THE ASPEN INSTITUTE

ASPEN IDEAS FESTIVAL 2015 THE ROAD TO CHARACTER

Greenwald Pavilion Aspen, Colorado

Saturday, July 4, 2015

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LIST OF PARTICIPANTS: KATIE COURIC Global Anchor, Yahoo News DAVID BROOKS Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times *

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THE ROAD TO CHARACTER SPEAKER: Here we go -- but you're in the wrong place because Katie Couric is over there, and David Brooks is in Paepcke because those venues could use a little bit of body count. But anyway we have wonderful content and as always, it's a delight to have Katie Couric and David Brooks here. We spent some time this week on the subject of character, and I'm going to turn it right away so they can get right into it. Please welcome David and Katie. (Applause) MS. COURIC: Hi everyone. Good morning. Happy 4th of July. I'm thrilled to be here with David, somebody I admire so much. And I loved his book, The Road to Character, and it's something that has been on my mind and probably the mind of many of you all as we kind of navigate the treacherous waters of modern society. So we're just going to start and get right to it. And David, in your you state "I wrote this book before we talk about that, I this one paragraph because I setter for us.

author's note about this book to save my own soul". And was going to ask you to read think it's a good table-

MR. BROOKS: This is a paragraph my friends think is the truest paragraph in the book. (Laughter) MR. BROOKS: "I was born with a natural disposition towards shallowness. I now work as a pundit and a columnist. I'm paid to be a narcissist to blow hard, to volley my opinions, to appear more confident about them than I really am, to appear smarter than I really am, to appear better and more authoritative than I really am. I have to work harder than most people to avoid a life of smug superficiality. I've also become more aware like many people these days I've lived a life of vague moral aspiration, vaguely wanting to be good, vaguely wanting to serve some larger purpose while lacking a concrete moral vocabulary, a clear understanding of how

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to live a rich inner life or even a clear knowledge of how character is developed and depth is achieved." MS. COURIC:

Was that a paragraph for you to

MR. BROOKS:

Yes.

write?

(Laughter) MR. BROOKS: But it's a book about humility, and humility is -- some people think humility is thinking lowly of yourself, but my favorite definition of humility is radical self-awareness from a distance, and so it's -humility is a quality of self-awareness. It's the ability to step outside yourself. If you ever see Chuck Close's paintings or photographs, the face is the whole thing. Humility is the opposite of that. It's seeing yourself as part of a broader landscape. And so part of the thing about writing this book was I ran across people who were just way better and way deeper than I am. And you know, some of the more famous, you know, I had a lot of people, there's been some talk on this guy this week, I happened at Washington to be seated next to the Dalai Lama at a luncheon and he's just a deep, joyful soul. He actually - at luncheon he laughed at odd moments, he's the kind of guy who just laughs for no apparent reason. (Laughter) MR. BROOKS: And you want to be polite, so you sort of laugh along with him. (Laughter) MR. BROOKS: And then you want to insert jokes just to make sense of the laughter. And I was sitting with him and he would laugh and I would laugh, and I was trying to think of what to say -(Laughter)

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MR. BROOKS: -- and he -- I -- he was carrying a canvas bag, a sort of dalai lama bag and I said, so you got any candy in the bag? (Laughter) MR. BROOKS: And he starts emptying the bag and it's everything he -- pulling out stuff, and it's like everything you get in the first class cabin of an international flight -(Laughter) MR. BROOKS: -- so it's like the eye thing and the ear plug, then a big Toblerone bar, but when you're around a guy like that, there's just a depth of joy and you don't get that from your career. And you know, he's famous, but I don't think I put this in the book, but a couple -- about a year ago, I went up to Frederick, Maryland and I ran into a group of women probably 30 -aged 50 to 80, who teach immigrants English, and then how to read. And this process can take 7 or 8 months or years. So there's -- just takes forever. And when you walk into this room, they just radiated a gentleness and a kindness and a goodness, and they just cared about what you were saying. They didn't know me from Adam, but my -- they made me feel so important. And they just radiated an inner light. And I'm sure we all -- if we run across these people periodically, you just radiate an inner light. And my reaction was, you know, I've achieved way more career success than I ever thought I would, but I certainly haven't achieved that. And we'd all want to have that. And so I just want to figure out how does that happen. MS. COURIC: And you talk a lot, David, about sort of being keenly aware of how the moral ecology, you use that term throughout the book, has changed and what -it became abundantly clear when you were listening to a command performance of a radio broadcast on NPR after World War II had ended and then you juxtapose that with a football play that you saw on television right after you

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were listening to that. Can you talk about those two different kind of moral ecologies that you witnessed? MR. BROOKS: Yeah. epiphanies involve NPR.

So all great moral

(Laughter) (Applause) MR. BROOKS: And so I'm driving home in Washington on a Sunday night, and listening to our -- one of our NPR stations, WETA, and they re-broadcast all radio shows. And they re-broadcast a show called "Command Performance" which was a variety show that went out to troops in World War II, and I happened to hear the episode that was broadcast live on V-J Day, just hours after the Japanese announced their surrender. And Bing Crosby is the host, gets out there and he says, we've just learned we've won this war, but I guess we're not proud of this moment, we're just humble, we're just glad we got through it. And I was really struck by the beautiful tone of modesty. And -MS. COURIC: by everybody --

That was repeated again and again

MR. BROOKS:

Yeah, so --

MS. COURIC:

-- on that broadcast, right?

MR. BROOKS: Right, so like Burgess Meredith was out there, and he was character actor, remember him, and he reads a passage from (inaudible) and he said we won this war because we have brave allies, we have great soldiers, we happen to have a lot of material abundance. We didn't win it because we're God's chosen people. We should just try to stay humble and be worthy of the peace. And it was just a beautiful sentiment at a moment which could have been just something. And so I watched that and I go home and I turn on the TV and I watch a football game, and a quarterback throws a pass to a wide receiver who's tackled after a 2-yard game, and the defensive player does what all professional athletes do at moments

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of supreme professional achievement, which he does a victory dance and honor himself. And it occurred to me I'd seen a bigger self-puffing victory dance after a 2yard game than I'd heard after winning World War II. (Laughter) MR. BROOKS: And so that symbolized to me a shift from a culture of self-effacement which is I'm no better than anybody else, but nobody is better than me, to a culture of distinction which says look what I've achieved, we're -- I'm special. And I should emphasize we would not want to go back to the moral culture of the 1940s. It was more racist, it was more sexist, it was less emotional, the food was really boring. (Laughter) MR. BROOKS:

But in this one round concept of

MS. COURIC:

Very homogenous I should say.

MR. BROOKS:

Very homogenous.

MS. COURIC:

Yeah.

self --

MR. BROOKS: But they had a smaller sense of self. They weren't bragging about what college they go to on the back-window sticker. They weren't saying that -MS. COURIC:

Or where they went on vacation.

