Previous - 166. Montaigne
The Road to Character: Take two
pxii Now I'm in a much better position to see what's important here in the Introduction. Brooks associates what he calls "resume" values with Adam I, and "eulogy" values with Adam II. Here's a key passage,Adam II lives by an inverse logic. It's a moral logic, not an economic one. You have to give to receive. You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself. You have to conquer your desire to get what you crave. Success leads to the greatest failure, which is pride. Failure leads to the greatest success, which is humility and learning. In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.
To nurture your Adam I career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your Adam II moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses.
I have mixed feelings about this -- ignoring for a moment the bit in bold. I've never been a career oriented, Adam I type person. I've always been more interested in values and self-discovery. So this should get an enthusiastic "Amen!" from me, but, now, with Brooks's Adam II exemplars in mind (Francis Perkins, Dwight Eisenhower and his mother, Dorothy Day, George Marshall, A. Philip Randolph & Bayard Rustin, George Eliot, Augustine, Samuel Johnson & Montaigne), I'm mostly just confused.
In The Brothers Karamazov it was obvious who exemplified the values important to Dostoevsky -- and these values would sound very similar to these resume values. Zosima, of course, but also his mentor and Zosima's brother. Even Alyosha. (And particularly Lizaveta, but that may just be my view.) I can't imagine Dostoevsky making any more sense of Brooks's list than I can. Less, actually, since I don't assume all American's are busy paving the road to hell. In fact, I think he would see this list as proof that America was so depraved now that we can no longer even distinguish bad from good.
Brooks is looking at character building, or at least forming, but to what end he seems not to care as much about. I'm kind of appalled to find myself defending Dostoevsky's position here, but what I see is character building in support of resume values. The end product is more productive middle class strivers. And this is why Montaigne stands out -- from my perspective in a good way -- on this list.
Now for the bit in bold. One of the first books referred to by Brooks is Man's Search for Meaning by Frankl and this is also at the heart of this book. Brooks only talks about religion, Augustine in particular, but also Day, but there is, in my opinion, a huge hole in this book where he fails to explicitly mention National Socialism and Communism, the other ways man commonly found meaning in the 20th century.
I can almost believe that an American could write a book about values that is blind to the middle class world order, but that anyone can write a book on values so early in this new century that ignores the main plot points of the previous century seems odd, to say the least.
I'm trying to apply this character building to myself, with limited success. I struggled unsuccessfully against three different foreign languages and all I learned was that I'm not good with languages. I struggled with Scholastic Philosophy and learned that cult dogma is not my thing -- though I might have a little more success with the subject now than I did in my early twenties... but not much more, if I'm being honest. I struggled with conventional notions of sin and lust in my younger days, even after I lost faith in the religions that were the basis of those notions, but I always struggled in vain -- which is the point, from the view of the religious institution as clever con. The house always wins.
I did learn from, and don't regret, my football playing days, but I'm not sure learning to hit the other person harder than he hits you is really character building. From struggling with technical writing I learned that other people are probably better suited to that line of work, except when I'm uniquely qualified, which is rarely the case. I have learned a great deal from a lifetime of making mistakes in almost any realm you can think of, which makes me better at many things, but not necessarily a better person.
Perhaps I haven't risked enough. If fact I'm almost certain that's true, but it's still hard for me to view common sense as a moral failing. Did Dante envision a circle of hell for people guilty of sins of omission? What would that be like?
I did think of one thing that might possible apply, my being forced to go to the gym by my back problem. There's no way I would have done this on my own but have stuck with it now for about 25 years. But I'm not too impressed with this change as I'm pretty damn sure I wouldn't continue if I weren't worried about my back and keeping in shape for my trash sorting and hauling work.
I'm like a Viennese Jew with a serious weakness for rich German bakery items, who lost weight and grew healthier in the camps. I appreciate the silver lining but can't take much personal credit.
pxiii This book is about Adam II. It's about how some people have cultivated strong character. It's about one mindset that people through the centuries have adopted to put iron in their core and to cultivate a wise heart...
A moment ago I was reading about Syria and the al-Assad family. Now there are some people who have cultivated strong character and put iron in their core. It isn't easy to rule an assemblage of peoples when you come from a minority tribe and minority religious group. This may have come easier to Hafez, as a military man, but for Bashar, who was trained as a doctor, it must have been a struggle. Perhaps this would be a good point in time to try to sell Game of Thrones virtues like those Bashar has learned, but I still think it would be a hard sell. And would we call these "eulogy" values?
Isn't it more correct to say that the people in this book started with significant personality weaknesses that they found a way of overcoming or dealing with. In some cases, they really only lacked a direction for their lives which they eventually found.
Here's what I think Brooks is actually writing about, and it is interesting enough: When I was reading the biographies of Admirals Nimitz, Halsey, and Spruance, I noticed that the U.S. Navy took some trouble to put young -- promising -- officers in circumstances that would challenge them. Halsey left the Academy as a football player and discipline problem so he was given M.P. duties early on and then sent to not only the Naval War College, but the Army War College as well. (That he ended up as naval commander under MacArthur in the South Pacific during WW2 looks almost like divine intervention, though Nimitz was likely the divinity in question.) The more intellectual (for the Navy) Spruance had a problem dealing with less cerebral officers, so the Navy kept assigning him to particularly dim and difficult superior officers until he found a way of working with them.
In the interest of creating better officers, the Navy forced these young officers to grow as people so they would be in a position to excel in their military careers. The care the Navy seemed to take in this task is surprising and impressive, if also supremely self-serving.
Since Plutarch's Parallel Lives is mentioned, and is an obvious inspiration for a collection of biographies like this, it's worth noting that Plutarch could have chosen to pair up his subjects quite differently. Instead of similar Greek and Roman biographies, he could have paired two Romans or two Greeks living in very different eras and contrasted the virtues each exemplified. Camillus may have been George Washington's model of virtue, but he would not have been a success in the age of Sulla and Caesar. The Younger Cato's problem was that his virtues were already out-of-step with his times, though I'm not sure he would have been any happier really in an earlier age.
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