The Road to Character

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] hard than I really am to appear better and more authoritative than I really am I have to work harder than most people to avoid a life of smug superficiality I've also become a more aware like many people these days I've lived a life of vague moral aspiration vaguely wanting to be it vaguely wanting to serve some larger purpose while lacking a concrete moral vocabulary a clear understanding of how to live a rich inner life or even a clear knowledge of how character is developed and depth is achieved was that a tough paragraph for you to write yes but uh it's a book about humility and and humility is uh some people think humility is thinking lowly of yourself but my favorite definition of humility is radical self-awareness from a distance and so it's humility is a quality of self-awareness it's the ability to step outside yourself you if you ever see Chuck Close paintings or photographs the face is the whole thing humility is the opposite of that it's seeing yourself as part of a broader landscape and so part of the thing about writing this book was I run ran across people who were just way better and way deeper than I am and you know some of them were famous I you know I had a lot of people there's been some talk on this guy this week uh I happen to at Washington be seated next to the dolly llama at a luncheon and he's just a deep joyful Soul uh he actually I at the lunch and he laughs at odd moments he's the kind of guy who just laughs for no apparent reason and and you want to be polite so you sort of laugh along with him and then you want to insert jokes just to make sense of the laughter uh and I was sitting with him and he would laugh and I would laugh and I was trying to think of what to say uh and he I said he was carrying a a canvas bag a sort of a dolly llama bag and and I said so you got any candy in the bag and he he starts emptying the bag and it's everything he pulling out stuff and it's like everything you get in the first class cabin of an international flight so it's like the eye thing and the earplug then a a big tobler own bar but when you're around a guy like that there's just a depth of joy and you don't get that from your career uh and and you know he's famous but I don't think I put this in the book but I a couple about a year ago I went up to Frederick Maryland and I I I ran into a group of women probably 30 age 50 to 80 who teach immigrants English and then how to read and this process can take seven or eight months or years so there just takes forever and when you walk into this room that they just radiated a gentleness and a kindness and a goodness and they just cared about what you were saying they didn't know me from Adam but they made me feel so important and they just radiated in inner light and I'm sure we all run across these people periodically you just radiate an inner light and my reaction was you know i' I've achieved way more Career Success than I ever thought I would but I certainly haven't achieved that and we'd all want to have that and so I just wanted to figure out how how does that happen and you talk a lot David about sort of being keenly aware of how the moral ecology use that term a lot throughout the book has changed and and what it became abundantly clear when you were listening to a Command Performance of a radio broadcast on NPR after World War II had ended and then you juxtapose that with a football play that you saw on television right after you were listening to that can you talk about those two different kind of moral ecologies that you witnessed yeah so all all great moral epiphanies involve NPR and and and so I'm driving home in in Washington on a Sunday night and listening to our one of our NPR stations WTA and they rebroadcast old radio shows uh and they re rebroadcast a show called Command Performance which was a variety show that went out to the Troops in World War II and I happen to hear the episode that was broadcast live on VJ Day just hours after to the Japanese announc their surrender and Bing Crosby is the host gets out there and he says uh we've just learned we've won this war but I guess we're not proud at this moment we're just humbled we're just glad we got through it and I was really struck by the beautiful tone of modesty and that was repeated again and again by everybody on that broadcast like Burgess Meredith was out there and he was character actor if you remember him and he reads a passage from Ernie pile and he said we won this war because we have Brave allies we have great soldiers we haveen have a lot of material abundance we didn't win it cuz we're God's chosen people we should just try to stay humble and be worthy of the peace and it was just a beautiful sentiment at a moment which could have been chess thumping and so I watch that and then I go home and I turn on the TV I watch a football game and a quarterback throws a pass to a wide receiver who's tackled after a two- yard gain and the the defensive player does what all professional athletes do at moments of supreme Personal Achievement which he does a victory dance and honor himself and it occurred to me I'd seen a bigger self- puuffin victory dance after a 2- yard gain than I'd heard after winning World War II and so that symbolized to me a shift from a culture of self- effacement which says I'm no better than anybody else but nobody's better than me to a culture of Distinction which says look what I've achieved we're spe I'm special and I should emphasize we would not want to go back to the moral culture of the 1940s it was more racist it was more sexist it was less emotional uh the food was really boring uh but in this one realm concept homogenous very homogeneous but they they had a small sense of self they weren't bragging about what college they go to on the back window sticker they weren't saying where they went on vacation the MV uh you weren't there was a strong social sanction more of a strong social sanction about getting too big for your Brites and there was more of a code of reticence there was no exclamation point on the keyboards of the typewriters if you remember you had to hit like I think uh I don't know you had to hit uh apostrophe and then backspace and then period and you couldn't text with those things um and so there's just a a more of a code of reticence and you know there's something beautiful about that I say that narcissism is a voracious hunger in a small space but humility is is calm and beautiful in fact you talk about I thought very movingly about uh George Herbert Walker Bush and about how his being a part of that generation was actually very difficult for him when he was running for president can you talk about that I got this from two of his speech writers they would he was running for president the first time and they were trying to get him to say why I should be president how great I am and they would write in a sentence with the first person pronoun I did this I did that I did this and he would cut out all the sentences with a first- person pronoun because it just was in his ethos we do not talk about ourselves and they finally beat him up and said you're running for president you got to talk about yourself so he put He did a speech where he talked about himself and his mom who was still alive called and said George you're talking about yourself too much thought that was so interesting though right I mean think about how different it is today in terms of the candidates running which we'll get to in a moment but you know my friends who spend a fair amount of time psychoanalyzing you uh wonder I I if if if there somewhere in this Awakening was there a personal existential crisis that made you realize that you had in fact been living a vague life of moral aspirations