The Brooks Biopsy - On Paradise Drive

What follows is a more or less accurate transcriptions of my thoughts and feelings as I skimmed through another David Brooks tome in search of gold.

(Who the hell thought this was a good idea? Now I see why no one mentions On Paradise Drive, this thing is embarrassing even by Brooks' standards. My God, the prose, it reads like Erma Bombeck fucked Don DeLillo. No way I'm even skimming this bastard. Let's just skip to the index, figure out how many times he managed to quote Burke this time and call it a day. What the f..."buddy sex"? Oh, I've got to see this. Page 165...oh, a heading that reads "Fuckbuddies." Classy. I get it Dave, you can be vulgar too, you're not like those aristocratic types. Great, almost ten goddamn pages on the "hookup culture." Well, it was every bit as real as the meritocracy.

Hey, this next section is headed "Character." There's a coincidence. I wonder if he has the same non-advice for the Kids These Days as he would a decade later. That would be a hell of a...

...oh, you motherfucking liar. Goddamn it)

The students in America's colleges are bright, lively, funny, and generous...Their commitment to community service is one of the marvels of the age. Their volunteer work may have started out as a way to impress admissions officers, but their interest in it has transcended shallow careerism...

...It is not that they have bad character or no character. I haven't yet seen a machine that allows us to peer into a generation's souls and measure whether they are deep or not. We are right to be skeptical about generalizations on the moral health of America's youth. But we can observe their public lives and the way they conduct themselves in social situations. It is not too hard to see that at the very least, talk about character has been crowded out amid all the rush, bustle, and achievement.

On the whole, college students are articulate on every subject save morality. When you talk to them about character, you notice that they are hesitant to say anything definitive, as if any firm statement about which lifestyle choice is conductive to firm character development might break the code of civility...

...Although today's colleges impose all sorts of rules to reduce safety risks and encourage behavior, they see passing along knowledge, not building character, as their primary task. (p. 173-175, emphasis added)

You know, it's so rare you can definitely prove that someone is an asshole. So rare, in fact, that I'd like to take a moment and bask in the sputum-green radiance of what I unearthed. It's hard to know where to start, really. There's the obvious contradiction in play - the exact same youth cohort went from good-natured if somewhat disheveled kids in 2004 to moral vacuums forever perched on the edge of sociopathy in 2015. There's the hypocrisy - Brooks condemning in 2004 that upon which he would base an entire book a decade later ("We are right to be skeptical about generalizations on the moral health of America's youth" unless someone's ready to publish us doing that).

But those are early courses, the soup and salad to the main course that's staring us right in the eye. Here we see David Brooks in 2004 - well before the humility course or the Niebuhr obsession or the angst-ridden columns about his own dismal life - discussing things that today he claims he only began to think about recently. And not just the same ideas, but the same rhetoric and even some of the same exact words.

How was it that I ended that last post?

He walked down the road to character, met himself eight times and found the promised land which was right back where he started.

I never dreamed that this was a statement that I even could prove and yet here it is, proven. Long before his study of the Great Men of recent history, Brooks already knew how it was going to end. There it is. Behold it in all its judgmental, cranky, duplicitous glory.

And that's all I have to say on our dear friend Dave, unless someone wants to listen to me do a dramatic reading of some of the more nauseating bits of prose from On Paradise Drive. Leave a comment if you want to hear something you can't unhear, skillfully enunciated in my rough and nasally baritone.

The Road to Character: Master Post

PRELUDE

In which the critic expounds on the Very Serious Person and introduces their king

INTRODUCTION (ADAM II)

In which we find the place where most of the author's acolytes started skimming

CHAPTER 1 (THE SHIFT)

In which the author and the publisher struggle with the concept of accuracy

CHAPTER 2 (THE SUMMONED SELF)

In which the author introduces his belief that one cannot be both a successful person and a good person, and the critic points out the author's laziness

CHAPTER 3 (SELF-CONQUEST)

In which the author discovers, quite by happenstance, that spineless equivocation is actually a virtue

CHAPTER 4 (STRUGGLE)

In which the author, fresh from being pampered and catered to, discovers the virtue of suffering

CHAPTER 5 (SELF-MASTERY)

In which the author "discovers" that obedience to authority is a good thing

CHAPTER 6 (DIGNITY)

In which the author borrows and borrows and borrows

CHAPTER 7 (LOVE)

In which the author tries to understand this thing the hu-mans call...love

CHAPTER 8 (ORDERED LOVE)

In which the author learns that all of you are living your lives wrong

CHAPTER 9 (SELF-EXAMINATION)

In which the critic is just about done with this shit

CHAPTER 10 (THE BIG ME) (Part I, Part II, Part III)

In which the author exposes his ignorance of the common man, wags his finger at the Kids These Days and reaches a conclusion that's not a conclusion

POSTLUDE

In which the critic is formally done with this shit

THE BROOKS BIOPSY - ON PARADISE DRIVE

In which the author hasn't changed his tune since 2004

The Road to Character: Postlude

So what did we learn from all of this nonsense?

Personally, I didn't learn a damn thing. Brooks presented me with a lot of safe, intuitive, and outright cliche bits of moral advice, dressed up in such a way that it's totally irrelevant to my actual concerns and trials. But that was bound to happen, since it's obvious that this book was not written with me or anyone like me in mind. Everything in this book was clearly targeted toward an elite audience - parenting and career advice for the wealthy and well-connected to prevent them from ruining their kids. The elite tier is the only world Brooks has ever known, so it makes sense that he'd speak in their language. Honestly though, I can't hold this against him too much. As parochial as this book can get, that approach is still preferable to Megan McArdle's junk drawer philosophy. If nothing else, Brooks knows his audience, and it ain't me.

Of course, this being a book about personal growth and the journey to be a better man, maybe there's a better question to ask: What did David Brooks learn? Well, he learned that respect for authority is a good thing and you need to do it more. He learned that you are too fixated on status and fame. He learned that you don't give enough thought to the ones you love. He learned that you are hard-hearted and too proud to admit it. He learned a lot of things that you need to do to become a better person. And who would know better than David Brooks, master of humility?

The Road to Character is supposed to be about conquering yourself but it's all turned inside out. Every character flaw or deficit described in this thing is one that Brooks saw in someone else - in the Kids These Days or their parents or the dirty hippies or the people who leave mean comments under his columns or that woman who said she hated him at a party or his ex-wife or Paul Krugman...anyone else, everyone else. The man who, his colleagues tell me, is "constitutionally incapable of finger-wagging" does quite a bit of it in these pages. Way back in the introduction, I had a big ol' laugh over Brooks tearing himself down. Turns out that this was the last time he would do that. Much like McArdle, Brooks seems incapable of admitting to any specific errors in judgment. He wants to be a better man but he's unwilling to face down any of the things he's done over the past quarter of a century.

In fact, let's go into detail about that, using this charming little video of Brooks giving a speech on Reinhold Niebuhr, a man he praised at length in The Road to Character, back in 2010 during his pre-moralizing phase:

For those of you who can't or don't want to watch, here's how it went down: During the Q&A, a woman challenged Brooks' supposed admiration of Niebuhr's modesty in light of his support of the Iraq War and his dismissive and insulting attitude toward its critics. Here's how the expert in humility responded:

...I'm not sure I would have ridiculed anybody who didn't support the war. Let me tell you why I supported the war. I supported it because my basic view was that, having spent a long time in the Middle East, was A-1 that Saddam represented a unique evil in the world. I'm not sure how Niebuhr would come down, but that was not an unusual view in those days...And what had happened you would take the Central European model or the Russian model and help bring about the same sort of transition in Iraq and then in the Middle East. And the things people like me got wrong was the difficulty of doing that, unaware but supposedly became aware relatively quickly of the incompetent planning, the fact that many of our leaders in government did not believe in this mission, and what it would take to create a democratic Iraq. And so certainly all those things have been well-rehearsed (sic). But I will say after all this, when they're sort of sliding beyond whether the war was a good idea or not, there is now a pseudo-democratic Iraq. And the execution of the policy was terrible. But if, in 20 years, there is an Iraq which is developing on the path on which it is now developing, a rocky road to a messy democracy... [Emphasis added]

Consider the sheer arrogance coming from a man who was so grandly, publicly wrong. It wasn't my fault; my logic was sound. It was the Bush Administration. It was Congress. It was the generals. It was everyone's fault but ours. And when it all turns around, you'll all see that we were always right. This man taught a course on humility at Yale just a few years after this.

