Author:: [[David Brooks]] DateFinished:: 6/25/2023 Rating:: 7 Tags:: #🟥 # The Road to Character  ## 🚀The Book in 3 Sentences - Over the last few decades America has lost it's cultural emphasis on character building in favor of priding itself on individualism and achievement. - American's prioritize Resume virtues over Eulogy virtues and Adam 1 over Adam 2. - The book explores how we can follow the road to character, the difficult path to practicing virtue, cultivating good values, and self-reflection through the stories of seven people from history who forged a great character. ### 🎨 Impressions - The book has an interesting outline. It's first and last chapters are a commentary on how cultural discussions on character have changed in America over the last few years. The middle serves more as a biography of seven great people from history and how they cultivated great character. ### 📖Who Should Read It? - Anyone interested in building their character ### ☘️ How the Book Changed Me - The book didn't say anything I didn't already know. Reading books like this is just great for putting you in the mindset of developing your character. # Summary ### Chapter 1: The Shift - Over the last few years we have shifted away from discussions about character. - [[Adam 1 Vs. Adam 2]] - [[Vocation vs. career]] - We are experiencing a meaning crisis. We must re-learn how to cultivate a great character. - The road to character is a path of embracing humility for wisdom and self-improvement. - Self reflection is crucial. Cataloging errors and developing strategies for moral growth. - Acknowledging that the road to character often involves moments of moral crisis and self-awareness. ### Chapter 2: The Summoned Self - Distinguishing between vocation and career. - Valuing moral weaknesses as opportunities for correction and growth. - Exploring the tensions between the party of reticence and the party of exposure. - Reflecting on the appropriateness and burden of sharing one's emotions. - Striving to find the Golden Mean and dissolve the ego. ### Chapter 3: Self-Conquest - Understanding the dual nature of human beings: fallen yet splendidly endowed. - Recognizing character as a foundation for personal and professional success. - Embracing the cultivation of virtues and the construction of character. - Appreciating the importance of self-awareness and moral responsibility. ### Chapter 4: Struggle - Viewing novel reading as wisdom literature and a means of self-improvement. - Finding significance in ordeals and recognizing the formative power of suffering. - Engaging in self-reflection and confession as a pathway to transformation. - Acknowledging personal moral responsibility and individual choice. ### Chapter 5: Self-Mastery - Cultivating reverence and admiration for heroes and role models. - Practicing the virtue of reticence and finding the Golden Mean. - Embracing self-discipline and humility in the pursuit of character. - Balancing the external achievements of Adam I with the internal growth of Adam II. ### Chapter 6: Dignity - Acknowledging that humanity is both inherently sinful and capable of virtue. - Embracing the concept of moral responsibility and personal agency. - Challenging the easy conscience and moral complacency of modern society. - Striving to live a moral life through self-awareness and moral choice. ### Chapter 7: Love - Experiencing emotional fusion and shared destiny through love. - Practicing vulnerability and decentering the self for the sake of love. - Recognizing the value of admiration, reverence, and a fifty-year conversation. - Understanding that love extends beyond personal happiness and fosters personal growth. ### Chapter 8: Ordered Love - Embracing tensions, paradoxes, and ironies as part of the complexity of life. - Challenging the belief that one is the sole driver of their own journey. - Rejecting the culture of authenticity and the reliance on personal feelings. - Embracing a more ordered approach to life and moral decision-making. ### Chapter 9: Self-Examination - Embracing a dualistic perspective and considering multiple vantage points. - Adapting and making trade-offs in response to changing circumstances. - Recognizing the limitations of the culture of authenticity and personal feelings. - Engaging in self-examination as a means of understanding oneself and others. ### Chapter 10: The Big Me - Recognizing the impact of information technology on moral ecology. - Navigating the challenges of faster and busier communications. - Being cautious of self-referential information environments and broadcasting personalities. - Striving to maintain authenticity and balance in a