and that you weren't the person you really wanted to be rather than viewing sort of the changes in sort of our moral ecology was there something internally that was happening with you it wasn't a midlife crisis um I think if I had one I'm shallow enough that the Porsche would have solved it uh I don't think so uh um something tells me that's not true no offense to the Porsche owners in the crowd of whom it's like 40% out there [Applause] uh I think this is a Ferrari crowd yeah yeah but an electric car Ferrari crowd uh uh uh um but I you know there there are certain moments partly it was just it was insufficiency more than anything else and partly you know one of my undergrads said it so boldly to me he said you know the chief myth in the society is that success leads to happiness and that's not true is it and that is that is a fundamental Truth uh and but we confuse that second there's just insufficiency like I said you see people ahead of you and secondly I do think there are different or third agency moments moments when your internal criteria shifts and I I have in this book um this uh a passage about a woman I rever George Elliot and she uh when she was 32 through her 20s she was emotionally needy to the extreme and she F in fell in love with every guy she would ever meet and it was pathetic and she just whether married unmarried whatever she just fell in love and they would reject her their wife would throw her out of the house whatever and she was just she she grew up in a home without love and she was emotionally needy then at when at age 32 she falls in love with Herbert Spencer the philosopher and she writes a letter to him at the end of their relationship which is a somewhat pathetic like your old life but somewhat profound and the pathetic part is please marry me please marry me uh if you don't marry me I'll die if you do marry me you won't notice me I won't cause any trouble around the house it's like uh and that was the pathetic part but then in the end she has this paragraph which is amazing where I'm not I'm just going to paraphrase it but something like uh I I'm I suppose no woman ever before wrote a letter such as this but I am conscious in the light of true reason that I'm worthy of your respect and tenderness whatever vulgar men and and vulgar women may think of me and it's that's assertion that I am worthy of you that's a moment that I think happens to people in their early 30s where it's an agency moment they develop their own internal criteria they don't rely on external praise or or affirmation they rely on their own internal criteria for what they're worth when they're doing right when they're doing wrong and that's maturity that's when maturity happens and so it happened to her at 32 and I think we have these moments when it happens to us in early adulthood we sort of know what we want we all have a bunch of things we love and we know which loves are in which order what we really want out of life and but then you go you know I think that happens in 30 you discover who you are but then you know I'm 53 it happens again and you could your life you change life changes your circumstance change and the things you want change and so I think we all make four big commitments in life to to family including romance and children to a Creed uh to a vocation to a community and you make those commitments in at adulthood when you're formed and sometimes those are life commitments but sometimes you can make new commitments at 53 or 75 or 80 and so I was at a stage in life where I was making a lot of new commitments in part because of things that were happening in my personal life in part because my career hit a level where I wasn't manic about it and so you I was just you sort of did the Peggy Lee is that all there is it wasn't quite that I mean I I was super happy with what I was I wasn't dissatisfied but I wanted the vector just a lot of things I'll say it I got divorced three years ago and a lot of things when that happens it's only the divorce that happens on the day of the divorce a friend of mine said to me you know if you project out a year ago a year from now and count your five your 10 closest friends seven of them will be people you don't yet and that turned out to be true CU a lot of things change and so suddenly the vector of change in my life had radically accelerated and a lot of new options and a lot of new possibilities and a lot of new hungers for Spiritual and social and Vocational depth came to mind uh and so that sort of that was that happened in the middle of this book and it it was part of the process of reshaping having said that it seems to be there are so many forces at work David these days that are working against that maturity that growth that agency in terms of sort of how our world is working and this whole culture of narcissism that you talk a lot about in the book you call it the big me the sort of you're so special culture the obsession with celebrity and fame social media what impact have all those external forces have had on our ability to develop to develop our internal character well partly it's just the world is so competitive especially for young people there's just no time second we're hurt we're surrounded by social media and just the buzz of information and so it's hard to step back and hear the Stu still voices inside and you know I I was thinking about this at a session I was at yesterday you know how can you make lifelong commitments when it's hard to have an attention span that's more than 30 seconds because of what you know what everything is doing to us and so I I think there's that and then there's a projection culture you know the you mentioned the emphasis on Celebrity I'm really struck a series of people have done work on this surveys and that at UCLA they survey college students what do you want from life and fame used to be at the bottom or near the bottom uh and now it's ranked second or third of what people want from life I think it's part of reality TV and part because of Facebook but people really want to be famous uh it's outward projection uh and my two favorite studies on this are somebody asked I think Junior High School girls would you rather be a cele celeb's personal assistant Justin Bieber's personal assistant or president of Harvard and by something like 3 to1 they'd rather be Justin Bieber's personal assistant though to be fair I asked the president of Harvard and she would rather be Justin [Laughter] be my other one that I like is uh the Paris Hilton one well the other one I I can't remember the Paris Hilton one the one the other one I like is the they ask college students would you rather have a life that involves a lot of fame or a lot of sex and by two to one they show a life that involves a lot of Fame and so I go to college campus and say listen I'm on TV twice a week I read a column in a prom newspaper I'm kind of famous go with the sex it's better but didn't they ask something too about who would you rather have lunch with and the order was Jennifer Lopez Jesus and Paris Hilton in that order a natural tra yeah those are the three people I'd like to have dinner with dead or alive just kidding but um you know there's another Sur too that I read that that kids say if if you don't share it with your on social media did it actually happened and 55% say no no I do have friends where I'm out with them it they're they're wondering how the through what Forum should this this be shared this experience is this an Instagram experience is it a Twitter experience is it a Facebook experience um and so but that just that makes it all external and you know and so my students and a lot of us are it's very easy to be external to think even when we're thinking about doing good and you say how do you want to be good they'll they'll say I want