David Brooks/david-brooks-new-york-times
By Robert Chalmers
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Call me stubborn, I tell David Brooks, but I've never got along with self-help books. I may have been buying the wrong ones.
To be fair to Brooks, the scale and ambition of his new book, The Road to Character, offers the reader a very different kind of challenge than most of the genre.
"I wrote this book," as he puts it, "to save my soul."
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"How's that going?"
"I am not a great person," he says, "but I'm a better person for having written it. I have a clear sense of right and wrong."
Brooks, 53, is a columnist for The New York Times employed, he says, as "a narcissistic blow-hard." He's an amiable if instinctively reserved figure – how could you dislike a man who dispenses advice such as "Wisdom starts with epistemological modesty" and then gets trapped in the lift doors on our way to a London rooftop bar?
Brooks' thesis is that we have become obsessed with what he calls "resumé virtues" – things like market skills and self-promotion – and neglected "eulogy virtues" such as kindness, abstinence and humility. We could benefit from studying the old-world values of figures including Eisenhower and George Eliot, just two of the many subjects of biographical sketches which constitute the main part of the book.
The Road to Character concludes with Brooks' 15-point "Humility Code," I read Point Two out loud, replacing the "we" in the original text with the first person pronoun.
"[I] have an innate tendency towards overconfidence," it begins. "[I] underestimate my own failures."
"Now that," I tell Brooks, "really isn't me at all. Dwelling on my own failures? I do little else. Ask anyone."
"But 90% of people are not like you. They believe that they have above-average leadership skills."
"Are you saying I'm weird?"
"You are clearly ... unusual. And consequently," Brooks adds, with just a hint of mischief, "should be celebrated."
The notion of transgression, he believes, needs reclaiming, as "Sin is a necessary part of our mental furniture."
"I know what you mean about sin and furniture. I keep mine, to quote Vivian Stanshall, 'in the wardrobe of my soul; in the section labelled Shirts'."
"Personally," Brooks replies, "I keep my sin with my pants."
His book advises us to "do what others don't want to do; go where others don't want to go" next to which, in my copy, I tell him, appears the hand-written note: "Burnley." This leads us to debate another passage on the sins of disrespect and mockery. Disrespect, the text mentions, is traditionally absolved by three steps: "apology, cleansing and restitution."
"I don't recall that," he says, "I've made a living out of mockery."
"Are you sure," I reply, "you should be preaching the wisdom of renouncing worldly ambition while hammering around the world plugging your work like a free market whore ... sorry, that was possibly not the best choice of words there."
"The paradox you mention is not lost on me. But I do want people to read my book."
"One critic attacked your 'blinkered, glib moral instruction' and identified a 'passive-aggressive nostalgia for what somebody told Brooks "outdoors" might have been like long ago'."
"I believe that, over the centuries, smart people had incredibly valuable perceptions. But I don't live in the past. People stereotype me as a fogey. I am not. I go to hip-hop concerts."
"Pardon?"
"I listen to Kendrick Lamar. I was at a Nas concert not long ago."
"Has writing this book really changed you?"
"Yes. I'm more vulnerable. I used to be somebody people didn't confide in."
"Why not?"
"I didn't project an ability to listen."
"You should have taken your headphones off."
"I had metaphorical moral headphones on. People didn't associate me with an intimate life. Now, when people have a trauma, they talk to me."
As we say goodbye I sense that Brooks feels the tone of our conversation has been marginally less elevated than it could have been. At least now, if I was occasionally guilty of committing the sin of disrespect, I'm aware of the remedial steps: remorse, cleansing, and restitution. So if I did transgress, David, I'd like you to know that I apologise, I'm running a bath, and the money's in the post.
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