culture focused on the self. Citation (APA): Brooks, D. (2015). _The Road to Character_ [Kindle iOS version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com --- Introduction: Adam II Highlight(yellow) - Page xi · Location 64 Recently I’ve been thinking about the difference between the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the ones you list on your résumé, the skills that you bring to the job market and that contribute to external success. The eulogy virtues are deeper. They’re the virtues that get talked about at your funeral, the ones that exist at the core of your being—whether you are kind, brave, honest or faithful; what kind of relationships you formed. Highlight(yellow) - Page xi · Location 74 we could say that Adam I is the career-oriented, ambitious side of our nature. Adam I is the external, résumé Adam. Adam I wants to build, create, produce, and discover things. He wants to have high status and win victories. Adam II is the internal Adam. Adam II wants to embody certain moral qualities. Highlight(yellow) - Page xvii · Location 160 They radiate a sort of moral joy. They answer softly when challenged harshly. They are silent when unfairly abused. They are dignified when others try to humiliate them, restrained when others try to provoke them. But they get things done. They perform acts of sacrificial service with the same modest everyday spirit they would display if they were just getting the groceries. They are not thinking about what impressive work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all. They just seem delighted by the flawed people around them. They just recognize what needs doing and they do it. Chapter 1: The Shift Highlight(yellow) - Page 3 · Location 175 CHAPTER 1 THE SHIFT Note - Page 3 · Location 176 .h3 Highlight(yellow) - Page 8 · Location 286 Humility is the awareness that there’s a lot you don’t know and that a lot of what you think you know is distorted or wrong. This is the way humility leads to wisdom. Montaigne once wrote, “We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.” That’s because wisdom isn’t a body of information. It’s the moral quality of knowing what you don’t know and figuring out a way to handle your ignorance, uncertainty, and limitation. Highlight(yellow) - Page 12 · Location 343 Each night, he catalogs the errors. He tallies his recurring core sins and the other mistakes that might have branched off from them. Then he develops strategies for how he might do better tomorrow. Tomorrow he’ll try to look differently at people, pause more before people. He’ll put care above prestige, the higher thing above the lower thing. We all have a moral responsibility to be more moral every day, and he will struggle to inch ahead each day in this most important sphere. Highlight(yellow) - Page 13 · Location 371 The road to character often involves moments of moral crisis, confrontation, and recovery. When they were in a crucible moment, they suddenly had a greater ability to see their own nature. The everyday self-deceptions and illusions of self-mastery were shattered. They had to humble themselves in self-awareness if they had any hope of rising up transformed. Alice had to be small to enter Wonderland. Or, as Kierkegaard put it, “Only the one who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved.” Chapter 2: The Summoned Self Highlight(yellow) - Page 16 · Location 412 CHAPTER 2 THE SUMMONED SELF Note - Page 16 · Location 414 .h3 Highlight(yellow) - Page 24 · Location 567 Frankl, like Perkins, had a vocation. A vocation is not a career. A person choosing a career looks for job opportunities and room for advancement. A person choosing a career is looking for something that will provide financial and psychological benefits. If your job or career isn’t working for you, you choose a different one. A person does not choose a vocation. A vocation is a calling. People generally feel they have no choice in the matter. Their life would be unrecognizable unless they pursued this line of activity. Highlight(yellow) - Page 28 · Location 642 Today, teachers tend to look for their students’ intellectual strengths, so they can cultivate them. But a century ago, professors tended to look for their students’ moral weaknesses, so they could correct them. Highlight(yellow) - Page 37 · Location 820 There is a general struggle between two philosophic dispositions, what the social critic Rochelle Gurstein calls the party of reticence and the party of exposure. The party of reticence believes that the tender emotions of the inner world are brutalized and polluted when they are exposed to the glare of public exhibition. The party