The Four Commitments: The Choices That Create Your Life

Thank You mr. first I should thank mr. vice president thank you and dr. Biden for coming if something happens to me you're taken over if that does happen we'll be a journey about 2:00 a.m. it's a pleasure to be here I come here to get out of Washington get in touch with the real America I don't want see what people are complaining about it seems okay to me but now I'll be brief I've been at Aspen ideas festival for many years and I I know you didn't come here to hear me speak you came here to hear yourself speak try to get out of the way that now I did a little comedy routine at the comedy night the other night and one of things thank you you're about to hear a little of it again one of things I tried to explain to that crowd is I've just written a book on character and writing a book on character does not give you good character reading a book on character does not give you good character buying a book on character on the other hand does give you good character and when I tried to explain to that crowd was a life of spiritual ambition I was born like a lot of Jewish children I was immaculately conceived I was a little spiritually out of place as a child I went to Grace Church School in lower Manhattan I was part of the old Jewish boys divan in choir at Grace we would sing the hymns but to square with our religion we wouldn't say the word Jesus so the volume would sort of drop down and come back up but I was spiritually ambitious I thought I'd join a religion but I want to join at the top as deity I thought that would be good but then when I was 18 the admissions officers at Columbia Brown and Wesley and decided that she could be receive Chicago and my favorite thing about Chicago is it's a Baptist school or atheist professor to teach Jewish students st. Thomas Aquinas and then I moved to New York and got shallow I told the crowd I started a business selling man-bun toupees you should come out to Aspen where there's a certain creature I'm fascinated by in Aspen who are these old guys who come out here to retire and they're billionaires and they've just decided to not die and so they hire these six personal trainers they're popping cialis like breath mints they're shrunk down to like 90 pounds five foot two and if you're hiking up a mountain they zoom right by you pad little waves of contempt going past them it's like being passed like by a little iron raisinet going up the mountain there and then finally as I got older I got a little more feminine and spiritually open I'm the only man in America to have read that book Eat Pray Love I was lactating by age page 123 but I was still trying to develop you know some soul and so one of the things I did to become spiritually improved was I would shop at progressive grocery stores like Trader Joe's and Whole Foods where the cashiers look like they're on loan from Amnesty International my favorite section I've sold this truck for is they they the snack food ception they couldn't have pretzels and potato chips that would be vulgar that so they have the seaweed based snacks we used to get veggie booty with kale which is for families who want or kids who come up and say mom mom I want to snack that'll help prevent colorectal cancer and that's for them and so you try these lame things to be spiritually sophisticated but spiritual elevation comes at the strangest moments and it came for me about 10 years ago I had one of those moments I do a show on Friday nights called the news hour with Jim Lehrer thank you and I do a guy named Mark shields our segment it's shields and Brooks we want to call Brook shields I would've been better but they didn't go for that it's shields and Brooks before of me it was shields and Gert or shields and she go shields and gergan shields and calvin coolidge shields and I think Plato it started out as but I came home most about ten years ago and I was living in Bethesda Maryland and it was about 7:30 at night and I drive it in my driveway which sort of wrapped around the house and Mike three kids were then like twelve nine and four we're in the backyard and they had win these super market balls and they were kicking it up in the air this plastic ball and they were chasing across the yard to get to the ball and they were tumbling all over each other and they were laughing and they were giggling and just putting a pile of kids on top of a ball so I pulled into the driveway and I see this tableau all parents have seen it of just perfect family happiness and I just sit there in the car looking at it through the windshield and it's one of those moments when life and time feel like they're suspended and I had a feeling of being overwhelmed with gratitude reality sort of spits pills outside its boundaries you've experienced a joy that's greater than anything you ever feel at work and you you sort of alerted to higher joy and you want to be worthy of such moments and that's a moment where gratitude and really grace unmerited love lifts you up and inspires you to try to be higher I get those moments sometimes with those with those kinds of experiences and sometimes I get it when I meet somebody who radiates it in her light you meet these people about every 30 days or so maybe more often if you're lucky where they just radiate an inner light I was saying the other day that one of the people I I met at a Washington function of all places was the dalai lama and he just radiates that light he's a sort of person who laughs for no apparent reason and so he starts laughing and then i'm sitting next to him and i want to be polite so i start laughing and he laughs and i laugh and like i feel i should insert a joke just to justify the laughter and the one thing I said was that I was nervous so I he is a little canvas dolly llama bag so I said you got any candy in her bag and so he starts pulling out what's in the bag and it's