But that's just the specific point. The more generally applicable takeaway is that Brooks, like most Very Serious pundits, refuses to admit that he's wrong about anything. I don't believe that those people who were wrong about Iraq need to supplicate and beg for forgiveness and then disappear forever, but I do think that at some point in the past decade, they needed to admit that they fucked up. They never have - the kind of pass-the-buck non-apology seen above is the best we've ever gotten from any pundit. And this might not be so bad if it were one time only, but these people refuse to admit that they were wrong about anything at all. Every error was a systemic error, an understandable slip-up caused by someone else's failure - and that's when they admit that they're wrong at all.

This presents a special problem for Brooks. He wants to cast himself as a humble man who's struggling to better himself one day at a time. But how humble can you possibly be if you never admit that you made any mistakes? How can you confront your sinful nature when you refuse to confront any sins? Brooks admitted to being shallow, but he never explained how that shallowness manifests. There are general stains on his precious character, but no specific misdeeds that caused them. It's almost like he can't think of any, which is funny because those detractors he refuses to listen to could probably give him a whole bunch.

Brooks probably does wish he was a better man, maybe even one of those Great Men that are so central to his paleoconservative worldview. The problem is that the transformation that he himself describes demands way too much of him. He preaches the need for a worthwhile vocation even as he clings to a job he hates for the easy paycheck. He instructs others to ignore the external joys of prestige even as he gladly accepts the accolades showered upon him by his peers. He demands that others confront their wretched and sinful nature even as he denies ever doing anything wrong. He speaks of the virtue of the private life even as he grants himself the privilege to judge the private lives of the poor from afar. He wants everyone else to sacrifice while he stays the same.

And really, that describes Brooks most of all. He walked down the road to character, met himself eight times and found the promised land which was right back where he started. Would that we could all get paid for such things.

Thank you for reading the latest dissection. A few notes on the way out:

• As with the last series, I've posted an extended review on Amazon. Due to the high profile of this particular specimen, it will take a few hundred helpful votes to raise it to the top of the page - a bold goal, but not impossible. If you have an Amazon account, please head on over and vote me helpful. The review isn't as in-depth or inflammatory as this series has been, but I hope it's more honest than the hundreds of people pretending that this was inspirational and/or whining about the KTDs.
• If you have any suggestions for future subjects, I'd love to hear about them. Leave any recommendations either in the comments of this post or in the About section. My priority is for non-fiction - recent or older - written by people who have grossly undeserved respect (read: no wingnut trash) and terrible politically-oriented novels, preferably by grade-A assholes with no business composing fiction (read: wingnut trash welcome).

The Road to Character: Chapter 10 (The Big Me) Part III

Well, we did it. We're at the end of...The Road to Character. Our last big hurrah before leaving this one behind is something that David Brooks sincerely calls "The Humility Code." I've been waiting for this for hundreds of pages, to analyze Brooks' big takeaway, his last piece of advice for the KTDs and everyone else who isn't David Brooks. Which is why the Code ended up being such a terrible disappointment. It's hardly a "code," more a restatement of the same bullshit that we've been sifting through for 9.5 chapters. Given Brooks' dedication to ambiguity, I'm not sure why I'm surprised. I guess the long list under that magnificent heading raised my hopes for something spectacularly awful. Instead, we're stuck with a list of fairly safe, quasi-religious moral claims.

But we're here, so let's dig in. I've partially transcribed every entry, but the real ones are a lot longer than this, mostly due to the same repetition that's characterized the rest of the book.

1. We don't live for happiness, we live for holiness...All human beings seek to lead lives not just of pleasure, but of purpose, righteousness, and virtue.

Something that the filthy Youngs seem to understand, but let's pretend they don't so that we can feel superior. Note the pseudo-religious language on display - there's a lot more coming.

2. Proposition one defines the goal of life. The long road to character begins with an accurate understanding of our nature, and the core of that understanding is that we are flawed creatures. We have an innate tendency toward selfishness and overconfidence.

Remember that you are swine, and only David Brooks can lead you out of filth.

3. Although we are flawed creatures, we are also splendidly endowed. We are divided within ourselves, both fearfully and wonderfully made. We do sin, but we also have the capacity to recognize sin, to feel ashamed of sin, and to overcome sin.

Quote on loan from the Holy Bible. I knew there was a source he hadn't poached yet.

4. In the struggle against your own weakness, humility is the greatest virtue.

I was kidding when I said this before, but Brooks has ruined yet another caricature by turning into it.

5. Pride is the central vice. Pride is a problem in the sensory apparatus. Pride blinds us to the reality of our divided nature.

It goes on like this for close to half a page. You're welcome for not showing you the whole thing.

6. Once the necessities for survival are satisfied, the struggle against sin and for virtue is the central drama of life. No external conflict is as consequential or as dramatic as the inner campaign against our own deficiencies.

Spoken like someone who's never had a cause he really, truly believed in.

7. Character is built in the course of your inner confrontation. Character is a set of dispositions, desires and habits that are slowly engraved during the struggle against your own weakness.

Only heathens like Paul Krugman think that character has any connection to what you do or how you treat people. A true thought leader knows that you determine your character by your use of words like "sin" and "discipline."

8. The things that lead us astray are short term - lust, fear, vanity, gluttony. The things we call character endure over the long term - courage, honesty, humility. People with character are capable of a long obedience in the same direction, of staying attached to people and causes and callings consistently through thick and thin.

So avoid sin and you're fine. Except you can't, because...

9. No person can achieve self-mastery on his or her own. Individual will, reason, compassion, and character are not strong enough to consistently defeat selfishness, pride, greed, and self-deception. Everybody needs redemptive assistance from outside - from God, family, friends, ancestors, rules, traditions, institutions, and exemplars.

Remember, you are still swine and need something to save your soul, like David Brooks is saved by his commitment to journalistic excellence. Why are you laughing?

10. We are ultimately saved by grace.

You know who's missing from this? Calvin. There's a big Calvin-shaped hole in this book. I guess that kind of overt religious call-out would distract from the plausibly deniable faux-spiritualism running throughout the narrative.

11. Defeating weakness often means quieting the self. Only by quieting the self, by muting the sound of your own ego, can you see the world clearly.

Instagram kills, kids.

12. Wisdom starts with epistemological modesty. The world is immeasurably complex and the private stock of reason is small. We are generally not capable of understanding the complex web of causes that drive events.

At least when McArdle argued that no one can know anything, she was straightforward about it (seriously, "epistemological modesty"?).

13. No good life is possible unless it is organized around a vocation.

For you lowly types who have to work for a living, I guess you'll just have to live with being shallow.

14. The best leader tries to lead along the grain of human nature rather than go against it...he prefers arrangements that are low and steady to those that are lofty and heroic.

I have no idea what Brooks is talking about here.

15. The person who successfully struggles against weakness and sin may or may not become rich and famous, but that person will become mature.

Which is why you should become rich and famous first and then write about your struggles. To paraphrase Machiavelli, it's better to look humble than to be humble.

