Review: The Road to Character

The Road to Character by David Brooks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was delighted to discover that this book is a Plutarch Lives variation on the theme of one of my favorite books: The Lonely Man of Faith written by Joseph Soloveitchik in 1965. In this book it was noted that there are two accounts of creation in Genesis and argued that these represent the two opposing sides of our nature:
1) Adam 1 or the career-oriented ambitious résumé adam who wants to build, create, dominate, conquer, produce, discover and control.
2) Adam 2 is the internal Adam who wants to have serene inner character, to know right and wrong, to be good, not just do good, to live according to obedience to transcendent truth.

This is also reflected in King Benjamin’s address to the people in the Book of Mormon when he says in Mosiah 3:19:
“For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.”

David Brooks modernizes to the current cultural moment by dividing these two natures into two relatable virtues: the Résumé and Eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the ones that garner fame and prestige while the eulogy virtues garner a deeper relationship between people through personal connection, service, sharing of suffering and joy and common values.
Here are the contrasts I noted between the Natural, résumé Adam 1 and the covenant, eulogy, Adam II:
Adam 1 (Career Adam or Natural Man)
• Adam I wants to rise above and dominate nature
• Seeks to reach for the stars and overcome cosmic forces
• The authentic self is rooted in desires and appetites
• Hungers after adulation, praise, fame
• Filled with self-esteem, self-confidence
• Judges success by victories over other people
• Flaws, stumblings and imperfections are things I mock and deride in others. I am intolerant of other’s flaws
• Ultimate meaning comes from “making your mark on world”
• Compares everything to self
• Focuses on talents and not character
• Wants to venture forth
• Asks how things work
• Focused on reason and argument
• Motto: Success and happiness
• Outer majestic and Noble Adam
• Seeks to live a life of passion, and satisfaction of desire
• Seeks a life of self-expression or Self-actualization
• Lives by a straightforward utilitarian logic
• Practice makes perfect, Cultivate your strengths
• Lack the internal criteria to make unshakable commitments.
• Shrewd Animal
• Human relationships seen in economic terms: opportunity costs, scalability, human capital, cost-benefit analysis
• Private acts don’t affect public image
• Blooming virtues of smart young beautiful college students
• Seeks knowledge/information
• Focused on the Big accomplishments
• Sin is external
• Moral ‘Romantic’ The Golden figure and Culture of Authenticity—Culture of Identity or the Big Me
• Gospel of self-trust “Do what feels good”
• Sin doesn’t exist or is a barrier to fame and fortune
• Soul can be filled with ideologies and consumer products
• Distrust conventions, traditions, institutions outside self.
• We can know ourselves without help from others, God.
• It is easy to change ourselves to match our golden self since we only need to find it—it exists within us already.

Adam 2 (Covenant, Redeemed Man)
• Adam II wants to obey a calling to serve the world
• Renounces worldly status to serve a sacred purpose
• Mind, body, and spirit all serve one transcendent purpose
• Hungers for self-awareness, instruction, and self-assessment
• Filled with self-respect – has integrity to sacred covenants
• Judges success by victories over self, self-mastery
• It is okay to be flawed and stumble; you are no better than others, and therefore we tolerate each other’s flaws
• Ultimate meaning is external or extrinsic to oneself
• Knows everybody’s suffering is unique
• Focuses on inner moral drama and character over talents
• Wants to return to one’s roots, honor one’s parents, God
• Asks WHY things are, what is the meaning of life
• Focused on Faith
• Motto: Charity, Hope, Redemption
• Inner Humble Adam
• Seeks to live a life of purpose
• Seeks to serve/lift others to reach their moral potential
• Lives by a moral logic—do unto others.
• Weakness is a blessing Confront your weakness
• Failure leads to the greatest success, which is humility and learning and ultimately to redemption
• In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself
• In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself
• Has a mind furnished by fixed principles and a core of iron to make unshakable personal commitments
“When was the last time you told the truth knowing it would hurt you?”
• Views Human relationships as eternal bonds upon which you are dependent for salvation and redemption
• Private acts carry public moral purposes
• Ripening virtues of Saints who lived a little, suffered, felt joy
• Seeks wisdom
• Focused on the smallest details and habits of life
• Sin is intrinsic to our nature and must be confronted
• Moral Realist—The Crooked Timber: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
• Skeptical of appetites, passions, desires, represses n. urges
• Sin is universal and a barrier to inner peace
• Romans 7:18 For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do”
• Distrust self and trust tradition and outside social restraint
• Kahneman “We have an almost unlimited ability to ignore our own ignorance
• It is hard to build ourselves around fixed moral principles and requires 10,000 of daily small acts of kindness and reflection from other’s Conscience, Stand of Trees.

One of the Plutarch Lives presented in David Brooks treatise was Dorothy Day who served as a social activist and was a Catholic convert. Though I do not agree with much of her philosophical values I did like this quote:

“I try to think back; I try to remember this life that the Lord gave me; the other day I wrote down the words “a life remembered,” and I was going to try to make a summary for myself, write what mattered most— but I couldn’t do it. I just sat there and thought of our Lord, and His visit to us all those centuries ago, and I said to myself that my great luck was to have had Him on my mind for so long in my life!”

Along with the Adam 1 résumé virtues that David Brooks examined he also noted the effects that focus solely on these virtues can produce including postmodern Expressive Individualism. Some of these themes are also seen in other conservative writers and books such as Sen. Ben Sasse, Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”, Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart”, JD Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” and others that note the breakdown of American communities

Among these, Brooks notes that:
1) Decades ago people told pollsters that they had four or five close friends whom they could tell everything. Today it is two or three, the number of people with NO confidants has doubled. Suicide has increased dramatically in the last 20 years.
2) 35% of older adults report being chronically lonely up from 20% in the year 2000.
3) Social Trust has declined: in 1960 significant majorities said people are generally trustworthy. In 1990 there Distrusters were in the majority by a 20 point margin.
4) People have become less empathetic: college students today score 40% lower than students in the 1970s in test of their ability to understand what another person is feeling. Most of that drop occurred after 2000.
5) Google showed usage of words like Character, Conscience, and Virtue in books, magazines, etc have dropped dramatically over the course of the 20th century
a. Bravery declined 66%, Gratitude is down 49%, Humility is down 52%, Kindness is down 56%
6) In the 1940s and 1950s psychologist asked more than 10,000 adolescents wheter they considered themselves to be a very important person, 12% said yes, in 1990 it was 80% of boys and 77% of girls.
7) Life Goal survey from 1976 showed that being famous ranked 15/16 for life goals. In 2007 it was in the top 3 for a majority.
8) In this ethos, sin is not found in your individual self; it is found in the external structures of society—in racism, inequality, and oppression. To improve yourself, you have to be taught to love yourself, to be true to yourself, not to doubt yourself and struggle against yourself. As one of the characters in one of the High School Musical movies sings, “The answers are all inside of me / All I’ve got to do is believe.”

The book ends on a very optimistic note, however, and presents a “Humility Code” that summarizes the virtues that were modeled by many of the lives of this book including Dwight Eisenhower’s virtue of self-conquest, the pseudonymous George Eliot’s (Mary Anne Evans was her true name) virtue of love, Augustine’s Ordered Love, and ending with Samual Johnson’s virtue of self-examination. For anybody interested in forming deeper connections with others and perhaps also with God, this book is a good place to start.



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