The Road to Character
Book reviews
“Of making many books there is no end. . . “Ecclesiastes 12:12 NRSV
The Road to Character
By David Brooks, Random house, 2015
Reviewed by Walter B. Shurden
The Road to Character by David Brooks, random house, 2015 Reviewed by Walter B. Shurden One of the most anticipated few moments of the week for my wife and me is the segment on PBS on Friday evenings that features Mark Shields and David Brooks. Shields is one of our favorite Democrats, Brooks one of our favorite Republicans. They model civility in public discourse without sacrificing distinctive points of view. And while cheering for Shields, we are almost always challenged and often sobered by Brooks.
This book, for me, proves why David Brooks is one of the nation’s most respected, somewhat conservative, public intellectuals. Brooks, a Jew, writes a book about ethics with amazing sensitivity to and knowledge of the religious, the irreligious, the once-religious, the rationalist, the mystic, the Protestant, the Catholic and the Jew. I promise: you will envy the man’s intellectual breadth and depth.
Brooks wrote, so he says, in apparently self-denigrating language, “to save my own soul.” And he gives evidence of this purpose in quasiautobiographical sentences throughout the book. One wonders if he actually succeeded in having his soul saved. Indeed, there has been public speculation that Brooks has considered converting to Christianity. See, for example, the online article of April 15, 2015 by Mark Stricherz titled Is the New York Times’ David Brooks Converting to Christianity?
I have no idea if his soul was saved or if he is converting to Christianity. I do know that he writes as one who has experienced the untamable grace of life and the overflowing life of gratitude that follows on the heels of that grace. Christians have no monopoly here, however. Many Jews, Abraham Heschel being exhibit A, have written movingly of a radical grace that drives to glad service.
Brooks assumes with amazing ease the mantles of several professionals: historian, philosopher, theologian, ethicist, cultural critic, biographer, and especially preacher. He may be appalled at my saying so, but he preaches some superb sermons. See for example his “sermons” on vocation (24-25); on whatever happened to individual sin (53-56); on moderation (69-71); on the arduous path of religion (88-89); on what suffering can do for us (94-96); on what to do in a time of trauma (100-101); on the value of institutions (115-117); on how change comes (147-149); on what love does (170-171); on the fear of missing out (192-193); on getting more than you deserve (206-207); and on the humility code (261-267). Honestly, this is one of the most provocative books for preachers that I have read in a long, long time. But it is also as far from a book on preaching as any that I have read in a long, long time. His “preaching” revolves primarily around what the older theologians called “anthropology” or “human nature.”
The book is a hundred times more exciting than the flat, tasteless title suggests. The Road to Character! Ugh! Had I been his editor, I would have called it The Crooked Timber Tradition: How Character is Created by Going Down before Coming Up. The Crooked Timber Tradition, argues Brooks, is that understanding of human nature that says that we are all crooked — selfcentered to the core; we have “bugs in our souls” (244). Our personal character, if fashioned at all, is constructed from crooked timber. Brooks becomes biblical and unabashedly and fortunately calls this crooked timber by its first name: SIN.
As crooked timber, none of us ever becomes absolutely straight. We can become straighter, however. To become straighter, we need “redemptive assistance from outside — from family, friends, ancestors, rules, traditions, institutions, exemplars and, for believers, God” (12). And that redemption launches us into a lifelong struggle to become better people. The struggle, while unending and without terminus, is never a solitary journey.
Brooks believes that this moral realism, this crooked timber tradition, has been left behind in contemporary American culture. The loss occurred not in the pummeled 1960s, but earlier, in the late 30s and 40s. We have, he says, “lost the understanding of how character is built” (15). We have even lost the moral language to describe the “experience.” Brooks contends, rightly I think, that we now live in “The Big Me Culture,” having moved from a culture of self-effacement to a culture of self-promotion. Using a vivid football metaphor, Brooks says we have moved from a Johnny Unitas to a Joe Namath culture. Every football fan in the room will understand that contrast!
To show how character is built and how this crooked timber tradition is lived out, Brooks writes eight gorgeous biographical chapters. His choice of people is as diverse as it is inspiring and informative. Many of these eight chapters are biographies of people that you have long wanted to know more about but never got around to. They are: Frances Perkins, Dwight Eisenhower, Dorothy Day, George C. Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, George Eliot, Augustine, and Samuel Johnson. My favorite, and I think Brooks’ as well, is his chapter on Augustine. But his chapters on Perkins and Day are also brilliant. Apart from Brooks’ ethical summons to a higher life based on these lives, the lives themselves are worthy of study.
If you go looking for stories of transformative Christian experiences in all of these biographies, you will be let down. What you have are alternative “roads to character,” but they are all built out of the crooked timber tradition. Brooks says each had to “go down” into the valley of humility in order to come up “for grace to flood in” (13). While not precisely the same, this process of going down and coming up is a kind of secular-spiritual version of what some Christians have referred to for a long time as the conviction-confession- repentance redemption road to salvation. People coming up and out of this ethical syndrome do not appear either healed or perfect; “they come out different” (14).
Aside from his thesis on how our culture has changed and how personal character is formed, I discovered three delightful collaterals. (You may find more.) First, my guess is that Brooks will get lots of press from his “Introduction” where he discusses the difference between our résumé virtues and our eulogy virtues, from what we put on our personal bios and what will be said about us at our funerals. In like manner, he identifies the two opposing sides of our nature as described in the two contrasting accounts of creation in the early chapters of Genesis. These he calls Adam I and Adam II. Adam I is our external, résumé side that ambitiously seeks to conquer the world. Adam II is our internal, eulogy side that “wants to obey a calling to serve the world” (xii). Of course, the 270 pages that follow the “Introduction,” are a deep, deep wish from Brooks that we nurture Adam II and be done with Adam I.
The sentences that leap out at the reader, begging to be placed on the signature portion of one’s emails, are a second delight. They come from both Brooks and the many people he quotes: “I was born with a natural disposition toward shallowness” (xiv). (Which, of course, Brooks wasn’t.) Adam II people do not drop “little hints of their own distinctiveness and accomplishments” (xvii).
Solzhenitsyn: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart” (xvii).
Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how” (23).
“A person who embraces a calling doesn’t take a direct route to self fulfillment” (46). “The true self is what you have built from your nature, not just what your nature started out with” (68).
Dorothy Day: “The hunger of my ears can be as severe as someone else’s stomach hunger; the joy of hearing those expressions of gratitude” (92). Ear hunger! “People we call deep have almost always endured a season of suffering” (93). Day: “My great luck was to have
[the Lord] on my mind for so long in my life” (104). “All love is narrowing” (175). “If you organize your life around your own wants, other people become objects for the satisfaction of your own desires” (192). “When unattached to the right ends, communities can be more barbarous than individuals” (196). “The existence of more and more self-help books is proof that they rarely work” (199).
Jennifer Herdt: “God wants to give us a gift, and we want to buy it.” “You become what you love” (207).
Samuel Johnson: “No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library” (225). “Many try to avoid sorrow by living timid lives” (226).
My third delightful collateral: From Brooks’ literary references, you can make a long list of books to read. Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom (45). Harry Clor, On Moderation (70).
Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man (88). Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (98). George Santayana, The Last Puritan (139). George Eliot, Middlemarch (154). Jennifer Herdt, Putting on Virtue (204.
If you read and profit from Christian Ethics Today, you will do what I have done with this book. You will underline some of almost every page and you will talk back to Brooks in the margins. If you read it, it may help, in Brooks’ language, to “save your soul.”
Walter “Buddy” Shurden is Minister at Large, Mercer University.
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