to have a big social impact and that's necessary but not sufficient when you ask about something internal it's not enough to say I want to do good for the world I'm really asking about the quality of your in Soul uh and so that's developed in a different way to to succeed in the world or to solve a problem in the world you need to compete against other people people compete against the problems of the world but to develop on an inner soul I think it's necessary to confront your core sin your core weakness and to confront and do a battle with that weakness every single day and that's more of an internal process than an external process and so a lot of uh a lot of us just don't have a vocabulary to understand how that internal process is happening and how you wage that fight against your sin it's the confrontation against your own weakness that is um that is the essential moral struggle in fact you mentioned I think s somebody said 70 times in this book um and and what role is that just the the acknowledgement that we are all deeply flawed yeah I part of the shift in moral ecology is a shift from a belief that we're what I call the Crooked Timber School of humanity that we're splendidly endowed but we're also deeply broken and that we have both good and and Evil Within US soldier NS and as a quote the line between good and evil runs down through the each individual human heart and that and then we I we've had a new generation which is a more including my own I think any anybody Boomer and after where we're raised to think we're really the golden figures inside we're really good inside we just have to love ourselves we just have to actualize ourselves and that sin is social it's outside ourselves but we the golden figure of goodness that we have to get in touch with I think the earlier moral ecology is truer and I understand why the word sin is a very I I talked about this before I wrote or in the middle of writing the book on Charlie Rose and I got a call from a very great prominent publisher in New York and he said I love the way you described the book but don't use the word sin it's too much of a downer use the word insensitive and I said no I'm writing the book because some of the older moral vocabulary that we've lost is necessary to understand the moral stakes and now we only use the word sin in the context of fattening desserts but but it I think it's worth Reviving that word and I understand why it went away it was used to punish sex it was used to punish depravity but sin reminds us first that each day is a moral occasion and that the choices we make have moral consequences we carve a core piece of oursel into something either slightly elevated or something more degraded with each individual choice we make second a weakness is individual but sin is communal we all have the same sins and we struggle against them together there's a great uh I hope a lot of people have read this the David Foster Wallace's Kenyan commencement address where he talks about how self-centered we are naturally it's just our natural default and so we all have that work against that yeah and so we have to work against that and everybody has different sins I think if you sat down and reflected for 10 minutes and said what's my core sin whether some people it's vanity some people it's just status orientation greed self-centeredness I have a friend whose core sin is Hardness of Heart he's busy and when people come to him he's just not present for them or he's at a meeting instead of really listening he's thinking about what he can say to a pure clever and so at night he he lies in bed and think how did I do today at that and he tries to do better the next day but understanding the core weakness core sin in oneself is I think the beginning of the steps of of moral education how did your religious upbringing inform sort of how you've come to this point and how you know what what impact has that had yeah well I was born in a New York Jewish Home where the phrase was uh act yish think act British think yish uh and and so it was a uh it was a home uh deep mostly and I would say the moral and philosophical structure that I had was different than most people but it was familiar to people at the Aspen Institute or the foundation of the Aspen Institute it was really I went to the University of Chicago uh my favorite saying about Chicago it's a a Baptist school or atheist professors teach Jewish students St Thomas aquinus uh and and this is how Aspen was founded by the same people Robert mayor Hutchins and mor morler and during those two years I was taught by professor Western Civ I was taught Western Civ by professors who thought these are the keys to truth these people Aristotle n Mark gospels they lived and died for this literature has been handed down to us in the truth of blout life and the truth about virtue is in these books and that was really the I still interpret morality through the great books now I I've come to realize that they're insufficient the great books are not alone you need some Transcendent realm but uh I do think it's necessary to do the reading and and I do think unless you do the reading and know the categories and you know the words like sin Grace it's very hard to understand what's going on inside I have a passage in the book which is to me the ideal it's a night that Isaiah Berlin spent with anak mova the Russian poet and he goes into her apartment he's in St Petersburg just after the war World War II and he'd never heard of her she she was a great poetist who was quieted by the stalinists and he goes into her apartment and they start talking and he gets there at 8:00 and they start talking about their experience of the war and then by midnight they're talking about TV and Tolstoy and then by two they're talking about puskin and then by four they're talking and then she's reading his poetry telling her about the death of her husband in the war and of her children and her own oppression and they're talking all night and you get and then he he he has desperately has to go to the bathroom but he doesn't want to break the spell so he sits there all night and then at 10:00 in the morning he goes home to his hotel and flops on the bed and just says I'm in love I'm in love and they both understood that night was one of the most important nights of their lives and actually Michael ignatev who wrote a biography of Isaiah Berlin did something very brave the biography is probably like 350 pages of which something like 40 are dedicated to this one night and AK mova wrote a great poem called the visitor from the future about that night and it's about the Meeting of Minds and the meeting of hearts and the meeting of spirits it's the kind of bonding we all like or it you know rever it's a bonding at depth and I think to have done that you have to have done the reading uh and so you know when linol was struggling to get books he was poor but he was struggling to get books I think that's part of a moral education process and just quickly finally the one of the characters I have in this book is Samuel Johnson the great essayist he was a radically wretched young man uh he suffered from uh small poox uh Tourette Syndrome OCD uh uh he was he was blind he was deaf in one eye and one ear he was radically wretched uh and and what he did was he suffered in his first 30 years he just suffered and he has a great understanding of what suffering does to you and it can either destroy you and shrivel you or it can expand you and the the way it expanded him was first it introduced him to himself because paulic this Theologian has a passage with what the what suffering does is it takes you beneath the everydayness of life and reminds you you're not who you thought you were it carves into the floor of the basement of your soul or what you thought