MR. BROOKS: Or the MV -- you weren't -- you know, it was a strong social sanctioning -- more of a strong social sanction by getting too big for your britches. And there was more of a code of reticence, there was no exclamation point on the keyboards of the typewriters if you remember, you had to hit like -- I don't know, you had to hit apostrophe and then backspace and then period, and you couldn't text with those things. And so there's just more of a code of reticence. And you know, there's something beautiful about that, I say that

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narcissism is a voracious hunger in a small space, but humility is calm and beautiful. MS. very movingly how his being difficult for

COURIC: In fact you talk about -- I thought about George Herbert Walker Bush, and about a part of that generation was actually very him when he was running for President.

MR. BROOKS:

Yeah.

MS. COURIC:

Can you talk about that?

MR. BROOKS: I got this from two of his speech writers. They would -- he was running for President the first time, and they were trying to get him to say why I should be President, how great I am. And they would write in the sentence with the first person pronoun, I did this, I did that, I did this, and he would cut out all the sentences with the first person pronoun because it just was in his ethos we do not talk about ourselves. And they finally beat him up and said you're running for President, you'd have to talk about yourself. So he put -- he did a speech where he talked about himself and his mom who was still alive called and said, George, you're talking about yourself too much. (Laughter) MS. COURIC:

But that was so interesting though,

MR. BROOKS:

And he -- yeah.

right? Yeah.

Yeah.

MS. COURIC: I mean, think about how different it is today in terms of the candidates running -MR. BROOKS:

Yeah.

MS. COURIC: -- which we'll get to in a moment, but you know, my friends who spent a fair amount of time psychoanalyzing you -(Laughter)

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MS. COURIC: -- wonder if there somewhere in this awakening was there a personal existential crisis that made you realize that you had in fact been living a vague life of moral aspirations and that you weren't the person you really wanted to be, rather than viewing sort of the changes in sort of our moral ecology, was there something internally that was -MR. BROOKS:

Yeah.

MS. COURIC:

-- happening with you?

MR. BROOKS: It wasn't a midlife crisis. I think if I had one, I'm shallow enough that the Porsche would have solved it. (Laughter) (Applause) MS. COURIC: me that's not true.

I don't think so.

Something tells

MR. BROOKS: the crowd.

No offense to the Porsche owners in

(Laughter) MR. BROOKS:

I assume it's like 40 percent out

there. (Laughter) MS. COURIC:

I think this is a Ferrari crowd.

MR. BROOKS: Yeah. Yeah. But an electric car Ferrari crowd. You know, there are certain moments, partly it was just -- it was insufficiency more than anything else. And probably, you know, one of my undergrads said it so boldly to me, said, you know, the chief myth in the society is that success leads to happiness, and that's not true, is it? And that is the fundamental truth. And -- but we confuse that. Second, there's just insufficiency, like I said, you see people

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ahead of you. And secondly, I do think there are different -- a third agency moments, moments when your internal criteria shifts. And I have in this book this -- a passage about a woman I revere, George Eliot, and she when she was 32 -through her 20s she was emotionally needy to the extreme, she fell in love with every guy she would ever meet and it was pathetic. And she was -- whether married and unmarried, whatever, she just fell in love and they would reject her, their wife would throw her out of the house, whatever. And she was just -- she grew up in a home without love and she was emotionally needy. Then at age 32 she falls in love with Herbert Spencer, the philosopher, and she writes a letter to him at the end of their relationship which is somewhat pathetic like real life, but somewhat profound. And the pathetic part is please marry me, please marry me, if you don't marry me, I'll die. If you do marry me, you won't notice me, I won't cause any trouble around the house -(Laughter) MR. BROOKS: -- and that was the pathetic part. But then in the end she has this paragraph which is amazing. I'm not -- I'm just going to paraphrase it. It was something like "I suppose no woman ever before wrote a letter such as this, but I am conscious in the light of true reason that I'm worthy of your respect and tenderness whatever vulgar men and vulgar women may think of me". And it's that assertion that I am worthy of you, that's a moment that I think happens to people in their early 30s, where it's an agency moment, they develop their own internal criteria, they don't rely on external praise or affirmation, they rely on their own internal criteria for what they're worth, when they're doing right, when they're doing wrong, and that's maturity, that's when maturity happens. And so it happened to her at 32, and I think we have these moments when it happens to us in early adulthood, we sort of know what we want, we all have a

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bunch of things we love and we know which loves are and in which order, what we really want out of life. And -- but then you go -- you know, I think that happens in 30, you discover who you are, but then, you know, I'm 53, it happens again, and your life -- you change, life changes, your circumstances change, and the things you want change. And so I think we all make four big commitments in life to family including romance and children, to a creed, to a vocation, to a community, and you make those commitments in -- at adulthood when you're formed, and sometimes those are life commitments, but sometimes you can make new commitments at 53 or 75 or 80. And so I was at a stage in life where I was making a lot of new commitments in part because of things that were happening in my personal life, in part because my career hit a level where I wasn't manic about it. And so you -- I was just MS. COURIC: that all there is?

You sort of did the Peggy Lee is

MR. BROOKS: It wasn't quite that. I mean, I was super happy with what I was. I wasn't dissatisfied. But I wanted the vector, just a lot of things -- I'll say it, I got the worst 3 years ago. And a lot of things, when that happens, it's something that -- worst that happens on the day, the (inaudible) friend of mine said to me, you know, if you could project that a year ago, a year from now, and count your 10 closest friends, 7 of them will be people you don't know yet. And that turned out to be true because a lot of things changed. And so certainly the vector of change in my life had radically accelerated. And a lot of new options and a lot of new possibilities, and a lot of new hungers for spiritual and social and vocational depth came to mind. And so that sort of -that happened in the middle of this book, and it was part of the process of reshaping it. MS. COURIC: Having said that, it seems to be there are so many forces at work, David, these days that are working against that maturity, that growth, that agency, in terms of sort of how our world is working in this whole culture of narcissism that you talk a lot about

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in the book. You call it the "big me," the sort of you're so special culture of the obsession with celebrity and fame, social media. What impact have all those external forces have had on our ability to develop our internal character? MR. BROOKS: Well, partly it's just a world that's so competitive especially for young people there's just no time. Second we're surrounded by social media, and just the buzz of information. And so it's hard to step back and hear the soft still voices inside, and you know, I was thinking of this at a session I was at yesterday, you know, how can you make lifelong commitments when it's hard to have an attention span that's more than 30 seconds because of what, you know, what everything is doing to us. And so I think there's that. And then there's a projection culture, you know, the -- you mentioned the emphasis on celebrity. I'm really struck -a series of people have done work on this survey and at UCLA, they survey college students what do you want from life. And fame used to be at the bottom, or near the bottom. And now it's ranked second or third to what people want from life. I think it's in part because of reality TV, in part because of Facebook, but people really want to be famous, outward projection. And my two favorite studies on this are somebody asked I think junior high school girls, would you rather be a celebrity's personal assistant, Justin Bieber's personal assistant or president of Harvard, and by some like 3 to 1, they'd rather be Justin Bieber's personal assistant. Though to be fair I asked the president of Harvard and she would rather be Justin Bieber's -(Laughter) MR. BROOKS:

My other one that I like is -- I

MS. COURIC:

Is the Paris Hilton one.

don't --

MR. BROOKS: Well, the other one -- I can't remember the Paris Hilton. The one -- the other one I

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like is they asked college students would you rather have a life that involves a lot of fame or a lot of sex? And by two to one they chose a life that involves a lot of fame, and so I go to college campuses and say, listen, I'm on TV twice a week, I write a column in a prominent newspaper -(Laughter) MR. BROOKS: sex, it's better.

