The Road to Depth: Thinking about what Character Is

I know this talk is always a special talk for me it's a sort of one-off talk for me where I Mull what I've been thinking about over the past few years over the past year since my last talk and I sorta Jam all the accumulated thoughts into one talk and so I'm gonna do that again and when I was here a year ago I was in the other theatre over where you register and I gave a talk about character morality as his my want these days and a woman came up to me right after the talk and I had talked a little about suffering and a little about death and she told me she had lost her son in an auto accident and she was said she was a mathematician and she couldn't make sense she was used to making sense of things mathematically and in this case a car just drifted across the road no alcohol was involved nothing just across the road accident and killed her son another woman came up to me about 35 seconds later and said she had lost her husband I think two years before and in the days since she lost her husband she would walk along the beach and she read out of a little prayer book that she kept and after the talk she gave me the book and I keep it now in the drawer of my nightstand and I remember at those after both those encounters when somebody honors you with that sort of sharing even in a crowded room like this one you feel you should be worthy of that sort of thing you should have something to say or you should have some way to act and especially in those two encounters I really didn't know what to say I don't know how to act it was a I was unworthy of how they had honoured me and it sort of bothered me through the week and I was at because this is Aspen I was at a security line of the airport getting out of here and the person in front of me was Katie Couric so I asked her what do you do what'd he say and she you know said sometimes you just listen there's nothing else you can do you just listen and so I was thinking about that what she would call the art of presence and thinking about that in the intervening year and from some people who've endured that sort of suffering I have picked up a few things that those of us who were in the presence of those who are in I've endured a trauma should do and one of them I learned is just to bring it up in conversation a woman who lost a daughter told me you know people are afraid to bring up my daughter Anna because they think they don't want to remind me of her but Anna is always on my mind so you should bring it up and if I want to talk about it you've opened the door for me to talk about it and if yeah I don't want to talk about it I'll just let it pass but mention it and that was one thing I learned when you were with someone who's endure trauma the second is just show up and people who have endured this told me over and over again don't come like the cavalry trying to save the day just come like the milkman bringing milk just show up and just be there and sit alongside and keep company third I was told don't compare don't say you know I understand the loss of your son because my dog died don't compare one trauma to another never compare don't turn the other person's trauma into a story about yourself fourth be practical bring paper towels make sure the things you offer are not supply driven don't give the the meal that you are do best make sure it's demand-driven all for what they actually need fifth don't offer false counsel or false hope don't say you'll get over it don't insult the survivor by saying by trying to rationalize it don't try to say it's all for the best don't try to make sense of what what's happened don't try to impose any view upon it six don't try to take over practice is sort of passive activism don't try to fix the problem solve the problem interpret or explain the problem allow the sufferer the dignity of their own process and so it's a man manner matter of of just being there and just presence and so those are techniques you can learn if you don't want to be worthy of such moments but to be really worthy of such moments you'd say it's not just what you do it's not just some technique and to read about in a magazine but it's who you are it's establishing a real human connection and to establish that human connection it's a matter of deep meeting deep of having the quality of soul the depth of soul that really is capable of just being there for a person who's enduring suffering or was injured joy just being there at depth for other people and so the main question I've been thinking about over the past year is how do you possess this quality of inner depth how do you possess what might be called a thousand-year heart and the way the one-way frame I've I've put around that to try to understand that question of how you become a deeper person is separating two sorts of virtues the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues the resume virtues are the things you offer to the job market the skills you have that that make you employable the eulogy virtues are the things they talk about at your funeral and those are those are virtues that exist at the core of your being or they're your kind brave honest or faithful what sort of relationships you've formed and I think we lived in a culture and I certainly have guilty of this have spent way more time in my life thinking about the resume virtues going to school to think about how to develop skills than the eulogy virtues and though I think we would all agree the eulogy virtues are more important we spend more time I think most of us on the resume virtues so that's one way to think about it the second way to think about it is something I mentioned last year which I'll just review briefly and it's a instruction from a book called lonely man of faith by a rabbi named Joseph soloveitchik which came out in 1965 another way to think about the two sides of our nature so the way Chuck said there are two sides which he called Adam 1 and Adam - Adam 1 is the external Adam it's the resume Adam Adam one wants to build create produce discover things Adam two is the internal adam adam two wants to embody certain moral qualities to have a serene and her character not only to do good but to be good to live in obedience to some transcendent truth to having inner coherence of soul so adam one the resume adam wants to conquer the world become famous rich adam two wants to obey a calling and serve the world adam one asks how things work Adam two asks why things exist and what ultimately were here for Adam one wants to venture forth Adam two wants