THE ASPEN INSTITUTE
ASPEN IDEAS FESTIVAL 2016
THE FOUR COMMITMENTS: THE CHOICES THAT CREATE YOUR LIFE
Greenwald Pavilion
Rio Grande Trail
Aspen, Colorado
Friday, July 1, 2016
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LIST OF PARTICIPANTS
David Brooks
Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times
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THE FOUR COMMITMENTS:
THE CHOICES THAT CREATE YOUR LIFE
(5:15 p.m.)
MR. BROOKS: Thank you -- first I should thank
Mr. Vice President. Thank you and Dr. Biden for coming.
If something happens to me, you're taking over.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: If that does happen, we will be
adjourning at about 2:00 a.m.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: It's a pleasure to be here. I come
here to get out of Washington and get in touch with the
real America.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
MR. BROOKS: I don't see what people are
complaining about, it seems okay to me but -(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: Now I'll be brief. I've been at
Aspen Ideas Festival for many years and I know you didn't
come here to hear me speak, you came here to hear yourself
speak.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
MR. BROOKS: I'll try to get out of the way of
that. Now I did a little comedy routine at the Comedy
Night the other night and one of the things -(Applause)
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MR. BROOKS:
little of it again.
Thank you. You're about to hear a
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: One of the things I tried to
explain to that crowd is that I'd just written a book on
character, and writing a book on character does not give
you good character, reading a book on character does not
give you a good character, buying a book on character on
the other hand -(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: -- does give you good character.
And what I tried to explain to that crowd was a life of
spiritual ambition. I was born -- like a lot of Jewish
children, I was immaculately conceived.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: I was a little spiritually out of
place as a child. I went to Grace Church School in Lower
Manhattan. I was part of the all Jewish boys davening
choir at Grace. We would sing the hymns but to square
with our religion, we wouldn't sing the word "Jesus" so
the volume would sort of drop down and come back up.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: But I was spiritually ambitious.
thought I'd join a religion but I wanted to join at the
top as deity. I thought that would be good.
I
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: But then when I was 18, the
admissions officers at Columbia, Brown and Wesleyan
decided I should go to the University of Chicago.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: And my favorite thing about Chicago
is it's a back to school where atheist professors teach
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your students St. Thomas Aquinas.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: And then I moved to New York and
got shallow. I told the crowd I started a business
selling man bun toupees. You should come out to Aspen
where there's a certain creature I'm fascinated by in
Aspen who are these old guys who come out here to retire
and they're billionaires and they've just decided to not
die.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: And so they hire these six personal
trainers, they're popping Cialis like breath mints.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: They are shrunk down to like 90
pounds, five-foot-two and if you're hiking up a mountain,
they zoom right by you, little waves of contempt going
past them. It's like being passed like by a little iron
Raisinet going up the mountain there.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: And then finally as I got older, I
got a little more feminine and spiritually open. I'm the
only man in America to have read that book Eat Pray Love.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS:
I was lactating by page 123.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: But I was still trying to develop,
you know, some soul. And so one of the things I did to
become spiritually improved was I would shop at
progressive grocery stores like Trader Joe's and Whole
Foods where the cashiers look like they're on loan from
Amnesty International.
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(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: My favorite section, I've told this
joke before, is they -- the snack food section. And they
couldn't have pretzels and potato chips -- that would be
vulgar. So they have these seaweed-based snacks, we used
to get Veggie Booty with Kale, which is for families who
want -- or kids who come home and say, "Mom, mom, I want a
snack that'll help prevent colorectal cancer."
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: I mean, that's for them. And so
you try these lame things to be spiritually sophisticated.
But spiritual elevation comes at the strangest moments.
And it came for me about 10 years ago, I had one of those
moments. I do a show on Friday nights called the NewsHour
with Jim Lehrer.
(Applause)
MR. BROOKS: Thank you. And I do it with a guy
named Mark Shields, our segment it's Shields and Brooks.
We wanted to call it Brooks Shields, that would have been
better, but they didn't go for that.
(Applause)
MR. BROOKS: It's Shields and Brooks. Before me
it was Shields and Gigot, Shields and Gergen, Shields and
Calvin Coolidge -(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS:
started out as.
-- Shields and, I think, Plato it
But I came home, it was about 10 years ago, and
I was living in Bethesda, Maryland and it was about 7:30
at night. And I drive in at my driveway, which is sort of
wrapped around the house. And my three kids were then
like 12, 9 and 4. We're in the backyard and they had one
of these supermarket balls. And they were kicking it up
in the air, this plastic ball, and they were chasing
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across the yard to get to the ball, and they were tumbling
all over each other, and they were laughing, and they were
giggling and just putting a pile of kids on top of a ball.
So I pull into the driveway and I see this
tableau, all parents have seen it, of just perfect family
happiness. And I just sit there in the car looking at it
through the windshield. And it's one of those moments
when life and time feel like they're suspended. And I had
a feeling of being overwhelmed with gratitude. Reality
sort of spills outside its boundaries, you've experienced
a joy that's greater than anything you ever feel at work
and you -- you're sort of alerted to a higher joy. And
you want to be worthy of such moments. And that's a
moment where gratitude and really grace, unmerited love,
lifts you up and inspires you to try to be higher.
