"The Road to Character" by David Brooks (Book Review by Bob Racine)

                                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.