everything you get in the first-class cabin with international flight it's like the ear plugs eye patch little razor Toblerone bar but when you're around people like that you think at least I think you know I've achieved way more career success than I ever thought I would but that inner light the ability glow with joy and grace that I don't have and how do you get that there's a Catholic writer named Robert Spitzer who reminds us there are four levels of happiness there's material pleasure having good food nice clothing good sex beautiful car there's ego comparative pleasure winning status and popularity being a success in the marketplace getting a little famous maybe third there's generativity the pleasure you get from contributing to others serving community helping the poor and fourth and finally there's transcendence and this is the highest level of joy and happiness and awareness that comes from knowing one's place in the cosmic order a connection to a love that goes beyond the physical realm a feeling of connection to an unconditional truth and unconditional love a political ideal justice goodness beauty and home and getting one into her easy were all sort of wired for that getting three and four are harder and so I had written this book a few years ago on how do you move from level one and two to level three and four and I didn't know if I could do it but I wanted to read about people who did and I wanted to study those people so I wrote a book and I'm the distinction it was called the road to character and the distinction of dating in beginning of the book was between the eulogy and the resume virtues the resume things are they make you go to your job the eulogy virtues are those the things they say about you after you're dead are you honorable courageous brave capable of great love and I quoted a rabbi Joseph soloveitchik who said we are both these sides of our nature and there are some times in tension and so I wanted to know how did people and the characters in my book were all kind of pathetic at age 20 they were not made great but they were magnificent by age 70 they did something special with their lives to improve their souls and so I don't know what was that and the core theme of the book was that it's the inner drama against our own weaknesses that we each have a sin whether it's vanity or greed or fear and how we fight against that sin is what determines the quality of our character and so we all should sit down and think what is my course in - shallowness by the way and so one of the characters for example in the book was Dwight Eisenhower when Eisenhower was seven or nine something like that he wanted to go out trick-or-treating his mom this amazing woman named Ida wouldn't let him and he threw a temper tantrum and punched the tree in the front yard and he punched it so bad he rubbed all the skin off his fingers and Ida sent him to his room let him cry for an hour but then went up to bound it bind his wounds and recited a verse from Proverbs and the verse was he that he who conquers his own soul is greater than he who taketh the city and 60 years later when Eisenhower wrote his memoirs he said that was the most important conversation of his life because he taught him he had a problem which was his anger and his passion and his temper and if he was going to make anything of himself he would have to confront that problem and he really did we think it was the most careless country-club kind of guy that was creation he during the World War two I'll going to pick the right war and during the presidency at night he was up at night not sleeping smoking drinking throat cancer blood pressure spikes but he knew he could not lead from that position of anger and so he had to project confidence optimism and cheerfulness and he did that as an act of will and practice some of his devices were silly he was a hater he would hate people so I'd write their names on pieces of paper and rip them up and throw them in the garbage can just as a purging device and that was my main thesis in the book but there are some things you recognize a book after it comes out and one of the things I recognized about my characters is they all had amazing mothers and I didn't realize when I was writing the book their dads and but the moms were amazing and I came across a study just a couple weeks ago of soldiers in World War two and the soldiers they all these guys got drafted the army in World War two but some of them were rose and were promoted of the major some stayed at low ranks or private or something so what factor determined or correlated with getting promoted was at IQ no no correlation was it social status no correlation was it physical courage no correlation the number one correlation between getting promoted was love of mother the guys with amazing relationships with their moms had received vast bucketfuls of love and were able to offer that love to their men and they became good officers and so that was one thing I realized about my characters they all had amazing moms and they were infused with love the second thing is they were capable of making amazing commitments and on my book was too individualistic when you look at the characters from a little further back they were all capable of really connecting at attaching deeply to institutions outside themselves one of my characters was Dorothy day and she was a I always say about her she was the sort of person she would read novels but she couldn't just read them she acted out the character she acted like the character she was reading about and unfortunately she read a lot of dusty esky and so she's like drinking carousing living in poverty but her life was turned around when she was about 30 when she gave birth to her daughter and she realized during pregnancy all the accounts of childbearing she'd ever read were written by men and so 40 minutes after the birth of her daughter she wrote