invited voices of conscience to explore the key issues of our day from an ethical perspective my name is tim hart anderson i'm the senior minister at westminster presbyterian church located on the glenn mall in beautiful downtown minneapolis and moderator of the forum it's my pleasure to introduce today's yes peter david brooks is one of the nation's leading writers and commentators he's an op ed columnist for the new york times and appears regularly on p b s news hour and meet the press he was born in toronto grew up in new york city graduated from the university of chicago with a degree in history he's been a contributing editor at newsweek and the atlantic and a senior editor at the weekly standard he's the bestselling author of the social animal the hidden sources of love character and achievement and two previous books which he describes as comic sociology bobos in paradise and on paradise drive his newest book and the reason he's here today to talk about this is the road to character a challenging book looking at values virtues and choices that form who we are ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming to the grab the money and ran away we'll that was my first step over the right policy was we shop at progressive grocery stores i'm sure the twin cities fine tradition of that of whole foods and trader joe's or other cashiers look like they're on loan from amnesty international  he gave me an outstanding piece of advice when i was about twenty three he was at it my wedding and he said become a moderate republican there's a big future in that and so that's a sort of a windy road and it's actually a windy road that takes me to this beautiful church i went to a church in norman have a church school called grace church it even has a strand bookstore downtown this red store beautiful beautiful place i was part of the all jewish boys that every day ever since i was seven remember high school i want to date a woman named bernice she didn't want to date me she went to the some other guy i remember thinking what is she thinking i write way better than that guy least people have different values so we'll so these are the twists and turns that we all have in our lives and some of them aren't expected amusing some of them are just uplifting and so i had an experience about ten years ago now i do a side of the house and you could see the backyard and my kids were at that point twelve giant four had one of these big balls you get supermarket and they were kicking it up in the air and it was curving and landing and those are the are they were across and they  in the driveway and was confronted with this perfect scene and i just sat there in the car staring at the wind chill that and was one of those unexpected moments that parents have had when life and time suspended when reality spills outside its boundaries and you just get a sense of feeling overwhelmed with gratitude for a beauty you haven't or and when you have a moment like that you first realize it's group provides you with a higher joy than anything you can get in the workplace second it sort of enlarges your heart it fills you up and makes the heart a little larger the third thing is it creates is really a moment of grace creates a strange during to be worthy of that undeserved beauty and so moments like that you just want to be a little better to be worthy of such experiences and it happens sometimes in moments like that in moments of transcendence you go over that way sometimes it happens when you meet people and of course he's globally famous but we all meet regular people who have that you know like i was in maryland in the town of north of washington about nine months ago and i ran to  group of ladies who teach immigrants english and how to read there were thirty ways h fifty they say and you walk in the room and immediately they're just radiating kindness and gentleness and patience and they don't know me from adam but when you talk to them they make you feel important and value their blasters musical incomes quickly they're just grateful for life they're not thinking about what wonderful work they do they're nothing about themselves at all and so we're not the least in my circumstance when i come across some treatment when i came across them i'm thinking you know i've achieved way more in creatures and i never imagined but when you see that in your life you think well i haven't achieved that you'll get one life i'd like to achieve that become a little better and so the book is really about that how that happens and the it opens with a concept of distinction that cedric sense to me you're honest courageous honorable capable of great love and we all know you with the virtues are more important but we have to have a culture that values the rsum virtues and educational system of those two i saw a har university study where they asked junior high school kids what your parents care more about their you get good grades or that you're kind and eighty percent of the kids said my parents get more about me getting good grades and i think a lot of us parents we probably do know about the grades a little more than the kindness and so that's the shift and that's the way the cultures are directly to this and a book that helped me think about this was a book called lonely man a faith which was written by joseph rel forth i don't she wants to return home to warmth of a family meal to friends having drinks around the board and so the rejects as these two sides of our nature are in tension sometimes they go together have a good career having to carry h ein but sometimes there's tension over a friend who you ask people in job interviews every interviewee says name a time you told the truth and it hurt you he wants to know they're willing to put out a tube of it once and time and i see the conflict sometimes comes about because the two others operate by different logic the external adam one operates by economic logic the logic of the marketplace which is straightforward input leads output ever this roared practice makes perfect don't to the internal i don't lives by moral logic which is paradoxical in inverse you have to give to receive you have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself you have to conquer yours are together you crave success can lead to the greatest failure which is arrogance and pride failure can lead to the greatest success which is humility in learning in order for failure so if you have to forgive yourself in order to find yourself you have to lose yourself still voice it comes from within we live in a culture where for a few generations we told each other how wonderful we are which does not encourage moral self interrogation if you look at a commencement clichs follow your passion be true you're still trust yourself love yourself we told a couple generations how great they are and they believe there's also in one hundred fifty you call the