I get those moments sometimes with those kinds
of experiences and sometimes I get it when I meet somebody
who radiates an inner light. You meet these people about
every 30 days or so, or maybe more often if you're lucky,
where they just radiate an inner light.
I was saying the other day that one of the
people I met at a Washington function, of all places, was
the Dalai Lama, and he just radiates that light. He's a
sort of person who laughs for no apparent reason. And so
he starts laughing and then I -- I'm sitting next to him
and I want to be polite, so I started laughing. And he
laughs and I laugh and, like, I feel I should insert a
joke just to justify the laughter -(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: -- and the one thing I said was
that, I was nervous, so he has a little canvas Dalai Lama
bag, so I said, "You got any candy in your bag?" And so
he starts pulling out what's in the bag and it's
everything you get in the first class cabin with
international flights.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS:
It's like the earplugs, eye patch,
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little razor, Toblerone bar. But when you're around
people like that you think, at least I think, "You know,
I've achieved way more career success than I ever thought
I would." But that inner light, the ability to glow with
joy and grace, that I don't have. And how do you get
that?
There's a Catholic writer named Robert Spitzer
who reminds us there are four levels of happiness.
There's material pleasure: having good food, nice
clothing, good sex, beautiful car; there's ego comparative
pleasure: winning status and popularity, being a success
in the marketplace, getting a little famous maybe; third,
there's generativity: the pleasure you get from
contributing to others, serving a community, helping the
poor. And fourth and finally, there's transcendence, and
this is the highest level of joy and happiness, an
awareness that comes from knowing one's place in the
cosmic order, a connection to a love that goes beyond the
physical realm, a feeling of connection to an
unconditional truth and unconditional love, a political
ideal, justice, goodness, beauty and home.
And getting one and two are easy, we're all sort
of wired for that. Getting three and four are harder.
And so I had written this book a few years ago on how do
you move from level one and two to level three and four.
And I didn't know if I could do it. But I wanted to read
about people who did and I wanted to study those people.
So I wrote a book and I -- the distinction, it
was called The Road to Character and the distinction at
the beginning of the book was between the eulogy and the
resume virtues. The resume things are they make you good
at your job. The eulogy virtues are those that -- the
things they say about you after you're dead, are you
honorable, courageous, brave, capable of great love.
And I quoted Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik who said, "We are
both these sides of our nature and there are sometimes
intention." And so I wanted to know how did people and
the characters in my book were all kind of pathetic at age
20, they were not made great, but they were magnificent by
age 70, they did something special with their lives to
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improve their souls. And so I don't know what was that.
And the core theme of the book was that it's the inner
drama against our own weaknesses, that we each have a sin,
whether it's vanity or greed or fear, and how we fight
against that sin is what determines the quality of our
character. And so we all should sit down and think what
is my core sin. Mine is shallowness, by the way.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: And so one of the characters, for
example, in the book was Dwight Eisenhower. When
Eisenhower was seven or nine, something like that, he
wanted to go out trick-or-treating. His mom, this amazing
woman named Ida, wouldn't let him. And he threw a temper
tantrum and punched the tree in the front yard and he
punched it so bad he rubbed all the skin off his fingers.
And Ida sent him to his room, let him cry for an hour but
then went up to bound -- bind his wounds and recited a
verse from Proverbs and the verse was, "He that -- he who
conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a
city."
And 60 years later when Eisenhower wrote his
memoirs, he said that was the most important conversation
of his life because it taught him he had problem, which
was his anger, and his passion and his temper. And if he
was going to make anything of himself, he would have to
confront that problem. And he really did.
We think of him as this garrulous, country club
kind of guy, that was creation. He -- during the World
War II, I'm going to pick the right word -(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: -- and during the presidency, at
night, he was up at night not sleeping, smoking, drinking,
throat cancer, blood pressure spikes, but he knew he could
not lead from that position of anger. And so he had to
project confidence, optimism and cheerfulness. And he did
that as an act of will and practice. Some of his devices
were silly. He was a hater, he would hate people, so he'd
write their names on pieces of paper and rip them up and
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throw them in the garbage can, just as a purging device.
And that was my main thesis in the book. But
there's some things you will recognize a book after it
comes out. And one of the things I recognized about my
characters is they all had amazing mothers. And I didn't
realize when I was writing the book, their dads were "eh",
but the moms were amazing.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: And I came across this study just a
couple of weeks ago of soldiers in World War II. And the
soldiers, they -- all these guys got drafted in the Army
in World War II but some of them rose and were promoted up
to major, some stayed at low ranks or private or
something. So what factor determined or correlated with
getting promoted? Was it IQ? No, no correlation. Was it
social status? No correlation. Was it physical courage?
No correlation.