one it's a very beautiful essay but it culminates with this passage if I had written the greatest book composed the greatest Symphony painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms no human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I felt after the birth of my child with this came and eat to worship and to adore she needed somebody to thank she found God at that moment she became a Catholic she started a Catholic where newspaper she started a homeless shelter a soup kitchen and Luke spent the next 60 years of her life not only serving the poor but living a life of poverty in the poor in amongst the poor and just a long commitment along obedient in the same direction for 60 years another night characters was a woman named Frances Perkins she was having tea in 1913 in lower Manhattan she hears a commotion she runs outside she stumbled across one of those famous fires in American history the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire she runs up to it and she sees what she thinks her bundles of clothing being thrown out of the 10th floor window but it's like 9/11 human beings are leaping to their death rather than being burned to death and she sees the guy heist seamstresses across the windowsill and drop them into space he does a first a second a third a fourth is his girlfriend who he kisses and drops her and then he goes and that was what you might call her call within a call she was already sort of a do-gooder and activist but that moment purified her ambition to do good and she she would work with anybody compromise with anybody she a fierce ambition to serve the cause of worker safety and spent the next 50 years of her life serving that cause culminating in secretary labor under Franklin Roosevelt the first woman in the cabinet and so the people that I was writing about they were not only combating something in themselves they were committing and making a covenant to people around them the kind of covenant that Ruth made to Naomi in the Bible where you go I will go where you Lodge I will Lodge your people shall be my people and your God my God where you die I will die and there I will be buried and so our inner natures are formed by our outer promises and when you think about it life is just a forum for promise making there are obvious promises we make it a wearisome ceremony we promise to love and serve our spouse but there are silent pom promises that pervade life even me standing up here I'm making a promise to you that I'm going to do my best to give you an interesting talk when you go to a dinner party you're making a promise to be civil kind and attentive to your host we are constantly making promises to each other and it's our promises that define us on our rent road without being bound to the fulfillment of our promises we would never be able to keep our identities we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each person's lonely heart caught in its contradictions and equivocal ''tis so since the book came out I've been thinking a lot about promises and commitments what is a commitment well it is a form of promising but it's a little more making commitment means falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters because our commitments really stretch long into time and it's not always fun to keep a commitment but you keep it because you've built a structure behavior around it and I came to the conclusion that to live a fulfilled life we make four big commitments to a spouse and a family to a vocation to a philosophy or faith and to a community now only one of these commitments comes with a big ceremony of the beginning the marriage but in some sense we are making a commitment and having a ceremony in honor of all those commitments we happen to live in a community that makes commitment making hard we live in a society filled with D commitment devices the internet our watches our phones how do you make a lifelong commitment if you can't keep your attention for more than 30 seconds on one thing we have a culture and I teach in college we have a culture of FOMO fear of missing out if you commit to one thing you'll miss all the other goodies down the road we have a culture of fear and a lot of people who are paralyzed by indecision because they're afraid of making the wrong commitment we have a culture of autonomy that we should be self-contained creatures true to our inner selves and we also have a false definition of freedom we think freedom is keeping options open living in a life that's unencumbered in preserving room for future choices but to me that's I found in my life that's a recipe for a frazzle meant a state of being harried multitasking distraction that a lot of us live in a lot of the time and one things I've really thought last few weeks is that if you spend your years keeping your options open you leave an impotent fragmented life you'll wander about in the indeterminacy of your own passing feelings and changeable heart life will just be a series of temporary moments not an accumulating building flow of accomplishments you'll never be all in for anyone or any path because your eyes will always be wandering over to some other possibility you lay waste to your powers scattering them in all directions and the effect of having a lot of people like that we have a fragmented and isolated society when many people live a life where arms-length to their commitments we have loneliness of public fragmentation polarization or politics you contribute to social isolation that we see around us which leads to rising suicide addiction rates rising mental illness greater inequality falling social trust strain family bonds and a loss of national cohesion so when you think about it to make commitments in this culture you have to buck the surrounding culture you have to be a little counter cultural and you go after have to go after the higher freedom that comes when you've