The popular conservative writer explores the shift in character development in U.S. society and the virtue of humility. Excerpted from “David Brooks” April 28, 2015.

DAVID BROOKS, Op-Ed Columnist,?The New York Times; Author, The Road to Character
In conversation with JUDGE LADORIS H. CORDELL (RET.) Independent Police Auditor, City of San Jose

DAVID BROOKS: There are moments that break through the normalcy of life. I remember I was doing the “NewsHour” – I do a show called the “NewsHour” with Jim Lehrer and with a guy named Mark Shields. I was coming home one Sunday afternoon after doing the show, and I pulled into my driveway in Bethesda, Maryland – the driveway looks into the backyard. I saw my three kids in the back – then 12, 9 and 5 or so – and I saw them playing with a ball. They were kicking it up in the air, and it was curving and arcing in the wind. I saw that they were laughing and frolicking, and the weather was perfect – the sun was coming in, and the grass was green, and it was one of those unexpected tableaus I just looked at through the windshield.

It was one of those moments when life and time seem to be suspended, and reality spills outside its boundaries, and you just get a sense of feeling overwhelmed with gratitude for a beauty you haven’t earned. When you get that kind of mo- ment, it elicits a strange stirring. It opens up your heart and exposes tender ground. You get a sense of higher moral joy that’s better than anything you ever get at work, and you sort of want to be worthy of it.

I’ve had that experience sometimes in moments I’ve spent being around people that I really admire. There are some people I’m sure you’ve met who radiate an inner glow. I met some people in another part of Maryland about a year or two ago who teach immigrants how to read. There was a roomful of women, 30 to 40, and they just radiated a patience and a goodness and a modesty, and they made you feel important. They were not thinking about what great work they were doing in their service. They were not thinking about themselves at all. So, I had that thought, that I’ve achieved way more in my career than I ever thought I would, but I haven’t achieved that. I haven’t achieved that inner light. There are certainly some people who just radiate with it.

We also live in a culture that tells us to celebrate ourselves, if you follow the commencement clichés: follow your pas- sion, be true to yourself, trust yourself. We tell our kids how great they are, and they believe us. In 1950, the Gallup organization asked high school students, “Are you a very important person?” In 1950, 12 percent said, “Yes, I’m a very important person.” They asked the same question in 2005. It wasn’t 12 percent. It was 80 percent who said they were a very important person. So we’ve become a more self- assertive culture and a less humble culture. Humility is not thinking lowly of yourself. Humility is radical self-awareness from a position of other-centeredness. It’s being able to see yourself accurately and know your strengths and weaknesses, where you are strong and where you are broken.

[George] Eliot was sort of emotion- ally needy. She fell in love with every guy she ever met. Married, unmarried, she’d charm them. They would become interested. Their wives would kick her out of the house. So by 30, she was not that impressive. But at 32, she fell in love with a guy named Herbert Spencer, the philosopher, and she wrote him a note. The note said – it was somewhat pathetic, “Please marry me! Please marry me! Please marry me! You won’t even notice me. I’ll be around the house. I won’t bother you.” But then she ends with a flourish, “I suppose no woman ever before wrote such a letter as this – but I am not ashamed of it, for I am conscious in the light of reason and true refinement, I am worthy of your respect and tenderness, whatever gross men or vulgar-minded women might think of me.” It was an assertion of her own worthiness. That’s what you might call an agency moment – the moment, usually in [your] 30’s or 40’s, when you develop your own inner criteria, and you don’t need someone’s praise or criticism from outside. You know what’s valuable and what’s not valuable, what you’re ashamed of and what you’re proud of.

It didn’t work out with Spencer. It worked out with a guy named George Lewes. Lewes was a writer. He was legally married though his wife was living with another guy and had three children with the other guy. But still he was legally married. Eliot fell in love with him and had to decide: Go with Lewes, be labeled as an adulteress and lose all [her] friends [and] family? Pick Lewes, or pick everybody else? She went with Lewes. She wrote, “I have counted the cost of the step I have taken and am prepared to bear, without irritation or bitterness, renunciation of all my friends. I am not mistaken in the person to whom I have attached myself. He is worthy of the sacrifice I have incurred, and my only anxiety is that he should be rightly judged.”

