The Road to Character
Ratings18
Average rating3.1
With the wisdom, humor, curiosity, and sharp insights that have brought millions of readers to his New York Times column and his previous bestsellers, David Brooks has consistently illuminated our daily lives in surprising and original ways. In The Social Animal, he explored the neuroscience of human connection and how we can flourish together. Now, in The Road to Character, he focuses on the deeper values that should inform our lives. Responding to what he calls the culture of the Big Me, which emphasizes external success, Brooks challenges us, and himself, to rebalance the scales between our "resume virtues" -- achieving wealth, fame, and status -- and our "eulogy virtues," those that exist at the core of our being: kindness, bravery, honesty, or faithfulness, focusing on what kind of relationships we have formed. Looking to some of the world's greatest thinkers and inspiring leaders, Brooks explores how, through internal struggle and a sense of their own limitations, they have built a strong inner character. Labor activist Frances Perkins understood the need to suppress parts of herself so that she could be an instrument in a larger cause. Dwight Eisenhower organized his life not around impulsive self-expression but considered self-restraint. Dorothy Day, a devout Catholic convert and champion of the poor, learned as a young woman the vocabulary of simplicity and surrender. Civil rights pioneers A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin learned reticence and the logic of self-discipline, the need to distrust oneself even while waging a noble crusade. Blending psychology, politics, spirituality, and confessional, The Road to Character provides an opportunity for us to rethink our priorities, and strive to build rich inner lives marked by humility and moral depth. "Joy," David Brooks writes, "is a byproduct experienced by people who are aiming for something else. But it comes." - Publisher.
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You are not worthy. Being born so late in time, you missed the opportunity to grow up with puritanical values. You must search inside yourself, but that is not where the answer is.
Wow. I struggled with this book. The snippets into great lives were interesting - people like Francis Perkins, President Eisenhower, George Marshall, “George Eliot”. The rest of the book, although expected due to the title and intended goals, felt preachy to me.
The book ends on a note of joy, that one may find it in a life of duty and self control. However, none of the portrayed lives show any semblance of joy. Moreover, they were described again and again as choosing some service or other over joy. I'm not suggesting that we all live moment to moment with a short sighted approach, letting loose with our lust and gluttony. Rather, I'm saying that the content of the book does not align with the closing argument and that I think the heroic portrayal of people who do not seem outwardly happy for that end is not reasonable.
It's difficult to write a book on character without taking a strong opinion on what it takes to “have character”, but I felt like this one did. This left me without as much of a takeaway as I would have hoped. The main focus is on biographies of various people, looking into how they lived. The leading thread throughout these was relatively simple: develop your own beliefs, stick to them through the hard times, don't showboat and base your life on the journey rather than the outcome.
A book that would normally fall into ‘just-another-self-improvement-book' turns to be strikingly painful at times, when you realise you've been chasing the wrong gods. The things our inner selves really need, like.. “serene inner character, build a solid sense of right and wrong -not only do good -but be good.. love intimately -sacrifice self in the service of others to live in obedience to some transcendent truth, to have a cohesive inner soul that honors creation and one's own possibilities.” tend to be last in our list of priorities.