The number one correlation between getting
promoted was love of mother. The guys with amazing
relationships with their moms had received vast bucketfuls
of love and were able to offer that love to their men, and
they became good officers. And so that was one thing I
realized about my characters, they all had amazing moms
and they were infused with love.
The second thing is they were capable of making
amazing commitments. And my book was too individualistic.
When you look at the characters from a little further
back, they were all capable of really connecting and
attaching deeply to institutions outside themselves. One
of my characters was Dorothy Day. And she was a -- I
always say about her, she was the sort of person she would
read novels but she couldn't just read them, she acted out
the character, she acted like the characters she was
reading about, and unfortunately she read a lot of
Dostoevsky -(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS:
-- and so she's like drinking,
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carousing, living in poverty. But her life was turned
around when she was about 30 when she gave birth to her
daughter. And she realized during pregnancy all the
accounts of childbearing she'd ever read were written by
men. And so 40 minutes after the birth of her daughter
she wrote one, it's a very beautiful essay, but it
culminates with this passage, "If I had written the
greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the
most beautiful painting, or carved the most exquisite
figure, I could not have felt the more exalted creator
than I did when they placed my child in my arms. No human
creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love
and joy, as I felt after the birth of my child."
With this came a need to worship and to adore.
She needed somebody to thank. She found God at that
moment. She became a Catholic. She started Catholic
Worker newspaper, she started a homeless shelter, a soup
kitchen and spent the next 60 years of her life not only
serving the poor, but living a life of poverty in the poor
-- in amongst the poor, and just a long commitment, along
obedience in the same direction for 60 years.
Another of my characters was a woman named
Frances Perkins. She was having tea in 1913 in Lower
Manhattan, she hears a commotion, she runs outside, she
stumbled across one of those famous fires in American
history, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. She runs
up to it and she sees what she thinks are bundles of
clothing being thrown out of the tenth floor window. But
it's like 9/11, human beings are leaping to their death
rather than being burned to death. And she sees a guy
hoist seamstresses across the windowsill and drop them
into space. He does a first, a second, a third, fourth is
his girlfriend who he kisses and drops her and then he
goes. And that was what you might call her call within a
call. She was already sort of a do-gooder, an activist,
but that moment purified her ambition to do good. And she
-- she would work with anybody, compromise with anybody,
she'd a fierce ambition to serve the cause of worker
safety and spent the next 50 years of her life serving
that cause culminating as Secretary of Labor under
Franklin Roosevelt, the first woman in the cabinet.
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And so the people that I was writing about, they
were not only combating something in themselves, they were
committing and making a covenant to people around them,
the kind of covenant that Ruth made to Naomi in the Bible:
"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 so our inner natures are formed by our outer
promises. And when you think about it, life is just a
forum for promise making. There are obvious promises we
make. At a marriage ceremony we promise to love and serve
our spouse. But there are silent promises that pervade
life. Even me standing up here, I'm making a promise to
you that I'm going to do my best to give you an
interesting talk. When you go to a dinner party, you're
making a promise to be civil, kind, and attentive to your
host. We are constantly making promises to each other.
And it's our promises that define us.
Hannah Arendt wrote, "Without being bound to the
fulfillment of our promises, we would never be able to
keep our identities. We would be condemned to wander
helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each
person's lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and
equivocalities."
So since the book came out, I've been thinking a
lot about promises and commitments. What is a commitment?
Well, it is a form of promising, but it's a little more.
Making a commitment means falling in love with something
and then building a structure behavior around it for those
moments when love falters because our commitments really
stretch long into time and it's not always fun to keep a
commitment, but you keep it because you built a structure
behavior around it.
And I came to the conclusion that to live a
fulfilled life, we make four big commitments: to a spouse
and a family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and
to a community. Now, only one of these commitments comes
with a big ceremony at the beginning, the marriage. But
in some sense we are making a commitment and having a
ceremony in honor of all those commitments.
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We happen to live in a community that makes
commitment making hard. We live in a society filled with
decommitment devices -- the Internet, our watches, our
phones. How do you make a lifelong commitment if you
can't keep your attention for more than 30 seconds on one
thing? We have a culture, and I teach in college, we have
a culture of FOMO, fear of missing out. If you commit to
one thing, you miss all the other goodies down the road.
We have a culture of fear. I know a lot of
people are paralyzed by indecision because they're afraid
of making the wrong commitment. We have a culture of
autonomy that we should be self-contained creatures true
to our inner selves.
And we also have a false definition of freedom.
We think freedom is keeping options open, living in a life
that's unencumbered and preserving room for future
choices. But to me, that's -- I found in my life that's a
recipe for frazzlement, a state of being harried,
multitasking, distraction, that a lot of us live in a lot
of the time.
And one of the things I've really thought in the
last few weeks is that if you spend your years keeping
your options open, you live an impotent, fragmented life.