chained yourself to a political cause or cultural cause or as group of people or a philosophy or faith it's our restraints that liberate us for higher freedom you have to chain yourself to years of piano practice if you have want to have the freedom to really play well as the pastor of Tim Keller puts it freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions is finding the right ones and so I've spent a lot of time thinking about commitment making how does it happen how do you make commitments and when you make a commitment whether it's to philosophy to a faith going to med school joining the Marine Corps entering nursing school it's super hard because you're binding yourself for years in the future and you've got to know what you really love which is a very difficult thing to know and not only that you've got to know what your future self is going to love philosophers have a concept they called a vampire problem so suppose somebody came to you and said would you like to be a vampire for the rest of your life you could fly around at night you could live forever you'd have all these magical powers be cool well you might think maybe but the problem is you as your human self don't know what it'll feel like to be a vampire self the act of making that decision is going to change who you are and so we have a lot of decisions we make in life that are vampire decisions for example having kids having kids will change who you are so the decision to have kids you're as you're private you're single apparently childless self trying to imagine who will I be as a parent you have no way of knowing joining the military will change who you are getting married will change who you are you have to take all these blind leaps of faith and you can't think through that problem because you have no actual information about what the future is going to hold for you so how do you make that kind of commitment well there are two big motivators that help people make commitments one of them is love you just fall in love with something whether it's this academic discipline or a person or a god now the first thing love does is humbles us it reminds us we're not even control of ourselves you can't control your own thinking when you're in love when you look across the crowd you think you see your beloved they are sitting there the second thing love does is it plows open hard ground it opens up the crust of our lives that we've used to cover over ourselves exposing soft flesh below and it makes us more Bible to be suffered deep pain but also deep joy the thirdly love third thing love does is it dissenters itself you realize your riches are not in yourself they're in another person and the final thing does is it leads to unity to a sort of fusion elite unity between two people there's a great passage in a book called Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louie there Bernier and old guys talking to his daughter and he's his he's talking about his relationship with his late wife and he says love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away and this is both an art and a fortunate accident your mother and I had it we had roots that grew toward each other underground and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two and that's a fusion that's a commitment when one thing has become fused with another now that's the first passion of love leading to the deep fusion of souls and we write and have a lot of songs and Taylor Swift sings a lot of songs about the first passion of love but a commitment is over time and philosophers have a concept they call the second love and this is the love that happens deep into a relationship after each side has been bruised a little knows each other a little better disillusioned with each other and there's a man who's at this conference who wrote a beautiful description of this second love his name and Lisa Leon Wiesel terror saw him over by the meadows earlier today and he gave a toast to a couple friends of mine at their wedding which described the second love this kind of love he wrote is private and it is particularly its object is the specificity of this man and that woman the distinctiveness of this spirit and that flesh this love prefers deep to wide and here to there the grasp to the reach when the day is done and the lights are out there was only this other heart this other mind this other face to assist in repelling one's demons or in greeting one's angels it does not matter who the president is when one consents to marry one consents to be truly known which is an ominous prospect and so one bets on love to correct for the ordinariness of the impression and to call forth the forgiveness that is invariably required by an accurate perception of oneself marriages are exposures we may be heroes to our spouses but we may not be idols and that's just a beautiful description of how love deepens and fuses people and like Saint Agustin sixteen hundred years ago I'm a big believer that we're primary loving will creatures were not cognitive thinking creatures our feelings are more important and so love is the first thing that motivates us to make these big commitments in these four areas but it's not just love we also want our commitments to be morally validated we're all born with a moral imagination we have moral sentiments with a concept we have we all feel the innate urge to pursue our highest good we want to feel our life has some meaning and yearning we all know it's weird in our in our language we don't really have a word for this moral ambition moral imagination moral yearning the Greeks had a word for it which was eros but we've screwed up that word so now it refers to sex and so different writers have tried different words for to suggest that moral hunger that we feel to have a life of meaning and purpose and be good people Dorothy day who I mentioned before called it loneliness a longing for