-- I'm kind of famous, go with the

(Laughter) MS. COURIC: But didn't they ask something too about who would you rather have lunch with and the order was Jennifer Lopez, Jesus, and Paris Hilton. And -MR. BROOKS:

Yeah.

MS. COURIC:

Yeah.

A natural troika.

(Laughter) MS. COURIC: Those are the three people I'd like to have dinner with dead or alive. MR. BROOKS:

Yeah.

MS. COURIC:

Just kidding.

MR. BROOKS:

Yeah.

MS. COURIC: You know, but there's another survey too that I read that kids say if you don't share it with your -- on social media did it actually happen -MR. BROOKS:

Yeah.

MS. COURIC:

-- and 55 percent saying no.

MR. BROOKS: No, I do have friends where I'm out with them, they're wondering how the -- through what forum should this be shared --

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MS. COURIC:

This experience.

MR. BROOKS: Is this an Instagram experience, is it a Twitter experience, is it a Facebook experience? And so -- but that just -- that makes it all external and you know, and so my students and a lot of us are -- it's very easy to be external to think even when we think about doing good, and you say how do you want to be good, they'll say I want to have a big social impact. And that's necessary, but not sufficient. When you ask about something internal, it's not enough to say I want to do good for the world. I'm really asking you about the quality of your inner soul. And so that's developed in a different way. To succeed in the world, to solve a problem in the world you need to compete against other people, compete against the problems of the world, but to develop an inner soul, I think it's necessary to confront your core sin, your core weakness, and to confront and do a battle with that weakness every single day. And that's more of an internal process than an external process. And so a lot of us just don't have vocabulary to understand how that internal process is happening and how you wage that fight against your sin. It's the confrontation against your own weakness that is the essential moral strength. MS. COURIC: In fact you mention I think sin somebody said 70 times in this book and what role -- is that just the acknowledgment that we are all deeply flawed? MR. BROOKS: Yeah, well, I -- a part of this shift in moral ecology is a shift from a belief that we're what I call the crooked timber school of humanity, that we're splendidly endowed, but we're also deeply broken. And that we have both good and evil within us. Solzhenitsyn has a quote "The line between good and evil runs down through the -- each individual human heart". And that -- and then we've had a new generation which is a more -- including my own, I think anybody boomer and after where we're raised to think we live the golden figures inside, we're really good inside, we just have to love

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ourselves, we just have to actualize ourselves. And that sin is social, it's outside ourselves. But we -- the golden figure of goodness that we have to get in touch with, I think that earlier moral ecology is truer. And I understand why the word sin is a very -- I talked about this before I wrote -- in the middle of writing the book on Charlie Rose, and I got a call from a very great and prominent publisher in New York and he said, I loved the way you described your book, but don't use the word "sin." It's too much of a downer. Use the word "insensitive." And I said, no, I'm writing the book because some of the older moral vocabulary that we've lost is necessary to understand the moral stakes. And now we only use the word sin in the context of fattening desserts. (Laughter) MR. BROOKS: But I think it's worth reviving that word. And I understand why it went away. It was used to punish sex, it was used to punish depravity. But sin reminds us first that each day is a moral occasion, and that the choices we make have moral consequences. We carve a core piece of ourselves into something that's slightly elevated or something more degraded with individual choice we make. Second, a weakness is individual, but sin is communal. We all have the same sins and we struggle against them together. There's a great -- I hope a lot of people have read this, the David Foster Wallace's Kenyon commencement address where he talks about how self-centered we are naturally, it's just our natural default. And so we all have that -MS. COURIC:

To work against that.

MR. BROOKS: Yeah, and so we have to work against that, and everybody has differences. I think if you sat down and reflected for 10 minutes and said what's my core sin, whether -- some people it's vanity, some people it's just status orientation, greed, selfcenteredness. I have a friend whose core sin is hardness of heart. He's busy and when people come to him, he's just not present for them, or he's at a meeting and

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instead of really listening he's thinking about what he can say to appear clever. And so at night he lies in bed and think how did I do today at that? And he tries to do better the next day. But understanding the core weakness, core sin in oneself is I think the beginning of the steps of moral education. MS. COURIC: How did your religious upbringing inform sort of how you've come to this point, how -- you know, what impact has that had? MR. BROOKS: Yeah. Well, I was born in a New York Jewish home where the phrase was act Yiddish, think - act British, think Yiddish. (Laughter) MR. BROOKS: And so it was a home deep -- mostly -- and I would say the moral and philosophical structure that I had was different than most people, but it was familiar to people at the Aspen Institute, or the foundation of the Aspen Institute. It was really I went to the University of Chicago, my favorite saying about Chicago, it's a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students St. Thomas Aquinas. (Laughter) MR. BROOKS: And this is how Aspen was founded by the same people, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and Mortimer Adler. And during those 2 years I was taught by professors (inaudible) -- I was taught (inaudible) by professors who thought these are the keys to truth. These people Aristotle, Nietzsche, Marx, gospels, they lived and died for this literature, it's been handed down to us and the truth of love-life and truth of at virtue is in these books. And that was really the -- I still interpret morality through the great books. Now I've come to realize that they are insufficient, the great books are not alone, you need some transcending realm. But I do think it's necessary to do the reading, and I do think unless you do the reading and know the categories, and you know the words like sin, grace, it's