of exposure believes that anything secret is suspect and that life works better when everything is brought out into the open and discussed. Note - Page 37 · Location 823 When is it okay to burden other people with your emotions? When is it not? How do you differentiate the two? How can you tell if your emotions have merit? Or if they are leading you astray. It reminds me of how our system 1 intuitions can sometimes lead us astray. Highlight(yellow) - Page 38 · Location 842 Every virtue can come with its own accompanying vice. The virtue of reticence can yield the vice of aloofness. Note - Page 38 · Location 843 The secret is in finding the Golden Mean as Aristotle called it. One thing that strikes me about Perkins is how she dissolved her ego. She rarely talked about herself. She purposefully used the pronoun one instead of I to refer to herself in papers. She carried a will with her so that if she died she “wouldn’t cause too much trouble.” Chapter 3: Self-Conquest Highlight(yellow) - Page 48 · Location 1001 CHAPTER 3 SELF-CONQUEST Note - Page 48 · Location 1004 .h3 Highlight(yellow) - Page 53 · Location 1091 That concept—conquering your own soul—was a significant one in the moral ecology in which Eisenhower grew up. It was based on the idea that deep inside we are dual in our nature. We are fallen, but also splendidly endowed. We have a side to our nature that is sinful—selfish, deceiving, and self-deceiving—but we have another side to our nature that is in God’s image, that seeks transcendence and virtue. The essential drama of life is the drama to construct character, which is an engraved set of disciplined habits, a settled disposition to do good. The cultivation of Adam II was seen as a necessary foundation for Adam I to flourish. Note - Page 53 · Location 1097 This reminds me of Christakis’s belief that we are inherently good in nature. We simply have to create the right environment to act so. It also reminds me of Transcend. People are inherently good but must learn to open there sales even with faulty boat bottoms. Highlight(yellow) - Page 54 · Location 1111 “sin,” like “vocation” and “soul,” is one of those words that it is impossible to do without. It is one of those words—and there will be many in this book—that have to be reclaimed and modernized. Sin is a necessary piece of our mental furniture because it reminds us that life is a moral affair. No matter how hard we try to reduce everything to deterministic brain chemistry, no matter how hard we try to reduce behavior to the sort of herd instinct that is captured in big data, no matter how hard we strive to replace sin with nonmoral words, like “mistake” or “error” or “weakness,” the most essential parts of life are matters of individual responsibility and moral choice: whether to be brave or cowardly, honest or deceitful, compassionate or callous, faithful or disloyal. Note - Page 54 · Location 1117 Small sins on Monday build the path for bigger sins on Monday. This is why the excuse, “I just watch TV for a hour a day, or have dessert every day, or I didn’t help out that old man that needed to cross the street” isn’t a good one. They pave the way for bigger sins. Self discipline on a small scale makes you Antifragile so you can act virtuously in the times it does matter. Highlight(yellow) - Page 57 · Location 1162 Today, when we say that somebody is repressed, we tend to mean it as a criticism. It means they are uptight, stiff, or unaware of their true emotional selves. That’s because we live in a self-expressive culture. We tend to trust the impulses inside the self and distrust the forces outside the self that seek to push down those impulses. Note - Page 57 · Location 1165 This reminds me of the coddling of the American Mind great untruth 3: Always trust your emotions. Highlight(yellow) - Page 57 · Location 1174 Character, as the Yale law professor Anthony T. Kronman has put it, is “an ensemble of settled dispositions—of habitual feelings and desires.” 