The Relationalist Manifesto p. 3 - The Process of Becoming a Person

A prelude: Two years ago, Brooks did an Aspen speech that pretty well laid the groundwork for this book. It's here, but I really recommending not watching that as it is stunningly boring, with such a high concentration of quotes that even Brooks seems a little bored by it. However, it does show the evolution (such as it is) of this section, which is about changes.

1. The central journey of modern life is moving self to service. We start out listening to the default settings of the ego and gradually learn to listen to the higher callings of the heart and soul.

I was actually wondering about this myself - The Second Mountain is, like The Road to Character, a self-help book masquerading as a political treatise, but so much of the hype centers on something both Brooks and I have observed rich people doing - spending their later years seeking some kind of meaning. I would actually read a book that was more a study of this phenomenon, but Brooks is presenting it as advice, which, uh...if this is natural and people are doing it anyway, why do we need to buy your book?

1. Much of modern social thought, drawing on thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and modern economics, sees human beings as fundamentally selfish. Children, Freud wrote, “are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.” Most of modern thought was written by men, and often a certain sort of alpha men, who did not even see the systems of care that undergirded the societies in which they lived.

Yep, two first entries - Aspen has a formatting error that no one's caught yet. Anyway, this is the first head-on condemnation of modernism we've seen, but probably not the last. As with Dreher and a lot of conservative writers, Brooks' philosophy rests heavily on prelapsarian dogma. He doesn't go as far back as Dreher, but name-checking Hobbes means that the Fall was at least a few hundred years ago.

2. Relationalism asserts that human beings are both fundamentally broken but also splendidly endowed. We have egoistic self-interested desires, and we need those desires in order to accomplish some of the necessary tasks of life: to build an identity, to make a mark on the world, to break away from parents, to compete, create and to shine. Our savage impulses to dominate, rape, murder and destroy are written across the annals of history. But relationalism asserts that there are other, deeper parts of ourselves. There are motivations that are even stronger than self-interest, even if they are more elusive. There are capacities that can tame the savage lusts and subdue the beasts that remain inside. At the deepest center of each person there is what we call, metaphorically, the heart and soul.

That "broken but splendidly endowed" line sounded familiar, so I did a few searches, and...well, it was in The Road to Character, but dates at least back to a column he wrote in 2015 that was dedicated to hyping The Road to Character. He really did write the same book twice, didn't he? And I know I'm making too much of this, but here's the thing - I'm always afraid I overuse phrases, so I run every manuscript through text analysis to find weaknesses. That's too much effort for Mr. Vocation Matters, though.

Oh, and if certain words in there popped out at you, and you found yourself saying "He's not going to write about rape, is he?" in a mortified whisper, well...you might want to skip entry 4.

3. The heart is that piece of us that longs for fusion with others. We are not primarily thinking creatures; we are primarily loving and desiring creatures. We are defined by what we desire. We become what we love. The core question for each of us is: Have we educated our emotions to love the right things in the right way?

Just a reminder that this man was giving speeches on behaviorism and neuroscience as recently as 2016.

4. The soul is the piece of us that gives each person infinite dignity and worth. Slavery is wrong because it obliterates a soul. Rape is not just an assault on physical molecules; it obliterates another soul. The soul yearns for goodness. Each human being wants to lead a good and meaningful life, and feels life falling apart when it seems meaningless.

And there it is, "an assault on physical molecules" that "obliterates a soul." I will leave analyzing the lack of taste here as an exercise for the reader.

5. A child is born with both ego and heart and soul on full display. But for many people, around adolescence, the ego begins to swell, and the heart and soul recede. People at this age need to establish an identity, to carve a self. Meanwhile, our society tells adolescent boys to bury their emotions and become men. It tells little girls that if they reveal the true depths of themselves, nobody will like them. Our public culture, normalizes selfishness, rationalizes egoism, and covers over and renders us inarticulate about the deeper longings of the heart and soul.

Oh sweet mercy, why is this so badly written? The latter half is pretty stock gender studies stuff you might hear from any number of liberals (you know, the ones who are As Bad As Trump), but that first few sentences..."the ego begins to swell"? Is this a fucking first draft? Also, teenagers don't have souls? Citation Needed?

6. But eventually most people realize that something is missing in the self-interested life. They achieve worldly success and find it unsatisfying. Or perhaps they have fallen in love, or been loved in a way that plows open the crusty topsoil of life and reveals the true personality down below. Or perhaps they endure a period of failure, suffering, or grief that carves through the surface and reveals the vast depths underneath. One way or another, people get introduced to the full depths of themselves, the full amplitude of life. They realize that only emotional, moral, and spiritual food can provide the nourishment they crave.

"The crusty topsoil of..." Oh, forget it. Anyway, this is from the Aspen speech. There, alongside hollow material success, he includes a series of things that might lead to a revelation of the hollowness of modern life, including the death of a child. He put that next to the ennui of having too much money and not enough to do. This man is claiming that other people have no souls.

7. When a person has undergone one of these experiences, which can happen at any age, she is no longer just an individual; she has become a person. Her whole personhood is alive and engaged. She has discovered, down at the substrate, her infinite ability to care. Relationalism is a worldview that guides and encourages us as we undertake this personal transformation, surpassing the desires of the ego and taking on a bigger journey.

Again, this is from the Aspen speech. While he does include that "any age" caveat there, he more specifically claims that this usually happens at age 30, at which point one starts to seek meaning. So what happens when we map that back onto Brooks' life? When he was in his 30s, he was in Brussels doing the closest thing to legitimate journalism he's ever attempted. Apparently, being the Dave Barry of the Republican donor class was more spiritually fulfilling than that.

8. The movement toward becoming a person is downward and then outward: To peer deeper into ourselves to that place where we find the yearnings for others, and then outward in relationship toward the world. A person achieves self-mastery, Maritain wrote, for the purpose of self-giving.

So you go inward to go outward, and that's how you avoid being outward focused. Right.

9. An individual who has become a person has staged a rebellion. She rebels against the individualistic ethos and all the systems of impersonalism. Society tells her to want independence, but she has declared her interdependence. Society says we live in a materialist reality, but she says we live in an enchanted reality. Society tells her to keep her options open, but she says, No, I will commit. I will root myself down. Society says, Try to rise above and be better than; she says, No, I will walk with, serve, and come in under. Society says, Cultivate with the self-interested side of your life; she says, No, I will cultivate the whole of myself. Society says build your own identity; she says I build my identity by honoring my relationships. Life goes well only when you are living with the whole of yourself.

I don't know why Brooks loves this particular literary device - you know, the thing where each sentence starts with the same word for six consecutive sentences - but he sure does. I wonder where he stole it.

10. The relationalist doesn’t walk away from the capitalist meritocracy, the systems of mainstream life. But she balances that worldview with a countervailing ethos that supplements, corrects, and ennobles. She walks in that world, with all its pleasures and achievements, but with a different spirit, a different approach, and different goals. She is communal where the world is too individual. She is more emotional when the world is too cognitive. She is moral when the world is too utilitarian.

And there's the rub - you don't have to give anything up, you don't have to change your life, you just have to tweak your outlook a bit. Quite the "revolution" you boys at Aspen are fomenting. This is another clear influence from Dreher, who spoke the language of monasticism but then opted to stay in the filthy modern world after all. And why not? What makes these guys angry about liberals and leftists is that those are the people telling them that change must come, to them or to society. One writing books for people who fear change will not receive great reviews if that book advises change.

Next time: Wait, this part has 17 bullets?