This book does have something of a conclusion, but if you've been reading thus far it's an imminently predicable one:

Even within the tradition of moral realism, there are many differences of temperament, technique, tactics, and taste. Two people who both subscribe to the "crooked timber" view may approach specific questions in different ways. Should you stay in your suffering or move on from it as soon as possible? Should you keep a journal to maximize self-awareness, or does that just lead to paralyzing self-consciousness and self-indulgence? Should you be reticent or expressive? Should you take control of your own life or surrender it to God's grace?

Should you actually change your life, or should you continue to rake in large sums of money and bask in adulation and prestige even as you criticize others for trying to achieve some small measure of the same? Should you take pride in your work, or should you cannibalize your own pseudo-academic philosophizing, knowing that your employer would accept it? Should you write a book about character that has a conclusion, or just let it peter out into the usual indistinct mush? Should you try, or should you fake it?

Next time: My conclusion.

The Road to Character: Chapter 10 (The Big Me) Part II

Okay, this next part's obligatory and all of you saw it coming, so let's dispose of it swiftly:

This intellectual and cultural shift toward the Big Me was reinforced by economic and technological changes. All of us today live in a technological culture. I'm not a big believe that social media have had a ruinous effect on the culture, as many technophobes fear. There is no evidence to support the idea that technology has induced people to live in a fake online world while renouncing the real one.

I'd like you to guess what's going to come next. Read the end of that paragraph, consider it in light of everything you know about Brooks and everything we've been through thus far, and take a stab at predicting the following line. I'll see you on the other side of the panda.

Got your guesses all lined up? All right, here's the next line:

But 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.

You saw a self-serving "but" coming, but not three of them, did you? That's the magic of David Brooks. In order to save me an awful lot of transcription, I'll just give you the synopsis of these three effects:

1. Everything is faster, which means less time to sit quietly and reflect on deeper things.
2. People have a greater ability to pursue their own interests independently of the group.
3. People are encouraged to promote themselves even in casual social situations.

The first one is obviously a crock - people have been complaining about the fast pace of modern life since Socrates was corrupting the youth of Athens. Brooks and his cohort seem to view Facebook and the iPhone as in a different category than the automobile or radio or the telephone or the telegraph or the iron horse or the steam ship or goddamn coffee houses, all of which our culture somehow survived. The second one is just a reheated version of Robert Putnam's "isolating effect of technology," which I've always thought was a load of bunk (Short version: It either ignores all of those introverts who use the internet to find connections or pretends that they all would have just magically become extroverts if there was no internet). The third is one I'm a bit more sympathetic toward, and I've argued myself that a lot of people do treat friends and relatives like their audiences. But unless you buy into that hard Brooksian dichotomy and believe that wanting to be recognized means that you are incapable of love, then I don't see how that informs anything else Brooks has to say.

That was just a little aside. Most of this post will focus on a relatively small but very dense part of the chapter concerning those rascally Kids These Days. Having been ruined by Facebook and Dr. Spock and the dirty hippies and the death of Reinhold Niebuhr, we must now plumb the depths of the crisis of character facing the KTDs. It's a fact-heavy section, and we've already seen just how judiciously Brooks treats facts, so you're better believe I checked every single endnote in this thing.

We start off midway through Brooks' complaint about the meritocracy, which is a thing that exists. Brooks insists that judging people on vulgar things like what they've done is socially corrosive in a very special way. In fact, his argument here is so ugly I don't want to put it in my own words. I'll let him speak for himself:

Children are bathed in love, but it is often directional love. Parents shower their kids with affection, but it is not simple affection, it is meritocratic affection - it is intermingled with the desire to help their children achieve worldly success...

...Lurking in the shadows of merit-based love is the possibility that it may be withdrawn if the child disappoints. Parents would deny this, but the wolf of conditional love is lurking here.

David Brooks apparently believes that most parents these days are clinical narcissists incapable of feeling any genuine love for their children. That's a conclusion consistent with his arguments that developing marketable skills slowly but surely turns you into a monster. It's also a monstrous assumption in itself. Brooks doesn't bother proving that many parents are working their way through the dark triad, he just assumes that it's true. That's deeply disturbing. Given the projection on display in the rest of the book, I wonder what this says about the world of the elites in which Brooks dwells. Granted, it would explain a lot if they were all incapable of empathy, but that's a hell of an assumption to make on the basis of nothing. Doesn't bother Brooks, though.

So what happens when, apparently, a generation is raised by the deeply pathological?

This cultural, technological, and meritocratic environment hasn't made us a race of depraved barbarians. But it has made us less morally articulate.

And now Brooks makes his factual case. Which is to say his "factual" case. Which is to say:

College students now say that they put more value on money and career success. Every year, researchers from UCLA survey a nationwide sample of college freshmen to gauge their values and what they want out of life. In 1966, 80 percent of freshmen said that they were strongly motivate to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. Today, less than half of them say that. In 1966, 42 percent said that becoming rich was an important life goal. [Today,] 74 percent agreed with that statement.

Given how this book started, we should be wary when Brooks gives stats like this. In this case, though, we won't need to do much digging because it's right there on the page. I wickedly edited the above passage to cover up the fact that "today" is 1990, the year that survey was taken. That means that some of the KTDs are in their early-mid forties and are likely to be the parents of the current youth cohort. Knowing this makes this a hell of a lot less shocking - really, how many of you are surprised that a bunch of 80's kids were obsessed with money?

Brooks might argue that since this is an ongoing trend covering the last fifty years, you could actually draw a direct connection between one group born in the early 70's and another born in the late 90's because they were both driven by the same factors. If that's the case, then looking at the actual KTDs should show no difference. The 2014 version of the UCLA survey - the most recent Brooks would have been able to access - doesn't really talk about money all that much, focusing on more contemporary issues. But a little digging turns up a number of studies from the last five years which are described here and here. So what do we know about the KTDs?

• 64% want to make the world a better place.
• 64% would rather have a fulfilling job with a basic salary a boring high-paying job.
• 63% want to work for a company that contributes to worthy causes.
• 88% favor collaboration over competition
• 88% put a priority on "work-life integration."

The untrammeled greed and selfishness just jump out at you, don't they? And if you're more of a practical, real world kind of thinker, then you'll be interested to know that in the real world, the average KTD is just about broke, worries about money on a regular basis (again, this is where Brooks is really out of touch) and wishes that he or she could live closer to family.

Got anything else, Dave?

According to an Ernst & Young survey, 65 percent of college students expect to become millionaires.

Three things. One, this was from 2001, so it's closer to today but still leaves a lot of space, even by Brooks' standards (Unitas and Namath were supposed to be from different worlds despite being born only ten years apart, remember). Two, this was a survey of the interns who showed up at an international get-together hosted by their financial giant employer, so we're not exactly talking about a representative sample of all college students, let alone all KTDs. And third, there's this, from the press release:

...43 percent of students also said that family and friends are a priority right now as they manage their work and personal lives.

Of course Brooks believes they all have sociopaths for parents, so maybe that doesn't count for much.

Next:

People have become less empathetic - or at least they display less empathy in how they describe themselves. A University of Michigan study found that today's college students score 40 percent lower than their predecessors in the 1970s in their ability to understand what another person is feeling. The biggest drop came in the years after 2000.

This is true, and props to Brooks to pointing out an obvious weakness - it's a self-report study that assumes you can objectively gauge empathy through responses to questions like "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me" and that this is just as accurate as observing behaviors. Personally, I'd give a neutral or negative answer to a question like that just because it would feel pompous to answer in the affirmative. And as Thomas H. Sander says, you have to consider this in light of the fact that actual civic engagement is on the rise.