God or goodness or holiness CS Lewis called it joy joy was not the completion of desire but the highest possible form of desire and so we burned with sort of a spiritual hunger and if we don't feel it we end up dry unsatisfied twisted and self-loathing and the image that is coming to my head about that moral yearning is that it's like it's not there all the time and so it's like there's a part of our souls that's like a reclusive Leopard and this is the part that doesn't care about money or status or Facebook Likes or everyday things and the leopard is the part that inside us that yearns for transcendence that some feeling of connection to unconditional love some feeling connected to justice and for long periods of our lives especially young and in our 20s when we were working and trying to build a career the leopard is high in the forest mountains you might get a glimpse of them out of the corner of your eye just off in the distance trailing you through the tree trunks and there are spare moments when you've a glee or even urgently feel his presence this could happen agonizingly during one of those long sleepless maybe guilt-ridden lights nights when your thoughts come as a great poet named Christian Wyman put it like a drawer full of knives and the or the leopards can visit like it did me that in my backyard during one of those fantastic moments with friends and family when you look out at laughing faces of the people you love and you're overwhelmed by gratitude and then too you feel a spiritual uplift the leopard can come during moments of suffering when you're forced to peer into the deepest cavities of yourself and you want to know how that's connected the moments of suffering to some longer story of redemption and then there are moments and a lot of us are middle-aged or beyond which I think are inevitable in every life but maybe toward middle more toward middle or older age when the leopard comes out of the hills and he just sits there in the middle of your doorframe and he stares at you inescapably eye to eye face to face implacable and unmoving and demand some justification what's your purpose here why were you sent here what's your mission and at those moments there are no excuses everybody has to let down the mask and you have to think am I really serving my eyes good I think we all face those moments sooner or later and those who have no answers and who have given the question no thought die knowing that and trying to suppress that knowledge and some awful way but most of us try and try to do our best and the weird thing about fulfilling the Leopards hunger trying to be our best selves is you've got to break out of the normal logic of life normally and when you buy a car you buy a couch you buy some food you have a normal self-interested utilitarian logic you know is this in my best self-interest to the benefits exceed the cost is this best for me does this work is a beat my needs when you're making a commitment to something whether it's a spouse or religion or a cause those questions are the worst questions you can ask imagine going into a marriage and asking the question what's best for me if both sides are asking that don't bet on the marriage imagining finding of faith and saying does this serve my needs that's not a faith that's just opportunism imagining serving a cause like the civil rights cause and saying is this working for me nobody marches across the Selma bridge if it's working for them because there a lot of moments when it's not working for you so you have to adopt a different lens moral lens which is beyond rationality which takes you beyond utilitarian thinking when you have to just throw it all in people who adopt a moral lens are looking for ways to forget themselves surrender themselves throw themselves into something without counting the cost they understand if only by instinct that their true joy is found on the distant side of unselfishness or not on this side people who ask use a moral lens don't ask what do I want from life they ask what is life asking of me Francis Perkins was not saying what's my passion when she was standing on a street corner there was this problem ten floors above her and that became her life mission and people who see through immoral lens have a different view of marriage they don't ask is this person right for me they ask can I love her in a way that brings out her loveliness can we take our private practice and direct it outward can we can I go through every day assuming that my own selfishness is the core problem in our relationship we have a tendency when were in relationships to think the other person selfishness is actually the core problem but ours is the only one we can control and so I think we people stick with their commitments both because they're just in love which is fun and they have some yearning a yearning to be a good person and they'll do amazing things driven by these two motivations but a commitment is in just motivation a commitment is also discipline because we're doing our commitments over a long period of time when a lot of the moments are not magical there are a lot of teachers I know who go through years where they're putting more into their profession than they're getting out of it but they can't quit because they are teachers that's their identity and so it's sort of like ordered energy and so then I began thinking what disciplines a commitment it's not just cushy love or your vague yearning it's tough and realistic I think the first thing that disciplines a commitment is is truth the ability to see truth and that seems like an obvious thing we don't look out and see but not everybody actually sees the world clearly I cover politics and people don't see the world clearly john ruskin a Victorian art critic wrote the more I think of it the more I find this conclusion more oppressed upon me that the greatest thing a human soul ever does