The Road to Character

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.

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.

David Brooks takes a close look at some of the world's most highly respected people, including a war leader, a champions of the poor, a Civil Rights leader, a writer, and more. He shows how the difficulties each person faced helped develop the person's character. Brooks makes a distinction between the two Adams in the book of Genesis in the Christian Bible. One Adam, Adam 1, becomes great by developing ambition and other worldly values. The other Adam, Adam 2, becomes great by becoming a person who respects others and develops inner values. All of the people Brooks looks at develop into people of great character, like Adam 2.

Short Review: The profiles of people of Character are interesting, but continually I was frustrated by Brooks inability to really point to what was different between those with Character then and those without character now. He keeps saying that things were not better in the past, but much of the nature of why people acted differently was related to other cultural issues that we do not want to bring back. Submission to authority and willingness to just keep your head down and plug away may be one way to built character, but it is also a way to ignore injustice around you. Repressing your feelings to the outside world may be a way to make your life look like it is better than it is, but is that fundamentally different from the ‘Facebook perfect' that Brooks and others also seem to be condemning.

What was most frustrating was the overt religious discussion of the motivation of many of the characters profiled. That discussion was concerned with Grace, Sin, Mercy, Forgiveness, Love, but with almost all of the Christian theological meaning stripped out. What was left was mostly a civil religious utilitarianism. It was a communal understanding of utilitarianism, so the work you are doing may not benefit you individually but it is good for society. But it is still utilitarianism.

I am all for focusing on character, but I think character has to mean something with an intrinsic purpose. I strive after good character and work on repressing my sin, not for the purposes of repressing sin or getting what I want or earning salvation, but to become the person that God intends me to be. I overcome sin and express love to those around me, through the grace of God with the assistance of the Holy Spirit and the Christian community around me not for the purpose of building character but in thankfulness to God for the mercy that he has demonstrated to me already.

It is not all bad, but it is frustrating. My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/road-to-character/