David Brooks - The 5 Levels of Character

my standard line is that writing a book on character doesn't give you good character and reading a book on character doesn't give you good character but buying a book on character does give you a good character so what I'm gonna do is and I wrote this book together a few years ago and at the end it was called the road character but I think neither of us are quite happy with the word character it sounds sort of stuffy and stodgy and so a lot of what I think a lot of people have done is just trying to figure out what this vague word means and what framework it is and there's a lot of imposing a framework and then trying to get a different framework just to clarify this fuzzy thing and so that's what I'm gonna try to do just for 15 minutes and four speakers you should know that countdown clock is actually counting up so you can speak forever and I will try it to apply it to the people who are our practitioners I went to a school called the University of Chicago where we had a slogan a t-shirt sure it works in practice but does it work in theory and so I will try to merge the two now we all have an idea of character which is individualistic Victorian version that reason is the charioteer steering the passions and reason holds back the passions and out of that you get character and so character is sort of like a mortal muscle you go to the gym to work out characters basically self-discipline self-control willpower and self-restraint and I think of all the versions of character this is clearly the most bogus that if this version of character has self-restraint worked then new year's resolutions would work and they don't and so I thought I might walk through how I think character develops and especially what are the pressure points at which we can hit it and we're going to start with their inborn nature were social egotists or cooperative creatures if you took a baby there was a University of Washington study they took a baby at 39 minutes old and the doctor wagged his tongue at the baby and the baby wagged her tongue back she didn't know what a face was or a tongue but she knew how to imitate we imitate each other babies cry when they hear other babies cry but they don't cry at recordings of their own cry it's just basic cooperation my Yale colleague Paul bloom takes infants and he shows them videos the video shows a triangle trying to climb a mountain but there's a circle pushing the triangle down and babies get that the circle is being unhelpful and they don't like circles after that so there's some basic sense where we are social and cooperative there's also a basic sense where we're kind of selfish I thought David Foster Wallace put it best in his famous Kenyan commencement speech which says all of the world every day looks like it revolves around me I see you from perspective me I see him from the perspective of me I see all of us from the perspective of me and so we are all slightly selfish and a little bit dishonest Dan Ariely studies dishonesty at Duke I think and one of the things he did was hit when he was at MIT he put dollar bills in the the dorm refrigerators and then he put coke cans next to them and he'd come back in a few days and all the coke cans were stolen didn't but none of the dollar bills because people feel free taking the cocaine but it feels like robbing to steal a dollar bill and so the rule is we all steal as much as we can and make to maintain our self-image the Kennedy Center has a gift shop in Washington and they were losing a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year from a gift shop that was staffed entirely entirely by volunteers and they were wondering who was stealing all this money and so they put in surveillance equipment and it turned out everybody was stealing the money almost every volunteer was pocketing a little money and so dishonesty and surveys and is somewhat pervasive we're all a little bit dishonest I came across a quote from a locksmith 1% of people will always be honest and never steal another 1% will always be dishonest and will always try to pick your lock and steal your television the rest will be honest as long as the conditions are right but if they are tempted enough they will be dishonest too locks won't protect you from the thieves who can get into your house if they really want to they will protect you from the mostly honest people who might be tempted if you didn't have a lock and so we're somewhat social but also somewhat selfish and so characters a problem and yet one of the things we do is we bond we bond with each other and in my view and this is my next book we make five big bonds in our life five big commitments to a spouse and family most of us to a faith or philosophy to a vocation to a community and to our friends and so those commitments are at the core of who we are we survive on the basis of those commitments it's because parents can commit to their children that babies grow up and live and our identities are formed by those commitments if you ask people who they are if we ask who you are yourself the answer you give is good it's gonna be some not some innate trait it's gonna be what you're committed to and so at base in my view character is our ability to keep the commitments we are in meshed in character is basically keeping commitments James Q Wilson put it well character is fundamentally relational and he wrote when a child forms friendships he takes on commitments to peers and expects commitments in return friends test one another in commitments with games and teasing they challenge each other self-control since a Fair Play obligation to honor the group and its members so when people are out on the on the playground what they're doing is they're testing and improving each other's commitments and they're seeing who can be trusted in times of trouble and so at the first level of character it's just you can count on me it's just you can count on me it's staying faithful to the commitments and that's the the bottom level and so the first pressure point if you want to affect people in their character the first thing is to give them a sense of attachment a sense of strong attachment to surround them with strong loves to which people want to remain faithful we have a friend who has worked with youth all his life getting Bill Milliken and Milliken was asked you've been doing this what programs have you seen a change and transforms a child's life and he says I've been doing this for 50 years and I've never seen the program chain a child's life only relationships change life and so it's those programs that build strong relationships that create attachments and nurture love's the second is the things like what happens in the playground which is encouraging people to have games and mentoring relationships where they can explore and work on their capacity for faithfulness and so at this first level character building is just about solidarity but then and here we get to the second level when we get together we don't just get together to be together we get together to do something people get together to achieve something to grow crops to raise a family to educate the young or to learn about character and doing these tasks requires a