was the floor and then it carves through that revealing a cavity below and carves through that revealing a cavity below and it really introduces you to yourself those moments of suffering and then it teaches you empathy because you you want to you are suffering you feel empathy for others who suffer then it launches you up to Transcendence those who want to make use of their suffering and connected to a narrative of transcendence and so I have friends who's who lost their son when he was six and they didn't just say we had two years of grief let's go party they created a foundation hope for Henry to to connect his death and their suffering to a moment of service and Transcendence and so Johnson went through all that self- knowledge empathy a commitment which for him was writing and he couldn't control his mind he couldn't control his body but he could read and write and grasp himself in the reality the truth and develop a settled philosophy of life and I do think in that way just doing the reading being curious the people who come here and are curious and who try to set achieve a settled philosophy of life that's a component of moral education too and if you haven't done the reading if you don't have a a settled philosophy of Life a commitment to a philosophy of life then you're unsteady and I don't think moral education can be complete you need to give us a reading list and then let us borrow your brain for a few three months you know believe me my brain is I I sure I get the reput I don't know but my brain is believe me it's nothing special uh if I did not graduate in the top third of my high school class my SAT scores were not spectacular believe me my brain is nothing special I don't know about that but but but let's talk about sort of people of great moral character being to to that last point being born or or being made and you say they they aren't born they are made but don't you think that certain people are predisposed even genetically predisposed to certain qualities like empathy and kindness I I sort of think they are I think there's something very intrinsic about some people having those gifts yeah I guess the first thing to be said is some people we know some things are genetically related risk uh how willingness to take risk and but I I guess there are probably people in this room I don't know if Jonathan ha is around here there are people around here there he is he can answer this question better than I but here I'm going to give it a shot Jonathan which is that uh the distinction between um what's what we're predisposed I mean our genes are there to be activated by our environment you can either nod or shake your head Jonathan if I'm getting this wrong but but that it's they're there to be act to be either improved on or or not improved on or to be changed they're not they don't exist our genetic endowment doesn't exist I think in in isolation from who we are and the lives we live and so some people may be genetically endowed to be more um risk-taking or to be more empathetic uh or to be more emotional you know more up and down and some people are have just equipoise but I would regard these traits you're on a leash you you can depending on your life you can flow so they're malleable yeah so we're malleable and I would say each of the and then in lived life um all the people in my book were messes at 20 they were all pathetic and they were magnificent at 70 and it was something they did uh and something they did with assistants from outside so one of the characters is Dorothy Day and Dorothy day was um she was one of these people who who couldn't just read novels she had to act them out and she became the novels she was reading and unfortunately she read a lot of dfki uh and and so she was drinking she was grousing she was living in a Garrett uh and uh she her life was complete disorganization and a mess uh abortions suicide attempts she couldn't control herself and so at 20 whatever endowment her endowment she had Endowment for great spiritual depth uh but it was unfocused she was fragmented and so her movement from character was from fragmentation to cohesion and the what changed her was the the birth of her daughter she had a birth of her daughter out of wedlock and she had decided in the process of pregnancy that all the accounts of childhood she'd ever read were of childbearing were written by men so she said I'm going to write one and so 40 minutes or something like that after she gave birth she sat down and wrote an essay about what it was like and she talks about the violence of it and and but then at the end she is a passage that something like if I had painted the greatest painting composed the greatest Symphony or sculpted the greatest sculpture I could not have felt the more exalted Creator than did when they placed my child in my arms and with that came vast floods of love and joy and a desire to worship and a desire to adore in other words the birth of her child gave her a sense not only of the love for her child but I have a friend named Christian Wyman a great poet who says that love is always flowing it's flowing outward and her love for her daughter flowed outward she needed somebody to thank and to adore and she decided there must be a God she became a Catholic and spent the next 60 years in uh Ser in creating homeless shelters food kitchens in in service trying to live a life of poverty and a life of incredible focus and self-sacrifice sometimes excessive self-sacrifice but it was that act of childbearing which focused her which she turned into a moral occasion to move away from the chaos and disorganization of her early life into the commitment and focus of her main life she's one of the people you profile David I mean you talk about others like and you can mention them Dwight Eisenhower Francis Perkins how did you pick these people and I know that you say that that a number of things happened in their lives and you kind of categorize them like the humility shift self-defeat the dependency leap energizing love the call within the call so how did you pick those particular figures and how did some of these factors enter into their lives with you don't have to go through every one of them but maybe give us a a sampling so I picked people I tried to pick people who were there who were alive at Command Performance area so a lot of them were in their for were prominent in the 40s whether it was Eisenhower Marshall Dorothy Day or Francis Perkins I then cheated uh and then I wanted people and they all share one thing this crooked Timber View of humanity this view that that I'm broken inside and I need to fix my own Brokenness and then they exemplify different categories or different experiences that I think are part of a moral education and so for Johnson it's suffering and intellectual effort for day at submission for uh George Elliott it's I mentioned her as the agency moment but her it's it's a daring leap of love and so she had a um uh she she fell in love after Herbert Spencer she fell in love with a guy named George Lewis and George Lewis was a fellow writer who was also married uh who was married but his wife was estranged and had had three kids with another man uh and but but and but she fell in love with him but this is victoriia in England if she's with George Lewis she will be labeled an adulterous and written at a polite society and lose all her friends so she has a choice between uh between choosing Lewis and choosing everybody else and uh she thinks about it for two weeks Mo mostly by herself and she chooses Lewis they go off to Germany her family cuts her off her friends Cut Her Off she's blackballed everywhere in London Society she's lost everything and she's chosen him and it was the right choice for her because from that emotional neediness she needed a deep