But that might be what makes this the perfect David Brooks fast fact. Despite all the big talk over figures like Frances Perkins and Dorothy Day, Brooks has little interest in applied goodness. He specifically rejects tangible, external demonstrations of moral character because he wouldn't have a case otherwise. On traditional measures of morality - things like substance abuse, promiscuity and criminality - the KTDs are doing fine. On the progressive virtues of acceptance and egalitarianism, the KTDs are doing great. And even on many of those intangible Brooksian virtues - service and community awareness and interpersonal bonds - the KTDs are fine. Brooks is bellyaching over a crisis of character that just isn't there.

For his argument to work, Brooks has to pretend that none of this matters. He has to look at these fiscally restrained, communally minded do-gooders and tell himself that nothing they say, do or think means anything. He has to argue that there's some high-order intangible morality, independent of anything they do or believe, that they've rejected. It's a rejection he can sense because they don't use words like "sin" or use them in a different way. And if you think I'm kidding, consider that his last piece of evidence involves using software to prove that books no longer contain moral language. No, really:

Over the past few decades there has been a sharp rise in the usage of individualist words and phrases like "self" and "personalized"...Usage of words like "character," "conscience," and "virtue" all declined over the course of the twentieth century.

Brooks assumes that this means something and feels no particular need to prove it. If you're interested in a more scientific approach - something beyond the usual "President Obama is a narcissist because he says 'I' a lot" nonsense - you can check here and here to see people who study this kind of thing explain just why Brooks is wrong. But never mind that.

You want to know something? I can't stand the KTDs. I live a few blocks from a major public university and a few blocks from the downtown area, so I know them and they drive me crazy. I hate that they're so trend obsessed. I hate that they put hashtags in their speech. I hate that a healthy chunk of them consider my saying "drive me crazy" to be a dire slur. I hate that they're all so fragile that I can't speak my mind around them. I hate that they're always walking in front of my car because they can't look up from their goddamn phones. I hate the fact that, for all the talk about substance abuse being all down, half the ones I encounter are entitled drunken twits.

But here's the thing: It doesn't matter. My personal opinions on the mores and beliefs of a pack of eighteen year olds only tells me that I've run into some obnoxious ones in my life. That's it. It doesn't speak to some general decline of character, it just means that we're different. Brooks doesn't get that; he doesn't want to get that. He's writing for an audience of old cranks who want proof that the young generation really is in decline (and that it's different when their own parents said the same thing). Whining about the KTDs just wouldn't be as satisfying otherwise.

So now that we've "proven" that the KTDs are lost in a moral vacuum that's invisible to everyone except David Brooks, it's time for him to give some advice in the form of...a humility code. That's Part III. See you on the other side.

The Road to Character: Chapter 10 (The Big Me) Part I

Before we begin what's going to be an extended series of posts on David Brooks' conclusion, I'd like to take a moment to talk about "priming." It's a psychological term referring to the way in which subtle cues can be used to adjusts how a person makes decisions or perceives a situation. When deliberate, priming is an experimental factor being studied; when inadvertent, it's noise that can distort the findings of a survey. And of course, it can also be used by a layman as a form of rhetoric. It's damn effective, too - even if you spot it or know it's coming in advance, it can still be very effective.

There's a great example of this in The Road to Character. Brooks has already been priming the reader for over 200 pages to think of the world in terms of a glorious fallen past and a degenerate hollow present, but now that we're transitioning back into the present he wants to prime us for that in particular. Here's how he does that:

In January 1969, two great quarterbacks faced each other from opposite sidelines in Super Bowl III. Both Johnny Unitas and Joe Namath were raised in the steel towns of western Pennsylvania. But they had grown up a decade apart and lived in different moral cultures...

...[Unitas] was unflamboyant and understated. "I always figured being a little dull was part of being a pro. Win or lose, I never walked off a football field without first thinking of something boring to say to [the press], he would say later...

...Joe Namath was the flamboyant star, with white shoes and flowing hair, brashly guaranteeing victory. Broadway Joe was outrageously entertaining and fun to be around. He made himself the center of attention, a spectacle off the field as much as on it, with $5,000 fur coats, long sideburns, and playboy manners...

There are around four pages of this. Read just those passages carefully - I'll wait.

Now, read this analysis from deeper in the chapter of the Dr. Seuss classic Oh, the Places You'll Go!:

The book is about a boy who is reminded that he has all these amazing talents and gifts, and ultimate freedom to choose his life: "You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose." The boy is reminded that his life is about fulfilling his own desires. "You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the guy who'll decide where to go."

Leave aside for a second that this is bullshit, that anyone even passingly familiar with that book knows that it's primarily about confronting the world and one's personal fears of being out there rather than how awesome you are. And while we're at it, ignore the bullshit in the previous passages, suggesting that Unitas and Namath - born in the same general period - somehow represent different "moral ecologies" rather than simply different personalities. Set all of that aside...

...Did Brooks start to make sense, even for a second? Did it seem like he was really on to something?

Courtesy of My Charade, CC-BY

It's a hell of a trick. A lot of this chapter seems to be criticism of the old cliché "Be yourself." It's the kind of thing we tell to kids to help them resist peer pressure or endure bullying or take chances they wouldn't otherwise. But properly primed, it's not hard to see this message the David Brooks way, as an invocation of narcissism and selfishness. To use his words, this is the belief that "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." It suddenly seems so negative, doesn't it?

We touched briefly on this during the analysis of The Upside of Down and I ultimately concluded that McArdle was probably doing that by accident, even though with her scattershot approach she really needed it. Brooks, by contrast, is doing this on purpose, no question. He's much more subtle and skillful and the placement really feels deliberate. But I'm not sure why he feels a need to manipulate the reader like this. Unlike McArdle, Brooks knows his audience - middle age upper-class elites who are ready and eager to dump on the young for being young. He didn't need to prime them to look down on the KTDs, so why bother?

Moving beyond the priming, Brooks opens this chapter with something that, at first blush, seems remarkable. David Brooks, who loves to punch hippies, seems like he's ready to go cold turkey:

But then moral realism collapsed. Its vocabulary and ways of thinking were forgotten or shoved off into the margins of society. Realism and romanticism slipped out of balance. A moral vocabulary was lost, [You just said that, Dave - Ed.] and along with it a methodology for the formation of souls. This shift did not happen during the 1960s and 1970s, though that period was a great romantic flowering. It happened earlier, in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Of course, that's not what's happening at all. This is a lead into Brooks complaining about Benjamin Spock and Norman Vincent Peale and Betty Friedan - the whole paleoconservative enemies list. Again, it's funny how Brooks' intensive study into the characters of these Great Men led him to conclusions that he's held for most of his life. It's sort of a small-scale variant on the phenomenon of self projection as God. Wherever the master of humility looks, he sees himself staring back.

We then move on to Brooks' complaints about the meritocracy. Like most people who are successful, Brooks assumes that the meritocracy is something that actually exists, fully oblivious to the fact that he, himself, got his entire career via connections. But never mind that, what's so wrong with succeeding on your own merits?

The meritocracy liberates enormous energies, and ranks people in ways good and bad. But it also has a subtle effect on character, culture, and values. Any hypercompetitive system built upon merit is going to encourage people to think a lot about themselves and the cultivation of their own skills...Subtly, softly, but pervasively, this system instills a certain utilitarian calculus in us all. The meritocracy subtly encourages an instrumental ethos in which each occasion - a party, a dinner - and each acquaintance becomes an opportunity to advance your status and professional life project.

This is something Brooks has been driving at since the start with all that "Adam I and Adam II" stuff. Brooks views these values not merely as dichotomous, but as mutually exclusive. Being materially successful erodes your ability to feel love for another person, and vice versa.

Some of you may find this hard to believe. Brooks has spent the last fifteen years of his life - not to mention a good portion of this book - seeking the middle ground and carving it out where it didn't exist. Surely the Pope of the American Center wouldn't say something like this and mean it? Well...