to return home to the comfort of a family meal Adam one's motto a success Adams two experiences life as a moral drama and his motto is charity love and redemption now soloveitchik argued that each of us lives at the confrontation between these two atoms these two sides of our nature and I'd add the confrontation is different you know some days we want to be externally successful some days we want to be internally good and they're both right Liam you've gotta have a balance and the question is whether your life is in balance between these two things and I'd add that balance is so hard to achieve because these two atoms are in tension with each other and sometimes in contradiction with each other atom and they live by different logics Adam won the the resume Adam lives by a straightforward economic logic effort leads to reward practice makes perfect pursue self-interest work hard Adam to lives by an inverse logic was a moral logic not an economic one you have to give to receive you have to descender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself you have to conquer your desire to get what you want success leads to the greatest failure which is pride failure leads to the greatest success which is humility and learning to forget yourself you have to lose yourself to find yourself you have to forget yourself and so it's filled with paradoxes and so they're entirely different logics and I found in my own life and I think I see around us that we live in a culture that nurtures Adam one go to the magazines the bookstores universities a lot of attention on resume Adam neglects Adam - it's not that people are bad it's just that morally and articulate we don't the categories to think about those things we're in a very competitive society the competition to achieve admiration attention so fierce there's little time to cultivate inner depth or in a technological society and the the noise of fast and shallow communications makes it hard to hear that the quiet voices that emanate out of our depth third we have the publicity culture a war for attention we're taught to be assertive to master skills to broadcast our brand to get likes to get followers and it's hard in that outward to look inward and have the moments of spare moments for inner depth and so you know I think if you're only atom one you turn into a sort of shrewd animal of crafty crafty clever creatures adept at playing games and turns life into a game and I think you learn the ability to speak in a sophisticated moral vocabulary I don't think we're degenerate we just don't have that vocabulary to think about how we actually become depth to think about what's actually going on inside and so in thinking about this problem how do you develop a better atom - more or less I thought it's better to start from the beginning and ask basic questions and the first basic question is you know when we say someone is deep what do we mean by that when we look at someone say that as a deep person what do we mean what's what wisdom is contained in the words and I think we mean that that person is capable of experiencing large and so nervous emotions they have a profound spiritual presence you know people are deeper or spiritual they've come to some stable philosophical convictions about fundamental things they've made firmly rooted with moral commitments let's put it another way that people are deep we say are deep in the realm of emotion they have a web of unconditional love in the realm of intellect they've ascent of permanent philosophies about how life is in the realm of action they have a commitment to important projects that can't be completed in a lifetime in the realm of morality they have a certain consistency and rigor they're not always perfect but there's sort of a moral demand that pervades everything they do so I think that's sort of what we mean when we say someone is deep then when we then the next question is well how long does it take to get that how does depth happen and when we look at people who we think are depth or deeper whether it's Gandhi or Pope Francis you notice it doesn't happen all at once the the people the things that that happen that that's lead you astray those things are fast lost fear vanity gluttony the things that we admire most honesty humility self-control courage those things take some time and they accumulate slowly it's sort of an ensemble of settled feelings and so when we think of people are deep usually it's been over a long time it's not something that happens to people in their 15 the next question to ask is where does all this stuff happen when we say it's deep what are we talking about are we talking about their cerebellum their frontal cortex now we're actually talking about some metaphorical moral center of themselves we're talking about some core and it can't be reduced to a brain state it's a metaphor we understand it by metaphor and that there's some core piece of yourself that when you make a decision you make that core piece of yourself slightly better or worse if you make disciplined and selfless decisions you'll reinforce core tendencies in that self if you make selfish and short-sighted decisions you'll fragment or degrade that core piece of yourself and so you can degrade and that core piece of yourself even if you're not hurting anybody else if you have a bunch of degraded thoughts selfish thoughts lustful thoughts you'll degrade something in yourself and so there's some core piece there and the old-fashioned word we would use for that core piece is the word soul and one of the things when you start thinking about that there are a lot of words that used to have real power in the culture and now don't have much power the word soul well soul music but for centuries it had real power that word and we sort of let those words drift away from the center of our consciousness but I think recovering those words is part of recovering what it means to be to think seriously about these questions moral questions and so the next question asked when we admire a deep person or virtuous person again I'm thinking of Dorothy day or people I admire like Francis or Agustin or even soloveitchik Albert Schweitzer what do we admire about them like what is the quality of our admiration and one of the things you think about it is it's a it's it's beautiful its aesthetic Albert Schweitzer was this great man who gave up being a very successful music theorist became a doctor went off to Africa and he didn't hire people who we thought would be idealistic or who were out to do good he only hired people who good service