love a deep cohering love and out of that love she really came into herself about a year into their relationship um Louis said to her you know have you ever thought about writing fiction which he had never done and she said I'll try it so she went off for a week and wrote a short story which she then read to him aloud and by the middle of the story he's weeping cuz he sees the talent she has and in some ways his love is is the more coherent or the more admirable cuz after that moment he um he surrenders her his career to hers he knows she's way more important to writer than she he is so he becomes her a her agent her publicist her editor she's very sensitive to criticism and so she he gets up in the morning and he reads her all the papers if there's an article that mentions her he cuts it out so she won't have to see it and she he really serves her uh and and that what they have together is uh you know not just the first blush of passionate love like Taylor Swift but um but like a deep enduring love but this this is really as much about him as it is about her isn't it yeah can I read this passage I I love a passage sure sure sure um th this man who wrote this passage was here earlier the week I think he's left Leon weaseler but it's about um uh it's about how love can be moral improving and it's not passionate it's not idealistic it's a radical commitment from one flawed human being to another flawed human being and it's very particular and it's very local and Leon who was here uh for most of this week wrote this as a toast to uh two friends uh who you've probably heard of Samantha power and Kass sunstein when they got married in Ireland a few years ago and this is what Leon wrote It's a passage I happen to like reading aloud love is a revolution in scale a revision of magnitudes it is private and it is particular 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 the here to there the grasp to the reach love is or should be indifferent to history immune to it a soft and sturdy Haven from it when the day is done when the lights are out and there is 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 marriages are exposures we may be heroes to our spouses but we may not be idols and that's sort of the realistic commitment of love from one person to another and the way that commitment is particular and in some sense desperate in some sense joyous uh and that's making it turning what could be just a choice into a deep and profoundly anchoring um activity and I I will say this after the book I I came to realize that I used to character building was internal uh that you do it by like iron self-control self-discipline but then I I came to the conclusion that none of us is strong enough to defeat our own sins by oursel we all need Redemptive assistance from outside and the people of Great Character what they have is a great ability to make deep commitments to things outside themselves relationships relationships a commit like a like a like Johnson to a settled philosophy like like Elliot to a set of to be in mesed in unconditional loves um Francis Perkins in the book to be dedicated to causes that can't be completed in a single lifetime just long causes uh and to religious like Augustine's in the book to a complete dedication to God and so the ability to make really strong commitments is to me the essence of character building not iron self-control it's not an IND individual thing it's a relationship thing and yet you also say that even in love love that that has become a resume virtue and of course you talk a lot about resume virtues versus eulogy virtues and we'll get to more on that in a moment but since we're on the topic of love you write things once done in a poetic frame of mind such as meeting a potential lover are now done in a more professional frame of mind what makes you say that I teach a Yale okay uh I I do think you know I do think a lot of things that have were poetic been turned uh prosaic uh some in some senses applying to college and some sense we're all balancing time and so when you're balancing time your decision is filled with prudence and I do think and I don't know how universally this is true I do think a lot of people in making these it's believe me making a marriage decision is obviously as I've told you from my personal history a great Enigma to me but uh but how much of how much do you trust the past passion and how much do you trust the Prudence I do not have an answer to that but I do think a lot of people make that decision what am I going to get out of is it prudent and in some senses the the Affairs we love or we admire are they're made without counting the cost uh and it didn't it didn't matter for George Elliott what the cost was she didn't count the cost she made the leap uh and for for Augustin uh the cost was very high for him um and some I I don't know how much we should trust that passion but I do think that passion is an is an element and that passion which is completely imprudent unprofessional non-cognitive if you want to use the oldfashioned terminology uh I do think that's um something that's harder to do in a society where we're um we've got guide books all the time where we've got books like the rules about how to date uh which I'm sure all of you have read know uh and which is all based on calculation how to manipulate a relationship so get it to where you want it to be getting back to resume virtues versus eulogy virtues you probably don't need probably a lot of people here have already read the book and a lot of the columns that you've written about this but why don't you quickly explain that and then we'll talk about how Society in some way ways works works against those eulogy virtues yeah just very quickly the the resume virtues are things that make you good at your job whether you're good at accounting uh good at being a lawyer good at math uh the eulogy virtues are the things they say about you after you're dead whether you're courageous Brave honest honorable capable of great love and we all know the eulogy virtues are more important but I do think we live in a society and certainly an educational system which gives a lot more Primacy to the to the to the resume virtues we our school systems are built around giving people skills and I think our colleges are relatively inarticulate about how to how to be a really deep good person and you know there there's a debate between uh Steven picker and Leon weaseler actually and other over whether colleges should be in this business Pinker says no our job is not to do moral education our job is to teach geography or to teach psychology or to teach this or that it's not our job that is not the way colleges used to think of themselves they used to think of themselves as character Builders and the the college I have in the book is is um Francis perkins's College which was Mount hoio which is a college that really left a mark on its students uh these were I mean the some of the rules in Mount Holio when Sheed in 1898 one of the rules was um freshman shall be silent in the presence of sophomores uh freshman shall bow respectfully when passing a sophomore on the hall and that's to teach difference but then her worst subject was um was uh I think chemistry or biology and so they forced her to major in biology uh because if you can tackle your worst subject you can tackle what life will throw at you and then the most impressive thing holy o did was they that they sent their kids off as missionaries around the world and so it's 1902 and they're sending young single women off to Tibet to Pakistan to China to Africa and somebody did a survey of all the female missionaries abroad in 1920 and 25% were Holio grads there just this intense sense of heroic service and there was that Spirit of aroused heroism that at least at