is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way hundreds of people can talk for one who can think but thousands can think for one who can see and that ability to see clearly is a very hard skill to learn I think we learn it for in our educational institutions by a scientific method mathematical method or sometimes just reading great writers have the ability to see one of my favorite writers my favorite writer is Leo Tolstoy and my favorite book is Anna Karenina and there's a scene in that novel where he describes this girl Kitty going to a ball and Kitty is like 17 and Tolstoy was like a middle-aged guy somehow describes what it feels like for a young woman when her hair looks perfect she puts on a dress and it just fits perfectly she puts on a velvet choker and it fits perfectly so he describes what it's like to just have it all going on and then she goes to the ball and she's the belle of the ball and everybody's asking her to dance and all eyes are upon her and she's being whirled around and she sees the guy she wants to marry a guy named Vronsky and she thinks he's going to ask her to the final dance and propose during that dance and she's being whirled around by somebody else and she sees Ron ski and he's got this look of rapturous love on his face and she whirls around some more and she sees Ron ski with that look of rapturous love but he's not looking at her he's looking at Anna Karenina and Tolstoy describes again with great clarity what it feels like to have her whole insides implode and to peace go from the highest high to the lowest low and he describes it all with crystalline purity and he describes Ron ski by the way looking at Anna Karenina a married woman thinking I can't help myself and this is going to kill me I can't stop myself I love her and that's the course and told stories ability is just in the sensitivity to observe carefully and to see the world carefully how things flow and I think to have a commitment and to carry it through you have to be over realistic and be able to see the world and that commitment to truth is really what keeps people sort of on track and from being captured by the own self delusions the second thing I think it's a commitment is disciplined is by craft we all have certain professions which all have sort of institutional disciplines imposed upon us musicians have to play scales surgeons have to lay out their tools I happen to be a newspaper columnist and I told the group in this tent yesterday that I have my own craft of writing has its own disciplines I have a very bad memory and so what I do is I take notes hundreds of notes for each column and they usually get about 200 pages of research material which I write up and markup and in the morning my column is do I get out on the carpet in the floor of my living room and I separate all my notes and papers into piles and each pile is a paragraph in my column so my columns only integer words but there'll be 14 piles on the floor and so for me the writing process is not the act of typing into the keyboard it's the act of crawling around on the carpet and laying out my piles and there are moments when connections are being made and it's all beginning to make sense and ideas are popping into my head where it's the best part of my job it's almost like prayer and so that is the craft of my profession having to structure and organize a piece of writing and getting it done every three days but we all are disciplined by our craft and by the certain commitments we do and then the third and final thing that I think disciplines our commitments is community we all live surrounded by others and fortunately we're up were responsible to toward them we have to they are the eyes of others insist on certain standards of behavior they prevent us a little from doing wrong and sometimes they lift us up to doing well I have a friend who lives in northern Louisiana named Roger ear and he lives in a really small town somewhere up north and he had a sister named Ruthie who was a teacher and she was one of those people who just radiated energy and unfortunately Ruthie died when she was in her 40s and though the town probably had like 600 people in it something like 1500 came out to her funeral and she was a woman who hated to wear shoes she go barefoot all the time and her husband was a fireman and they firemen carried her casket to the gravesite barefoot and one things Ruthie did in service to her community was on Christmas Eve she wanted the dead to be remembered and so she'd go to the town cemetery and on top of each gravestone she would put a lit candle and she happened to die just before Christmas and rod was sitting with his mom in their house and he said on Christmas Eve to her should we do what Ruthie used to do and put candles on the gravestones and his mom said you know in future years I think I could do that but right now it's just too tough it's just a little too tough and so they didn't do it but they drove to another family another member of their family and they drove across town and they happen to pass the cemetery and somebody else had put a candles on every gravestone and so that's an example of community picking up itself one member of the community passing something on a standard of behavior and so I think these are the things that organize our commitments drive our commitments discipline our commitments and the people who somebody said to me earlier in the festival think of a wagon wheel every time you keep a promise you add another spike spoke to that wagon wheel and you increase the integrity of the whole wheel every time you break a promise you take away a spoke and you decrease the integrity of the wheel well somebody is full rich for big commitments they've got integrity it's an emergent property out of these commitments they're surrounded by webs of unconditional love and I do think the inner joy radiates from that one of my