful newspaper columnist—did the hard work of scouring his own soul.
Even if Brooks is the kind of writer who makes you want to preface your sentences with the phrase “Brooks isn’t wrong to point out,” Brooks isn’t wrong to point out that the examination of what comprises a moral life, an examination that came as second nature to his subjects, has fallen out of cultural favor, at least in the overachieving circles of the meritocracy. (Among literary essayists and their readers, however, it’s not quite such a taboo: consider the recent work of Leslie Jamison and Eula Biss.) “What the Victorians were to sex, we are to morality: everything is covered in euphemism,” he writes, with nice precision.
What is the nature of the moral crisis that Brooks has identified? He argues that, from Biblical times right up until the mid-nineteen-forties, a culture of what he calls “moral realism” prevailed. According to Brooks, our elders emphasized the dangers of sin and the limitations of the individual, and they constructed useful religious and social institutions in an effort to encourage virtuous self-circumscription. In the eighteenth century, he goes on, moral realism was challenged by the new ideas of moral Romanticism, whereby the self was exalted rather than distrusted. He suggests that these two moral modes coexisted until the aftermath of the Second World War—an upheaval so cataclysmic that anyone who came out the other end of it was desperate for fun and pleasure. At that point, Brooks says, culture became re-centered on the self, spawning the likes of the permissive Doctor Spock and Norman Vincent Peale, whose book “The Power of Positive Thinking” “rested atop the Times [best-seller] list for an astounding ninety-eight weeks.”
From then until now, Brooks argues, our society has devolved into an ever-increasing celebration of the self. Parents and schools nurture self-esteem, and value self-expression in offspring and students. The form of ambition our society celebrates is being true to oneself by pursuing one’s own passion. Broadcasting oneself through the construction of a social-media persona is nigh on compulsory; being “liked” matters even more to us than being well-liked did to Willy Loman. As a result, Brooks argues, we have become less empathetic, and more apt to regard our relationships with others in the light of useful expediency. We are living in the “Age of the Selfie,” Brooks notes, adding to the more than a hundred and forty thousand uses of that phrase already tallied by Google.
At the same time, Brooks urges, it’s not too late to join a counterculture—“to live a decent life, to build up the soul.” To help his readers do so, he’s boldly provided at the end of his book a fifteen-point “Humility Code,” which includes the assertions “We don’t live for happiness, we live for holiness” and “pride is the central vice,” as well as the injunction “No good life is possible unless it is organized around a vocation.” And yet Brooks reassures his readers that the moral life, as he conceives it, need not require the kind of renunciation sought by St. Augustine, who is the subject of Chapter 8. “It doesn’t matter if you work on Wall Street or at a charity distributing medicine to the poor,” Brooks writes. “The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in moral struggle against yourself.”
It’s worth pausing here to note that, by privileging an internal struggle against oneself over one’s external actions toward others, Brooks would seem to be advocating just the kind of self-centeredness he otherwise laments. It’s also questionable to assert that working on Wall Street and serving the poor should be seen as morally equivalent. Brooks notes with dismay the growing ranks of college students who happily affirm that, upon graduation, they will aim for financial success over other possible goals. “Financial security, once seen as a middling value, is now tied as students’ top goal,” he writes. (Unfortunately, the study he cites to support this fact dates all the way back to 1990, when today’s new college graduates weren’t even born, though Brooks’s observation is surely buttressed by his interactions with students at Yale, where he has taught a class for several years.)
But a young person’s sense that she is obliged to secure her financial future is not necessarily an indication of creeping greed and selfishness. It might equally be regarded as the inevitable result of an economy that ever more ruthlessly separates the rich from the poor. Or it could be the product of a society that provides less and less in the way of social support, then faults its more vulnerable members for their failure to get a toehold on the meritocratic ladder. It could be a consequence of a cultural climate in which doing a job that serves others—being a teacher or a social worker—is undervalued as a goal for the ambitious and high-achieving, and in which the acquisition of an expensive college degree is perceived as more and more necessary to pursue even the most altruistic of career goals. (Try landing a job as the person distributing medicine to the poor at a charity without a diploma.) Cultivating the eulogy virtues, at least in one’s professional life, is much harder to do with a full load of debt.
Moreover, the very notion of “eulogy virtues” partakes in the crisis of selfishness that Brooks is busy decrying. In his chapter on George Eliot, Brooks cites the famous concluding passage of Eliot’s greatest novel, “Middlemarch,” concerning Eliot’s ardent heroine, Dorothea, with whose aspirations the book began: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” Brooks is right to alight upon this passage: it’s a magnificent expression of a resonant theme. In Eliot’s characterization of Dorothea over the course of the nine hundred-odd pages of “Middlemarch,” a reader gradually witnesses an individual’s growth from debilitating self-centeredness to a larger, more profoundly gratifying empathy. Brooks’s instinct that there is wisdom to be found in literature that cannot be found in the pages of the latest social science journals is well-advised, and the possibility that his book may bring the likes of Eliot or Samuel Johnson—another literary figure about whom he writes with engaging sympathy—to a wider general readership is a heartening thought.
But Eliot’s unvisited tombs, in their quiet, solemn modesty, present an image that is the very opposite of a what is implied by a eulogy—which is, after all, a very public affirmation and celebration of a life. Brooks hopes that readers of his book will find themselves inspired to pursue the so-called eulogy virtues with all the intensity with which they once sought the résumé virtues, as he says he has been inspired to do himself. But the avowed cultivator of eulogy virtues may still be hoping that, when he’s gone, others will sing his praises. A hidden life is a much more demanding prospect to accept, or to recommend.