organization ask high school seniors are you a very important person less college students would you rather have a lace to resort to to a lot of fame or to a lot of sex and by two to one they preferred the fame and so i go to college and they say listen i want to be twice a week i wrote a column from this paper on the famous go with and so that's the main current of our culture but if you're only having one you turn threat of a shoot down of crafty and soft preserving utilitarian you like a quality of inner depth you lose the ability to get more of a cavalier about what's happening inside you live with an unconscious boredom not really attached to the highest ideals and i found in my life saddest settle for a self satisfied moral mediocrity you grade yourself on a forgiving curve you think that obviously for anybody people seem to like me i must be doing ok but slowly there's a gap that opens up between your desired self and your actual self you're not really deserving of you would you wish for and you're not the sort of what do they do what were the activities one of the figures in the book is a woman in eisenhower she was born eighteen sixty two in shenandoah virginia her mother died when she was five her father was a leaven she became an indentured servant for a family that has or that was a most important conversation of his life because it taught him he had a weakness which was his temper and the need to overcome and i did taught him two things one humility humility is not thinking of yourself it's accurate self awareness from a and he for the during world war two we think of moses garrulous country club but that is something he created through effort and nights in fact he was lying awake anxious hungry and song you drinking throat infections spiking they also took the young women and still them heroic moral ambition the phrases go where no one wants to go do what no one wants to do and they sent them out as missionaries to tibet to pakistan to china to and that sort of wandered around looking for mission recall sort of scattered genteel but in one thousand thirteen she's having tea in lower manhattan and she hears a commotion so she rushes outside and she looks across washington square and she sees a fire and she stumbled across one of those famous fires in american history the triangle shirtwaist factory for she sees what she thinks are bundles of clothing being thrown out of the tent for window but it's not clothing it's human beings deciding they'd rather hurl themselves to their deaths than burn to death and she's fifty three people go over and she says young man helping seamstresses over the windowsill and dropping them into space a second or third or fourth his girlfriend w other things she cared about she would work with anybody she would compromise of anything anything to become a ruthless instrument in the cause of worker safety and she for the next fifty or sixty years relied on that  and she went off and he became a lobbyist for worker safety legislation but she gets up there and the say legislators who are not always the most enlightened human beings on the face of the earth they they say they are they say or they want to her seriously and so she keeps a folder at home called notes on the mail my feeling is she says they want to take you seriously as a young woman but they want to be loved by their mothers so she dresses like their mothers she just took an eight one of the creators of the new deal with good and special security and so from her we were vocation we talk college students find your passion because not only do we saddle them with a bunch of debt we give them career to really advice to make sure they never pill or paid off eighty percent of college graduates do not have a passion we tell them look within yourself but that's not the purpose did she look within herself she didn't say what do i want from life she asked what is the fourth person i mention is george eliot the great novelist she was one of the start of the victorian era to a woman who was killed her mother and who could not provide her with love and attention who died when only it was young so she grew up with this visual racialist hunger for love and she would fall in love with everybody should meet every guy during her twenty's tall short old young married unmarried she fell over the guy she can transfer the conversation his wife would get rid of the house that was  general rule then at age thirty two she fell in love with the philosopher herbert spencer and she should read him a letter that was at once pathetic but also profound the pathetic third is the beginning where she's begging him to marry her  but i'm not ashamed for unconscious in the light of reason and true refinement that i'm worthy of your respect and tenderness whatever vulgar my view women in my think of me and so this is what you might call her agency moment there's a moment that i think happens often early thirty's where people no longer require external affirmation of criticisms from or from outside their job to internal pressure if or when they're doing well and when they're not doing well and she had her agency moment aged thirty in his wife and that woman was living with another guy who had three kids or that other guy but and she fell for the worse but he was legally married during her of it there's no divorce there's no tolerance for that and she  she has to decide if she goes with little louis she will be labeled an adulterous and written on a plate society and so the choice is between him and everybody else she lose her family should lose everything she thinks about it for a week and she in their lives most people that have those moments they've lost a loved one they've lost a job or a romantic break up and what suffering does is it first thing is it because it introduces you to yourself the suffering want to connect their suffering to him to a narrative that takes him into service i have friends who lost a child when he was six and they didn't say well we've had a couple years of grief let's go party so we can get happier again they create a foundation coco for henry which would take his suffering and their suffering and lead to a service outside so it's down the software's attend the fee and then finally the service and so we would say to people have x endured those moments of suffering own mind your own heart being in love is like being conquered by an army that you want to be invaded by second think of love house of them hard ground exposes soft tenderness making a vulnerable to greater suffering but also greater jo says that suffering that love eliminates the distinction between giving and receiving when a friend when you consent to allow a friend to give you a gift you're doing a greater favor by giving your friend the pleasure of giving a gift to a piece of himself and so she had that kind of have that kind of romantic passionate idealistic love that she