The meaning of the word "character" changes. It is used less to describe traits like selflessness, generosity, self-sacrifice, and other qualities that sometimes make worldly success less likely. It is instead used to describe traits like self-control, grit, resilience, and tenacity, qualities that make worldly success more likely...

The shrewd animal has streamlined his inner humanity to make his ascent more aerodynamic...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? There just isn't time to get carried away by love and passion.

...I couldn't tell you if he means it, but he said that and more. In Brooks' world, there is no such thing as a well-rounded person. You're either going to spend your life pushing aside people who get in your way or flailing yourself with cords for your filthy sins. Sociopath or masochist - that's your choice, kid, make it before it's made for you. Just remember that if you choose wrong, you'll never experience the simple, pure joy of bonding with your employer.

As absurd as this all is, it also gives away something very telling about Brooks and his worldview. It's something I noticed very early on, and I've been waiting for the right time to go into detail on it. Throughout this book, David Brooks writes about work solely in terms of prestige. You can see it in the above passages, or in anything he's written about "vocation," or in the condemnation of the KTDs we'll see in Part II. Either implicitly or explicitly, every time he talks about work he's talking about becoming prestigious.

It makes sense, because it's been a part of Brooks' world probably since he was very young. He came from a comfortable, privileged background and swiftly ascended into the ranks of the elite. He would have spent most of his college years surrounded by people for whom a certain level of material success was a foregone conclusion, so they would have spoken of their future professions in terms of image and status, with vulgar concepts like money considered only in that money is a factor in status. It wouldn't have taken him long to internalize this, especially once he started cozying up to the superstars of the conservative movement.

It's not just that Brooks views his own work in terms of how to become more famed and respected, it's that he seems to think that everyone else has the same outlook. What got me thinking about this was a throwaway passage all that way back on pages 55-56:

I once met an employer who asks each job applicant, "Describe a time when you told the truth and it hurt you." He is essentially asking those people if they have their loves in the right order, if they would put love of truth above love of career.

Brooks looks at the job interview as an opportunity to make a moral judgment on the prospective employee. If the prospect lies, then he clearly places status over those deeper values. It never occurs to him that the person might have prepared and rehearsed for this, not because he wants to build his status, but because he'd like to eat tomorrow. At no point in his discussion of profession and vocation and career does Brooks consider that work is something most people do to make a living. With his background, it's not something that would even occur to him.

David Brooks loves to pen self-deprecating one-liners about how out of touch he is. He always assumes that this is because he doesn't spend his weekends at mid-range chain restaurants, drinking domestic beer and shooting the bull about the NFL. He is out of touch, but that's not why. Brooks and his peers are out of touch because they don't know what it's like to worry about money. Something tells me that Brooks has never missed a night's sleep trying to figure out how to cover all his bills, or opened up an ulcer trying to conceal his empty bank account from the wife and kids, or gotten sloppy drunk to forget yet another failed interview. The difference between Brooks and the Real, True Americans isn't cultural, it's economic. This is a man who will never be broke, because his brand is so valuable that he can make more money in a single speaking engagement than most people do all year. He's sheltered from the number one American stressor, and a lifetime of noble savages Heartland tours won't fix that.

We can all have a good laugh at that "bonding with an employer" line, but that's just proof that Brooks doesn't get it. To him, schmoozing the boss is an act of oily cynicism that erodes the soul. To me, it's survival. I've learned from harsh first-hand experience what an employer actually is - a man or a woman with the power to destroy my life at will. Since I live in a state where employers don't need cause to fire someone, they can exercise this will for petty, capricious and personal reasons. I know full well the consequences of working a late shift and having little personal contact with my supervisor, leaving him to draw conclusions about my character from fragments of information and his own presumptions. Don't think that I've never wondered if things might have turned out differently had I laughed at his bad jokes or chit-chatted with him about college sports like everyone else.

In Part II, we'll see Brooks build his case against the Kids These Days, and it's especially awful. Stay tuned.

The Road to Character: Chapter 9 (Self-Examination)

...[Samuel] Johnson is like an East Coast rapper - intense, earnest, combative. [Michel de] Montaigne is like a West Coast rapper - equally realistic but also relaxed, mellow, sun-drenched.

I can't top that line. I could sit here staring at this page for hours, I could drink myself into oblivion, I could lock myself in a dark closet until I lose touch with reality, and I still won't be able to top this. It is the perfect distillation of Brooks' writing style. It's tonally awkward compared to everything else in that chapter. It's an awful metaphor that makes less and less sense the more you think about it. It's stolen - Brooks allegedly got it from one of those kids who so wisely opted to take his humility course. It's weirdly wrong - the West Coast was the home of gangsta rap and the birthplace of N.W.A., how is that "relaxed" or "mellow"? And can I safely assume that the mistake was on Brooks when he wrote it down rather than the student when she said it?

There's no point in going over the rest of the chapter, none at all. There's nothing to learn from it. It's still mostly other people's work. It's even lazier than Chapter 8, which I think confirms my hypothesis about Brooks losing steam. The above quote is followed by a compare-and-contrast bit that absolutely reads like the kind of thing a college freshman writes to give the illusion of understanding when really he just doesn't know enough about the topic to draw any conclusions. I don't even know what the virtue on display is meant to be. "Self-examination" is about as broad as it gets. Hasn't every chapter been about self-examination? Isn't that part and parcel of Brooks' thesis? Is it necessary for it to get its own little chapter when that's been a running theme for the previous two hundred pages?

This is the last of the book reports, of the unambitious freshman essays. I have not enjoyed them at all. You know, I wish that this book was aggravating to read. I wish that Brooks had been much more forceful in his preaching and lecturing because it would have given me far more material to work with. But they were frustrating in a different and far less productive way. This was 225 pages of nothing, of monotonous writing, of trite and ancient ideas, of self-righteousness disguised as the wisdom of the ages, of self-blindness and unintentional irony. This was writing as product, as something to be churned out so it can be bound and placed conspicuously on a shelf to invoke a dialogue at some cocktail party. This was writing that, in a sterling act of hypocrisy, served only to elevate the author's name even as he decried those shallow souls who live for fame.

The good news is that it gets better, which is to say that it gets better for me and hopefully for you. In Chapter 10, we'll watch as Brooks struggles to bring it all together. We'll watch him pretend that there was some greater lesson to be gleaned from the stitched-together digests he's presented us. We'll watch him complain about the hippies and the Kids These Days while pretending that he's doing nothing of the sort. We'll watch him give away the game on his own personal unacknowledged beliefs and biases, the ones that he failed to unearth on his journey of self-discovery. And then once we think that there's nothing more, that he couldn't top himself, we'll watch him present a Humility Code for the KTDs to follow in their own lives. I've seen but a glimpse, and it is amazing. Two parts amazing, in fact; maybe even three parts.

But for right now, I can only leave you with this one quote, this ugly testament to the writer's hackdom, this unconsidered signpost proving once again that no one has read this far. Ponder it, for the road in all its splendor and terror has led us here. Ponder it and try not to laugh too hard. Save some of that for next week, when we dive deep into the black pool of Brooksian understanding.

I hope I'll see you then.

Brooks' code is five items better.

The Road to Character: Chapter 8 (Ordered Love)

In any long writing project, there's a point when the author just gets plain sick of the work. It doesn't matter if it's fiction or non-fiction, high-brow literary trash or popular garbage, a doorstop or a pamphlet. Eventually, you're sick of the thesis, the characters, the setting, the research, the grand notion you though was so brilliant once upon a time. And it doesn't always happen right in the middle, like you might think - very often it sets in close to the end, when daylight is visible and the thing is almost complete. Ever read a book and thought the ending felt hurried? That's probably why - the writer was trying to wrap the bastard up.