You'll wander about in the indeterminacy of your own
passing feelings and changeable heart. Life will just be
a series of temporary moments, not an accumulating
building flow of accomplishments. You'll never be all-in
for anyone or any path because your eyes will always be
wandering over to some other possibility. You will lay
waste to your powers, scattering them in all directions.
And the effect of having a lot of people like
that, we have a fragmented and isolated society. When
many people live a life arm's length to their commitments,
we have loneliness and public fragmentation, polarization
in our politics. You contribute to social isolation that
we see around us, which leads to rising suicide, addiction
rates, rising mental illness, greater inequality, falling
social trust, strained family bonds and a loss of national
cohesion.
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So when you think about it, to make commitments
in this culture, you have to buck the surrounding culture,
you have to be a little countercultural and you go after - have to go after the higher freedom that comes when
you've chained yourself to a political cause or a cultural
cause or as group of people or a philosophy or faith.
It's our restraints that liberate us for a higher freedom.
You have to chain yourself to years of piano practice if
you have -- want to have the freedom to really play well.
As the Pastor Tim Keller puts it, "Freedom is
not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the
right ones." And so I've spent a lot of time thinking
about commitment making, how does it happen, how do you
make commitments. And when you make a commitment, whether
it's to a philosophy, to a faith, going to med school,
joining the Marine Corps, entering nursing school, it's
super hard because you're binding yourself for years in
the future. And you've got to know what you really love,
which is a very difficult thing to know. And not only
that, you've got to know what your future self is going to
love.
Philosophers have a concept they call the
vampire problem. So suppose somebody came to you and
said, "Would you like to be a vampire for the rest your
life? You could fly around at night, you can live
forever. You'll have all these magical powers, be cool."
Well, you might think, "Maybe." But the problem is you as
your human self don't know what it will feel like to be a
vampire self. The act of making that decision is going to
change who you are.
And so we have a lot of decisions we make in
life that are vampire decisions. For example, having
kids. Having kids will change who you are. So the
decision to have kids, you're as your private -- your
single parent -- childless self trying to imagine who will
I be as a parent, you have no way of knowing. Joining the
military will change who you are. Getting married will
change who you are. You have to take all these blind
leaps of faith. And you can't think through that problem
because you have no actual information about what the
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future is going to hold for you.
So how do you make that kind of commitment?
Well, there are two big motivators that help people make
commitments. One of them is love. You just fall in love
with something, whether it's this academic discipline, or
a person, or a god.
Now the first thing love does is humbles us, it
reminds us we're not even in control of ourselves. You
can't control your own thinking when you're in love. When
you look across the crowd you think you see your beloved
there sitting there. The second thing love does is it
plows open hard ground. It opens up the crust of our
lives that we've used to cover of ourselves, exposing soft
flesh below. And it makes us more liable to be suffer
deep pain, but also deep joy. The third love -- third
thing love does is it decenters the self. You realize
your riches are not in yourself, they are in another
person. And the final thing it does is it leads to unity,
to a sort of fusion unity between two people.
There's a great passage in a book called Captain
Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres. An old guy is
talking to his daughter and he is talking about his
relationship with his late 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 towards
each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms
had fallen from our branches we found that we were one
tree and not two." And that's a fusion and that's a
commitment when one thing has become fused with another.
Now that's the first passion of love leading to
the deep fusion of souls. And we write and have a lot of
songs and Taylor Swift sings a lot of songs -(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: -- about the first passion of love.
But a commitment is over time. And philosophers have a
concept they call the second love. And this is the love
that happens deep into a relationship after each side has
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been bruised a little, knows each other a little better,
disillusioned with each other.
And there's a man who's at this conference who
wrote a beautiful description of this second love. His
name is Leon Wieseltier. I saw him over by the Meadows
earlier today. And he gave a toast to a couple friends of
mine at their wedding which describe the second love.
"This kind of love," he wrote "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, and here to there,
the grasp to the reach. When the day is done, and the
lights are out, 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 by an accurate perception of one self.
Marriages are exposures. We may be heroes to our spouses
but we may not be idols." And that's just a beautiful
description of how love deepens and fuses people.
And like St. Augustine 1,600 years ago, I'm a
big believer that we're primary loving creatures, we're
not cognitive thinking creatures. Our feelings are more
important. And so love is the first thing that motivates
us to make these big commitments in these four areas. But
it's not just love. We also want our commitments to be
morally validated. We're all born with a moral
imagination. We have moral sentiments. We have a
concept, we have -- we all feel the innate urge to pursue
our highest good.
We want to feel your life has some meaning and
yearning. We all -- it's weird in our language we don't
really have a word for this, moral ambition, moral
imagination, moral yearning. The Greeks had a word for
it, which was "eros". But we've screwed up that word so
now it refers to sex. And so different writers have tried
different words to suggest that moral hunger that we feel,
to have a life of meaning and purpose and be good people.
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Dorothy Day, who I mentioned before, called that
loneliness, a longing for God or goodness or holiness.