experienced and then frankly  well but she also had a second love and a second love as the kind that comes later in life if you can it up a little and maybe after marriage or maybe just later and it's like people are not as idealistic at each other not as ideals who are themselves their real estate about their own natures their with a stick of their partner and they cultivate a love which is less idealistic but more enduring and more specific this kind of love as described by a friend of mine namely wieseltier in a toast a wedding toast this kind of love he wrote is private and it is particularly its object is the specificity of this man that woman the distinctiveness of this spirit and that flesh this love prefers deep to why you're there the grist to the reach when the day is done and the lights around there is only this other hurt this other mind this other face to a system repelling of one's demons or greeting one's angels it does not matter who the pr marriages are exposures we may be heroes to ourselves what we may not be idols so there's an enduring love she stayed was for the rest of his life for about twenty years about a year and he says to or you know you should try your hand subordinates his own career he becomes your agent or editor publicist she sensitive to criticism and so he gets up early in the morning ritual papers cuts out any article that may mention and so love and so these are just some of the activities that lead to death lead to character and these are people who do not think they're wonderful inside they thought they were splendidly in doubt deeply broken and they confronted themselves through acts of vocation through acts of intellectual effort through acts of self defeat and through acts of love they were capable of making awesome commitments and they didn't do it alone then finding more progress was done in the privacy of your own closet they did it with others because we all need productive systems from outside and finally they just experience x moments of joy character building sounds like this harvester test but if you look in all their lives and she says you know all my life i want to be a certain sort of person for a christian and now you are that his conversion has happened and she basically says i'm ready to go my workers done and nine days later she die and then in the confession she describes their fourth final conversation in a garden where their voice is lifted into sweetness and harmony after all those years of conflict and they talked about the future life the past life and he talks about just the sweetness of rising above the bodily into the spiritual and there's a long sentence and one sentence is very hard to read in course but has one word that repeats itself and that word is the word and you realize that i don't one's inhibitions are never satisfied there's always something else out there but i'm too has moments where it just is surrenders ingratitude and that's when the inner joy is released and that's speaker today is david brooks columnist political commentator and author of the book the road to character while the ushers collect questions from the end house audience i'd like to invite the radio audience to learn more about the town hall forum at our website westminster forum dot org you can find us on facebook and twitter as well and now mr brooks if you would return to the pulpit i will present the questions from our audience faithful who are completely wonderful people i know many many people are atheists are completely wonderful people and i'm force i know some faithful and some atheist and so i asked for my own observation i don't think you have to be faithful to to be wonderful i do think you have to have a moral calculator and i do think you have the words to better the handholds to understand the tradition and so i think two things are necessary one is to recover rediscover and modernize the more of the cavalry a lot of words that have fallen on the usage the big one for me is stand a word that is now used most in the context of fattening deserves if you don't know what sin is in your own brokenness then it's tough to know what to struggle against thomas burton said souls are like athletes they need something powerful to rise to the full extent of their powers and if you can't name what's wrong and you can understand that there's something broken in all of us with it and the greed self centeredness you don't know where you're struggling against and characters are built through that struggle against yourself through that self confrontation the second they all say is marshall and i do think there are certain things that are so intricate and intimate that they should be shared with people with whom one's have a long harder than lasting trusting relationship and that if i were to broadcast it i would simpl gracefulness and there's a beauty to it and i should say if i think of politicians who have been humbled who i've had a chance to cover probably the most the greatest exemplar of that is sitting here in the room of walter you i just among the people i specially who are in this current climate which is a very hard climate operative what i see is a lot of politicians come in for the right reasons of wanting to serve and but the process requires so much selling themselves as the products they become they've become believe years of their own spin in their own propaganda and what sometimes gets lost is the inner destroyers they just become public personalities and they while remaining a basically normal human being and and i was listening to my local n p r show and i happen to hear an old radio broadcasts of the rebroadcast called command performance and it was a variety show that went out to the troops in world war two and the episode i heard was on v j day nine hundred forty five hours after the japanese announcer surrender and being cross he gets out there and he says we've just learned we've won this war because we don't feel too proud we just feel humble we're just way we got through it and i was really struck by the tone of mode meredith the character actor gets up there and reach best very pile and he says we didn't win this war because we have we're we're god's chosen people we're better than anybody else we should just dress a modest and be worthy of the peace and i just thought that was very elegant and beautiful and we would not want to go back to the culture the 's it was racist it was sexist the food was for will that smaller sense of self was something i do think we can recover  in the classroom teach this sort of stuff and he wrote me this is he was a veterinarian from oregon individually he wrote what a wise person teaches is the smallest part of what they give the totality of their life and the way they go about it in the smallest details is what gets transmitted never forget that the message is a person perfected over lifetimes of effort that was set in motion by yet