second level of character traits not just attachment but self-control and self-discipline these are the performative character traits grit self-control thrift modesty moderation the things that make you a good student and a good employee and so these are these second group of character traits are inculcated famously by Aristotelian habits we give people small acts of self control and then they develop into people who are likely to be self-controlled the act is father to the virtue as Aristotle said and so what we do is we give people homework assignments so they learn to do their work every day we have little acts of etiquette you don't start eating until everybody at the table has their food a little act of self-control and if you can instill habits of small acts of self-control you can encourage larger acts of self-control the rigors of team sports Paul tuff who I'm sure a lot of you have read had an example in one of his books of a chess coach at is 318 in New York and she taught what character what tough calls in the non-cognitive skills simply by teaching chess and she never had to talk about character in this level she just talked about self discipline and becoming really good at chess and character came in through the back door and so this this performative character traits like grit and self-reliance are the second level of character building one of the problems in contemporary America is that we take the second level of character building and sometimes it's imagined it's all of character building over the last few years and in part because of my friend Paul tough our the word the meaning of the word character has shifted so it's no longer a deep moral virtue that makes you a good four and virtuous person it's a performative virtue that makes you good at your job and that's diminishing this these performative virtues are parts of character but they're not the whole thing the third level of character is living a balanced life between your different commitments we all live in a matrix of worth people things are pulling us in the opposite direction our commitment to our job versus recommend to our family our commitment to the public good versus private happiness between God and nation between different faiths between different ideas freedom and security justice and mercy and there's no rule for settling these balances when two things can contradict James Q Wilson again a good character however defined is not live a life lived according to a rule there rarely is a rule it's a life lived in balance the balance among the moral senses is to me more an aesthetic than a philosophical matter it is aesthetic in two senses it is a balance that is struck without deliberation or reasoned justifications and in the character thereby form there is no clear distinction between form and content so the people at this third level of character building they have all these different things that are committed to and they have to find the right balance being nice to their spouse being nice to their kids being nice to their friends sometimes it's just raw time and so how do people find the balance well the first thing is they live in dense organizations some schools that I go to are thin and they don't really leave a mark and their students but some schools are thick and they do leave a mark because there's an intense set of norms and cultural and expectations that are fiercely opposed imposed and at inside those norms there's a set of priorities a lot of what we do in life is figuring out of all the things I love what do I love most towards of my job most do I love money most do I love the truth most and dense cultures create a set of priorities of what love is than the other the second and the the second thing that creates that sense of priorities which again is more aesthetic is James's word in the word that comes out here is moral ecologies we often tell our students to come up with a value system for their own find out why you believe and if your name is nietzsche or aerosol maybe you can do that but most of us can't do that we have to borrow somebody else's moral ecology and fortunately history and civilization has left us a lot of moral ecologies to pick and choose from so one of the things schools can usefully do is say I'm not going to tell you what to believe but here's a bunch of belief systems you find one that's right for you it could be the Greek system based on honor and courage it could be the stoic system based on the suppression of emotions it could be the Hebraic system based on obedience to law and rational discernment it could be the Christian system based on surrender to virtue and grace and agape it could be in the Enlightenment system based on reason and finding morality through reason there's all sorts of world tributaries there's Buddhism and there's all sorts of moral ecologies and philosophies and you just pick one or pick two or combine your own and that something schools can usually at least throw before students and then there's this process so mostly I've been talking about these first three belief systems these three levels of pressure points are mostly worldly their levels of attachment there's levels of self-control and there's a moral sense as owning one's moral emotions and one's moral sentiments to know how to balance your attachments but we all get to a certain point in life where we have a crisis or we get a little deeper and I've come to think life is often about finding your second mountain like we all start out in life climbing a mountain and we're climbing the mountain to become a great academic or a great this or that and then something happens in life of death a career setback and you realize actually that wasn't my mountain and this second Mountain tends to be an internal mountain and a mountain having to do with virtue and vice right and wrong grace and salvation and that second Mountain is the the next level of character building and that's the one that's hardest for us to discuss in the secular atmosphere it often happens through the death of a loved one people get their lives totally thrown off course and they have to fall our back on what's inside sometimes and some of my students were in their mid-twenties they went to Yale they were successful at everything they had a career setback they got fired I'm thinking one of my kids right now and well everything fell apart and so at the young age of 23 or 24 he's got a second mountain to find because that career he thought was gonna have he's not gonna have some of it is by adverse circumstances I've been studying people who were imprisoned people like Dostoyevsky vaclav havel Nelson Mandela and they get everything taken away from the outer world and all they've got is they're in the world and the best of them discover their second mountain at that moment that we were talking about Viktor Frankl who was in Auschwitz and they could take away everything but his life but he did what he called his inner whole his response is to be worthy of suffering and to treat suffering with dignity and I was telling the story of a woman he spoke to in the camps who was dying in the infirmary and she was had was losing her life but she had a tree that was outside her window and she told Franco