favorite passages in literature is in st. Augustine's Confessions and Dustin was born in North Africa 1,500 1,600 years ago and he had a mom named Monica who was the helicopter mom to be all helicopter moms and so she was telling Augustine who - boo - the friend who not to befriend hoo - Marian who not to marry who to think what to think what not to think and they had intense conflict and so he decided he had a family who's in his 30s he decide I got to get away from mom so he sneaks onto a boat heads for Italy the boats leaving and he sees her on the shore screaming at him she gets on the next boat tracks him down in Italy and then but then at the end of her life they're still in Italy she says to him I think she's 59 she says Tim you know I've been on you all your life but I really only wanted you to be a certain sort of man and a certain sort of Christian and now you are that kind of person and so my work here was done and I'm ready to go I thought I want to go back in Africa but God is everywhere he'll find me and she does in fact died nine days later and Agustin describes their final conversation which takes place in a garden and after a life of conflict and screaming and fighting he describes it as the sweetest of all possible conversations that rises above material things into the realm of pure spirit and then he has a long sentence and it is very hard to understand but it's got one word throughout it and that word is hushed and so he says the voices our voices were hushed the birds and the trees were hushed the wind was in the trees was hushed and it just keeps going on hushed hushed hushed and you get this sense of deep tranquility and peace or Shalom as it says in Hebrew and you really get the sense that if somebody who strongly committed himself them to each other him to his faith him to his mission some of the yearning going away and just being satisfied and that I think is one of the dreams of peace and tranquility we long for in our lives the second thing that I think a deep commitment can do is give you that sense of meaning which can help you endure anything I hope a lot of the people in this room has have read man search for meaning by Viktor Frankl Frankel was a psychologist in the 30s in Germany or in Austria and he was captured by the Nazis they sent into concentration camp and he said you know this wasn't what the life I was looking for but this is what life is asking me and he decided I'm a psychologist I'm in a concentration camp I'll study suffering and he said suffering became a problem I did not want to turn my back down and so he suffered suffering but he counseled a lot of the people in there and he tried to figure out who was surviving the camps and who wasn't and a lot of the people who survived thought everyday about their loved ones who were outside the camps and spoke to them one of Franklin's friends said to him one day listen if I don't get back to my wife and if you should see her again then tell her that I talked to her daily and hourly you remember that second tell her I'd loved her more than anyone thirdly tell her the short time I've been married to her outweighs everything even all that we've gone through here and it was that ability to focus on some ideal and some person and keep that commitment alive that kept the people alive and then he met a young woman who was sick and dying in a bed and he went up to her and she said I'm grateful fate has hit me this hard in my former life I was spoiled and I did not take spiritual accomplishment seriously but in the camp she'd made a commitment she was super sick she was in a bed and her commitment was to the only living thing she could see from the bed which was a tree outside the window and she told Franco this tree is the only friend I have in my loneliness I often talked to this tree and Frank Laster if the tree ever talked back to her and she said yeah the tree says to me I am here I am here I'm life I'm eternal life and so what you see is a commitment which is the elta commitment to something beyond the physical realm a commitment to some eternal peace eternal presence eternal truth and so I think these are the sorts of things that we keep our commitments you at the end of the road you get these kind of tranquility these kind of connections or something transcend that level-4 of happiness I wanted to close by talking about our vice president Phil it allow me I got to spend a little time with him this afternoon it was off the record so I can't tell you what we said but I loved interviewing Joe Biden because he is a man of intense loyalty and commitments to family to the Senate to the state of Delaware and to pretty much everyone he runs into and one of the things I'm like the worst journalist in the world when I gets a chance to meet with the vice president I probably should be asking about Syria or something like that but one of the things I've tried to do in a few occasions we've had a chance to spend time together as asking about his his mom and dad because he was raised with all these Maxim's and rules of etiquette and politeness that really are the formation the way a family forms a commitment and a code of character and a code of dignity and one of the things I've always been struck by in his campaign speeches is by how often he quotes family members especially parents and when you hear the frankly his parents the dead living on and his speeches you reminded the ultimate payoff of a commitment that if you are emotionally bonded that your voice lingers on long after you're gone and I have a passage I'll close with bias a mathematician from Indiana University named Douglas Hofstadter and his is about the ultimate form of union between two people which is almost a union within brains and he was in Italy when his kids were four and two and he had a wife who unfortunately when she was in her 30s died of a brain aneurysm and he would keep a