I bring this up because I suspect that Chapter 8 is where this feeling set in for Brooks. This is where Brooks' prose really starts to break down. It might just be because I'm tired of this thing, but I'm spotting weaknesses where there was once an unbroken stretch of beige indistinctness. The writing increasingly has that first draft feel:

[Augustine] was born at the tail end of the Roman Empire, at a time when the empire was collapsing but still seemed eternal.

The metaphors and comparisons are becoming ever more strained:

As a young man, Augustine belonged to a strict philosophic sect called the Manichees. This was a little like joining the Communist Party in Russia at the start of the twentieth century.

Sometimes, it feels like Brooks doesn't realize that he's no longer discussing an early modern figure and uses somewhat anachronistic language:

Augustine's father...headed a family that was somewhere in the upper end of the middle class.

All in all, it feels like this chapter was written with even less care than the ones that came before it. It's like we're in the sophomore slump of these awful term papers.

So we'll stick with the plan - ignore the stuff that Brooks borrowed and look at what we're meant to learn. And this time the lesson is a little complex, which is to say that it's less clear than normal. Mainly it's about the sin of pride (and there's that Catholic flavor again), but there are other little asides that don't have much to do with that. For example:

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. They step back, they read self-help books like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People...

...Your willpower is not strong enough to successfully police your desires. If you really did have that kind of power, then New Year's resolutions would work. Diets would work. The bookstores wouldn't be full of self-help books. You'd need just the one and that would do the trick.

Take that, self-help books that aren't written by David Brooks!

Shamelessly lifted from Driftglass.

The theme of this chapter is, in so many words, that you can't change. Ever. It's impossible. You think you've changed? Well you can't, not without Jesus "a glimpse of some realm beyond the edge of what we know," thank you Chapter 7. Speaking of which, all that stuff in the last chapter about meliorism and self-control being a muscle that you can improve? That was then and this is now, and now you need to hand yourself over to God the "eternal objective order."

As with everything else Brooks has written in this book, what's contained in this chapter is far too vague to be construed as genuine piety. It is, as it has always been, a lecture, the latest circular from the Pope of the American Center. Those of you reading this who turned your life around in some way - who overcame addiction, who climbed out of debt, who discarded self-destructive urges, who made amends for unhealthy relationships, even those who lost a significant amount of weight - you didn't do it. Brooks knows you didn't do it, and what's more he knows that you have no concept of how to do it:

You can't lead a good life by steering yourself, in the first place, because you do not have the capacity to do so. The mind is such a vast, unknown cosmos you can never even know yourself by yourself. Your emotions are so changeable and complex you can't order your emotional life by yourself. Your appetites are so infinite you can never satisfy them on your own. The powers of self-deception are so profound you are rarely fully honest with yourself.

You're lying to yourself when you think you've changed. You can't help but lie to yourself, don't you understand that? I'm the only one who understands these things, that's why you need to listen to me.

And that's the secret to this chapter and this book - it all comes back to projection. It's an inward journey directed outward because it's so much easier for Brooks to deal with other people's issues than his own. It goes something like this: I'm miserable, ergo you must be miserable, ergo you must change, and the only way you will change is to listen to me. For expert in humility David Brooks, it always comes back around to David Brooks, projecting his own woes outward, turning his own frailties into problems affecting all people so he can diagnose them in others.

All of Brooks' study has still left him totally self-blind, but that was always going to happen because he didn't read those biographies to learn anything new. He read them for the same reason he spent 2006-2012 bumbling through all those scientific accounts. He wanted to confirm his own beliefs - then in objective terms, now in spiritual terms. It's a common affliction among anyone with personal convictions, even (and especially) among those careerist pundits for whom their convictions must be readily disposable. Everyone wants to be right. Everyone wants to be told he's right.

Which is unfortunate because, per Brooks, that's the start of shameful pride.

The proud person tries to establish self-worth by winning a great reputation, but of course this makes him utterly dependent on the gossipy and unstable crowd for his own identity...

...Hungry for exaltation, the proud person has a tendency to make himself ridiculous. Proud people have an amazing tendency to turn themselves into buffoons, with a comb-over that fools nobody, with golden bathroom fixtures that impress nobody, with name-dropping stories that inspire nobody.

I'm sure that Brooks, a man who is sheltered from all of his critics, has a deep understanding of humility. Or is this directed at those critics? Is it possible that this "gossipy and unstable crowd" is comprised of those digital barbarians in the blogosphere who've vexed him so much over the last decade and a half? Am I in that crowd? In short, is it possible that all of these arguments are just to establish for Brooks some sort of internal source of superiority not affected by his detractors in the outside world and all of those filthy facts they lob at him like stones?

Perhaps if I, too, was a master of humility then I wouldn't see the irony here. It seems the first step in that transformation is to realize that my head does not belong on my shoulders but in a closer, darker place.

Stay tuned for the last of the book reports and then the concluding chapter we've all been waiting for.

The Road to Character: Chapter 7 (Love)

I was told to keep an eye on this one. You may already be somewhat familiar with this chapter as Brooks already wrote about George Eliot for his column, and really that column was just a heavily condensed version of this very chapter. Charlie Pierce couldn't even make it to the end of that column, which says an awful lot. But the chapter is so much worse that even that suggests. How? Oh, you'll see. You'll all see.

Ahem.

This chapter actually contains two Brooksian virtues for the price of one. The first one is agency, a word that (like "vocation") Brooks is very much in love with. He already wrote about it in that column, but here's how it appears in the book:

Some biographers have said that letter represented a pivotal moment in Eliot’s life, with its mixture of vulnerability and strong assertion. After the years of disjointed neediness, the iron was beginning to enter her soul and she was capable of that completely justified assertion of her own dignity. You might say that this moment was Eliot’s agency moment, the moment when she stopped being blown about by her voids and weaknesses and began to live according to her own inner criteria, gradually developing a passionate and steady capacity to initiate action and drive her own life.

...I'm sorry, that was from the column. Here's what he had to say in the book:

This letter represents a pivotal moment in Eliot's life, with its mixture of pleading vulnerability and strong assertion. After the years of disjointed neediness, the iron was beginning to enter her soul and she became capable of that declaration of her own dignity. You might say that this moment was Eliot's agency moment, the moment when she began the process by which she would stop being blown about by her voids and begin to live according to her own inner criteria, gradually developing a passionate and steady capacity to initiate action and drive her own life.

Yep. Brooks basically dropped one of his already published columns right into the middle of this chapter. Pages 163 and 164 contain nine paragraphs taken almost verbatim (with minor changes, as seen above) from his column of November 13, 2014. He only omitted the widely mocked "I know some guys" part. And of course several of those paragraphs are dominated by quotes drawn from specific sources, so he borrowed something from himself that he'd already borrowed from someone else. This right here is the kind of commitment to his vocation that Brooks has learned from his extensive studies.

I can't get too worked up over this, though, because of what happens later in the chapter. The other virtue, as noted in the chapter title, is love. Pages 168-174 concern the nature of this virtue. The first two pages concern a relationship between Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova which, as usual, is dull but inoffensive and mostly accurate (and a hell of a lot less explicit than anything he included about Bayard Rustin). And then it goes to a place that's far more surreal and existentially disturbing than anything I expected to see in a David Brooks book. You see, Brooks feels the need to dig deeper into the concept of love to discern its utility on his path towards righteousness and the result is something that calls for extensive transcription.

I'm terribly sorry for what you're about to witness:

...love often does several key things to reorient the soul. The first thing it does is humble us. It reminds us that we are not even in control of ourselves. In most cultures and civilizations, love is described in myth and story as an external force - a god or demon - that comes in and colonizes a person...

