This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Famed New York Times columnist David Brooks was raised in a secular Jewish household in New York City.
Episode Transcript
Lee
David
And so that's sort of the culture I grew up in - not the deepest, most spiritual culture - but occasionally there are moments in life where the spirit is awakened. And you realize you want to do better in life. And it was one of those times when life and time is suspended, and reality sort of spills outside its boundaries, and you feel like you've received a happiness which is greater than anything you could have deserved.
Lee
In this episode of Tokens, we listened to Brooks talk about his own life.
Lauren
And his book, The Road to Character.
Lee
Ah, yes. And I welcome a co-host for this episode, Lauren White. Welcome Lauren.
Lauren
Thanks Lee.
Lee
It's good to have you and welcome to you all.
I am delighted to welcome my colleague, Dr. Lauren Smelser white, who will be joining me as an occasional co-host on the podcast. Welcome Lauren.
Lauren
Thank you Lee.
Lee
It is very nice to have you here with us. Lauren has roots in Alabama, spent some time in Africa growing up, undergrad master's degree's in English Literature, then a PhD in theology. So Laura, and I'm just wondering, so you can kind of introduce yourself to some of our listeners, tell us three things that might surprise folks about someone who has a PhD in systematic theology from Vanderbilt university.
Lauren
Well, you might not guess that I was raised in the Church of Christ and that I remain in the Church of Christ as a systematician. You might not guess that I really enjoy sci-fi and horror films. And you might not guess that I wear makeup and get my hair highlighted. And I managed to hold all of that together.
Lee
Yes. And hold all of it together quite well. Yeah, one of these days we'll have to have more conversation about the horror literature thing.
Lauren
I'm just waiting for you to ask.
Lee
[Laughs] Well, I am excited about this episode today. I really geeked out the day we had this live Tokens Show event and David Brooks spoke.
Lauren
Understandably so, and I think he delivered on your geeky anticipation. He really delivered a lot with this speech. Every line of it seems to invite a lot of response.
Lee
Yeah. I was particularly delighted I got to ride in the car with him back to the Nashville airport, and for that 30 minutes, we talked about everybody from Stanley Hauerwas to Alasdair MacIntyre to, oh, I don't know, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton. It was a delightful sort of conversation there.
Lauren
Thank you. We're all jealous.
Lee
[Laughs]He is the only guy... of a lot of the interesting people I've gotten to do stuff with... I think he's the only guy that my wife Laura has ever said, “Well, you'll win points with me if you introduced me to David Brooks.”
Lauren
And did you win those points? That's the question.
Lee
I don't know. I think I might have gotten to introduce her very briefly, but I'm not sure about that. I finally did deliver on a good introduction. One night backstage at the Ryman, he and his wife had come into town and were at our show and got to introduce her then. And I think I won some points then.
Lauren
The question is how many points did you accumulate.
Lee
I have that in my little book of points. I haven't cashed those in yet. [Laughs]
Lauren
So Brooks is a famed New York Times columnist. He's been a regular on NPR as well as PBS News Hour. And on News Hour, he represents conservative thinking, of course, in the American sociopolitical scheme of things. And his conversation partner represents the liberal side of the divide, so to speak, but they've always sustained respectful and smart dialogue.
Lee
Yeah. And so it's wonderful to watch them be able to do that time and again. And so today we did this event for the Business With Purpose awards show at the Music City Center, downtown Nashville. Brooks that day was the honoree, and Tokens was doing the entertainment piece, helping produce the event. Brooks had just recently published The Road to Character and here's the first half. Of his acceptance speech.
Please welcome Mr. David Brooks.
[Applause]
David
Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to be here. This is far afield for me. I did grow up in New York City in lower Manhattan. I grew up in the sixties to somewhat left-wing parents. In 1965 they took me to a be-in, where hippies would go to central park just to be. And one of the things they did, they set a garbage can on fire and threw their wallets into the fire to demonstrate their liberation from money and material things. And I was five years old and I saw a $5 bill on fire in the garbage can. So I broke from the crowd, reached in the fire, grabbed the money and ran away. That was sort of my first step over to the right American life.
[Laughter]
And now I'm a conservative columnist at the New York Times, a job I likened to being the chief rabbi at Mecca.
[Laughter]
Not a lot of company there all the time. In New York, it was a different culture. I grew up in a Jewish household, but I sang in the choir, a church choir. I was part of the all Jewish boys, davening choir at Grace Church School. We would sing the hymns, but to square it with our faith, we wouldn't sing the word Jesus, so the volume would just drop down and come back up.