as if they were just doing the dishes he didn't want any idealist because they didn't think they'd be tough enough to handle the rigors of being a jungle doctor and when you look at trikes you read his rating read his writing or they could Pope Francis there's something aesthetically beautiful about the guy and they possess sort of a moral framework they possess some sort of character and they possess and here comes another word that's sort of old-fashioned but that has lost some of its power and it seems pompous to us and that word is virtue they possess a certain virtue and the word virtue again it has pompous connotations seems stuff-up self-righteous but all virtue is is having your loves in the right order we all love and desire a multitude of things we all desire love friendship family popularity we all desire money be in good shape we all desire a lot of different things and I think all of us understand whether we've thought about it or not that some loves are higher than other loves that the love of family is higher than the love of money and if you've sold out your family to make an extra buck you've done something wrong if the love of truth or friendship is higher than the love of popularity if somebody tells you a secret and you blab it at a dinner party to become popular for a few minutes at the dinner party conversation we know you've inverted your love and so being virtue is not some pompous thing it's not some puritanical thing it's just having your loves in the right order and so what I've tried to capture here is what depth looks like and feels like that is something acquired slowly that it's virtuous that it happens in the soul in a moral Center and so that's what we think about when we think of death at so nervousness and that high standard that some people do achieve and so then to me the big question is what activities do you do to get you there how do you get on your way to death and I should give you the secret of why I'm giving this talk we have a lot of emphasis on our society unhappiness how can I be happy how can I measure happiness I'm trying to offer an antidote to that I'm all for happiness I happen to be happy right now it's great but I'm trying to remind us of a different goal in life that is deeper than happiness and more important than happiness and I'm calling a depth you could call it holiness you can call whatever you want but I'm trying to help us think about that and what words go with that so what I'm doing in this talk is trying to give us a counterculture to think about the happiness culture which are so much around us so again the final question is what activities send us to depth to make us holy if you want to use a religious term well the first one is love it's really hard to think so-and-so is deep if they haven't experienced some big transforming love the hero's we think about it could be love for a cause usually it's love for a person it could be love for God whether it's Martin Luther King or Mandela or anybody else Lincoln they've they've experienced some transforming love for something and so love is a key part of it so what does love do first it humbles us it reminds us love reminds us were not even control of ourselves love is like an invading army that conquers you little by little reorganizes your energy levels reorganizes your sleep patterns reorganizes your conversational topics reorganizes the objects of your sexual desire the focus of your attention when you're in love you can't stop thinking about your beloved you walk through a crowd in the airport you think you see him or her down in the crowd every every perception has changed love is the strongest kind of invading army that doesn't generate opposition a person who love wants to be conquered by that army and wants to be totally defeated by it and so that's one thing love does it humbles us by reminding us we don't even control our own minds love just takes over the second and maybe the central thing to love does is it dissenters the self if a shallow person lives in the smallness of his own ego a person love finds the center of himself is outside so his treasures are somewhere out there or at least in the space between the two and so you find people in this tumultuous relationships where they're making their themselves a miserable and you say you know you really should break off of that person you're making yourself miserable you're not being happy and you find very often they don't want to break off because they'd rather be unhappy with that person than happy without them and so what love does first it takes over and then it causes you to seek union with another and the your joy the center of yourself happens outside of yourself and the joy of another third thing love does is it complicates the distinction between giving and receiving because two selves are so intermingled in love the person giving is giving to him or herself Montaigne has a beautiful sentence where he says that the person who who receives a gift from her beloved is doing the ultimate favor to that person by giving them the pleasure of giving a gift and so the solves are mingled and giving and receiving is more or less the same thing Montaigne is this wonderful guide to see he was really looking for depth but he did it in sort of if I can say this in sort of a West Coast Southern California kind of way he didn't want to be suffering his way to death he didn't want to be miserable on the way to death he thought I'm gonna be happy on the way to death but I'm still gonna get there and I'm you know tremendous faith in nature and I'm gonna have tremendous faith and the happy activities of life are gonna make me a deep soul you know adolescents think to be DPF to wear black all the time Montaigne was not like that and he put tremendous emphasis on friendship he had a great friendship with this guy and here's a sentence he wrote about his friendship such a friendship has no model but itself and can only be compared to itself it was not one special consideration or two nor three nor four not a thousand it was some mysterious quintessence of all this mixture which possessed itself of my will which led it to plunge and lose myself in his which possessed itself of his whole will and let it with a similar hunger and a like impulse to plunge and lose itself in mind I may truly say lose for left us with nothing that was our own nothing that was either his or mine and when Montaigne was asked what caused you to fall in love with this guy I loved OoT he couldn't have an answer it was just it was because I was high and