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very hard to understand what's going on inside, a passage in the book which is to me the ideal, it's a night that Isaiah Berlin spent with Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poetess, and he goes into her apartment, he's in St. Petersburg just after the war, World War II, and he'd never heard of her, she was a great poetess who was quieted by the Stalinists, and he goes into her apartment and they start talking. And he gets there at 8:00 o'clock, and they start talking about their experience of the war, and then by midnight they're talking about (inaudible) and Tolstoy, and then by 2:00 they're talking about Pushkin, and then by 4:00 they're talking, and then she's reading his poetry, telling her about the death of her husband in the war and of her children and her own oppression, and they're talking all night. And you get -- and then he has desperately to go to the bathroom, but he doesn't want to break this spell. So he sits there all night, and then at 10:00 in the morning, he goes home to his hotel and flops on the bed, and just says, I'm in love, I'm in love. And they both understood that night was one of the most important nights of their lives. And actually Michael Ignatieff, who read a biography of Isaiah Berlin did something very brave, the biography is probably like 350 pages of which something like 40 are dedicated to this one night. And Akhmatova wrote a great poem called The Visitor from the Future about that night. And it's about the meeting of minds and the meeting of hearts and the meeting of spirits, it's the kind of bonding we all like or we know, revere. It's a bonding at depth. And I think to have done that, you have to have done the reading. And so you know, when Lincoln was struggling to get books, he was poor, but he was struggling to get books, I think that's part of a moral education process. And just quickly, finally, one of the characters I have in this book is Samuel Johnson, the great essayist; he was a radically wretched young man. He suffered from smallpox, Tourette's Syndrome, OCD, he was blind, he was deaf in one eye and one ear. He was radically wretched. And what he did was he suffered in his first 30 years. He

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just suffered. And he has a great understanding what suffering does to you, and it can either destroy you and shrivel you or it can expand you. And the way it expanded him was first it introduced him to himself, because (inaudible) this theologian has a passage with what suffering does is it takes you beneath the everydayness of life and reminds you you're not who you thought you were. It carves into the floor of the basement of your soul, or what you thought was the floor, and then it carves through that revealing a cavity below, and carves through that revealing a cavity below, and it really introduces you to yourself, those moments of suffering. And then it teaches you empathy because you want to -- you -- suffering you feel empathy for others you suffer and then it launches you up to transcendence, those who want to make use of their suffering are connected to a narrative of transcendence. And so I have friends who lost their son when he was 6, and they didn't just say we had 2 years of grief, let's go party, they created a foundation, Hope for Henry, to connect his death and their suffering to a moment of service and transcendence. And so Johnson went through all that, self-knowledge, empathy, a commitment which for him was writing, and he couldn't control his mind, he couldn't control his body, but he could read and write and grasp (phonetic) himself in the reality of the truth and develop a settled philosophy of life. And I do think in that way just doing the reading, being curious, the people who come here and are curious and who try to set -achieve a settled philosophy of life, that's a component of moral education too. And if you haven't done the reading and if you don't have a settled philosophy of life, a commitment to a philosophy of life, then you're unsteady and I don't think moral education can be complete. MS. COURIC: You need to give us a reading list and then let us borrow your brain for a few months. (Laughter) MS. COURIC:

You know --

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MR. BROOKS: Believe me, my brain is -- I -sure I get -- I don't know -- but my brain is believe me it's nothing special. I did not graduate in the top third of my high school class, my SAT scores were not spectacular, believe me, my brain is nothing special. MS. COURIC:

I don't know about that.

(Laughter) MS. COURIC: But let's talk about sort of people of great moral character being -- to that last point being born or being made, and you say they aren't born, they are made, but don't you think that certain people are predisposed, even genetically predisposed to certain qualities like empathy and kindness? I sort of think they are. I think there's something very intrinsic about some people having those gifts. MR. BROOKS: Yeah, actually the first thing to be said is, some -- we know some things are genetically related, risk -- willingness to take risk, and -- but I guess my -- there are probably people in this room -- I don’t know if Jonathan Haidt is around here, there are people around here, there he is, he can answer this question better than I, but I'm going to give it a shot Jonathan, which is that the distinction between what's -what we are predisposed, I mean, our genes are there to be activated by our environment. You could either nod or shake your head, Jonathan, if I'm getting this wrong, but that -- it's -- they are there to be either improved on or not improved on or to be changed. They're not -- they don't exist, our genetic endowment doesn't exist I think in isolation from who we were and the lives we live. And so some people may be genetically endowed to be more risk-taking or to be more empathetic or to be more emotional, you know, more up and down. And some people are -- have just equal poise. But I would regard these traits -- you're on a leash, you can -- depending on your life you can flow. MS. COURIC:

So they're malleable.

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MR. BROOKS: Yeah, so we're malleable. And I would say each of the -- and then in lived life, all the people in my book were messes at 20. They were all pathetic, and they were magnificent at 70, and it was something they did, and something they did with assistance from outside. So one of the characters is Dorothy Day, and Dorothy Day was -- she was one of these people who couldn't just read novels, she had to act them out, and she became the novel she was reading, and unfortunately she read a lot of Dostoevsky -(Laughter) MR. BROOKS: -- and so she was drinking, she was grousing, she was living in a garret, and her life was complete disorganization and a mess. Abortion, suicide attempts, she couldn't control herself. And so at 20 whatever endowment, her endowment -- she had endowment for great spiritual depth, but it was unfocused, she was fragmented. And so her movement from character was from fragmentation to cohesion. And what changed her was the birth of her daughter, she had a birth of her daughter out of wedlock, and she had decided in the process of pregnancy that all the accounts of childhood she had ever read -- of childbearing were written by men. So she said I'm going to write one. And so 40 minutes or something like that after she gave birth, she sat down and wrote an essay about what it was like. And she talks about the violence of it and -- but then at the end she has a passage that's something like if I had painted the greatest painting, composed the greatest symphony, or sculpted the greatest sculpture, I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms. And with that came vast floods of love and joy and a desire to worship and a desire to adore. In other words the birth of her child gave her a sense not only of the love for her child, but I have a friend named Christian Wiman, a great poet, who says that love is always flowing. It's flowing outward. And her love for her daughter flowed outward. She needed somebody to thank and to adore, and she decided there must be a God. She became a Catholic, and spent the next 60 years

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in creating homeless shelters, food kitchens, in service trying to live a life of poverty. And a life of incredible focus and self-sacrifice, sometimes excessive self-sacrifice. But it was that act of childbearing which focused her which she turned into a moral occasion to move away from the chaos and disorganization of her earlier life into the commitment and focus of her remaining life. MS. COURIC: She's one of the people you profiled, David, I mean, you talk about others like -- and you can mention them, Dwight Eisenhower, Frances Perkins. How did you pick these people? And I know that you say that a number of things happened in their lives and you kind of categorize them, like the humility shift, selfdefeat, the dependency leap, energizing love, the call within the call. So how did you pick those particular figures, and how did some of these factors enter into their lives? You don't have to go through every one of them, but maybe give us a sampling. MR. BROOKS: Right. So I picked people -- I tried to pick people who were there, who were alive at command performance era. So a lot of them were in their - prominent in the '40s, whether it was Eisenhower, Marshall, Dorothy Day, or Frances Perkins, I then cheated. And then I wanted people, and they all share one thing, this crooked timber view of humanity, this view that I am broken inside, and I need to fix my own brokenness. And then they exemplify different categories or different experiences that I think are part of a moral education. And so for Johnson it's suffering, and intellectual effort. For Day it's submission. For George Eliot it's -- I mention her at the agency moment, but her it's a daring leap of love, and so she had -- she fell in love, after Herbert Spencer, she fell in love with a guy named George Lewes and George Lewes was a fellow writer who was also married -- who was married, but his wife was estranged, and had had three kids with another man. And - but she fell in love with him. But this is Victorian England, if she's with George Lewes she will be labeled an adulteress and written out of polite society and lose all her friends. So she has a choice between choosing Lewes, and choosing everybody else. And she thinks about it for