C.S. Lewis called it joy. Joy was not the completion of
desire but the highest possible form of desire. And so we
burn with sort of a spiritual hunger. And if we don't
feel it, we end up dry, unsatisfied, twisted and selfloathing.
And the image that is coming to my head about
that moral yearning is that it's like -- it's not there
all the time. And so it's like there's a part of our
souls that's like a reclusive leopard. And this is the
part that doesn't care about money or status or Facebook
likes or everyday things. And the leopard is the part
that inside us that yearns for transcendence, that some
feeling for connection to unconditional love, some
feelings connected to justice.
And for long periods of our lives, especially
young and in our 20s when we're working and trying to
build a career, the leopard is high in the forest
mountains. You might get a glimpse of him out of the
corner of your eye just off in the distance trailing you
through the tree trunks. And there are spare moments when
you vaguely or even urgently feel his presence. This can
happen agonizingly during one of those long sleepless
maybe guilt-ridden lights -- nights when your thoughts
come as a great poet name Christian Wiman put it, "Like a
drawer full of knives." And although leopards can visit
like it did me that -- in my backyard during one of those
fantastic moments with friends and family when you look
out at laughing faces of the people you love and you're
overwhelmed by gratitude, and then to you feel a spiritual
uplift.
The leopard can come during moments of suffering
when you're forced to peer into the deepest cavities of
yourself. And you want to know how that's connected, the
moments of suffering, to some longer story of redemption.
And then there are moments when a lot of us who are
middle-aged or beyond, which I think are inevitable in
every life, but maybe toward middle -- more toward middle
or older age when the leopard comes out of the hills and
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he just sits there in the middle of your doorframe and he
stares at you, inescapably, eye to eye, face to face,
implacable and unmoving and demand some justification,
what's your purpose here? Why were you sent here? What's
your mission? And at those moments there are no excuses.
Everybody has to let down the mask and you have to think,
"Am I really serving my highest good?" I think we all
face those moments sooner or later.
And those who have no answers or have given the
question no thought die knowing that and trying to
suppress that knowledge in some awful way. But most of us
try, and try to do our best. And the weird thing about
fulfilling the leopard's hunger, trying to be our best
selves, is you've got to break out of the normal logic of
life. Normally when you buy a car or you buy a couch, you
buy some food, you have a normal self-interested
utilitarian logic. You know, is this in my best self
interest, do the benefits exceed the cost, is this best
for me, does this work, does it meet my needs. When
you're making a commitment to something, whether it's a
spouse or a religion or a cause, those questions are the
worst questions you can ask.
Imagine going into a marriage and asking the
question, "What's best for me?" If both sides are asking
that, don't bet on the marriage.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: Imagine finding a faith and saying,
"Does this serve my needs?" That's not a faith, that's
just opportunism. Imagine serving a cause like the civil
rights cause and saying, "Is this working for me?" Nobody
marches across the Selma bridge if it's working for them,
because there are a lot of moments when it's not working
for you.
So you have to adopt a different lens, a moral
lens which is beyond rationality, which takes you beyond
utilitarian thinking, when you have to just throw it all
in. People who adopt a moral lens are looking for ways to
forget themselves, surrender themselves, throw themselves
into something without counting the cost. They
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understand, if only by instinct, that their true joy is
found on the distance side of unselfishness and not on
this side. People who has used a moral lens don't ask,
"What do I want from life?" They ask, "What is life
asking of me?" Frances Perkins was not saying, "What's my
passion?" when she was standing on a street corner. There
was this problem ten floors above her, and that became her
life mission.
And people who see through a moral lens have a
different view of marriage. They don't ask, "Is this
person right for me?" They ask, "Can I love her in a way
that brings out her loveliness? Can we take our private
passion and direct it outward? Can we -- can I go through
every day assuming that my own selfishness is the core
problem in our relationship?" We have a tendency when in
relationships to think the other person's selfishness is
actually the core problem. But ours is the only one we
can control. And so I think we -- people stick with their
commitments, both because they're just in love, which is
fun, and they have some yearning, a yearning to be a good
person. And they'll do amazing things driven by these two
motivations.
But a commitment isn't just motivation. A
commitment is also discipline because we're doing our
commitments over a long period of time when a lot of the
moments are not magical. There are a lot of teachers I
know who go through years where they're putting more into
their profession than they're getting out of it. But they
can't quit because they are teachers, that's their
identity. And so it's sort of like ordered energy. And
so then I began thinking, what disciplines a commitment?
It's not just gushy love or your vague yearning. It's
tough and realistic.
I think the first thing that disciplines a
commitment is truth, the ability to see truth. And that
seems like an obvious thing, we can all look out and see.
But not everybody actually sees the world clearly. I
cover politics and people don't see the world clearly.
(Laughter)
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MR. BROOKS: John Ruskin, a Victorian art
critic, wrote, "The more I think of it, the more I find
this conclusion more oppressed upon me that 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." And that ability to see clearly is a very hard
skill to learn, and I think we learn it formally in our
educational institutions by a scientific method,
mathematical method or sometimes just reading great
writers who have the ability to see.