[Laughter]
Then I went off to the University of Chicago, which is a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students St. Thomas Aquinas.
[Laughter]
And then I lived for most of my adult life or pretty secular life. I think the most spiritual thing I did was I shopped at progressive enlightened grocery stores, like Trader Joe's and Whole Foods, where all the cashiers look like they're on loan from Amnesty International. My favorite section of the stores is the snack food section, where they don't have pretzels and potato chips - that would be vulgar - so they have these seaweed-based snacks for kids to come home and say, “Mom, mom, I want a snack that'll help prevent colorectal cancer.”
[Laughter]
And so if you go out there, you go out to the parking lot at these stores and that's usually Audis, Saabs, and Volvo's, ‘cause in certain neighborhoods it's socially acceptable to have a luxury car so long as it comes from a country hostile to US foreign policy, that's fine. And there's a group of women who I studied called the Uber moms who are highly successful career moms who take time off to make sure all their kids get into Harvard. And you can actually usually tell the Uber moms cause they weigh less than their own children. You know, in the moment of delivery they're cutting the umbilical cord themselves, adjusting the video lighting, flashing little Mandarin flashcards so that their kids can go off into Harvard.
[Laughter]
And so that's sort of the culture I grew up in, not the deepest and most spiritual culture, but occasionally there are moments in life where the spirit is awakened. And you realize you want to do better in life. And one of those came to me. I was... I do a show on PBS called The News Hour with a guy named Mark Shields. Our segment's called “Shields and Brooks.” We wanted to call it “Brooks Shields.” That would have been better, but didn't go for that. And I was coming home - it was about 10 years ago - and I pulled into my driveway in Maryland. And my driveway wraps around the side of the house. And I look in my backyard and my three kids who are then 12, 10, and 4 or so were in the backyard with one of those supermarket plastic balls. And they were kicking it up in the air and they were running across the yard, chasing it down, and they were laughing and smiling and tumbling all over each other. And it was one of those perfect summer evenings where the sun is coming through the trees, the grass looks perfect, and I'm just pulled into the driveway and I'm confronted by this tableau of family happiness. And parents will all remember these feelings. And I just sat there looking through the windshield, and it was one of those times when life and time is suspended, and reality sort of spills outside its boundaries, and you feel like you've received a happiness which is greater than anything you could have deserved. And it's a moment of grace. And when you have that moment, first, you feel so grateful to God for giving you that moment. But you also want to be worthy of it. You want to live a life that makes you a little worthy of those kind of moments. And so it lifts you up and wants you to raise your sights and your standards. I get that with those kinds of moments. Sometimes I get it when I meet someone who radiates an inner light. We probably meet these people like once a month, they just radiate with an inner joy. I was seated in Washington next to the Dalai Lama at a luncheon like this one. And I was sitting next to him, and he's a guy who radiates that joy. He laughs for no apparent reason. He'll just be sitting there and he'll just bust out laughing. And you want to be polite, so you bust out laughing, and then he busts out laughing. And so it was awkward sitting with him actually. And so I didn't know what to say, but he had a little canvas Dalai Lama bag. And so I said, “You got any candy in your bag?” And so he starts pulling out all this stuff in the bag and it's basically everything you get on the first class capita of an international flight. It's like a little razor, earpieces, eyepatch, big Toblerone bar. He's a global celebrity, but we all meet people like this who have that joy. And when I meet them, I think, you know, I've achieved way more career success than I ever thought I would, but I haven't achieved that. How do you get that? And I've come to believe there are four levels of happiness. This is not new to me. First there's material happiness: having a nice car, a nice house, good food. Then there's ego and comparative happiness: winning victories, being better than other people, a little status. Then there's generativity: the pleasure we get from giving back to our community. And the fourth and highest is transcendence: an awareness of one's place in God's order, and connection to a love that goes beyond the physical realm, a feeling of service to justice, goodness, beauty and home. And so I began to think, how do you get to that third and fourth level? One and two come kind of naturally, three and four are harder. And one of the things that I came up with is a distinction between a belief that we have two sets of virtues. We have the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues. Resume are the things that make us good at our jobs. The eulogy ones are the ones they say about you after you're dead, whether you're courageous, honest, honorable, capable of great love. And you develop the resume virtues through a marketplace logic, which is straightforward. Input leads to output. Practice makes perfect. Effort leads to reward. but the eulogy virtues don't operate by that logic. They operate by a moral logic, which is filled with inversions and paradoxes, and will be familiar to anybody who reads Matthew. 