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2 weeks mostly by herself, and she chooses Lewes. They go off to Germany. Her family cuts her off, her friends cut her off, she's blackballed everywhere in London society. She's lost everything, and she's chosen him, and it was the right choice for her. Because from that emotional neediness she needed a deep love, a deep cohering love, and out of that love she really came into herself. About a year into their relationship, Lewes said to her, you know, have you ever thought about writing fiction, which she had never done, and she said I'll try it. So she went off for a week, and wrote a short story, which she then read to him aloud, and by the middle of the story he's weeping because he sees the talent she has. And in some ways his love is the more coherent or the more admirable because after that moment he surrenders his career to hers. He knows she's way more important a writer than he is, so he becomes her agent, her publicist, her editor. She's very sensitive to criticism, and so he gets up in the morning and he reads through all the papers. If there's an article that mentions her he cuts it out so she won't have to see it. He really serves her. (Laughter) MR. BROOKS: And that -- what they have together is not just the first blush of passionate love, like Taylor Swift. (Laughter) MR. BROOKS:

But like a deep enduring love.

MS. COURIC: But this, this is really as much about him as it is about her, isn't it? MR. BROOKS: Yeah, yeah. I've got the passage --

Can I read this --

MS. COURIC:

Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

MR. BROOKS:

This man who wrote this passage was

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here earlier the week, I think he's left, Leon Wieseltier, but it's about how love can be moral improving. And it's not passion, it's not idealistic, it's a radical commitment from one flawed human being to another flawed human being. And it's very particular, and it's very local. And Leon, who was here for most of this week, wrote this as a toast to friends, who you've probably heard of, Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein, when they got married in Ireland a few years ago. And this is what Leon wrote, it's a passage I happen to like reading aloud. "Love is a revolution in scale, a revision of magnitudes. It is private, and it is particular. Its object is the specificity of this man and that woman, the distinctiveness of this spirit and that flesh. This love prefers deep to wide, the here to there, the grasp to the reach. Love is or should be indifferent to history, immune to it, a soft and sturdy haven from it. When the day is done, when the lights are out, and there is only this other heart, this other mind, this other face to assist in repelling one's demons or in greeting one's angels. It does not matter who the president is. When one consents to marry, one consents to be truly known, which is an ominous prospect. And so one bets on love to correct for the ordinariness of the impression, and to call forth the forgiveness that is invariably required. Marriages are exposures. We may be heroes to our spouses, but we may not be idols." And that's sort of the realistic commitment of love from one person to another, and the way that commitment is particular, and in some sense desperate, in some sense joyous, and that's making it -- turning what could be just a choice into a deep and profoundly anchoring activity. And I will say this, after the book I came to realize that, I used to think character building was internal. That you do it by like iron self-control, self-discipline, but then I came to the conclusion that none of us is strong enough to defeat our own sins by our self. We all need redemptive assistance from outside. And the people of great character, what they have is a great ability to make deep commitments to things outside themselves.

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MS. COURIC:

Relationships, causes.

MR. BROOKS: Relationships, like a -- like Johnson to a settled philosophy, like Eliot to be a set of -- to be enmeshed in unconditional loves, Frances Perkins in the book to be dedicated to causes that can't be complete in a single lifetime, just long causes. And to religious, like Augustine's in the book, to a complete dedication to God. And so the ability to make really strong commitments is to me the essence of characterbuilding, not iron self-control. It's not an individual thing, it's a relationship thing. MS. COURIC: And yet you also say that even in love that that has become a resume virtue, and of course you talk a lot about resume virtues versus eulogy virtues, and we'll get to more on that in a moment, but since we're on the topic of love, you write, "Things once done in a poetic frame of mind, such as meeting a potential lover, now done in a more professional frame of mind." What makes you say that? MR. BROOKS:

I teach at Yale.

(Laughter) MS. COURIC:

Okay.

MR. BROOKS: I do think -- you know, I do think a lot of things that have -- were poetic have been turned prosaic. In some senses applying to college, and in some sense we're all balancing time, and so when you're balancing time your decision is filled with prudence. And I do think, and I don't know how universally this is true. I do think a lot of people in making these -- it's -believe me, making a marriage decision is, obviously as I've told you from my personal history, a great enigma to me. But how much do you trust the passion, and how much do you trust the prudence? I do not have an answer to that. But I do think a lot of people make that decision, what am I going to get out of it, is it prudent? And in some senses the affairs we love or we

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admire are -- they're made without counting the cost. And it didn't matter for George Eliot what the cost was, she didn't count the cost, she made the leap. And for Augustine the cost was very high for him, and some sense I don't know how much we should trust that passion, but I do think that passion is an element. And that passion, which is completely imprudent, unprofessional, non-cognitive, if you want to use the old-fashioned terminology, I do think that's something that's harder to do in a society where we've got guidebooks all the time, where we've got books like the rules about how to date, which I'm sure all of you have read, and which is all based on calculation, how to manipulate a relationship so to get it to where you want it to be. MS. COURIC: Getting back to resume virtues versus eulogy virtues, you probably don't need to -probably a lot of people here have already read the book and a lot of the columns that you've written about this. But why don't you quickly explain that, and then we'll talk about how society in some ways works against those "eulogy virtues." MR. BROOKS: Yeah, just very quickly the "resume virtues" are the things that make you good at your job, whether you're good at accounting, good at being a lawyer, good at math. The "eulogy virtues" are the things they say about you after you're dead, whether you're courageous, brave, honest, honorable, capable of great love. And we all know the eulogy virtues are more important. But I do think we live in a society, and certainly an educational system which gives a lot more primacy to the resume virtues. Our school systems are built around giving people skills. And I think that our colleges are relatively inarticulate about how to be a really deep, good person. And you know, there's a debate between Steven Pinker and Leon Wieseltier actually, and others, over whether colleges should be in this business. Pinker says, no, our job is not to do moral education. Our job is to teach geography or to teach psychology or to teach this or that. It's not our job. That is not the way colleges used to think of themselves. They used to think of

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themselves as character-builders. And the college I have in the book is Frances Perkins' college, which was Mount Holyoke, which is a college that really left a mark on its students. These were -- I mean, some of the rules in Mount Holyoke, when she arrived in 1898, one of the rules was freshmen shall be silent in the presence of sophomores. (Laughter) MR. BROOKS: Freshmen shall bow respectfully when passing a sophomore on the hall. And that's to teach deference. But then her worst subject was, I think, chemistry or biology. And so they forced her to major in biology because if you can tackle your worst subject, you can tackle what life will throw at you. And then the most impressive thing Holyoke did was that they sent their kids off as missionaries around the world. And so it's 1902, and they're sending young, single women off to Tibet, to Pakistan, to China, to Africa. And somebody did a survey of all the female missionaries abroad in 1920, and 25 percent were Holyoke grads. There was just this intense sense of heroic service, and there was that spirit of aroused heroism that at least at Holyoke they thought was important to instill. And that was not a professional training. That was a moral training. MS. COURIC: But let's talk about qualities like ambition, aggressiveness, competitiveness, that often make people successful in this world. MR. BROOKS:

Yeah.