9 The idea is largely Aristotelian. If you act well, eventually you will be good. Change your behavior and eventually you rewire your brain. Chapter 4: Struggle Highlight(yellow) - Page 74 · Location 1480 CHAPTER 4 STRUGGLE Note - Page 74 · Location 1483 .h3 Highlight(yellow) - Page 79 · Location 1575 It’s hard now to recapture how seriously people took novel reading then, or at least how seriously Day and others took it—reading important works as wisdom literature, believing that supreme artists possessed insights that could be handed down as revelation, trying to mold one’s life around the heroic and deep souls one found in books. Day read as if her whole life depended upon it. Fewer people today see artists as oracles and novels as a form of revelation. The cognitive sciences have replaced literature as the way many people attempt to understand their own minds. Highlight(yellow) - Page 93 · Location 1850 When most people think about the future, they dream up ways they might live happier lives. But notice this phenomenon. When people remember the crucial events that formed them, they don’t usually talk about happiness. It is usually the ordeals that seem most significant. Most people shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering. Highlight(yellow) - Page 93 · Location 1859 But some people can connect their suffering to some greater design. They place their suffering in solidarity with all the others who have suffered. These people are clearly ennobled by it. It is not the suffering itself that makes all the difference, but the way it is experienced. Note - Page 94 · Location 1862 This reminds me of the stoic concept that events and meaning are separate. Highlight(yellow) - Page 103 · Location 2040 As Yishai Schwartz writes, “Confessions are meant to reveal universal truths through specific examples. Through introspection and engagement with the priest, the penitent uses her experiences to transcend her own life. Confession is thus a private moral act with a public moral purpose. For in reflecting on private decisions, we better understand the problems and struggles of humanity—itself composed of billions of individuals struggling with their own decisions.” Note - Page 103 · Location 2043 Knowing thyself isn’t a purely selfish act. It’s a private moral act with a public moral purpose. By understanding our own feelings and thoughts, we can better understand our fellow humans. Everyone experiences the same feelings and thoughts. It’s only the context that is different. Chapter 5: Self-Mastery Highlight(yellow) - Page 105 · Location 2063 CHAPTER 5 SELF-MASTERY Note - Page 105 · Location 2065 .h3 Highlight(yellow) - Page 107 · Location 2108 VMI taught Marshall a sense of reverence, the imaginative ability to hold up a hero in his mind to copy in all appropriate ways, to let him serve as a standard by which to judge himself. Note - Page 107 · Location 2109 .c1 Highlight(yellow) - Page 108 · Location 2118 By cultivating the habit of reverence—for ancient heroes, for the elderly, for leaders in one’s own life—teachers were not only offering knowledge of what greatness looks like, they were trying to nurture a talent for admiration. Note - Page 108 · Location 2119 .c2 For me the idols I hold most dearly in my life are Marcus Aurelius, John Vervaeke, and Anthony Metivier. Chapter 6: Dignity Highlight(yellow) - Page 130 · Location 2527 CHAPTER 6 DIGNITY Note - Page 130 · Location 2529 .h3 Highlight(yellow) - Page 149 · Location 2880 People like Randolph, Rustin, and King thought along Niebuhrian lines, and were influenced by him. Niebuhr argued that, beset by his own sinful nature, man is a problem to himself. Human actions take place in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension. We simply can’t understand the long chain of consequences arising from what we do, or even the origins of our own impulses. Niebuhr argued against the easy conscience of modern man, against moral complacency on every front. He reminded readers that we are never as virtuous as we think we are, and that our motives are never as pure as in our own accounting. Even while acknowledging our own weaknesses and corruptions, Niebuhr continued, it is necessary to take aggressive action to fight evil and injustice. Along the way it is important to acknowledge that our motives are not pure and we will end up being corrupted by whatever power we manage to attain and use. Chapter 7: Love Highlight(yellow) - Page 153 · Location 2940 CHAPTER 7 LOVE Note - Page 153 · Location 2941 .h3 Highlight(yellow) - Page 169 · Location 3230 stands as the beau ideal of a certain sort of communication. It’s communication between people who think that the knowledge most worth attending to is found not in data but in the great works of culture, in humanity’s inherited storehouse of moral, emotional, and existential wisdom. It’s a communication in which intellectual compatibility turns into emotional fusion. Berlin and Akhmatova could experience that sort of life-altering conversation because they had done the reading. They believed you have to grapple with the big ideas and the big books that teach you how to experience life in all its richness and how to make subtle moral and emotional judgments. They were spiritually ambitious. They had the common language of literature written by