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 can lead to the greatest failure, which is arrogance and pride. Failure can lead 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. And so I wrote a book about 11 people who, at 20, they were pathetic. By 70, they were magnificent. And I want us to know how they did it. And one of the things all my characters did was they had humility. Humility is radical self-awareness from a position of other centeredness. They saw their own strengths, but they also saw that moment where they were broken: that spot where their core sin was. One of the characters was Dwight Eisenhower. When he was nine, he wanted to go trick-or-treating. And his mom wouldn't let him. She said he was too young. So he threw a temper tantrum and punched the tree in the front yard so badly. He rubbed all the skin off his fingers. His mom let him go cry in his room for an hour, and then she came, bound his wounds, and recited a verse from Proverbs, which was, “He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who take up the city.” And when - I co-wrote his memoir 60 years later - he said that was the most important conversation of his life because it taught him that he had a sin, which in his case was passion and anger. And if he was going to amount to anybody, he had to wage a remorseless, inner drama, an inner conflict against his sin. And he spent the rest of his life trying to defeat his temper. And he did little trivial things. Like he was a big hater, he hated people. So he'd write their names on pieces of paper and rip them up, of the people he hated, just as a way to purge hatred. And he ended up creating a persona and a character, which was optimistic, and charming, and friendly, and confident. And so what my characters did was they identified, “What's my core sin?” Is it fear? Is it greed? Is it vanity? Is it shallowness? And they worked on it. But after I got done the book, I noticed a couple of things that I didn't realize writing the book. The first was all my characters had amazing moms, their dads were eh, but their moms were amazing. And I recently came across a study of World War II GIs. They were all recruited or drafted as privates. Some of them rose and became majors, some state private. So what correlated with the ability to rise? Was it intelligence? No correlation. Was it social status? No correlation. Was it physical courage? No correlation. It was relationship with mom. The guys who were capable of receiving love from their mother knew how to give love to their men, and they became officers. The second thing all my characters had the ability to do was make amazing commitments. Commitments, which are promises to things outside themselves. To me, a commitment is falling in love with something, and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters. And so some of them made a commitment to the cause of worker safety. Some made a commitment to the US army (George Marshall). Some made a commitment to writing. Some made a commitment to living a life of poverty and serving the poor.
Lee
You are listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life. We are most grateful to have you joining us. Please go over and leave us one of those five star reviews on Apple podcasts and subscribe there, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts.
Lauren
And remember, you can find our links, photos, books, and related videos from our extensive YouTube channel, all at Tokensshow.com/podcast. This is our episode with New York Times columnist David Brooks. Coming up is a bit of halftime color commentary.
Lee
Indeed. I want to hear Lauren, from a mother, about the last thing Brooks had to say there.
Lauren
Part two in just a moment.
Lee
You are listening to Tokens and our episode with New York Times columnist and author David Brooks on his book The Road to Character. Lauren, before we jump back in, I was wondering, as a mother, what do you think there of Brooks's claim that having a good mother is an important factor to the good life?
Lauren
Well, I felt a bit torn in listening to him, because on the one hand, obviously he's elevating the role of the mother and explaining just how important the maternal figure is in a person's development and just showing how powerful that role is in someone's life. On the other hand, the way he's framed it, I thought, you know, in listening to the speech and not having read the book, I assumed that his great characters were all men. And so it was interesting to me - when I went and did a little bit of digging, I found that he actually writes about women, Frances Perkins, Dorothy Day. And I just was curious to hear more about them as this kind of prototype of greatness?
Lee
Yeah. Yeah. If anything, it would be fascinating to even hear him talk about how the mother is relating to a woman...
Lauren
Absolutely.
Lee
… and how that plays out there. So, yeah, that makes lots of sense. Alright. Well, here's the rest of Brooks's speech in which he's discussing traits of individuals he studies who, in his words, at age 20 were pathetic and at age 70 were magnificent.
David
Some of them made a commitment to the cause of worker safety. Some made a commitment to the US army (George Marshall). Some made a commitment to writing. Some made a commitment to living a life of poverty and serving the poor. They made the kind of covenant that Ruth made to Naomi. Where you go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. And I came to believe that a successful life, a fulfilling life that reaches level four, that produces inner joy, depends on how well we make four big commitments in our lives. We make a commitment to a spouse and a family. We make a commitment to a vocation. We make a commitment to a philosophy or faith. And we make a commitment to a community. And it's how well we choose those things, and it's how will we execute and persist in those choices, that determines the fulfillment and the joy of our lives. And so I began thinking about commitment-making. How do you make it? How do you decide who to marry? I tell college presidents all the time, you know, your students, the most important decision they're going to make in life is who to marry. So every course in college should be about how to choose a marriage partner, literature of marriage, psychology of marriage, neuroscience of marriage. Nobody listens to me by the way.