One of my favorite writers, my favorite writer,
is Leo Tolstoy and my favorite book is Anna Karenina. And
there's a scene in that novel where he describes this girl
Kitty going to a ball. And Kitty is like 17, and Tolstoy,
who's like a middle-aged guy, somehow describes what it
feels like for a young woman when her hair looks perfect.
She puts on a dress and it just fits perfectly. She puts
on a velvet choker, and it fits perfectly.
So he describes what it's like to just have it
all going on. And then she goes to the ball and she's the
belle of the ball. And everybody's asking her to dance
and all eyes are upon her and she's being whirled around.
And she sees the guy she wants to marry, a guy named
Vronsky. And she thinks he's going to ask her to the
final dance and propose during that dance. And she's
being whirled around by somebody else and she sees Vronsky
and he's got this look of rapturous love on his face. And
she whirls around some more and she sees Vronsky with that
look of rapturous love, but he's not looking at her, he's
looking at Anna Karenina.
And Tolstoy describes again with great clarity
what it feels like to have our all insides implode and to
go from the highest high to the lowest low. And he
describes it all with crystalline purity and he describes
Vronsky, by the way, looking at Anna Karenina, a married
woman, thinking, "I can't help myself, this is going to
kill me. I can't stop myself. I love her." And he does
of course.
And Tolstoy's ability is just in the sensitivity
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to observe carefully and to see the world carefully, how
things flow.
And I think to have a commitment and to carry it
through, you have to be uber realistic and be able to see
the world. And that commitment to truth is really what
keeps people sort of on track and from being captured by
their own self-delusions.
The second thing I think it's -- a commitment is
disciplined is by craft. We all have certain professions
which all have sort of institutional disciplines imposed
upon us. Musicians have to play scales. Surgeons have to
lay out their tools.
I happen to be a newspaper columnist and I told
the group in this tent yesterday that I have -- my own
craft of writing has its own disciplines. I have a very
bad memory. And so what I do is I take notes, hundreds of
notes, for each column and they usually get about 200
pages of research material which I write up and markup.
And then the morning my column is due, I get out on the
carpet on the floor of my living room and I separate all
my notes and papers into piles. And each pile is a
paragraph in my column. So my column is only 800 words,
but there'll be 14 piles on the floor.
And so for me the writing process is not the act
of typing into the keyboard, it's the act of crawling
around on the carpet and laying out my piles. And there
are moments when connections are being made and it's all
beginning to make sense and ideas are popping into my head
where it's the best part of my job, it's almost like
prayer. And so that is the craft of my profession, having
to structure and organize a piece of writing and getting
it done every three days. But we all are disciplined by
our crafts and by the certain commitments we do.
And then the third and final thing that I think
disciplines our commitments is community. We all live
surrounded by others, and fortunately we're up -- we're
responsible toward them. We have to -- they -- the eyes
of others insist on certain standards of behavior. They
prevent us a little from doing wrong, and sometimes they
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lift us up to doing well.
I have a friend who lives in northern Louisiana
named Rod Dreher. And he lives in a really small town,
somewhere up north. And he had a sister named Ruthie who
was a teacher. And she was one of those people who just
radiated inner joy. And unfortunately Ruthie died when
she was in her 40s. And though the town probably had like
600 people in it, something like 1,500 came out to her
funeral. And she was a woman who hated to wear shoes, so
she would go barefoot all the time. And her husband was a
fireman. And they -- firemen carried her casket to the
gravesite barefoot.
And one of the things Ruthie did in service to
her community was on Christmas Eve she wanted the dead to
be remembered. And so she'd go to the town cemetery and
on top of each gravestone she would put a lit candle. And
she happened to die just before Christmas. And Rod was
sitting with his mom in their house, and he said on
Christmas Eve to her, "Should we do what Ruthie used to do
and put candles on the gravestones?" And his mom said,
"You know, in future years I think I could do that, but
right now it's just too tough. It's just a little too
tough." And so they didn't do it. But they drove to
another family, another member of their family, and they
drove across town and they happened to pass the cemetery
and somebody else had put the candles on every gravestone.
And so that's an example of a community picking up itself,
one member of the community passing something on a
standard of behavior.
And so I think these are the things that
organize our commitments, drive our commitments,
discipline our commitments. And the people who -somebody said to me earlier in the festival, think of a
wagon wheel, every time you keep a promise, you add
another spike -- a spoke to that wagon wheel and you
increase the integrity of the whole wheel. Every time you
break a promise, you take away a spoke and you decrease
the integrity of the wheel. When somebody is full rich,
four big commitments, they've got integrity. It's an
emergent property out of these commitments. They're
surrounded by webs of unconditional love. And I do think
22
the inner joy radiates from that.