MS. COURIC: Are they inherently incompatible with qualities that you mention in the book like humility, restraint, reticence, temperance, respect, and soft selfdiscipline, and the people who you say radiate that certain kind of moral joy. Can you have both resume virtues and eulogy virtues? MR. BROOKS:

Yeah, I think yes, and that it's

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important to balance, but they sit in tension. And so all the people in the book are super successful. George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, who was President, but they sit in -- well, here I'm going to borrow from a great book which everybody should read. I cite it in my book, but you should read the original book called Lonely Man of Faith by Joseph Soloveitchik, who says we have two sides of our nature, Adam I, and Adam II. Adam I is the external resume side, Adam II is the internal side of internal growth. And he says these two sides of our nature exist in tension with each other. But they, sometimes being a good person makes you better your career. You know, most -- well, if you're in business or in politics or anything, a lot of our career success is based on our capacity to build really good relationships. And building relationships is a moral -fundamentally depends on moral qualities of compassion, and care, and kindness, and compassionate understanding. But sometimes it's bad for your career. I think I mentioned this in our conversation last year. I had a friend who hires a lot of people, and he asks them in the job interview the following question, name a time you told the truth and it hurt you. And he wants to be sure that they sometimes are willing to put their Adam II above their Adam I. So I tell my students at Yale, "You've got to learn to fake that one." (Laughter) MS. COURIC: a good answer.

Come up with -- yeah, come up with

MR. BROOKS: Yeah. But I do think that -- so sometimes they go together, being a good person helps you in your career, but sometimes they are in tension, and I think the essence of the tension, which I tried to describe in the book, is that they operate by different logics. That when we're ambitious, and we're building a career, we're operating by the rules of economics, which is straightforward, which is input lead to output, practice makes perfect, effort leads to reward. And that's a worldly logic of how the market works. But the moral object is inverse, and the way you make moral

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progress is through a series of paradoxes. You have to give to receive, you have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself, success can lead to the greatest failure, which is arrogance and pride, failure can lead to the greatest success which is humility and learning. To find yourself you have to lose yourself. And so that's a bunch of paradoxes. And you know, if anybody reads Jewish thought, if anybody reads the Gospel of Matthew, the paradoxes are filled, and that's a moral education. It's a different process. And life is about trying to find the balance between the two. MS. COURIC: Are there any modern day figures who you think encompass sort of -- who are our modern moral exemplars, if you will? I mean, can you be a Warren Buffett and a Mother Teresa, and have both of those? MR. BROOKS: Yeah, I mean -- I think Buffett seems like a pretty admirable guy to me. You know, there's a guy I barely know, but I've read a lot of his work who exemplifies this trade, which is Atul Gawande, a surgeon in Boston, who seems to -- he operates on the body with a great sense of humility, that what he doesn't know about the body is vast, even a great surgeon like him. And so there's just a grace in his presentation, and a humility in the way he thinks about his role. I think my friend Samantha Power exemplifies a lot of these traits, is -- works in the practical world of diplomacy while retaining that passionate inner core that I think drove her to go into this. It's a very challenging -- I think it is so challenging to be in politics. MS. COURIC:

Are there any politicians?

(Laughter) MR. BROOKS:

You know, obviously Anthony Weiner,

and -(Laughter)

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MR. BROOKS: No, you know, the challenge for politicians is that they're -- they are their product. And every meeting is about them, and every billboard and ad is about them. And so in my experience is what they lose is the internal voice, the internal honest voice that gets hollowed out or sort of starved away. It's all public. And so the internal honest voice is lost. MS. COURIC: Well, it's hard to have an honest voice when it's all predicated upon polling, right? MR. BROOKS:

Right.

Exactly.

MS. COURIC: And what the impact is going to be on a certain position. MR. BROOKS: So we both covered John McCain in his glory days in 2000. And for whatever reason, he retained that honest voice. And if you got him in the right mood, then he would be completely honest about what he was doing, what he was doing wrong, what he was doing right. And I admire that so much about him. MS. COURIC: Well, that's why they called it the Straight Talk Express, right? MR. BROOKS: Yeah. No -- yeah. And so, yeah, we'd sit on that bus, and the way you got it going was to pick on somebody that he really didn't like and that -get his anger going. And so I remember we'd sit -- get on the van at 7:00 a.m. or the bus and say, "What do you think of Rick Santorum?" (Laughter) MR. BROOKS: And he was like "That's an asshole". And then he would go off and -- but then you had like a day of honesty. MS. COURIC:

What happened to him, though?

MR. BROOKS: Well, I think, for -- a lot of things happened when we get -- he felt he was burned by

29

the media. And then once he actually got the nomination eight years later, the public responsibility became so big that private -- maybe it's still there, I -- his relationship to the press is so different than it was then. And so -- and I confess I felt a little used because it seemed like we were friends, but it was just a using relationship. But I think it's very hard because you get punished driving in an honest voice. You really get punished for -MS. COURIC: Don't you think people are craving that though that even if they don't agree with your position, they're craving that authenticity and that they can live with a lot of things as long as they feel that you're being consistently true to yourself? MR. BROOKS: Yeah, I would love to test that proposition. I mean the politicians never do their -MS. COURIC: to, right?

I don't think anybody is willing

MR. BROOKS: Yeah. One of the stories I like is George H. W., the elder Bush. He was asked what it was like when he was shot down over the Pacific and he was in the water all alone, he didn't know what was happening, he might die floating there, and he was asked what were you thinking at that moment. And he said, well, you know, at that moment I'm out in the Pacific, and I'm thinking of my family, and I'm thinking of God, and then the little politician gear starts going and then he says, and I'm thinking of the separation of Church and State -(Laughter) MR. BROOKS:

Like --

MS. COURIC:

Really?