[Laughter]
But making a commitment, whether it's to a faith or to a marriage partner or to a vocation or community, is something you're trying to project years into the future. You can't think your way through this problem. The only thing you can do is fall in love with the problem. You can only do it by falling deeply in love with something - by falling in love with the city, by falling in love with a person, by falling in love with the career - because it is that love that will fuse you together. There's a great quote in a book called Captain Corelli's Mandolin. An old guy is talking to his daughter about his love for his wife and he says, “Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it. We had roots that grew toward each other underground. And when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches, we found that we were one tree and not two.” That's loving in a way that fuses people together. The second thing about a commitment is it has to be a love that's morally ratified. We all have a desperate search for meaning in our lives, to feel that our life has meaning, has holiness. We don't have a word in our language for the desire for holiness, but it's there in each of us. Viktor Frankl, a great psychologist, wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning. And he found the people who could survive in the camps, the concentration camps where he lived for four years, were those who found something, some purpose and some meaning in life to serve. And sometimes it was only the thought of a person or a spouse outside the camp who they were going to live in a way that upheld the dignity of that person. And they were going to think of that person hourly and daily. And they were going to realize the love for that person made all that they suffered worthwhile. And it's that hunger for holiness, for meaning and purpose, that ratifies our commitments. The next thing I thought is, okay, we're motivated by commitment to a desire to have purpose, a desire to fall in love, but how do we take a commitment and make it last through reality, through the tests of the years?
Well, the first thing we do is by truth. We're honest about it. We're honest about ourselves. There's a great quote from John Ruskin, who's a 19th century art critic. He said, “The more I think of it, the more I find this conclusion more pressed upon me: the greatest thing a human soul ever does is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think. But thousands can think for one who can see.” The ability to see reality clearly is just not an automatic trait. It's something you have to work on by reading and writing and thinking.
The second thing that disciplines a commitment is craft. We all have our professional disciplines. A surgeon lays out his instruments. A musician plays scales. I'm a writer. And my writing process involves a certain discipline that structures my day. I do it every day. I've done it since age seven from about 8:00 to 11:00 AM, and the way I write, I have a really bad memory, so I take all my thoughts and put them on note pads. And if I write a column, I'll have two or three hundred pages of research documents, and I lay them out in piles on my floor. And each pile is a paragraph in my column. So my column is only 806 words, but I'll have 14 or 15 piles on the floor. And for me, the act of writing is not the act of typing into the keyboard. It's the act of crawling around on the floor, organizing my piles, and when it's going well and thoughts are coming to me and I'm writing more ideas down, it's an act that feels almost like prayer. And that professional discipline organizes our commitments day to day.
The third thing that organizes a commitment and helps us persist in it, even when times get tough, is a community. It's a community of people who are looking over each other's shoulders, giving each other advice and passing down virtues. I have a friend who lives in Northern Louisiana named Roger, and his daughter lived in this small town - was named Ruthie - and unfortunately Ruthie died when she was in her early forties. But she was one of these people with the inner light. She was a teacher; maybe there are 800 people in the small town, but there are about 2000 people who showed up at the funeral because she touched so many lives. And she loved to go barefoot, so her husband was a fireman, and the firemen who carried her casket to the grave carried it barefoot. But one of the things Ruthie did for her community was on Christmas Eve, she thought the dead should be remembered. And so what she did, she went to the town cemetery, and every Christmas Eve, she would take a candle and light a candle on each gravestone. And she happened to die just before Christmas, and Rod, my friend, was sitting with his mom on the night of the funeral and it was Christmas Eve. And he said to his mom, “Should we do what Ruthie did and go to the cemetery and put a candle on each grave?” And his mom said, “You know, most years I'd love to do that. But this year, it's just too hard. I just couldn't get through it.” And so they said not to do it that year, but they were driving to another family event across town, and they drove by the cemetery and somebody else in the community had gotten candles and put it on each grave. And that's a community picking up the habits of the community and spreading it from person to person.