George Eliot is a person who was deepened by love. We would not say somebody had depth of character unless they were capable of great love. She was capable of great love. The first thing love does is it humbles you. It reminds you you’re not in control of your own mind. The second thing is it makes you vulnerable. The third thing it does is it decenters the self. It re- minds you that riches are not in yourself; they’re in others. The fourth thing it does is it eliminates the distinction between giving and receiving because you and your lover are fused. And these are the idealistic romantic loves that Taylor Swift sings about.

Question and answer session with Judge LaDoris H. Cordell

LADORIS H. CORDELL: You profile a dozen fascinating and strikingly different individuals in the book [The Road to Char- acter.] From Frances Perkins, a fervent liberal activist in the early 1900s, to Bayard Rus- tin, to St. Augustine and to football greats Johnny Unitas and Joe Namath. Given all the fascinating people in the world, how and why did you settle on those 12?

BROOKS: First, I liked them all. Second, they were not born to greatness. They were all messy at age 20. It was not natural to them.?

Third, they all [experienced] different things that have to happen if you’re going to develop character. For Dorothy Day, it was a total commitment to a community. Dorothy Day was the sort of person who couldn’t just read books. She had to live them out. And unfortunately she read a lot of Dostoevsky. So as a young woman, she was drinking and carousing and had suicide attempts and abortions. She gave birth to a child. For her, the birth of her child changed her. She decided that all of the experiences of childbirths she had read about had always been written by men. So she decided she was going to write one. Something like 40 minutes after giving birth, she sat down and wrote an essay. It’s an amazing essay.

CORDELL: That child ended up being a problem, right??

BROOKS: Yeah, it’s true.?

CORDELL: Serious mental illness.

BROOKS: Yes. But [Day] had a beautiful sentence. She wrote, “If I had painted the greatest painting, if I had sculpted the greatest sculpture or written the greatest symphony, I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms. With that came the need to worship and adore.” And she be- came a Catholic, [worked at] progressive newspapers and soup kitchens, and really became an amazing community builder.

I picked people who had some experience like that, and they all had one thing in common: They all were aware of sin. I think we’ve lost that awareness. But they were aware of their own sin. They were humble about it, and they struggled against it.

CORDELL: Much of The Road to Character has a religious feel to it. For example, you make 70 references to sin, 6 references to grace and numerous references to God. So this feels like a religious book with a focus on Christianity. Is that the case? Is this a religious book?

BROOKS: I don’t think it’s a religious book. I think it’s a secular book. But I do believe in religious terminology. The first thing I should say is that I believe there are wonderful people in the world who are complete atheists and wonderful people who are completely faithful. In the book, there are several atheists, or at least agnostics: Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, George Eliot. And some, like Dorothy Day and St. Augustine, were obviously religious.

People can make up their own minds whether they believe in God or not – but I do think the words that we inherit from Western civilization and from theology, from Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are useful words.

It’s very hard to think about moral life unless you use those words. For example, I did not know how many times I used the word sin. That’s a lot, but it’s a big word for me. I think I like it for a number of reasons.

First, when you use the word sin as opposed to weakness, it reminds you that life is a moral drama. Second, a weakness is something we have individually, but a sin is something we have collectively. We all sin and we all have the same sins – selfishness, self-centeredness – and it’s something we combat communally, so it reminds us how we’re all in it together. Unless you can see your own sin, you can’t confront yourself.
I had trouble finding a good definition of sin because the reason we got rid of it in our culture was because it was used to suggest that we were depraved. It was used to crack down on sex. It was used by people who were smug and self-righteous.

But to me, sin is about having your loves out of order. This is Augustine’s definition. We all love a lot of things in life. We love success. We love fame. We like to be popular. We like truth. We like our family. We love friendship.?