he was he and so love is the first thing that really is essential to death depth the second we'd say is suffering when people look forward and they plan their lives they say how can I plan some lives that'll make me happy but when people look backward at the things that made them who they are they usually don't talk about the moments when they were happiest they usually talked about the moments of suffering an ordeal so we we plan for happiness but were formed by suffering now it should be said there's nothing intrinsically noble about suffering most of the time when you're suffering you just want to get out of it but you do find people who were really improved by suffering you think of Franklin Roosevelt who is this sort of shallow guy before he suffered from polio and emerged a different sort of person after suffering from polio now the big thing suffering does is first it humbles you like love you can't really control your suffering even when you come out of your period of suffering the moments of healing seem like outside your control that just nature did it or God did it so it reminded humbles you the second thing suffering the does is it drags you deeper into yourself there's a 1950s theologian Paul Tillich who wrote that when people endure suffering they're taken between the routine busyness of life and they find out they're not who they believed themselves to be the pain involved in losing someone or even composing a great symphony or a book takes you smashes through the floor of what you felt was the bottom floor of your soul he wrote revealing a cavity below that one and then it smashes below that one and reels a cavity below that one and a cavity below that one and so it digs down and suffering people find depths of themselves they had never imagined the third thing suffering does it gives people a sense of calling they're not masters of their pain they can't control their pain but you do have a responsibility to respond to your pain and it's interesting to watch people in the depth of suffering how they respond to pain if you see someone who loses a child they don't say I've just endured the horrible pain of losing a child I really want to balance off my happiness levels by going out and partying a lot they don't say that what they do do is they form a foundation they want to take the suffering and they want to make it moral they want to somehow make it sacred so the response to suffering is not happiness it's some sort of moral commitment and an asset of eternal demands so suffering like love but in the inverse first you realize you're not in control yourself second it thrusts you outside of yourself third it thrusts you toward morality and makes you more moral more morally engaged the third act of going to death is internal struggle and here I don't mean the struggle involved in winning a championship or starting a company or making a lot of money you can as we know be the shallowest human being on earth and do all those things I mean the self struggle the people who seem at their depth are often at war with themselves they are aware that while they have great strength and great dignity they also have great weakness and they're engaged in an internal struggle with themselves I have a friend who goes to bed at night and he reviews the day what sins did I commit and sins is another of those words that has lost power in our culture but is sort of inescapable he asks what sins did I exist it would I would I commit today and he's a pretty good guy but he tends to have at least he told me this he tends to be a people pleaser and he's much in demand and people ask him favors can you do this for me can you do that for me and instead of saying honestly I don't feel like doing that it's not a high priority for me he lies and he says no I don't have time for that I've got this commitment this commitment this commitment so he's constantly lying to people to get out of commitments and that's a sin a small sin maybe and he's trying to flatly over flatters people he told me sometimes he's not present when someone's talking he's when somebody's in conversation he's not really thinking about what they're saying he's thinking about what impressive thing he can say to make himself more impressive before them and so he's not a big sinner he's not a murderer but he spends each night in bed thinking of those sins and trying to think how he can do better and you see in his example often the response to sit and is sort of this u-shape you're up here and you got to go down and think about your sins and then sort of plan your way out and so there's a moment of what soloveitchik calls withdrawal or in the Christian context we would call life death and resurrection dante into by economy you got to go down to hell to go up to heaven Kierkegaard has this great phrase only the knight who goes to the underworld gets to wrote so it gets to rescue the beloved and so there's this inner struggle with the weaknesses we all have some of us are scattered some of us like me start out shallow and you got to work your way to be a little less shallow some people are selfish well we're all selfish some people are just want to please people some people are terrified all the time and you got to engage in an internal struggle against that core weakness I told the story in this talk a couple years ago at Eisenhower his core weakness was just this anger this fury he grew furious with people at the drop of a hat and he spent his entire life trying to combat his own temper and it was an internal struggle and for a lot of these people if you read their journals I talked about Samuel Johnson last year the internal struggle against their own weakness is the most dramatic thing that's happening in their lives when they're a little less selfish when they're a little less pleasing they write it down in their journal as if it's this great victory when they let themselves down it's this horrific humiliation and no career success or failure will be as dramatic to them as that internal struggle and so internal struggle is sort of a logic by which we build character it's the logic by which I think we go to death so that's the third activity the fourth activity observant people are really deep is obedience and this is another quality that's really out of fashion these days when you go to commencement speeches college students are taught find your passion follow the beat of your own drummer pursue your dreams that is to say look inside yourself and find out what you want to do and the answers to your life vocation are inside yourself