picture of her on the dresser that he looked at every day but some days and one particular day he looked at it with particular intensity and here's what he wrote about that moment I looked at her face and I look so deeply I felt I was behind her eyes and all at once I found myself saying as tears flowed that's me that's me and those simple words brought back many thoughts that I'd had before about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity about the fact that of the core of both our souls they are identical hopes and dreams for our children about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes but were just one hope one clear thing that defines us both that welded us into a unit the kind of unit I would have dimly imagined before being married and having children I realized that though Carroll had died that core piece of er had not died at all but it had remained and lived on very determinately in my brain and that the first book I wrote a year ago was so individualistic but when you see people as they actually live they're fusing so determinately through commitments into each other's brains and living forever thank you we have a few minutes left I'm willing to do a complete takedown with the Obama administration let's just do five minutes of questions that we can all go there are microphones I see you I may be here and I see on the wings we'll start here I'm just curious how you identified and located the characters in your book how identified the characters in my book pretty randomly I was looking for people as I said who were messes at 20 and grade at 70 and I wanted them to illustrate different virtues the ability to turn suffering into something profound the ability to turn commitment to an institution George Marshall commitment to the u.s. military and I wanted to range the professions the hardest profession to find a good person in was writers they're all selfish narcissists and so I finally found George Eliot who made a heroic dive into love but it was it wasn't scientific I'm afraid they were people I really love and admire sir was there one over here I see a couple maybe in the back we'll just do a few first of all I'd like to thank you for an hour of reflection that was really wonderful but I also think I already know the answer this question but have you had a wonderful relationship with your mother with my mother my mother's still looking on from wherever she is he lives in Pennsylvania yeah my parents I'm a I'm a believer in the phrase it took three generation takes three generations to make a career and my parent my grandfather was a my mom's father was a lawyer but he didn't really do much law he wrote spending most of his life writing letters to the editor to the New York Times hoping to get in that's true and when I got this job of course I was dead by then but I certainly wished I could have I could have told him and then my mom what is was an academic and then worked in the pharmaceutical industry and she certainly passed on the the approach to ideas and the sort of tough constant steady love that some Jewish boys know very well and so I always give her my manuscripts to read and she's my most important reader because she's my toughest reader but also the one you really need to tell you the truth the name of that book and then just repeat the five commitments because I got so emotionally involved with your readings practically crying that I lost those four or five commitments and I would like to buy the book the well I'm glad you like to buy the book if it'll be out in two or three years my last book was called the road to character but it doesn't have any of this stuff in it but the next book will be more about that let's just do one more right down here thank you for running all the way in front row he's kind of hard to miss in your work on character and SAW and have you studied narcissism and do you have any thoughts on that have I studied narcissism yes I've covered this campaign so I have studied a few things I'll say is I think this younger generation is great but they have one of the things that you know we've told them how great they are for a few decades and they believed us and so just the two statistics out site which is in 1950 high school seniors were asked are you a very important person and roughly 12% said yes then the 1990s similar sorts of questions were asked and 80% said yes I'm a very important person psychologists have a thing called called the narcissism test where they give this to people all around the world they say I'm going to read you a bunch of statements does this apply to you and their statements like I find it easy to manipulate people because I'm so remarkable or somebody should write a biography about me or I like to look at my body and the median narcissism score has gone with 30% in the last 20 years and they give this all around the world and America scores number one in narcissism I think Serbia is second I think Israel is third I think and then on the bottom tends to be Asian countries with but with the Morocco and Switzerland so we have we've done well on thinking well of ourselves we actually score in math scores we score 25th in the world of math but if you ask American students are you really good at math we score number one in the world and thinking we're really good at math and so I do think much of the culture is great but we need a little more humility and to me humility is not thinking lowly of yourself it's radical self-awareness from a distance or from a position of other centeredness the ability to stand far outside yourself and see accurately your strengths and weaknesses and for somebody who's been behind the microphone for 51 minutes I probably need a little thank you

Channel: The Aspen Institute

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Length: 50min 43sec (3043 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 02 2016