I wish there was a camera when I first read this part, something to capture the external expression of what I was feeling as I paged through this nightmare of mislaid imagery. It had been characteristically boring up until this point. I wasn't expecting a shock.

Love is like an invading army that reminds you that you are not master of your own house. It conquers you little by little, reorganizing your energy levels, reorganizing your sleep patterns, reorganizing your conversational topics, and, toward the end of the process, rearranging the objects of your sexual desire and even the focus of your attention.

Descriptions of love are usually poetic in some way. That's very important, even when it's somewhat academic, because love is a kind of poetry. A dry, "objective" depiction of love is nothing but a study in madness. It becomes an inhuman, unnatural, disgusting thing that needs to be kept out of the light at all costs.

The person in love may think she is seeking personal happiness, but that's an illusion. She is really seeking fusing with another, and when fusion contradicts happiness, she will probably choose fusion...

...Many observers have noticed that love eliminates the distinction between giving and receiving. Since the selves of the two lovers are intermingled, scrambled, and fused, it feels more delicious to give to the beloved than to receive.

But it becomes far uglier when a person opts to describe love solely in utilitarian terms. A person who thinks of love in terms of how it benefits one's personal growth or, better yet, how it depicts society has shed some element of his basic humanity. He has given away something fundamentally human in service of some notion that, more often than not, offers nothing in return.

...love impels people to service. If love starts with a downward motion, burrowing into the vulnerability of self, exposing nakedness, it ends with an active upward motion.

The irony is that the man who so eagerly sold his soul is very often the one who professes to help others find their own. It's projection on a grand scale - I am lacking, therefore you must be lacking, therefore it falls on you to change. He becomes a salesman, peddling a solution to a problem that his customers don't have.

Love is submission, not decision. Love demands that you make a poetic surrender to an inexplicable power without counting the cost. Love asks you discard conditional thinking and to pour out your love in full force and not measure it in tablespoons.

...Oh dear God, I can't keep this up. The five pages David Brooks wrote about love in The Road to Character are among the greatest literary atrocities I've ever seen committed. They're hopelessly pretentious, but with Brooks you learn to expect that. The prose is stilted and repetitive but again, that's SOP. What I didn't see coming is just how nauseating the metaphors would become or the unreal places he would take his arguments. The whole thing reads like it was written by an alien observer trying to explain to his superiors why the hu-mans insist on holding hands. It's taking something very intimate and personal, something that the vast majority of human beings understand intuitively, and explaining it in the most abstract and high-minded way he possibly could. You want to express your feeling about love? You write a song or a story or an ode, you don't vivisect it.

This section tells me three things. One, I'm no longer sure that David Brooks is a human being. He may be an android, one with wonky programming that causes him to think exclusively in faux academic gobbledygook. I'm not sure if he's always been a robot or if the Snatchers grabbed him recently, but the current model simply doesn't have the hardware to express himself like an organic person would. The only alternate explanation I can conceive involves the mole people and cloning, which still makes more sense to me than the notion that an otherwise normal person who's been married would think in these terms.

Two, I can no longer say with confidence that it won't get worse than this. Remember when I said that back in Chapter 3? Watching Brooks use Dwight Eisenhower to defend his own centrism really seemed like the absolute nadir. Then this happened. I can't imagine how it could possibly get any worse, but all that tells me now is that it can only get worse in ways that are far beyond my brain's ability to comprehend them, and that's terrifying. For all I know, I could turn a page and see the text replaced with a bastardized version of the The King in Yellow, the world would start to dissolve and a shoggoth would roll down the block consuming people. It would be consistent with the trajectory thus far.

Third, and I'm very, very serious about this: No one read this far. None of those people who were praising Brooks for his insight read even a single page of this. I am as confident in that as I am of any single statement I've ever made in my life. I'm used to seeing encomiums to unreadable literary fiction in which all of the quotes the fawning critics give are from the first thirty pages and I know immediately how far they all actually read. In this case, I don't even need that. Nobody could have read this and still lied his way through a positive review...well, unless the critics are also Snatchers.

There's more I could say about this chapter, but what's the point? Read those quotes again. There were five pages of those. Five. Join me next time, I guess. I don't know why you would, you have to know that these last few chapters won't improve. However, if we can all last through two more of these book chapters - just two more, friends - then we'll hit an ending that, from what I've seen, is self-righteous in a way that's nothing shy of glorious. Stick with it.

The Road to Character: Chapter 6 (Dignity)

Chapter 6 is the civil rights chapter, which is to say that it's the black chapter. Yes, here's that "diverse set" that Brooks promised back in the introduction. It's mostly about Bayard Rustin, but it starts with A. Philip Randolph and ends with Martin Luther King. These are three connected figures, but it's odd that Brooks would try to cram so many people into one chapter. Judging by the citations at the end of the book, it might have been because he could only find one source apiece on these three men (because running down two sources on MLK would have been a terrible strain), so combining them was the only way he could reach even its comparatively short length (about five pages shorter than most).

Then again, maybe he didn't quite know what he was saying in this chapter. Perhaps because of the strain of trying to work in three stories, the format's a little strained here, and it's not really clear what virtue Brooks is trying to demonstrate here. I don't care what the chapter title says, it ain't dignity. Perhaps, dear reader, we can figure it out together.

Although the chapter starts out with Randolph, it's clear that most of this thing is about Rustin and the largest share of the pages are set aside for his life and times, and apparently the most important thing to know is that Rustin was gay gay gay. Of the eight pages specifically devoted to Rustin's history, four of them concern his sex life. It's funny that Brooks would be so obsessed with this, as Very Serious People like him are usually left-of-center on social matters like LGBT issues. A little cursory research suggests that Brooks defended gay marriage back in 2003 at a time when virtually no conservatives were willing to do that, not even the moderates.

So why does Brooks now think that I need to know about how many men Rustin fellated in prison? No other chapter is nearly as explicit, not even the next chapter which concerns romantic love. Is it important? Somewhat, insofar as her narrative concerns recovery from scandal, but there was no vital need to go into detail. Seriously, if he was unduly rough when talking about Eisenhower, then this was just plain brutal.

But enough of that, there's a point in here somewhere. I think it starts somewhere around here, on page 145:

At first, the major civil rights organizations such as the Urban League and the NAACP were skeptical or completely hostile. They did not want to offend legislators or members of the administration...In addition, there had long been a basic difference of outlook within the civil rights movements that involved not just a debate about strategy but also a deep difference of opinion about morality and human nature.

So this chapter displays not so much a virtue as a philosophy. What's more, it's a philosophy that Brooks has touched upon previously, one that sounds an awful lot like the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity:

Man is a sinner at the core of his being. He will rationalize the injustices that benefit him. He will not give up his privileges even if you can persuade him they are unjust. Even people on the righteous side of a cause can be corrupted by their own righteousness, can turn a selfless movement into an instrument to serve their own vanity. They can be corrupted by whatever power they attain and corrupted by their own powerlessness.

Everybody sing! Grey skies are gonna clear up, put on a happy face...

So Brooks' very cheery point is that people are swine by nature and you have to make them to do the right thing because they'll disappoint you otherwise. Oh, did I say that was Brooks' idea? Well, about that. He heavily cites an academic source called A Stone of Hope in this section, and this is a point where a compare and contrast are very interesting. Here's the section of A Stone of Hope that Brooks cites, and here's the relevant section of The Road to Character. You may notice a few similarities here that run deeper than the basic ideas. For example, here's the source:

Evil was "rampant" in the universe: "Only the superficial optimist who refuses to face the realities of life fails to see this patent fact."

And Brooks:

Evil, King declared, is "rampant" in the universe. "Only the superficial optimist who refuses to face the realities of life fails to see this patent fact."