Holy Oak they thought it was important to instill uh and it was that was not a professional training that was a moral training but let's talk about qualities like ambition aggressiveness competitiveness that often make people successful in this world are they inherently incompat incompatible with qualities that you mention in the book like humility restraint Rance R Rance uh Temperance respect and soft self discipline and the people who you say radiate that certain kind of moral Joy can you have both resume virtues and eulogy virt virtues yeah I think yes and it's important to balance but they sit in tension and so all the people in the book are super successful George Marshall Dwight has ours president but they they sit in they well here I'm going to borrow from a great book which everybody should read I cite it in my book but you should read that original book called Lonely Man of Faith by Joseph solic who who says we have two sides of our nature Adam 1 and Adam 2 Adam one is the external resume side Adam 2 is the internal side of of internal growth and he says these two sides of our nature exist in tension with each other but they sometimes being a good person uh makes you better at your career you know most if you're in business or in politics or anything a lot of our Career Success is based on our capacity to build really good relationships and building relationships is a moral is fundamentally depends on moral qualities of compassion and care and kindness and uh compassion understanding but uh so but sometimes it's bad for your career I think I mentioned this in our conversation last year I I I had a friend who hires a lot of people and he asked them in the job interview the following question name a time you told the truth and it hurt you and he wants to be sure that they sometimes are willing to put their atom two above their atom one so I tell my students at Yale you got to learn to fake that one uh come up with yeah come up with a good answer but I do think um that so sometimes they're they go together being a good person helps you in your career but sometimes they are in ttention and I think the essence of the tension which I tried to describe in the book is that they operate by different Logics that when we're ambitious and we're building a career we're operating by the rules of Economics which is straightforward which is input lead to Output practice makes perfect effort leads to reward and that's a worldly logic of how the market works but moral logic is inverse and the way you make moral progress is through a series of paradoxes you have to give to receive you have to surrender to something outside IDE yourself to gain strength within yourself success can lead to the greatest failure which is arrogance and pride failure can lead to the greatest success which is humility and learning to find yourself you have to lose yourself and so that's a bunch of paradoxes and you know if anybody reads Jewish thought if anybody reads the gospel of Matthew the paradoxes are filled and that that's a moral education it's a different process uh and life is about trying to find the balance between the two are there any modern-day figures who you think encompass sort of who are our modern moral exemplars if you will I mean can you be a Warren Buffett and a Mother Teresa and have both of those yeah I I mean I I think Buffett seems like a pretty admirable guy uh to me uh you know I there's a guy I barely know but I've read a lot of his work who who exemplifies this trade which is aul gande uh a surgeon in Boston who seems to he operates on the body with a great sense of humility that that that what he doesn't know about the body is vast even a great surgeon like him and so there's a just a Grace in his presentation and humility and the way he thinks about his role I think my friend Samantha power uh exemplifies a lot of these traits his works in the Practical world of diplomacy while retaining that passionate inner core that I think drove her to go into this it's it's a it's a very challenging I think it's so challenging to be in politics um are there any politicians um you know obviously Anthony Weiner and no uh you know the the challenge for politicians is that they're they're they are their product and every every meeting is about them and every billboard and AD is about them and so in my experience is what they lose is the internal voice the internal honest voice that gets hollowed out or sort of starved away it's it's all public and so the internal honest voice is lost well it's hard to have an honest voice when it's all predicated upon polling right and what the impact is going to be on a certain position so we um we both covered John McCain and His Glory Days in 2000 and for whatever reason he retained that honest voice and if you got him in the right mood um then he he would be completely honest about what he was doing what he was doing wrong what he was doing right and I admired that so much about him well that's why they called it the Straight Talk Express right and so yeah I would sit on that bus and the way you got him going was to pick on somebody that he really didn't like and get his anger going uh and so I I remember we'd s get in the van and 7 a.m. or the bus and say what do you think of Rick Santorum I was like f an and and then he would go off and and but then you had like a day of honesty uh what happened to him though well I think for a lot of things happened to him he got burned he felt he was burned by the media and then once he actually got the nomination 8 years later the public responsibility became so big that private um maybe it's still there I I he's his relationship to the Press is so different than it was then um and so and I confess I felt a little used because it seemed like we were friends but it was just a using relationship um uh but I think it's very hard because you get punished for having an an honest voice you really get punished for it don't you think people are craving that though that that even if they don't agree with your position they're craving that authenticity and and that they can live with a lot of things as long as they feel that you're being consistently true to yourself yeah I would love to test that proposition I mean the politicians never go I don't think anybody's willing to right one of the stories I like is George HW the Elder Bush he was asked what it was like when he was shot down over the Pacific and he was in the water all alone he didn't know what was happening he might die floating there and he was asked what were you thinking at that moment and he said well you know at that moment I'm out in the Pacific and I'm thinking of my family and I'm thinking of God and then the little politician gear starts going and then he says and I'm thinking of the separation of church and state and like really yeah so they have this like self-checking device uh and but you know you you know I you can imagine what it's like you're you're you're the nominee of a party millions of people you're they're riding on you you don't want to make a mistake I mean Hillary Clinton's in this role right now and she's not exactly Miss authenticity right now but maybe she feels and I'm sure one would feel this the burden of the whole party and the whole movement and maybe the whole country is upon you you can't afford to just mouth off and be honest you have to be so cautious and I think it she has she has everything to lose I think she thinks by by making a mistake or talking to reporters about and I'm sure if she or people like that were here she would blame us and say you guys leap on mistakes as if and you guys treat disagreement as a gaff and you're unforgiving uh when I do say something that I actually believe I think both are true by the way do you think that that that that we can