And these are the things that discipline the commitments, the four big commitments we make in our life. And I think if we make them well, we taste an inner peace that you never get from professional success. One of my favorite characters in the book is St. Augustine who lived like 1500 years ago, was born in North Africa. And he had a mom named Monica who was the helicopter mom to beat all helicopter moms. She, like, told them what to think, who to befriend, how to spend his time, who to marry, who not to marry. And they had conflict. And he said “I got to get away from her.” So he snuck onto a boat headed toward Italy. She's on the shore, screaming at him, “Get back here.” She gets on the next boat. She tracks him down in Italy and she finally, you know, they're just fighting their whole life. But when she's 59 and he's in his 30s and he's had his conversion experience, they're in a village in Italy called Ostia. And they're sitting in a garden, and she says to him, “You know, all my life I've wanted you to be a certain sort of Christian and you've become that kind of Christian. So my work here on this earth is done. I'm ready to go. I thought I wanted to die back in Africa, but God is everywhere. He'll find me.” And in fact, nine days later, she does die. And Augustine in his book The Confessions describes their final conversation after all the conflict. And it's this conversation he says “that rises above the material world into the realm of pure spirit.” And they have this harmonious, sweet conversation. And then there's a sentence as he's describing that conversation, which is really hard to understand; it's really long. And you can't quite figure out what he's saying, but he's got a word that he repeats through that sentence, and that word is “hushed.” And so he says the sound of the wind in the trees was hushed. The sound of the birds was hushed. The sound of our voices was hushed. The sound of our hearts was hushed. And he just goes on: hushed, hushed, hushed. And what he captures is a level of tranquility and peace and grace that comes, I think, after a life well led based on solid moral values, based on strong commitments, based on loves carried through. And I do think that's what we were all born and blessed to seek. Thanks very much.
Lee
I do love that speech.
Lauren
Yeah. Tell us why.
Lee
He's talking about such significant and important things, and he's able to do it in a way that is simultaneously serious but not overbearing, and even funny. And you can have people who disagree with him, but they ended up laughing and engaging his stuff. And so I think that's one of the things that makes it such a winsome speech. And I think the second thing is that he talks about how these moments of grace happen. And those moments of grace are these occasions in which you find you want to live a better life. And I thought, that's what this speech is to me - even though I, you know, I might say some of the things differently than he says - I look at it and I think I ended up wanting to be a better person and explore more the meaning of a good life after listening to him talk.
Lauren
Yeah, this really made me think about vocation. And I loved the image he painted of his act of writing is almost like an act of prayer. And it made me think about, we all have those things in our lives that draw us into... it's our work, but it's also something holy in a sense that we're offering up. And I think that's such a different sense of vocation than - what is it, he called the resume virtues?
Lee
Yeah, resume virtues and eulogy virtues.
Lauren
But it's interesting how what ends up on our resume could actually give us a hint at what that passion would be that would guide us into that kind of holy work.
Lee
Yeah. I've thought - once I heard that speech live - I've thought numerous times in my own writing, I'll flashback to him, talking about having those piles of research papers on his floor and crawling around and finding those as a sort of encouragement to think of framing my work in that sort of posture of prayer and commitment.
Lauren
Absolutely. He even inspired me to think about trying new methods, refreshing what can start to feel like mundane tasks.
Lee
Yeah. Other things you thought about the speech?
Lauren
I really, I like you appreciated the range, the humor woven together with something more philosophical and reflective, and the calling us to think about those hushed moments in life. You know, when he painted the picture of his family in the yard, I also thought about... we all have those moments in our own lives. So I think there's an invitation here to leave having heard the speech with that kind of vision to pay attention to those moments throughout our week.
Lee
Yeah. Well, it's great to have you with us today. Looking forward to having you back again soon.
Lauren
It's great to be with you.
Lee
Well, you've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life. Thank you for joining us. Please remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Please remember to refer us to a fellow podcast listener. If you have feedback we'd love to hear from you, email us a text or attach a voice memo and send it to the address podcast@tokensshow.com.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that make this podcast possible. Our co-host today Lauren Smelser White. Executive producer and manager, Christie Bragg of Bragg Management. Co-producer Jacob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios. Associate producer Leslie Thompson of Rogue Creative Marketing and Media. Our associate producer Ashley Bayne. Engineer Cariad Harmon. Production assistant Cara Fox. And our live event production team at Stonebrook Media led by Phil Barnett. Thanks for listening and peace be unto thee. The Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC, and Great Feeling Studios, both in Nashville, Tennessee.