One of my favorite passages in literature is in
St. Augustine's confessions. And Augustine was born in
North Africa 1,500, 1,600 years ago and had a mom named
Monica who was the helicopter mom to beat all helicopter
moms.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: And so she was telling Augustine
who to befriend, who not to befriend, who to marry, who
not to marry, who to think -- what to think, what not to
think. And they had intense conflicts. And so he decided
that he had a family, he was in his 30s, he decided I got
to get away from mom. So he sneaks onto a boat, heads for
Italy, the boat's leaving and he sees her on the shore
screaming at him. She gets on the next boat, tracks him
down in Italy.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: And then -- but then at the end of
her life they're still in Italy, she says to him -- I
think she's 59, she says to him, "You know, I've been on
you all your life, but I really only wanted you to be a
certain sort of man and a certain sort of Christian. And
now you are that kind of person. And so my work here is
done and I'm ready to go. I thought I wanted to go back
in Africa but God is everywhere, He'll find me." And she
does in fact die nine days later.
And Augustine describes their final conversation
which takes place in a garden. And after a life of
conflict and screaming and fighting, he describes it as
the sweetest of all possible conversations that rises
above material things into the realm of pure spirit. And
then he has a long sentence and it is very hard to
understand, but it's got one word throughout it and that
word is "hushed". And so he says, "The voices -- our
voices were hushed, the birds and the trees were hushed,
the wind was -- and the trees was hushed," and it just
keeps going on hushed, hushed, hushed. And you get this
sense of deep tranquility and peace, or shalom as it says
23
in Hebrew. And you really get the sense that of somebody
who has strongly committed himself, them to each other,
him to his faith, him to his mission, some of the yearning
going away and just being satisfied. And that I think is
one of the dreams of peace and tranquility we long for in
our lives.
The second thing that I think a deep commitment
can do is give you that sense of meaning which can help
you endure anything. I hope a lot of the people in this
room has -- have read Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor
Frankl. Frankl was a psychologist in the '30s in Germany
-- in Austria, and he was captured by the Nazis. They
sent him to concentration camp. And he said, "You know,
this wasn't what -- the life I was looking for, but this
is what life is asking of me." And he just said, "I'm a
psychologist, I'm at a concentration camp, I'll study
suffering." And he said, "Suffering became a problem I
did not want to turn my back on."
And so he suffered suffering, but he counseled a
lot of the people in there and he tried to figure out who
was surviving the camps and who wasn't. And a lot of the
people who survived thought every day about their loved
ones who were outside the camps and spoke to them. One of
Frankl's friends said to him one day, "Listen, if I don't
get back to my wife and if you should see her again, then
tell her that I talked of her daily and hourly. You
remember that. Second, tell her I loved her more than
anyone. Thirdly, tell her the short time I've been
married to her outweighs everything, even all that we've
gone through here." And it was that ability to focus on
some ideal and some person and keep that commitment alive
that kept the people alive.
And then he met a young woman who was sick and
dying in a bed. And he went up to her and she said, "I'm
grateful fate has hit me this hard. In my former life I
was spoiled and I did not take spiritual accomplishment
seriously." But in the camp she'd made a commitment, she
was super sick, she was in a bed, and her commitment was
the only living thing she could see from the bed which was
a tree outside the window. And she told Frankl, "This
tree is the only friend I have in my loneliness. I often
24
talk to this tree." And Frankl asked her if the tree ever
talked back to her. And she said, "Yeah, the tree says to
me, 'I am here, I am here, I'm life, I'm eternal life.'"
And so what you see is a commitment which is the ultimate
commitment to something beyond the physical realm, a
commitment to some eternal peace, eternal presence,
eternal truth.
And so I think these are the sorts of things if
we keep our commitments you -- at the end of the road you
get this kind of tranquility, this kind of connection to
something transcendent, that level four of happiness.
I wanted to close by talking about our vice
president if he'll allow me. I got to spend a little time
with him this afternoon and it was off the record so I can
tell you what we said. But I love interviewing Joe Biden
because he is a man of intense loyalty and commitments to
family, to the Senate, to the state of Delaware, and to
pretty much everyone he runs into.
And one of the things, I'm like the worst
journalist in the world, when I get the chance to meet
with the vice president I probably should be asking about
Syria or something like that. But one of the things I've
tried to do in a -- the few occasions where we've had a
chance to spend time together is asking about his mom and
dad because he was raised with all these maxims and rules
of etiquette and politeness that really are the formation
the way a family forms a commitment and a code of
character and a code of dignity.
And one of the things I've always been struck by
in his campaign speeches is by how often he quotes family
members, especially parents. And when you hear the,
frankly, his parents, the dead living on in his speeches,
you're reminded the ultimate payoff of a commitment that
if you are emotionally bonded, that your voice lingers on
long after you're gone.
And I have a passage I'll close with by a
mathematician from Indiana University named Douglas
Hofstadter. And his is about the ultimate form of union
between two people, which is almost a union within brains.
25
And he was in Italy when his kids were four and two. And
he had a wife who unfortunately when she was in her 30s
died of brain aneurysm. And he would keep a picture of
her on the dresser that he looked at every day. But some
days, and one particular day, he looked at it with
particular intensity. And here's what he wrote about that
moment, "I looked at her face and I looked so deeply, I
felt I was behind her eyes and all at once I found myself
saying, as tears flowed, 'that's me, that's me!'