help the electorate with this sort of development of a moral compass or an a some kind of character and that can be applied to our civil discourse or is that just too far gone because I like the the souls nsen quote that you mentioned the end of it you said the line separating good he said the line separating good and evil passes not through States not between classes nor between political parties uh but right through every human heart and it just seems to me that gosh that it's gotten so vitriolic and nasty and polarized do you have any hope that this sort of search for for some kind of character in all of us and Humanity in all of us can erase some of that negativity that's so pervasive now yeah I hope so but I mean don't have much hope but but one of one of the I recommend that people go to read um Dwight Eisen hour farewell address which is famous because of his warning about the military industrial complex but it's also a great exemplification of of moderation and moderation is not being mushy in the middle it's understanding that politics is fundamentally a competition between partial truths and that mostly what we're trying to do is balance we're just trying to achieve balance between freedom and security between achievement and equality there each part each party has a piece of the truth and you're just trying to find the right balance for that moment and if you see politics that way it's hard to hate the other side and I think one of the things that is corroded public discourse is the if if you go in with a modest sense of your own knowledge and know that first of all that the other side has a piece of the truth but also life is more complicated than you know and that you're probably wrong much of the time and you need people on the other side to balance off your own wrongness then you realize you depend on the people you disagree with if you have believe you have Truth by the short hairs and the people you disagree with are are just in the way and so it's no accident to me that Rush limbo is a very polarizing figure and also his affect is great ego because the two go together and so you know I just think it's a question of knowing you know I'm I'm probably at least partially wrong about this and that therefore we have to have excessive deference to the people and politeness toward the people who disagree with us and I you know you believe that with the gay marriage argument that the way to win over people who are staunchly defending religious liberty in the face of the Supreme Court decision need not self-righteousness and someone who is so convinced of their own truth but slow kind of compassionate convincing is that accurate that yeah so you know I'm Pro gay marriage I've been Pro gay marriage forever and um probably like 90% of the people in this room uh you know my argument in the early days was not that we should allow gay marriage but we should coers great marriage we should if we have a gay couple we should say you're getting married you're getting married you should get married uh uh but uh but you know right now 37% of the country feels gay marriage is wrong they feel it's being imposed upon them and they feel something precious is being lost so let's put ourselves in their shoes uh most of them are are Christian conservatives so they have organized their life about uh the truth of God's scripture and they've built their lives around that they feel with a great certitude and a wonderful um depth that that is that is the truth that is how God wants us to live he wants us to surrender he wants to imitate Christ in service to society and service to the poor and their life has been built upon that and in many ways it's wonderfully built upon that and they have I mean the Christian conservatives do give more to the poorer than liberals they do serve in a a thousand different ways to nurture the lonely to serve the poor to serve their communities to serve their families and the book that they regard as Truth uh has certain sayings about marriage and about homosexuality and so they rever that at the same time most of the ones I know especially the younger ones know gay people they love gay people in in the individual form and they're wrestling and they just want to know how to balance and they're going through a walk and some of them will say no I believe what scripture tells me some of them are wandering in different ways and I don't know where they're going to come out but I think I see so much good-hearted wrestling in that Community I think a it's uh it's so hard for them it's incumbent upon th those of us who are for gay marriage to respect them and their moral commitments to respect the wrestling and just as a matter of practical politics given how fast public public opinion is moving on this issue to make sure that they to allow them their space to wrestle and not turn this into a polarized issue and I say that on behalf of you're a kid who's closeted in Southern Indiana and you want to come out if the temperature is low on this issue it'll be easy to come out if in rural Southern Indiana being PR gay marriage is the same or being pro homo gay rights is the same as being or is perceived as being anti-religious and we have a culture war on this it's just going to be a lot harder for that kid in Southern Indiana which is an interesting I think perspect and an important perspective I have a couple more questions for David but I know there's like so many people who probably want to ask you some questions so I just urge you to get right to the point don't make a statement actually ask a question if you can and uh and then we'll wrap things up but uh my your biggest fan on the planet my mother-in-law Paula mulner never ask questions but she takes copious notes and she's the most intellectually curious person I know Paula do you have any questions for David wow here here let's uh yeah let's put get Paula with mother-in-law I hope I haven't embarrassed her thank you um I have a terrific daughter- in-law we all know that um David I'm wondering if there are uh people in or characters in narrative fiction that embody some of your ideas as something someone in classical literature someone in uh contemporary literature and your description of yourself sounds a little as though it was written by Philip Roth I told you that's that is a good question it raised an embarrassing episode in my life so uh this was when I was in college I was trying to be a writer and I was trying on different story different narrative modes and and I I I try wrote a story about myself in the mode of one of Roth's early earliest novels Port noise complaint uh and it was not it was like he had a little Edge especially about women uh and my girlfriend at the time read it and hated me it was like and I felt like saying no that's me being Philip Roth that's not the real me uh so but I think um L I think literature has left us a lot of characters we would rever uh in politics I I highly recommend uh trop and reading about Phineas finnn about a young politician who struggles with the realities of politics uh in uh but one of the things I say to my students is we're so blessed to have all these moral Traditions left to us and so there's um Achilles who is a certain sort of moral figure builds his morality about honor and courage and eternal glory Pericles about service to the state he was obviously not he was a real person uh but I guess my my heroes are the Russians uh and I'm a Tolstoy guy and the anti-hero is a character Ivan ilich who discovers at depth at death um what he uh that he's lived a life of of shallowness and lived his life wrong until the instant of his death but then there are a couple characters who are just who exemplify some of the traits in the book Levan who is a character in anak Corina and then the one thing