MR. BROOKS: Yeah. So they have this like selfchecking device. And -- but -- you know, you can imagine what it's like. You're the nominee of a party, millions of people, they're riding on you. You don't want to make a mistake. I mean Hillary Clinton is in this role right

30

now, and she's not exactly Ms. Authenticity right now. But maybe she feels, and I'm sure one would feel this, the burden of the whole party and the whole movement and maybe the whole country is upon you, you can't afford to just mouth off and be honest, you have to be so cautious. And I think it -MS. COURIC: she thinks by -MR. BROOKS: MS. COURIC: reporters about --

She has everything to lose I think Right. -- making a mistake or talking to

MR. BROOKS: Yeah. And I'm sure if she or people like that were here, she would blame us and say you guys sleep on mistakes as if -- and you guys treat disagreement as a gaffe and you're unforgiving when I do say something that I actually believe. MS. COURIC:

I think both are true, by the way.

MR. BROOKS:

Yeah.

MS. COURIC: Do you think that we can help the electorate with this sort of development of a moral compass or some kind of character and that can be applied to our civil discourse or is that just too far gone? Because I like the Solzhenitsyn quote that you mentioned at the end of it. You said the lines separating good -he said the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, nor between political parties, but right through every human heart. MR. BROOKS:

Yeah.

MS. COURIC: And it just seems to me that, gosh, that it's gotten so vitriolic and nasty and polarized. Do you have any hope that this sort of search for some kind of character in all of us and humanity in all of us can erase some of that negativity that's so pervasive now? MR. BROOKS:

Yeah.

I hope so.

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I mean I don't

have much hope. But one of the -- I recommend that people go to read Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address, which is famous because it was warning about the military industrial complex, but it's also a great exemplification of moderation. And moderation is not being mushy in the middle. It's understanding that politics is fundamentally a competition between partial truths and that mostly what we're trying to do is balance. We're just trying to achieve balance between freedom and security, between achievement and quality. Each party has a piece of the truth, and that you're just trying to find the right balance for that moment. And if you see politics that way, it's hard to hate the other side. And I think one of the things that has corroded public discourse is the -- if you go in with a modest sense of your own knowledge and know that -first of all that the other side has a piece of the truth, but also life is more complicated than you know and that you're probably wrong much of the time, and you need people on the other side to balance off your own wrongness, then you realize you depend on the people you disagree with if you have -- believe you have truth by the short hairs and the people you disagree with are just in the way. And so it's no accident to me that Rush Limbaugh's a very polarizing figure and also his affect is his great ego, because the two go together. And so, you know, I just think it's a question of knowing, you know, I'm probably at least partially wrong about this and that therefore we have to have excessive deference to the people and politeness toward the people who disagree with us. MS. COURIC: And I know you believe that with the gay marriage argument that the way to win over people who are staunchly defending religious liberty in the face of the Supreme Court decision need not self-righteousness than someone who is so convinced of their own truth, but slow kind of compassionate convincing, is that accurate? MR. BROOKS: Yeah. So, you know, I'm pro gay marriage, I've been pro gay marriage forever and probably like 90 percent of the people in this room, you know, my argument in the early days was not that we should allow

32

gay marriage, but we should coerce straight marriage, we should -- if we have a gay couple, we should say you're getting married, you getting married? You should get married. (Laughter) MR. BROOKS: But you know, right now, 37 percent of the country feels gay marriage is wrong, they feel it's being imposed upon them and they feel something precious is being lost. So let's put ourselves in their shoes. Most of them are Christian conservatives. So they have organized their life about the truth of God's scripture. And they've built their lives around that. They feel with a great certitude and a wonderful depth that that is the truth, that is how God wants us to live, he wants us to surrender, he wants to imitate Christ and service the society and service the poor. And their life has been built upon that. And in many ways it's wonderfully built upon that. And they have -- I mean the Christian conservatives do give more to the poor than liberals. They do serve in a thousand different ways to nurture the lonely, to serve the poor, to serve their communities, to serve their families. And the book that they regard as truth has certain sayings about marriage and about homosexuality, and so they revere that. At the same time, most of the ones I know, especially younger ones, know gay people, they love gay people in the individual form and they're wrestling, and they just want to know how to balance, and they're going through a walk. And some of them will say, no, I believe what the scripture tells me. Some of them are wandering in different ways, and I don't know where they're going to come out. But I see so much good-hearted wrestling in that community. I think, a) it's so hard for them. It's incumbent upon those of us who are for gay marriage to respect them and their moral commitments, to respect the wrestling, and just as a matter of practical politics, given how fast public opinion is moving on this issue, to make sure that they -- to allow them their space to wrestle and not turn this into a polarized issue. And I

33

say that on behalf of your kid who's closeted in Southern Indiana and you want to come out, if the temperature is low on this issue, it will be easy to come out. If in rural southern Indiana being pro-gay marriage is the same -- or being pro-homo -- gay rights is the same as being -or is perceived as being anti-religious, and we have a culture war on this, it's just going to be a lot harder for that kid in Southern Indiana. MS. COURIC: That's just an interesting, I think -- an important perspective. I have a couple more questions for David, but I know there's like so many people who probably want to ask you some questions. So I just urge you to get right to the point. Don't make a statement. Actually ask a good question if you can, and then we'll wrap things up. But my -- your biggest fan on the planet, my mother-in-law, Paula Moner (phonetic) -(Laughter) MS. COURIC: -- never asks questions, but she takes copious notes and she's the most intellectually curious person I know. Paula, do you have any questions for David? Here, here -- let's put -- yeah, let's put Paula on the mike. MR. BROOKS:

Old move with the mother-in-law.

MS. COURIC:

I hope I haven't embarrassed her.

MS. MONER: Thank you. I have a terrific daughter-in-law. We all know that. David, I'm wondering if there are -- people are characters in narrative fiction that embody some of your ideas, something -- someone in classical literature, someone in contemporary literature. And your description of yourself sounds a little as though it was written by Philip Roth. (Laughter) MS. COURIC:

I told you.