another wise person hidden from the recipients in the didn't miss a time and i like that  what a wise person teaches is the smallest part of what they give the messages the person it's the small little gestures of we remember from our teachers not what they taught us with who they were and so it's it's just behaving in that way since every meeting influence for all but but the one thing i want to caution against which has is important to me is that sometimes when we ask questions about internal things we answer with an external thing and so i was at school and i asked the head of the school how do you teach character and she said well we have or students do a lot of community service and that's great but there has to be recovered for the inner life not just the external impact and so sometimes we use community service as a patch to cover  the road to character dot com we're beginning every day to put out six or seven out there and some of them are very beautiful this one leg just read today leads to miners an eighty five year old guy and he talked about how you know he tries to serve his family many  actually likes but then he says one of the things that gives me purpose these days is my garden and then he he describes what plants are thriving with plants or not and there's something so simple and material in just tending a garden and it doesn't seem like a big hero thing but it reminds me of some of the reading of the new way just tending a plot of ground and making that sort of an organized nurturing and you know that that i don't want to thing that i ha egypt comes from genesis where there are two counts of creation one of man is given dominion over the earth to go out the others to tend the garden and there some things physical physically beautiful in organizing and rooting your life all twenty six we'll i'll just say two things i have yet to form judgments about them that's what we campaigned for we can get little glimpses i do think character is destiny in politics there was a poll think she's dishonest untrustworthy strong leader real and so they said hillary couldn't i don't think that's possible i think you're going to be a strong leader you have to be deal with it building relationships and to build relationships you basically have to be a decent person after somewhere out there i also think if you're not as strong if you're broken inside your watergate will come sooner or later and so i do think character is really important tree measure in times of adversity during the campaign and  i guess i could go through who i am positively impressed by who won but let's let it shake out and and see how well they all reveal themselves to be total scoundrels sometimes you read a column because it's the idea seems interesting it might be true feeling and i was just observing that we think it's weird we feel guilty people feel terrible that we you know we have a country three hundred thirty three million and we just have two legacy admissions but sometimes in totally legitimate ways where families and read certain values into the kids and they don't want to and they've seen public service in an intimate way from a very early age and so they  want to and we have political families with sons of senators and governors running for those offices and minnesota is a great example i can think of several families here and so this is the way life is we are not a collection of lone individuals who are making our way in the world we come into the society formed by our relationships most important our family relationships so it's not altogether surprising that there would be families of begin to dominate with their t or rockefeller's or clintons or bushes let's face it thinking you you can be present a united states is a really odd thing to think  something everywhere you really think well i'm going to select from the characters i have in the book and this is a religious figure but i only do it because i took this course at yale for three years and there are fourteen readings from some of the characters i've mentioned augusta and others and their final paper is i asked the students take any of the fourteen readings and apply it to a problem in your own life and so there are fourteen readings and last term out of say twenty four students in the seminar nineteen of them picked the same book and that book was a book club along well mina's by dorothy day and so it's a beautiful book and but what's interesting about her is she's a woman of intense emotional intensity she not only she read novels and she only read them but she she lived them out and unfortunately she read a lot of transfixed by how she's found a vocation they're transfixed by her sometimes self criticism which is intense and then the final thing i mention i mention that moment of hush for a dusting she had a moment like that which i've always enjoyed that's worth saying in the christian church she was asked to be in her life everything already memoirs because she was a beautiful writer and wrote all her life and she said you know i sat down one day and i wrote on the top of a piece of paper  life remembered and i thought about my life and how i would describe it and i thought of the major episodes in my life and i thought of the lord and his visit to us all those centuries ago and i was just grateful to have had him on my mind all that time we live in a culture that emphasizes freedom and we live in a climate these days where committing is harder if you look at the number of people who are committed to political parties that's gone down if you have a number of people who are committed to religious affiliations that's gone down people are just committing left and they're floating through life it's more fluid but the thing i've learned in my life is that the happiness and fulfillment is all based on your ability to commit your ability to strongly commit to things outside yourself and therefore five big commitments you have to make in life and your and i would say take your time of your twenty's and thirty's to make them your parents will go completely insane take your time and try things out and those commitments search to a philosophy of life you have some basic understanding of what you believe and don't try to create one on your own pick a tradition that already exists the second to a vocation to a career path membership same job the same thing you're doing there are two americas fourth your community and fifth to either a faith or some other philosophy all the social indicators of oneself in the sixty's are not in the right direction crime is down violence is down the cyclones down pregnancies are down fortune rates are down we're just moving in the right direction and we're still basically the same country th came from a moralistic energetic so for kerry country that somehow figures out how to do stuff so all the jeremiahs about how america's going downhill they've always been wrong