if you look at the people who are deep often they don't look inside themselves something calls to them from outside themselves I told the story a few years ago if Francis Perkins who was the first woman in cabinet of Franklin Roosevelt and Perkins was having coffee or tea one afternoon in 1913 at Washington Square Park on the north side she hears a commotion she rushes out and she sees a fire she stumbled across the triangle Factory Fischer the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and she rushes to the building which is just a block off Washington Square if you know New York and she sees the fire and then she sees what she thinks are bundles of clothing coming out of the top windows of the 10th and the 11th floor but it's not like 9/11 instead of being burned to death people are deciding to leap to their deaths just have a quicker death and so she sees I think 57 people go over this way and she sees a guy holding women over the windowsill and then dropping them a second a third and then one guy he holds the fourth his girlfriend they have a long embrace and a kiss and he drops her and then Eames himself goes over the edge and she watches this moment and she's a little unsure at this moment what to do but at this moment the world has presented her with a problem which is worker safety and she devotes the rest of her life to that problem and so it was obedience to that problem not something she found in herself this process of obedience was best described in another famous book called man's search for meeting which I'm sure many of you read by Viktor Frankl Franco was a psychologist in Europe I think in Vienna Jewish guy in the 1940s captured by the Nazis sent to concentration camps he laid tracks for a few years this was not the life he had planned for himself but this is what fate had put in front of him and so he wrote in that book it did not really matter what we expected from life but rather what life expected from us we needed to stop asking the meaning of life instead think of ourselves as those who are being questioned by life daily and hourly so fate had put a task in front of him first a moral task which he said was to suffer well the Nazis would try to humiliate him he tried to behave with dignity even the face of the pain and the humiliation to exercise what he called an inner halt every time they tried to humiliate him he would assert his dignity the second thing he was intellectual is psychological so he'd been put in this weird circumstance he had been given an opportunity to just study suffering and so he studied suffering and he decided if I live I'll write about suffering and what I learned about that now a few of us are put in circumstances that horrific of that extreme well we're all given certain talents which demand responsibility were all put around certain problems that are just in front of us whether we choose to respond to them or not and so people are obedient to that problem and you see people who who are like like Mother Teresa obedient to a problem year after year after year after year and then the final thing I'll say the activity that gets us to depth is acceptance and this is the hardest one for people like me and I suspect for a lot of us and I'm gonna describe the the trait of acceptance which is the most counterintuitive by another episode that happened to me when I was here at Aspen a year ago every year I go on a hike I go on the same hike every year and it's it's on the trail that's probably about 13 miles in some direction from here I have a GPS I don't know what direction and it's called the American Lake Trail and so I go on that it's like 90 minutes up and you get to this beautiful mountain lake and it's surrounded by mountains and I sat there i hiked up for about 90 minutes or two hours I sat there and eating candy that's what I do and I because I me I had a backpack full of books and I had a book about Puritanism and I opened it up and start reading this passage just while I'm resting up there and I came across a Puritan prayer called Valley of vision which I imagined as a 17th century prayer though I don't really know and the the prayer begins this way high and holy meek and lowly Lord thou hast brought me to the valley of vision where I live in the depths but seedy and the heights hemmed in my mountains of sin I behold thy glory let me learn by paradox that the way down is up that the way to be low is to be high that the broken heart is the healed heart and the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit and so I was reading that and and I was looking around and everything seemed to fit in with the world I was in and I'm sure you've all had these moments of the transcendent experience in nature the poem the prayer was high and holy I had these majestic mountains the vast limitless sky above me meek and lowly as I was sitting there I'm not really good at animals but there was a little badger or some furry critter who walked up and he didn't I was sitting quietly and still and so he walked up to me and like about a foot away from my sneaker and then he noticed me he scampered away and it was just this meek and lowly little one of God's creatures and seemed to fit in with the prayer I saw the beauty and the water rippling across the lake I saw the grounds really this valley enclosed and hemmed in by mountains and for me we've all had sort of transcendent experiences in nature for me this particular experience was the sensation of things clicking into place like a series of puzzle pieces clicking neatly into place like something well engineered car or something just being part of the order like there was this order of nature an order of life and I was there I was clicking in and being a part I was admitted and that word came to me I'm admitted now we think of admittance in our culture in a very certain way it has a certain connotation admittance admit in my world we think of it as college admittance it has an air of exclusivity are you admitted into college are you admitted into a club are you admitted into workplace are you admitted into a job or profession but I what I was experiencing then was a theory of it was open admissions they were it was I was just being admitted because I was a person I was up there and the most important thing of that form of admittance was that it wasn't earned there was nothing I did no virtual I possessed no work I did no great column I wrote I was just being admitted it was unmerited unearned admittance it was membership in some sort of human transcendent community and there's a word in