I'll say on this mode on the literary mode is I think one of the things literature does is it teaches us um not only to how to be though I think it widens our repertoire of emotions and gives us examples of how to be I think it teaches us how to see and seeing the world accurately is phenomenally hard and Toto is the great Seer and for some reason the scene that's leaping to my mind is one of my favorite scenes in literature it's in anakaren and it's about um Kitty I'll try to make this brief uh and he describes a scene she's getting ready for the ball she's a young woman she's probably 17 19 and she's getting ready for a ball and her dress is fitting perfectly and her hair is perfect and she has a velvet choker and it fits perfectly and he describes I don't know how to stto did it unless his wife helped him what it feels like to be putting on your costume and it's all just perfect and she's got it going on she's like just feeling it and she goes to the ball and she's the bell of the ball everybody's asking her to dance and she's swirling about in all eyes are upon her and she's just glowing and he describes this so accurately and there's a man she's expecting to answer to the final dance and she expects that he'll propose marriage and she's swirling around she sees his eyes it's fronky and he's got a look of utter love in his eyes and she swirls around again and she sees this utter look of utter love but it's not directed at her it's directed at another person anakan and totoy describes how her old insides collapse and in that description of that scene you it helps you identify what's actually going on inside your own life you get the vocabulary in the repertoire and develop empathy for other people right yeah my friend Christian Wyman says when you read a novel or a poem you don't acquire new knowledge you acquire a new experience and so that's I think what literature does most for us just the act of seeing and feeling we're almost out of time so I'm just going to ask two wrapup questions sorry everyone for those who wanted to ask David you you you can bug him as he leaves the tent but I think one important thing that I thought was really instructive about this book is the website you created David you wanted to hear from people about what experience they had that added value to their lives and and developed their own personal character and I think some of the things that you heard really surprised you so can you talk about that yeah some of them I was called the roadt character.com if anybody wants to go on it but I just ask people to describe their Heroes to describe their eulogies or describe their purpose in life and I expected a lot of the people to when I asked what's my purpose in life to say I'm I'm put on Earth obviously I expect a lot of people say to serve my family but also to help end the C help address global warming or to help reduce poverty or to teach the young and I will say the teachers who wrote in had the firmest and clearest and most confident sense of their own purpose and there a couple sad cases of people who retired from teaching and lost that sense of purpose and were in crisis because they'd had such fulfillment before but the thing that surprised me was how many people didn't really have a vast sense of purpose it was in the small acts of day-to-day that they found meeting the small inter the small kindnesses and then there was a beautiful thing written by a a guy who was probably in his 80s and he said you know I I found um a lot of my purposes in tending the Garden in my backyard and I had a tree killed by the frost I'm going to plant another one there are bushes that barely survived I'm going to try to nurture them and there was a small Beauty to just in the way he described just the tending of his own garden in the backyard which was small and modest and maybe not what he thought he'd do at age 20 but he derived a de a sense of constancy in service just from planting a tree and tending the little garden so when now that you've written the book and you've thought a lot of and talked a lot about these issues how how is your soul searching going and how would you describe ideally your own eulogy not that we're rushing anything right yeah uh but I think we all sort of think of that at some point uh yeah David Brooks died embarrassingly on the stage at the Aspen ideas Festival oh cuz he hadn't thought about that final question um uh well first I would say um that reading and writing a book doesn't get you there hopefully it can give you a road map but it's actually in the action and the doing um and so you talk about that in the book right about the importance of setting examples for yeah no and yeah I have this passage from this guy Dave Jolly who said what a wise person says is the least of that which he gives that it's the it's a totality of actions it's the small kindness is the way we treat people that gets communicated the message is the person and that's very true like I I use the example of Pope Francis I don't know much about the theological Innovations he's doing for the church but I know I really like the way he handles himself the message is the person and so I do think that's and reading and writing a book doesn't get you there you got to live it out and I will say have you changed um well we actually talked about this once at an airport line and Aspen Airport if you remember this um I think this was two years ago um I was the sort of person nobody ever confided in because I had a shell uh and uh starting maybe two years ago here at Aspen I hopefully was opening up a little and I became a person more people confided in and but I had no clue how to handle this it was like imagining leaving 51 years of Asperger and then suddenly you have emotional experience no that's an exagger that's a bit of an exaggeration but I believe me I didn't know what to do and I happened to be behind Katie at the uh security line at the airport here and I just said what do you do when somebody comes to you like with a story about the death of a child or something and I think you just said be present hug I don't what what did you tell me I think I said just listen yeah and uh you know let them I mean be there for them yeah be present and communicate and yeah just talk to them yeah so I try to do that now but it's so I think that's shifted but whether I become a better person it would be no I mean maybe a little but it's it's a lifelong thing and progress is gradual and hard to measure and your eulogy um I mean you know I I have I have purposes That I Want from life and I I've got I hope 35 40 more years um and I know what my purposes are I want to live in a in a house surrounded by love uh I'd like to um bring moral conversation into the secular public public sphere the way it used to be uh I think we're overp politicized and under morally under moralized and is just what we talk about in public uh and then I you know uh I'd like to exemplify a certain way of behaving in the world uh in political discourse um so i' hope to have made some progress in the next 35 or 40 years toward those things and I think you want to continue to be a person of humility which I think you are and God you could be so the opposite really yeah right yeah but I'll probably be known for the Fatal drug binge in Vegas in 10 years I don't I don't think so well it's always such a pleasure to to talk to you and really to listen to you David thank you so much

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 29,225

Keywords: The Road To Character, David Brooks (Author), Katie Couric (Celebrity), character, religion, values, new york times, materialism, Aspen Institute (Nonprofit Organization), aspen ideas festival

Id: 7pcZ4-etOrc

Length: 64min 52sec (3892 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2015