geniuses who understand us better than we understand ourselves. The night also stands as the beau ideal of a certain sort of bond. This sort of love depends on so many coincidences that it happens only once or twice in a lifetime, if ever. Berlin and Akhmatova felt all the pieces fitting amazingly into place. They were the same in many ways. There was such harmony that all the inner defenses fell down in one night. Highlight(yellow) - Page 170 · Location 3261 Love depends on the willingness of each person to be vulnerable and it deepens that vulnerability. It works because each person exposes their nakedness and the other rushes to meet it. “You will be loved the day when you will be able to show your weakness without the person using it to assert his strength,” the Italian novelist Cesar Pavese wrote. Next, love decenters the self. Love leads you out of your natural state of self-love. Love makes other people more vivid to you than you are to yourself. The person in love may think she is seeking personal happiness, but that’s an illusion. She is really seeking fusion with another, and when fusion contradicts happiness, she will probably choose fusion. If the shallow person lives in the smallness of his own ego, a person in love finds that the ultimate riches are not inside, they are out there, in the beloved and in the sharing of a destiny with the beloved. A successful marriage is a fifty-year conversation getting ever closer to that melding of mind and heart. Love expresses itself in shared smiles and shared tears and ends with the statement, “Love you? I am you.” Highlight(yellow) - Page 184 · Location 3500 There’s power in the particular and suspicion of the general. For Eliot, holiness isn’t in the next world but is embedded in a mundane thing like a marriage, which ties one down but gives one concrete and daily opportunities for self-sacrifice and service. Holiness is inspired by work, the daily task of doing some job well. She takes moral imagination—the sense of duty, the need to serve, the ardent desire to quell selfishness—and she concretizes it and makes it useful. Chapter 8: Ordered Love Highlight(yellow) - Page 186 · Location 3533 CHAPTER 8 ORDERED LOVE Note - Page 186 · Location 3535 .h3 Highlight(yellow) - Page 195 · Location 3704 In the Confessions, Augustine used an idle teenage prank from his own past to illustrate this phenomenon. One boring evening when he was sixteen, Augustine was hanging out with his buddies and they decided to steal some pears from a nearby orchard. They didn’t need the pears. They weren’t hungry. They weren’t particularly nice pears. They just stole them wantonly and threw them to some pigs for sport. Looking back, Augustine was astounded by the pointlessness and the tawdriness of the act. “I lusted to thieve, and did it, compelled by no hunger, nor poverty, but through a cloyedness of well-doing, and pamperedness of iniquity…. It was foul, and I loved it; I loved to perish, I loved mine own fault, not that for which I was faulty, but my fault itself. Foul soul, falling from Thy firmament to utter destruction; not seeking aught through the shame, but the shame itself.” Casual readers of the Confessions have always wondered why Augustine got so worked up over a childhood prank. I used to think that the theft of the pears was a stand-in for some more heinous crime the teenage boys committed that night, like molesting a girl or some such thing. But for Augustine, the very small purposelessness of the crime is part of its rotten normality. We commit such small perversities all the time, as part of the complacent order of life. Highlight(yellow) - Page 198 · Location 3756 Augustine hung between worlds. He wanted to live a truthful life. But he wasn’t ready to give up his career, or sex, or some of his worldly pursuits. He wanted to use the old methods to achieve better outcomes. That is to say, he was going to start with the core assumption that had always been the basis for his ambitious meritocratic life: that you are the prime driver of your life. The world is malleable enough to be shaped by you. To lead a better life you just have to work harder, or use more willpower, or make better decisions. This is more or less how many people try to rearrange their life today. They attack it like a homework assignment or a school project. Highlight(yellow) - Page 198 · Location 3765 But eventually Augustine came to believe that you can’t gradually reform yourself. He concluded that you can’t really lead a good life by using old methods. That’s because the method is the problem. The crucial flaw in his old life was the belief that he could be the driver