religions that applies to this state and that word is grace which is unmerited love things you don't deserve that come to you one of my favorite passages on Grace was written by Paul Tillich tilicho I mentioned earlier in a collection of essays called shaking of the foundations till it's wrote grace strikes us when we were in great pain and restlessness it strikes us when our disgust for own being our indifference our weakness our hostility our lack of direction composure have become intolerable to us sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness and it as though a voice is saying you are accepted you are accepted accepted by that which is greater than you and the name of which you do not know do not ask for the name now perhaps you will find it later do not try to do anything now perhaps later you will do much do not seek for anything do not perform anything do not intend anything simply accept the fact that you are accepted if that happens to us we experience grace after such an experience we may not be better than before we may not believe more than before but everything is transformed and nothing is demanded of this experience no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition nothing but as it so Adam one wants to go out and win victories to win grace to win honor to win beauty to win things Adam one wants to work Adam one wants to sweat and practice and Adam one when life overs him a gifts Adam one tends to ruin them by trying to buy the gifts ruin a gift by trying to buy it but Adam two at the deepest part of ourselves simply accepts the fact that he's accepted Adam to the spiritual side of her nature stands against the whole ethos of self-cultivation which is the resume side of our world the ethos of scrambling and working and climbing Adam - has that paradoxical logic I mentioned before he Adam - simply accepts the gifts it accepts the fact that your family loves you more than you deserve your friends are for you even when you're an attentive the past wants to give you gifts you did not earn the admissions committee has already met and you're already in your job is simply to accept the fact that you're accepted it's passive Adam - is passive in the face of this acceptance soloveitchik says your job is to retreat it's to withdraw and to accept this and this is the trait you see in these deep people they have acceptance that they are accepted and then the final paradox is that this somehow gives them great energy because it's like someone who gets the greatest birthday present ever they're grateful they're inspired they want to live that way they want to honor the people who gave them that gift and they want to pass on the gift that they didn't deserve Dorothy Day one of my heroes when she gave birth to her child she said if I had painted the greatest painting sculpted the greatest sculpture carved the greatest figure I could not have felt the most exalted greater than I did when they put my child in my arms and with that came a desire to adorn and to worship she was grateful for something she didn't earn she felt the great need to adore to worship and to serve and great energy came out of that that desire to pass along the gift in the middle of this year sometime around May I was in Frederick Maryland I did some fundraiser for a friend a bad mood because I hate traveling and speaking that's bad but so I go to this place and it's a fundraiser for a group that they teach adult immigrants to read and I learned while meeting these people that they it sometimes takes seven years to teach an adult to read in a foreign language and the people who did this were amazing they had they were sort of quiet they had a gratitude about them they had a calm settled manner they didn't have like the blooming virtues I see in my Yale students the kind of things that show up when you're 18 but they had the ripening virtues of people who lived a little learned a little suffered a little sort of a quiet weight and stability they were quiet people they were soft people they talked about their jobs very matter-of-factly they didn't boast they weren't trying to prove to me how smart they were they just were going about their job and there was something grateful about them and that gratitude imagine sitting with an immigrant seven years trying to teach them to read that's a great deal of energy and so there was just a quiet to them and they had nothing to prove they were just doing it with great energy and great passion so in this little talk I've tried to present a counterculture a counterculture first to the resume culture which we're all caught up in and a counterculture when we think about spiritual life - the happiness culture which less faces is about itself and about having meaning good mood happiness culture really it doesn't have much rule for suffering I've tried to describe what suffering is what what we think about or what depth is when we think about death and I've tried to describe the activities that contribute to death love obedience struggle suffering and finally this paradoxical one acceptance and when you look at those people who exemplify all this you see them not there there Adam - is just rich and strong and you feel that in them balancing their item1 and they're still out in the world they're still healing the sick they're still doing drug counseling they're still teaching and they're involved in the compromises of life but you see a certain Beauty a spiritual beauty to them and that beauty is summarized in a passage from Reinhold Niebuhr he wrote nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime therefore we must be saved by hope nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history therefore we must be saved by faith nothing we do however virtuous can be accomplished alone therefore we must be saved by love no virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as that are as it is from our standpoint therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness thanks and now that I've consumed my Pepsi product I I think we have 10 or 15 minutes for questions if anyone's asked about Ted Cruz I can do that too it was not adopted there's a question over there freaking thank you for your very stimulating speech when you talk about a core that can be either degraded or enhanced do you feel that there's any kind of internal neurological basis for this core that you mentioned yeah you know I wrote a book called the social animal that came out about four years ago and I'd spent the previous five years reading a lot about neuroscience and social