"And those simple words brought back many
thoughts that I had had before, about the fusion of our
souls into one higher-level entity, about the fact that at
the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and
dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopes
were not separate or distinct hopes but were just one
hope, one clear thing that defines us both, that wielded
us into a unit, the kind of unit I would have dimly
imagined before being married and having children. I
realized that though Carol had died, that core piece of
her had not died at all, but it had remained and lived on
very determinedly in my brain." And that -- the first
book I wrote a year ago was so individualistic. But when
you see people as they actually live, they are fusing so
determinedly through commitments into each other's brains
and living forever. Thank you.
(Applause)
MR. BROOKS: We have a few minutes left.
willing to do a complete takedown of the Obama
administration.
I'm
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: Let's just do five minutes of
questions. Then we can all go. There are microphones.
see may be here, and I see on the wings. We will start
here.
SPEAKER: I'm just curious how you identified
and located the characters in your book.
MR. BROOKS:
How I identified the characters in
26
I
my book. Pretty randomly. I was looking for people, as I
said, who were messes at 20 and great at 70 and I wanted
them to illustrate different virtues, the ability to turn
suffering into something profound, the ability to turn
commitment to an institution, George Marshall, commitment
to the U.S. military, and I wanted a range of professions.
The hardest profession to find a good person in was
writers.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: They're all selfish, narcissists.
And so I finally found George Eliot who made a heroic dive
into love. But it was it wasn't scientific, I'm afraid.
They were people I really love and admire.
So is there one over here? I see a couple, may
be in the back. We'll just do a few.
SPEAKER: First of all, I'd like to thank you
for an hour of reflection. That was really wonderful.
But I also think I already know the answer to this
question, but have you had a wonderful relationship with
your mother?
MR. BROOKS: With my mother?
My mother is
still looking from wherever she is, she lives in
Pennsylvania. Yeah, my parents -- I'm a believer in the
phrase "it took three generation -- it takes three
generations to make a career." And my parent -- my
grandfather was a -- my mom's father was a lawyer but he
didn't really do much law, he wrote -- spent most of his
life writing letters to the editor to the New York Times
hoping to get in.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: That's true. And when I got this
job, of course, I -- he was dead by then, but I certainly
wished I could have told him. And then my mom is -- was
an academic and then worked in the pharmaceutical
industry. And she certainly passed on the approach to
ideas and the sort of tough constant steady love that some
Jewish boys know very well.
27
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: And so I always give her my
manuscripts to read. And she's my most important reader
because she's my toughest reader, but also the one you
really need to tell you the truth.
SPEAKER: Could you tell us the name of that
book and then just repeat the five commitments? Because I
got so emotionally involved with your readings practically
crying that I lost those four or five commitments and I
would like to buy the book.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: Well, I'm glad you'd like to buy
the book if -- it will be out in two or three years.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: My last book was called The Road to
Character, but it doesn't have any of the stuff in it.
But the next book will be more about that.
Let's just do one more. Right down here. Thank
you for running all the way in front row. He's kind of
hard to miss.
SPEAKER: In your work on character and so on,
have you studied narcissism and do you have any thoughts
on that?
MR. BROOKS: Have I studied narcissism?
I've covered this campaign.
Yes,
(Laughter)
(Applause)
MR. BROOKS: So I have studied. The few things
I'll say is I think this younger generation is great. But
they have one of the things that, you know, we've told
them how great they are for a few decades and they
28
believed us.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: And so just the two statistics I'll
cite, which is in 1950 high school seniors were asked,
"Are you a very important person?" and roughly 12 percent
said yes. Then in the 1990s, similar sorts of questions
were asked and 80 percent said "Yes, I'm a very important
person." Psychologists have a thing called the narcissism
test where they read -- give this people all around the
world, they say, "I'm going to read you a bunch of
statements. Does this apply to you?" And there are
statements like, "I find it easy to manipulate people
because I'm so remarkable" or -(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: -- "somebody should write a
biography about me," or "I like to look at my body." And
the median narcissism score has gone up 30 percent in the
last 20 years. And they give this all around the world
and America scores number one in narcissism.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: I think Serbia's second. I think
Israel is third, I think. And then on the bottom tends to
be Asian countries with -- both with the Morocco and
Switzerland. So we have -- we've done well on thinking
well of ourselves.
We actually score -- in math scores, we score
25th in the world in math. But if you ask American
students, "Are you really good at math?" we score number
one in the world in thinking we're really good at math.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: And so I do think much of the
culture is great. But we need a little more humility.
And to me, humility is not thinking lowly of yourself,
it's radical self awareness from a distance or from a
position of other centeredness, the ability to stand far
29
outside yourself and see accurately your strengths and
weaknesses.
And for somebody who's been behind the
microphone for 51 minutes, I probably need a little.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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