of his own journey. So long as you believe that you are the captain of your own life, you will be drifting farther and farther from the truth. Chapter 9: Self-Examination Highlight(yellow) - Page 213 · Location 4022 CHAPTER 9 SELF-EXAMINATION Note - Page 213 · Location 4023 .h3 Highlight(yellow) - Page 222 · Location 4192 Johnson was a fervent dualist, believing that only tensions, paradoxes, and ironies could capture the complexity of real life. He was not a theorist, so he was comfortable with antitheses, things that didn’t seem to go together but in fact do. As the literary critic Paul Fussell observed, the buts and yets that dotted his prose became the substance of his writing, part of his sense that to grasp anything you have to look at it from many vantage points, seeing all its contradictory parts. Chapter 10: The Big Me Highlight(yellow) - Page 247 · Location 4640 Each moral climate is a collective response to the problems of the moment. People in the Victorian era were faced with a decline in religious faith and adopted a strict character morality as a way to compensate. People in the 1950s and 1960s confronted a different set of problems. When people shift from one moral ecology to another, they are making a trade-off in response to changing circumstances. Highlight(yellow) - Page 249 · Location 4679 The underlying assumptions about human nature and the shape of human life were altered by this shift to the Big Me. If you were born at any time over the last sixty years, you were probably born into what the philosopher Charles Taylor has called “the culture of authenticity.” This mindset is based on the romantic idea that each of us has a Golden Figure in the core of our self. There is an innately good True Self, which can be trusted, consulted, and gotten in touch with. Your personal feelings are the best guide for what is right and wrong. Note - Page 249 · Location 4683 This is an overly reductionistic view on broad the broad cultural perceptions of human nature of today. But I do agree with the point that just because you feel good about something, doesn’t mean it is good. It reminds me of the second great untruth from the Coddling of The American Mind, always trust your feelings. Our feelings and intuitions can lead us astray in some situations. They are not always to be trusted. Highlight(yellow) - Page 250 · Location 4701 information technology has had three effects on the moral ecology that have inflated the Big Me Adam I side of our natures and diminished the humbler Adam II. Highlight(yellow) - Page 250 · Location 4702 First, communications have become faster and busier. It is harder to attend to the soft, still voices that come from the depths. Note - Page 250 · Location 4703 Stillness is a key aspect of being able to attend to and realize you are not your thoughts. But our distracting media environment makes stillness something many people, especially iGen rarely get during their days. Highlight(yellow) - Page 250 · Location 4706 Second, social media allow a more self-referential information environment. People have more tools and occasions to construct a culture, a mental environment tailored specifically for themselves. Highlight(yellow) - Page 251 · Location 4712 Third, social media encourages a broadcasting personality. Our natural bent is to seek social approval and fear exclusion. Social networking technology allows us to spend our time engaged in a hypercompetitive struggle for attention, for victories in the currency of “likes.” Highlight(yellow) - Page 253 · Location 4748 The shrewd animal has streamlined his inner humanity to make his ascent more aerodynamic. He carefully manages his time and his emotional commitments. Things once done in a poetic frame of mind, such as going to college, meeting a potential lover, or bonding with an employer, are now done in a more professional frame of mind. Is this person, opportunity, or experience of use to me? Note - Page 253 · Location 4750 Fuck this resonates.## New highlights added 03-07-2023 at 11:37 AM ##### CHAPTER 9   SELF-EXAMINATION Johnson was a fervent dualist, believing that only tensions, paradoxes, and ironies could capture the complexity of real life. He was not a theorist, so he was comfortable with antitheses, things that didn’t seem to go together but in fact do. As the literary critic Paul Fussell observed, the buts and yets that dotted his prose became the substance of his writing, part of his sense that to grasp anything you have to look at it from many vantage points, seeing all its contradictory parts. ([Location 4192](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00LYXV61Y&location=4192))