MR. BROOKS: That is a good question. It raised an embarrassing episode of my life. So this was -- when I

34

was in college, I was trying to be a writer and I was trying on different story -- different narrative modes. And I tried -- wrote a story about myself in the mode of one of Roth's earliest novels, Portnoy's Complaint. And it was not -- it was like he had a little edge especially about women. And my girlfriend at the time read it and hated me. It was like -- and I felt like saying no, that's me being Philip Roth, that's not the real me, so. (Laughter) MR. BROOKS: But I think literature has left us a lot of characters we would revere. In politics, I highly recommend Trollope and reading about Phineas Finn, about a young politician who struggles with the realities of politics. In -- but one of the things I say to my students is we're so blessed to have all these moral traditions left to us. And so there's Achilles who's a certain sort of moral figure, builds his morality about honor and courage and eternal glory. Pericles is about service to the state. He was obviously not -- he was a real person. But I guess my heroes are the Russians, and I'm a Tolstoy guy. And the anti-hero is the character Ivan Ilyich who discovers a depth -- a death what he -- that he's lived a life of shallowness and lived his life wrong until the instant of his death. But then there are a couple of characters who are just -- who exemplify some of the traits in the book. Levin, who is the character in Anna Karenina. And then the one thing that I will say on this mode, on the literary mode, is I think one of the things literature does is it teaches us not only to how to be, though I think it winds our repertoire of emotions and gives us examples of how to be, I think it teaches us how to see. And seeing the world accurately is phenomenally hard. And Tolstoy is the great seer. And for some reason the scene that's leaping to my mind is one of my favorite scenes in literature, it's in Anna Karenina and it's about Kitty, I'll try to make this brief. And he described the scene, she's getting ready for the ball, she's a young woman, she's probably 17, 19, and she's

35

getting ready for a ball and her dress is fitting perfectly, and her hair is perfect. And she has a velvet choker and it fits perfectly. And he describes, I don't know how Tolstoy did it unless his wife helped him, what it feels like to be putting on your costume and it's all just perfect. And she's got it going on. She's like just feeling it. And she goes to the ball and she's the bell of the ball, everybody is asking her to dance and she's swirling about and all eyes are upon her and she's just glowing, he describes this so accurately. And there's the man she's expecting to ask her to the final dance and she expects that he'll propose marriage. And she's swirling around, she sees his eyes, it's Vronsky and he's got a look of utter love in his eyes. And she swirls around again and she sees this look of utter love, but it's not directed at her, it's directed at another person, Anna Karenina. And Tolstoy describes how her all insides collapse. And in that description of that scene, it helps you identify what's actually going on inside your own life. You get the vocabulary and the repertoire -MS. COURIC: people, right?

And develop empathy for other

MR. BROOKS: Right. Yeah. Yes. My friend Christian Wiman says when you read a novel or a poem, you don't acquire new knowledge, you acquire a new experience. And so that's I think what literature does most for of us, just the act of seeing and feeling. MS. COURIC: We're almost out of time, so I'm just going to ask two wrap-up questions. Sorry, everyone, for those who wanted to ask David. You can bug him as he leaves the tent. But I think one important thing that I thought was really instructive about this book is the website you created, David. You wanted to hear from people about what experience they had that added value to their lives and developed their own personal character. And I think some of the things that you heard really surprised you. So can you talk about that? MR. BROOKS:

Yeah, some of them -- it was called

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theroadtocharacter.com if anybody wants to go on it, but I just asked people to describe their heroes, to describe their eulogies, or describe their purpose in life. And I expected a lot of the people to when asked what's my purpose in life to say I'm put on earth -- obviously I expect a lot of people to say this, to serve my family, but also to help end the -- help address global warming, or to help reduce poverty, or to teach the young. And I will say the teachers who wrote in had the firmest and clearest and most confident sense of their own purpose. And there are a couple of sad cases of people who retired from teaching and lost that sense of purpose and were in crisis because they'd had such fulfillment before. But the thing that surprised me was how many people didn't really have a vast sense of purpose. It was in the small acts of day-to-dayness that they found meaning, the small kindnesses. Then there's a beautiful thing written by a guy who's probably in his 80s. And he said, you know, I found a lot of my purposes in tending the garden in my backyard, and I had a tree killed by the frost, I'm going to plant another one, there are bushes that barely survive, I'm going to try to nurture them. And there was a small beauty to just in the way he described just the tending of his own garden in the backyard, which was small and modest, and maybe not what he thought he'd do at age 20, but he derived a sense of constancy and service just from planting a tree and tending the little garden. MS. COURIC: So when -- now that you've written the book and you've thought a lot of -- and talked a lot about these issues, how is your soul searching going and how would you describe ideally your own eulogy? Not that we're rushing that -MR. BROOKS: MS. COURIC: that at some point.

Yeah, right, yeah. But I think we all sort of think of

MR. BROOKS: Yeah, David Brooks died embarrassingly on the stage of the Aspen Ideas Festival.

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(Laughter) MR. BROOKS: Yeah, I've thought about that final question. Oh, first I would say that reading and writing a book doesn't get you there. Hopefully it can give you a roadmap, but it's actually in the action, the doing. And so -MS. COURIC: And you talk about that in the book, right? About the importance of setting examples for -MR. BROOKS: Yeah -- no -- and yeah, I have this passage from this guy, Dave Jolly (phonetic), who said what a wise person says is least of that which he gives, that it's a totality of actions. It's the small kindnesses, the way we treat people that gets communicated. The message is the person. And that's very true. Like I use the example of Pope Francis. I don't know much about the theological innovations he's doing for the church, but I know I really like the way he handles himself. The message is the person. And so I do think that's -- and reading and writing a book doesn't get you there, you've got to live it out. And I will say -MS. COURIC:

Have you changed?

MR. BROOKS: Well, we actually talked about this once at an airport line, in Aspen Airport if you remember this. I think it was 2 years ago. I was this sort of person nobody ever confided in because I had a shell. And starting maybe 2 years ago here at Aspen, I hopefully was opening up a little and I became a person more people confided in. And -- but I had no clue how to handle this. So it was like imagining leaving 51 years of Aspergeryness and then suddenly you have emotional experience -- not, that's an -- that's a bit of an exaggeration, but believe me, I didn't know what to do. And I happened to be behind Katie at the security line at the airport here and I just said what do you do when somebody comes to you like with a story about the death of a child or something. And I think you just said be present, hug. What did you tell me?

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MS. COURIC:

I think I said just listen.

MR. BROOKS:

Yeah.

MS. COURIC: And you know, let them -- I mean, be there for them. Yeah, be present and communicate, and yeah, just talk to them. MR. BROOKS: Yeah. Yeah. So I try to do that now. But it's -- so I think that's shifted. But whether I've become a better person, it would be -- no, I mean, maybe a little, but it's a lifelong thing, and progress is gradual and hard to measure. MS. COURIC:

And your eulogy?

(Laughter) MR. BROOKS: I mean, you know, I have purposes that I want from life. And I've got I hope 35-40 more years, and I know what my purposes are. I want to live in a house surrounded by love. I'd like to bring moral conversation into the secular public sphere like it used to be. I think we're over-politicized and under-moralized to what we talk about in public. And then, you know, I'd like to exemplify a certain way of behaving in the world as in political discourse. So I hope to have made some progress in the next 35 or 40 years toward those things. MS. COURIC: And I think you want to continue to be a person of humility, which I think you are. And God, you could be so the opposite, really. MR. BROOKS:

Yeah.

Yeah.

(Laughter) MS. COURIC:

Right?

MR. BROOKS: Yeah, but, I'll probably be known for the fatal drug binge in Vegas in 10 years. (Laughter)

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MS. COURIC: I don't think so. Well, it's always such a pleasure to talk to you and really to listen to you, David. Thank you so much. (Applause) *

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