This posting is an opportunity to give David
Brooks the stage. It does so by offering
two quotes from his book, The Second Mountain,[1]
in which he makes a meaningful distinction.
In sharing his words, it might sound as if he is diminishing a central element
of an ideal person. That is, that that person
should have character. The opinion he expresses
is, as with all human qualities, that none of them indicate perfection or enjoy
an unqualified standing within one’s estimations. Life is not that simple. So, what does Brooks have to say about the
human quality of character?
Here
is the first quote:
When I wrote The Road to Character
[published in 2015], I was still enclosed in the prison of individualism. I believed that life is going best when we
take individual agency, when we grab the wheel and steer our own ship. I still believed that character is something
you build mostly on your own. You
identify your core sin and then, mustering all your willpower, you make
yourself strong in your weakest places.[2]
In the few years that have transpired from this
earlier mode of thinking, Brooks apparently has gone through a transformation
of sorts. And in doing so, he has not
only experienced a change of heart, but also a change of understanding what life
can be or should be. No, he didn’t abandon
the importance of character, but perhaps, one can say, augmented what it means to
him and how it functions for him in determining what he should be about.
In
a few lines following the above quote, Brooks adds:
I now think good character is a by-product of
giving yourself away. You love things
that are worthy of love. You surrender
to a community or cause, make promises to other people, build a thick jungle of
loving attachments, lose yourself in the daily act of serving others as they
lose themselves in the daily acts of serving you. Character is a good thing to have, and
there’s a lot to be learned on the road to character. But there’s a better thing to have – moral
joy. And that serenity arrives as you
come closer to embodying perfect love.[3]
In this blogger’s opinion, Brooks makes
important definitional points. One is
that character is complex and comprises various attributes. Some of them, if seen from an individualistic
perspective, home in on what one can and should do irrespective of social conditions. It gives one an air or burden of ascending
above how those around one are doing. That
is, irrespective of the travails one observes, one should act according to
principle and not merely respond to the daily challenges one encounters.
And yes, there is that element of character,
but it is not an unqualified attribute of goodness that Brooks previously ascribed
to it. Character also, and this is
Brooks’ second point, is subordinate to moral obligations he terms “joys.” And usually that means being concerned and
motivated to see how others are faring in relation to what concerns them. Here Brooks writes of “surrendering” to those
demands and describing what important role one’s culture plays in disposing
oneself to such thinking and feeling.
Of
course, as this blog argues, a culture ensconced in individualism, such as how the
American culture holds as prominent the natural rights view, reaching or even
recognizing Brooks’ “second mountain” – this surrender to an other-centered disposition
– seems unlikely to take hold.
Hopefully, efforts such as Brooks’ book – and even, to some degree, this
blog – can make a difference in people approaching and even climbing that “second”
communal “mountain.”
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