Published by Random House, 2015
Anyone
who watches the nightly News Hour on Public Television with any regularity
should be familiar with Mr. Brooks. As a
pundit and columnist for the New York Times he is called upon each Friday
evening, along with Mark Shields, a syndicated columnist, to analyze the week’s
news in depth and make prognostications on where the institutions of our
government and society are trending.
His most recent book feels to me like a departure from his usual stock
in trade, though that may be because I have not read any other of his writings;
I only know, and look forward to, his weekly spoken comments in front of the
camera that comprise one of the highlights of what I consider the best news
program on any TV channel. (Others who
rank with him besides Shields are Michael Gerson and Ruth Marcus, who sometimes
fill in when one of these two regulars is absent.)
The
book is based on an assumption that most of us who are entangled in the modern
world can hardly refute – that in this twenty-first century, character is not
the first consideration when people are planning their lives. We are living in the age of what Brooks calls
the Big Me. He takes to task the
widespread idea that one can do anything one sets one’s mind to do, all by
one’s self. And the notion that joy and
satisfaction are the product of self-assertion and aggressive self-advancement! And the claim, either direct or implied, that
“I am special!” He asserts that there
are two faces to each one of us, two sides of the coin, the external person and
the internal one, what he calls Adam I and Adam II. Let me permit him to tell you in his own
words, from his Introduction, how he differentiates between the two:
“Adam
I (the external) wants to build, create, produce, and discover things. He wants to have high status and win
victories.” Adam II, the internal,
“wants to love intimately, to sacrifice self in the service of others, to live
in obedience to some transcendent truth, to have a cohesive soul that honors
creation and one’s own possibilities.”
There
is another set of contrasting terms he uses to elucidate this duality of human
nature: the “resume virtues” and the “eulogy virtues.” The former consists of what you offer as
proof of your qualifications for one job or another, proof of your accumulated
experience, your education, your visible and certifiable attributes that you
hope will advance a career and build prestige.
Adam I in other words! The
latter, the eulogy virtues, are those that one would want to be remembered for
at life’s close, how one related to others, how one demonstrated caring, what
one achieved in service to high ideals, how much of a lasting gift to the surroundings
one became during that lifetime. The
very essence of Adam II!
Lurking
at the margin of each observation he makes is an air of the confessional. He makes clear at one point that he wrote the
book “to save my own soul.” Yeah! Nothing less! I do not believe he meant by this that in
writing it he was trying to earn his salvation.
In a separate on-line communication recently he set forth his idea of
character in its truest form:
“About
once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. . . They listen
well. They make you feel funny and valued.
You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so their
laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful
work they are doing. They are not
thinking about themselves at all.” He
goes on to say: “It occurs to me that
I’ve achieved a decent level of career success, but I have not achieved . . .
that generosity of spirit, or that depth of character.”
He
takes us through a wide spectrum of biographical material, very detailed and
thoroughly researched, of people who having completed their earthly lives and
are among those in his estimation who had to struggle to find their way out of
absorption in Adam I to arrive at a life in Adam II. He casts a very wide net. Although it confounds me as to how he thought
writing about people in history could turn him into that quality person he
wishes he were, I do have to concede that he is thorough about it. He leaves no stone unturned. A student of history would be enthralled.
Of
course, all the individuals whose lives he visits are deceased. He probably chose the dead over the
contemporary because they have all completed their journeys and
supposedly for that reason best embody the motif of the eulogy virtues. And he is not skimpy with his material; he
is, if nothing else, quite thorough and scrupulously well organized. He errs perhaps more on the side of two much
than not enough. He packs a lot of words
into this 270-page tome.
For
this reason I do not suggest that the reader take on the entire work. If you read the Introduction and the last
long chapter, you have the heart and soul of his presentation. Think of the intervening chapters as a
smorgasbord. Decide
which biographies stir your interest and curiosity. Naturally with a review in mind I had to
ingest the whole thing, but there are some people he treats who failed to
arouse mine. These are his choices in
alphabetical order, and I leave it to each reader to choose what is
appealing: Augustine of Hippo, Dorothy
Day, Dwight Eisenhower, George Eliot (alias Mary Anne Evans), Samuel Johnson,
George C. Marshall, Frances Perkins, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin.
What
we have is the sort of publication in which just about everything the author
wants to say is contained in each and every chapter. If you make a thorough study of any part at
random, you are likely to come away from the study feeling as if you have heard
everything the author wants to say. Each
and every chapter opens up the total trajectory of the theme. His writing does not exactly build, one layer
on top of another leading toward some ultimate summation. Each is a special wording, a particular
expression of the basic premise.
Let
me not give the impression that I hold any part of the book in serious
question. I found nothing that I would
disagree with propositionally. His
judgments about maturity and moral consciousness are quite pithy and
sound. He claims not to be a generous person,
but he is more than generous with the space he takes to enlighten us. He has not written a fiery encyclical or
thrown down any gauntlet; he speaks like a friend to a reasonable audience. He appreciates the fact that character is not
something that can be laid out in easy steps.
The road to this character cannot be reduced to a formula or “a shopping
list.” Adam II has to be cultivated over
time, a molding and shaping process that stems from a lot of hard internal work
and struggle.
I
only wish he had told us about how he personally is undergoing this
process. His is a little too much of an
intellectual approach at times. He never
quite gets out of the role of commentator.
Next time maybe he will open his own heart a little wider, tell us about
how his own narrative is shaping up, give us more personal testimony. For all he has put down on paper, he never
discusses his own personal life. Who is
David Brooks? Where is he on the
journey? What transcendent truth is he
aiming to be obdient to?
Or
maybe he should forget about historical figures and delve further into the
lives and experiences of these people he says he meets and admires so much, who
he claims he would like to emulate.
Their stories I would guess are every bit as absorbing and would speak
to us today with far more incisiveness.
At any rate, he does not make clear how his new personal experiment is
coming along. Has he “saved his soul,”
to any extent at all? Brooks should not
belittle the career choice he has made or what he has done with it, as he seems
on the verge of doing. We need the
commentators, the pundits, the columnists.
Their overview of what is going on in the world does great good. His insights, and, yes, even his scholarship,
serve a very moral and spiritual purpose.
I am not always sure whether I agree with what he says, but I for one
thrive on his words – every week, every season of the year.
To
read other entries in my blog, please consult its website: enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn about me consult on the website the
blog entry for August 9, 2013.
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