Brooks seems to really, really like the way other people phrase things. Oh, but he also enjoys cutting quotes short and putting his own spin on them. Brooks:

They took it as a matter of course that given the sinful nature of man, people could not be altered merely b education, consciousness raising, and expanded opportunity. It was wrong to put one's faith in historical processes, human institutions, or human goodness. As Rustin put it, American blacks look "upon the middle class idea of long term educational and cultural changes with fear and mistrust."

And the full quote from the source:

The average Negro has largely lost faith in middle-class whites. In his hour of need he seeks not "talk" but dynamic action. He looks upon the middle-class idea of long-term educational and cultural changes with fear and mistrust.

It was more a statement of tactics (Rustin being a fan of nonviolent action) than one of philosophy. Also he said it in 1942, not in the 60s like Brooks implies, but eh, details.

That Brooks is lazy shouldn't come as a shock by this point, but the fact that he's dealing with MLK really highlights the foibles in limited sourcing. Brooks' entire case rests in its entirety on a single source - there's nothing else at all cited in this section. Again, that's pretty remarkable given how easily one can track down other things the man said. For example, King's 1967 "Where Do We Go From Here?" speech, which concerned the progress and challenges of the civil rights movement and concluded with the famous "arc of the moral universe" quote, hardly seems as fatalistic and grim as Brooks suggests. But there I go, denying that every human being is a vile creature in dire need of guidance from David Brooks.

This was a brief post, but it was short for two reasons. One, there wasn't a lot of meat on this particular bone. And two, the next chapter was clearly written by an entity from beyond the stars and I'm eager to get to it.

The Road to Character: Chapter 5 (Self-Mastery)

First off, you have no idea how glad I am that we're halfway through this thing. Here's a quick mid-book review: The Road to Character is boring. The chapters read like lazy undergrad essays, void of interesting writing or insight or any real depth. Thus far, there's been no real attempt to weave these together - Brooks mentions the figures from his previous chapters, but only to contrast them. He has yet to find any common threads that run through these profiles, even though he's ostensibly providing a path to this higher virtue. Oh, and the writing is bracingly dull. The main thing that saves this thing is that it's easily skimmable, and I admit to that freely because I guarantee that the people who read The Road to Character genuinely and in its entirety number in the teens. I certainly can't imagine that anyone enjoyed reading this.

That said, the subject of this chapter is...George Catlett Marshall? Huh, well that seems like we're back in Eisenhower's wheelhouse, and in fact some of the sources for this chapter seem to be about Eisenhower. You don't think he just stumbled across Marshall while reading about Ike and decided to use both to fill out the book? No...that's unfair. What about the virtue on display?

He mastered the aesthetic of discipline, having the correct posture, erect carriage, crisp salute, direct gaze, well-pressed clothing, and the way of carrying the body that is an outward manifestation of inner self-control.

So Eisehower's virtue was moderation and his friend George Marshall's was self-control? Are those really so distinct? And speaking of which, are posture, carriage and "way of carrying the body" really different terms?

I'm being a touch facetious, although I feel like it's fair in this case. From the chapter title and the way it opens, you would think (as I did when I first read this) that we're going to learn about self-control. But it's actually about veneration of institutions. And just to prove that I'm not making that up:

Today, it is unusual to meet someone with an institutional mindset.

Hold on, that sentence structure seems awfully familiar. Let's flip back through this thing:

Today, many of us see life through the metaphor of a journey... (p. 9)

Today, commencement speeches tell graduates to follow their passion... (p. 21) 

Today, students live more or less unsupervised in their dorms. (p. 28)

Today, teachers tend to look for their students' intellectual strengths... (p. 28 again)

Today, community service is sometimes used as a patch... (p. 31)

Today, the word "sin" has lost its power... (p. 53)

Did I mention that David Brooks isn't a very dynamic writer? I'll grant you that this is a venial sin of writing, the kind of tic that a lot of people have. Brooks has even used willful repetition as a motif in the past (see this piece from 2005) so it could be deliberate, although it feels like one of those things that was overlooked in the rewrite cycle. But that's part of the problem - no one noticed, not Brooks or any of the people who worked on it. Most of these chapters already follow a formula - introduction to the topic figure, Brooks' commentary, and the rest of the information on the topic figure. Out of the first four commentary sections, three of them (on pages 21, 53 and 115) open with this same structure. Did no one catch this? Or did no one thing there was anything wrong with it? I'll say it again - in publishing, you have to be a professional to make amateur mistakes.

I wouldn't make such a big deal out of this but for two things. One, after finishing a manuscript I run it through text analysis to make sure that shit like this doesn't happen. Two, this remark (paraphrased from Dorothy L. Sayers) from back on page 25:

...if you serve the work - if you perform each task to its utmost perfection - then you will experience the deep satisfaction of craftsmanship and you will end up serving the community more richly than you could have consciously planned.

By comparison, Brooks only writes because it's an easy gig. It's still a viable explanation as to why Brooks hasn't found success all that satisfying.

Anyway, back to the subject:

We live in an age of institutional anxiety, when people are prone to distrust large organizations. This is partly because we've seen the failures of these institutions and partly because in the era of Big Me, we put the individual first.

You can probably guess which "partly" Brooks opts to focus on for the balance of the chapter. Americans (and especially the KTDs) aren't distrustful of massive hidebound monoliths because of the things we've seen with our own eyes, but because we're a pack of selfish bastards who can't stand the idea that we won't be the only one standing on stage getting famous. And he even quotes (well, paraphrases) Tina Brown, because if there's anyone who knows about the value of institutions, it's the woman who just finished running the Newsweek brand into the ground.

He does argue for the value of those institutions by appealing to professional standards. For example:

Journalism imposes habits that help reporters keep a mental distance from those they cover.

Presumably that's why Brooks hasn't spent all that much time rubbing elbows with the plain folk at the Applebee's salad bar. (Easy joke, not sorry I made it)

Brooks doesn't limit himself to bemoaning the decline of big old organizations or professions. He also moves into an area that in another part of the world is known as "filial piety." Witness:

One of the purest expressions of this attitude is a letter sent home by a Civil War soldier named Sullivan Ballou to his wife on the eve of the first battle of Bull Run, early in the war. Ballou, an orphan, knew the pain of growing up without a father. nonetheless, he wrote to his wife, he was willing to die to pay the debt he owed to his ancestors...

That was suitably dramatic. So what are we to learn from this?

We live in a society that places great emphasis on personal happiness, defined as not being frustrated in the realization of your wants. But old moral traditions do not die. They waft down the centuries and reinspire new people in new conditions.

Now, Brooks is a very old school conservative, the kind of guy who can't go more than a few weeks at a clip without quoting Edmund Burke. The notion that he only recently through his studies discovered the value of tradition is a laffer. These are beliefs he's held for most of his life, I'm sure. Certainly a guy who got his start working for William Buckley wasn't bucking a lot of traditions.

Remember that quote from the Sydney Morning Herald about Brooks mistaking "his own state of mind for the state of the cosmos"? This was what that reviewer was talking about. I don't believe for a second that Brooks went delving into history in search of answers. Every time he opened a biography, he found himself looking into a mirror, finding only those things that confirmed what he already believed. It's why he didn't bother to go any deeper, why he didn't try to suss out any patterns or threads in all these accounts. That was never the point.

I already mentioned that Brooks hasn't changed much in his actual life since starting this journey of improvement, but his beliefs haven't changed all that much, either. His external personality is certainly different - he's less condescending, more brooding - but deep down he's the same center-right stooge he's been for the last decade and a half. He responds to his personal problems by reading and writing and speaking about the need to change and grow, but he's yet to budge from his cozy spot in the center.

To become a better man, Brooks would have to change, and that's hard. So much easier to simply define your own standards for change such that you've already met them.

Next time: We're on the downward slope.