this tree is the only friend I have in my loneliness and she said I often talked to this tree and he said was the tree talked back to you and she said yeah the street does talk to me and he says what does it say and that she said well the tree says to me I am life I am life I'm eternal life and so everything was taken away but she experienced a moments of transcendence that sounds like joy even in Auschwitz and so those that that is the next level of character development is it attaining the highest level of joy there's a guy named Robert Spitzer who says we have four levels of happiness in this world we have material happiness having nice clothes nice car there's ego gratification winning victories and achieving success some status and third there's generativity the pleasure one gets back from giving back to one community and the fourth and highest level of that level of happiness is transcendence feeling connected to a universal truth feeling connected and unwashed in an unquenchable unconditional love and having a sense of one's purpose in place in the world and to me this is the highest level of character building and it's not done because it makes you good at your job it's done for its own self because it is the fulfillment of one's deepest nature we don't have a word in the Society for the sort of ambition that I think drives us the most which is the ambition to lead a meaningful and purposeful life CS Lewis called it joy for him joy was not realizing your desires but having the highest possible desires a hero of mine Dorothy day called it loneliness to be lonely for the highest possible life but it's a sort of moral ambition that I see in all my students I bet you see in yours one of them said we're so hungry because they want to feel their life has meaning and as Nietzsche said he who has a why to live for it can endure anyhow the only way they can get through the day is if they know why they're living and they get glimpses of it in sensations of reverence sometimes they've come across something that seems sacred and reverential sometimes they have moments of holy connection I was struck by a passage by this guy rabbi wolf Kelman who was on the march to Selma and he said during the March we felt connected in song to the transcendental the ineffable we felt triumphant celebration we felt that things change for the good and nothing is congealed forever that was a the warmest transcendental spiritual experience meaning and purpose and mission were beyond exact words meaning feeling song movement it was an overwhelming sense of spiritual Philmont we were experiencing what Heschel called the meaning beyond the mystery and people have those moments where they taste something higher and forever after they want to live up and be faithful to those moments and so to me that's the fifth and final pressure point of character building which is you've tasted some sense of sacredness or holiness and somehow you want to live up and be faithful to that moment and so you've enter in a phase shift in your life it's a different vocabulary words like covenant instead of contract where it's like vocation set of career it's a different logic it's not like what am I getting the most out of this as I can is it it's rather immoral logic am i giving the most as I can it's a and and so then there are things that activities that help people stay current or deepen this sense of character building some of them are simply spiritual disciplines like prayer or meditation or journal writing some of them are acts of selfless service some of them are self combat identifying the core sin in oneself and then purging oneself of it day by day some of its small groups have a tense communion some of it is done in solitude through intense periods of self-reflection but it is to me the highest form of character building and it is the one without which none of the others really make sense that unless one is aiming for this highest form which is a spiritual and transcendental form then all the others will seem incomplete and that the people we really admire have taken this highest form haven't and terminal eyes dit into their normal aspect of day there's a New Yorker writer named Larissa McFaul looks I can't even pronounce her last name MacFarquhar I think is his and she writes about extremes personal heroes people who save amazing Norman people's out at sea at shipwrecks who help people through the Holocaust and what's interesting about them is their internalized they'd internalized morality into their identities so they kidding them imagine not doing it and still being who they are what's amazing is they're amazingly calm about what they did and that they do not see it as any way remarkable I know I have there's a passage from Albert Schweitzer who was a doctor in Africa and he said when I'm recruiting from my hospital I do not want any moral heroes I don't want one people thinking they're doing anything heroic I want people to serve humanity just the way as if they were just doing the dishes it just seems normally he said there are no heroes of idealism there are only heroes of renunciation and so I'll just close with the thought which is we all I deal with kids at 18 to 22 a lot of you deal with them a little younger when you can actually make a difference and you sometimes wonder what am i how can i in still something is deep in character in their lives if you teach a math you can sort of see the results but if you're trying to teach character what do you see and I had a professor in college or so professor was at my college named Carl Weintraub who when his deathbed wrote an email to a friend of mine said you know all my life I tried to teach certain books and I tried to give the students of the sense of the sacredness and the importance and the blood and sweat and toil that the author's poured into them but sometimes for my students I would just hear back and it just sounded like they were pushing around air I tried to make a difference in their lives but I'm not sure I did that's often the sensation you get when you're when you're teaching character but I do think and if you think back to our own lives to our own school experiences there are not many sixteen year olds there are not many 20 year olds who can experience a sort of transcendence and spiritual discipline I can describe but I do think we can plant seeds and make them aware of things and it's just in the process of making them the more this level exists there are moral exemplars who have tasted this and that when we do that when the bad stuff happens later in life I had a student say to me you know suffering really helps character should I go out and find suffering and I said don't worry it'll find you and I do think if we plant those seeds at each of these different pressure points then when the bad stuff happens or the really good stuff happens then we will have done something to change their lives thank you [Applause]

Channel: Culture Feed

Views: 29,396

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Keywords: character, virtue, selfishness, honesty, love, self-control, theft, community, purpose, practice, heroes, transcendence

Id: VqlNnK2ALa0

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 16 2017