psychology and it's I'm so glad I spent those years around neuroscientists at cognitive scientists because you learn a lot about our nature and I I discovered I think I came to the conclusion that neuroscience rarely teaches us something new about philosophy but it teaches us which which old philosophers were probably more right than others so Descartes thought reasons totally separate from emotion I think we know from what we've learned about the brain and cognitive psychology that that's probably wrong that you knew about human nature more than Descartes but most of the things that we've learned from neuroscience confirm or disconfirm something George Eliot already knew George Eliot was pretty smart and had observed human nature and now what what neuroscience does is it clarifies our knowledge of that I think and it gives us the mechanism by which certain things happen by how Love Happens for example I think what we know about the brain reminds us that love is not an emotion it's a motivational state it's a drive which involves a lot of different emotions and so I think what's happened in the past 30 years is fantastic advance in helping us understand ourselves and finding out which theories what observations were true and we're not true what I don't think it can do is is describe to us the moral nature of what we're doing and I think one of the things that's led us away from I think it has had a demoralizing effect on society where we think of things either as evolutionary responses or we think of things in terms of utility and my students at Yale and I think a lot of us speak in a very utilitarian vocabulary what will leave the biggest at impact how can I do good outside but as far as seeing life as a moral drama inside I don't think evolutionary psychology and neuroscience for all their great benefits do that it happens on a different level which is why we have the metaphor of a soul it's not a real thing obviously but it's a it's not a spot in the brain but it's a moral it when we think of the soul we think we're involved in a moral drama rather than just a cognitive and decision-making drama and it's so easy to forget that and so for all the great benefits that neuroscience has given us in the past 30 years I think it's distracted us away from the fact that psychological health is very often moral health and I would say my students if they lack anything a lot of us lack the moral vocabulary just quickly a Christian Smitha sociologist went around college campuses asked them can you name your last moral dilemma and seventy percent could not name a moral dilemma they they would say I pulled in a parking space I couldn't afford I didn't have any quarters and you say that's a problem it's not really a moral dilemma and it's not that they're bad they just hadn't been given the vocabulary of of when values clash and so again not that just morally inarticulate I think all the attention that's going to the cognitive sciences and neuroscience which I'm guilty of has taken us a little away from morality theology talking in non pompous ways about the moral drama I'm really interested in this blossoming virtues in your 18 year old so we work with eighteen to twenty five year olds and at first we thought the challenge was help them develop real skills and ability to jump into the adult world and contribute but then we started noticing what you're saying that there was this other part let's call it Adam - that was very inchoate and inarticulate in them and necessary I think for their health so we started trying to work with him in this way and I'm just they have been I was so afraid they would tell us to go jump in a lake like you're not the mom with me you know I'm like a grown-up but they're so eager and hungry they're very willing I'm just interested in what you've learned about how how to give how to work with them on that dimension and if you find them interested or you find them like later you know when I'm 40 don't worry about this what is your experience exactly like your so Paul bloom a Yale psychologist does moral experiments on babies infants and so he'll have a little image of a triangle going up a hill circle trying to stop it and the babies at very young ages know there's something wrong with a circle and they root for the triangle so they have a moral sense but then it gets suppressed because we shove them in this high-achieving culture where all the emphasis is on you know building the right College resume getting the right grades getting into the college and you know my students are great they're they're perfect resume gods and they do sort of good moral things you know I joke my joke is when you ask what are you doing over summer spring break they say you know i'm i'm you know cycling across Thailand while reading into lepers they're doing a lot of that kind of stuff but when you tell them and I tell them in class I think you're great I don't think you have a moral vocabulary they get it immediately and the phrase that they seize on to is the phrase moral ecology that we live in this ecosystem that either gives us a moral system or it doesn't and they know they've been given a system that drives them to think about their skills and have not given what that they hunger for I agree with you they totally hunger for it and if I could ride my one hobby worse they're raised often in families that's push them to atom one and my students often have two majors one for mom and dad one for them the mom and dad major is always finance or economics the major for them is history are where they're where they really care about and worse mom and dad have really loved them passionately but are really anxious for them to succeed so they've got these two great forces and when those collide mom and dad love them a little more when they are succeeding and they withdraw the love a little when they're not succeeding and the wolf of conditional love is at the door here and they feel it and they have a panic that the love may be withdrawn if they don't stay on the balance beam of atom one and that is just a destructive force on them because it creates terror and it robs them of the internal criteria to make the decisions about their own lives and I think in this culture we have an epidemic of unconditional wealth and that's one of the things that pushes them to succeed so much but they hunger so much for this moral system the the best compliment I got from my student this year one of the students said in class after we've read Montaigne we've read Dorothy day we've read a Gustin he said the best