The Road to Character

Every now and then you read a book at just the right time.  I had the good fortune of picking up David Brooks’ The Road to Character during a season in which I was grappling with some of the deeper values that should inform our lives.  Brooks—op-ed columnist for The New York Times, Yale professor, and author—supplied the words I was unable to articulate and helped me expand my thinking about how strong character is cultivated.

Brooks offers a critical analysis of contemporary society and challenges us to rebalance the scales between our “resume virtues” – achieving wealth, fame, and status – and the “eulogy virtues” that exist at the core of our being: kindness, bravery, honesty, and faithfulness.  Some of my favorite quotes:

·      “While Adam I wants to conquer the world, Adam II wants to obey a calling to serve the world.”

·      “Thankfulness,” the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, said, “is a soil in which pride does not easily grow.”

·      “Truly humble people are engaged in a great effort to magnify what is best in themselves and defeat what is worst, to become strong in the weak places.”

·      “We are all built from ‘crooked timber.’”

·      “Today, teachers tend to look for their students’ intellectual strengths, so they can cultivate them.  But a century ago, professors tended to look for their students’ moral weaknesses, so they could correct them.”

·      “A successful marriage is a fifty-year conversation getting ever closer to that melding of mind and heart.”

·      “All love is narrowing.  It is the renunciation of other possibilities for the sake of one choice.”

·      “To be healed is to be broken open.”

·      “We don’t become better because we acquire better information.  We become better because we acquire better loves.”

·      “There are bugs in our souls that lead us toward selfishness and pride, that tempt us to put lower loves over higher loves.”

·      “The mental space that was once occupied by moral struggle has gradually become occupied by the struggle to achieve.  Morality has been displaced by utility.”

·      “You become more disciplined, considerate, and loving through a thousand small acts of self-control, sharing, service, friendship, and refined enjoyment.”

·      “The goal of leadership is to find a just balance between competing values and competing goals.”

Through biographical sketches Brooks explores how, through internal struggles and a sense of their own limitations, some have built a strong inner character:

·      Labor activist Frances Perkins (The Summoned Self) understood the need to suppress parts of herself so that she could be an instrument to a larger cause.  She was willing to soil her hands in politics in order to get things done in community service. 

·      Dwight Eisenhower (Self-Conquest) organized his life not around impulsive self-expression but considered self-restraint, “fueled by passion and policed by self-control.”

·      Dorothy Day (Struggle), a devout Catholic convert and champion of the poor, learned as a young woman the vocabulary of suffering, simplicity, and surrender.  She wanted not only to do good but to be good, to live a life that was as pure as possible.

·      George Marshall (Self-Mastery), soldier become statesman, was driven by his desire to contribute significantly to a cause greater than himself.  Dogged in his self-discipline, his interactions with others were marked by politeness and integrity.

·      Philip Randolph (Dignity) established a certain model for how to be a civil rights leader.  His incorruptibility, reticent formality, and above all his dignity, made it impossible to humiliate him.

·      Novelist George Eliot (Love) displayed an intense intellectual honesty, an arduous desire to live according to the parameters of her conscience, and amazing bravery in the face of social pressure – made possible by her love for George Lewes, which both lifted and deepened her.

·      Augustine (Ordered Love) once believed that you can arrive at fulfillment by your own efforts, only to discover true fulfillment once he renounced worldly pleasures to live for Christ.  He learned one of the things you have to do in order to receive grace is to renounce the idea that you can earn it.

·      Ever aware of his own egotism, self-centeredness, and self-deception, Samuel Johnson (Self-Examination) arduously attacked his own weaknesses.  He investigated the world with unblinking honesty, wrestling with matters of utmost importance in order to become his desired self.

Finally, Brooks offers this Humility Code:

1.     We don’t live for happiness; we live for holiness.

2.     Proposition one defines the goal of life. 

3.     Although we are flawed creatures with an innate tendency toward selfishness, we are also splendidly endowed.

4.     In the struggle against our own weakness, humility is the greatest virtue. Humility is having an accurate assessment of your own nature and your own place in the cosmos.

5.     Pride is the central vice.

6.     Once the necessities for survival are satisfied, the struggle against sin and for virtue is the central drama of life.

7.     Character is built in the course of your inner confrontation.

8.     The things that lead us astray are short term—lust, fear, vanity, gluttony.  The things we call character endure over the long term—courage, honesty, humility.

9.     No person can achieve self-mastery on his or her own.

10.  We are all ultimately saved by grace.

11.  Defeating weakness often means quieting the self.

12.  Wisdom starts with epistemological modesty.

13.  No good life is possible unless it is organized around a vocation.

14.  The best leader tried to lead along the grain of human nature rather than go against it.

15.  The person who successfully struggles against weakness and sin may or may not become rich and famous, but that person will become mature.

The Road to Character worked its way beneath my skin, helped me rethink my own priorities, and encouraged me to continue to develop a soul marked by humility and inner depth.