But we all know that certain loves are higher than others. We all basically know that our love of truth is higher, or should be higher, than our love of money. But sometimes we get our sins out of order. For example, if a friend tells you a secret and you blab that secret at a dinner party to be interesting, you’re putting your love of popularity above your love of friendship. And to me, that’s sin – getting your love out of order. We do that all the time. I think it’s useful to have that word. If you don’t have a word like sin or redemption or grace, the idea of being loved more than you deserve, you don’t have a vocabulary to think about your own life.

CORDELL: Has writing this book made you a happier person?

BROOKS: You know, it’s funny you say that. I teach the book as a class. I taught it three times, and one of my best students, who’s now a Rhodes scholar, at the end of the course, he said, “You know, since taking this course, I’m a much sadder person.” I took that as a high compliment because if you’re skating through on the surface of life feeling so pleased with yourself, and you’re a student at Yale, and you’re getting a Rhodes scholarship, maybe you need something to be sad about and something to be introspective about.

So I confess, I probably am a little sadder, but also I’m more emotional; let’s put it that way. I have higher highs and lower lows. You might as well live life to the fullest and experience it, as opposed to living it at the level of Twitter.?

CORDELL: Can you comment on religious freedom and the gay marriage collision? Paint for us a platform of coexistence and mutual respect without violating one’s own conscience.

BROOKS: I’m a big supporter of gay marriage. I wrote a column in 2003 saying gay people shouldn’t only be allowed to marry; they should be coerced into marrying. If your friends are gay, you should say, “Are you getting married? Are you married yet? Did you get married yet?” That’s long been my position.

But I know many people who are [conservative] Christians, Orthodox Jews and Muslims. They don’t have “a thing” with gay people, but they have these prescriptions, these rules about gay marriage. I don’t agree with them, but I see them as good people struggling the best they can with this issue, trying to find the right thing. There’s so much progress that has been made, I think it would be a mistake to turn it into a big culture war issue.

CORDELL: What is the best innovative way to support or to teach kids character in K-12 schools??

BROOKS: The most important thing is the quality of the teachers. I don’t know about you, but I barely remember what my teachers taught me, but I remember who they were.

We all have had people in our lives who just communicated by the way they were in the world – their kindness, their regularity, their constancy, their ability to show up – how one should behave.

Just two quick examples: One, I’m not Catholic; I don’t know much about Catholic theology, but I like the way Pope Francis conducts himself. The message is the person.

I used to do a show with a guy named Jim Lehrer. Onscreen, Lehrer had a very stoic expression. But offscreen, when I was talking, his face was quite expressive. When I would say something that was egotistical or embarrassing, I could see the little mouth curl downward. When I said something he liked, I could see a little crinkle of happiness in his eyes. For the 10 years I did the show, I tried to avoid the mouth crinkling down, and I tried to get the eyes. That’s sort of how mentor- ship works. He didn’t ever say anything to me, but I just saw his reactions, and I wanted to earn his respect. That was an education for me.?

CORDELL: In visiting Monticello, you commented that you were impressed that Thomas Jefferson had covered the walls with portraits of people who served as inspirations for him. So whose portraits cover your walls?

BROOKS: The people in the book are on my walls; the Bayard Rustins of the world, the Dorothy Days, the Augustines – my big heroes.
They’re more intellectual heroes than personal heroes. I have personal heroes, too.

One is Alexan?der Hamilton. He?was a young boy.?He lost his mom,?who died in the bed?next to him when?he was 12. His dad?had split. He was ?adopted by his grandfather, who died within a year. By 14, he had lost everybody. And by 25, he was George Washington’s chief of staff and a war hero. By 35, he had written the Federalist Papers and was a lawyer. By 45, he had retired as secretary of Treasury, and he created a system of government that believes in using government to enhance social mobility, to give poor boys and girls like him a chance to succeed.

As someone raised by my grandfather, I had very much an immigrant mentality and a great desire to make it in America. So Hamilton is the embodiment of that for me.

The second person is Edmund Burke, a philosopher whose work is organized around the phrase, “epistemological modesty,” that we should be modest about what we know, and we should respect the gifts that were handed down to us by our ancestors.

If you take those two thinkers and you put them together, I haven’t any original thoughts. I just borrowed from them. So they’re two heroes of mine.