thing about this class is you've made me so much sadder I took that as a compliment thank you David from your comments have you found any atom tools in your time at Yale or it just doesn't exist in that situation they're all at Princeton and [Music] no you find you find them everywhere that one of the things whites are said in this essay when he says I never hire idealists but the people who who are amazingly noble you find them they're just they're not the ones who are on Facebook and they're not broadcasting it I found amazing professors amazing students under the worst circumstances pursuing doing something that really is not great for their career I ran into a guy not long ago and the Hugh hires a lot of people I just asked him randomly what job what question do you ask somebody when you're deciding whether to hire them or not and this guy said I asked them this question name a time where you told the truth and it hurt you and that's a good question because it it's really asking are your loves in the right order do you put love of truth over love of career and a lot of my students a lot of my co professors have done that and have sacrificed sometimes fellowships sometimes lives of ease I met a young woman who was homeless in Phoenix she was going to enlist in the Navy just because she she needed money to pay for her four brothers she who she was looking after her parents had split back to the Philippines and God bless the enlistment officer said you should not have listened the Navy you should go to Annapolis go to the Academy her grades are good enough she went to the Academy and graduated number one academically in her class and she's now a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford amazing story but she spent all this time whatever spare time you have at the Naval Academy which believe me is not much finding foster homes and adopted parents for her brothers and you just see somebody living a life of that that's that's sort of amazing even in this culture and I I think we all could look around if you name the five people you admire most I think I think we could all do that and find people who are balanced I always keep a list of five people I admire most in Washington just so I don't feel totally hopeless and they're usually people like Anthony Weiner Eliot Spitzer not good but to leap out some of you may know one is no longer in Washington was George Shultz who was Secretary States after Treasury a remarkable man who did all these jobs it was never about himself and then another one who's always on my list is Jim Lehrer who I used to work with at the NewsHour who he did a TV show but the show was not about himself it was about the the stories and you couldn't see it but when I was talking to him on air and the camera was not on him his face was very expressive and I was saying if I was saying something unworthy of the show I could see his mouth droop and if I was saying something he liked he thought was worthy of the show I could see his eyes crinkle in a smile and so for ten years I was guided and taught by the mouth and the crinkling eye and those instant reactions were my teaching and somebody who has those right instincts proper instincts can be a great influence and teacher we have time for one more over here let's go with my friend Hannity thank you so much and I have a struggle going on but about us talk about deep and depth and in my life in Kenya in poverty I felt I was much more deeper and then when I came where I have a better life I feel like I'm losing Adam one I might the only one and how does a struggle so I just when I read it to you yeah thank you thank you that's a very profound point when you go back to look at some of the lives that people have really led very powerful lives in part there was so much hardship they couldn't afford not to be thrifty responsible because they they were in created with habits of discipline because there was no safety net there one little slip-up could lead to disaster and they were focused on the elementals and serving each other and you had to you have to rely on others to survive I should in the act of full disclosure my oldest son Joshua worked for Kennedy at the Kennedy School in Kibera and in Kenya so we do know each other and one of the things he'd noticed about the little girls he taught over five this was an internship in the summer was that they were on a swing set and when they fell off they didn't cry and they would really hit their heads and they were just out that hurt and then they would get up and not cry because there's a level of discipline that's enforced by poverty and then when you're surrounded by affluence a lot of that discipline goes away so some of the good habits can go away and then you get all the baubles of life and we don't think about it and maybe we should spend more time if Kitty's here a track a dangerous track for the Aspen ideas festival the corruptions of wealth but they are real I think I've just lost my private plane ride out of here but but you know our founding fathers and through history in every single religion that I know of they're super aware of that there's a reason the Beatitudes the last shall be hearth the meek shall inherit the earth not many of the wealthy will be chosen and I don't believe virtue in here's in a class and economic class I think you can be good or bad in any clients and I don't believe it and here's a profession you can have total Schmucks who are working at NGOs and total great people who are working at Goldman Sachs maybe not Goldman Sachs no but that it depends on whether you're whether you're doing internal struggle if you're a banker of one of my heroes a guy named Robert Rubin that it was you know he was at Goldman Sachs somebody doing internal struggle is building themselves and that you can do that poor you can do that rich it's whether you make the decision but it's certainly true that the biblical view of wealth that wealth is problematic it's a challenge it's a character challenge like power something we all especially a we're at Aspen has to deal with anyway your time is up thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 74,136

Rating: 4.8247809 out of 5

Keywords: David Brooks (Author), aspen ideas festival, Aspen Institute (Nonprofit Organization), deep, profound, thinking, Yale University (College/University), College (TV Genre), advice, inner lives, character, Advice (Media Genre), Television (Invention), Control, Mind, Road

Id: VGOrpOFTJTQ

Length: 55min 51sec (3351 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 11 2014