Making Sense with Sam Harris - #89 — On Becoming a Better Person

Episode Date: July 25, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with David Brooks about his book The Road to Character, the importance of words like “sin” and "virtue," self-esteem vs. self-overcoming, the significance of keeping promises, honesty, President Trump, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I am speaking with David Brooks. David is one of the nation's leading writers and commentators. He's an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, and he appears regularly on PBS's NewsHour and Meet the Press.

And he's the best-selling author of several books, The Social Animal, Bobo's in Paradise, and most recently, and the book under discussion, The Road to Character. And in this episode, we talk about that book, The Road to Character, and it was a very interesting book where David goes into the difference between self-gratification and self-overcoming on some basic level. So we talk about things like sin and self-esteem versus self-overcoming and the significance of keeping promises and the ethics of honesty and related matters. Inevitably, we get to Trump. There was no way I could let David Brooks escape without telling me something about his view of the current political landscape, but that does

not dominate the podcast for those of you who are sick to death of the topic. Our time was somewhat short. It's interesting that an hour on this podcast feels quite short, but David had another interview to get to, so enjoy it while it lasts. And now I give you David Brooks. I'm here with David Brooks. David, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's a great pleasure. So we've only met once. I'm trying to rack my brains to find another time. But we met at a meeting organized by the great John Brockman at one point. Does that square with your memory as well?

I do remember that. John Brockman is the zealot of modern American culture, global culture. He shows up everywhere. Many people don't know this, but he controls much of our intellectual life. people don't know this, but he controls much of our intellectual life. So I want to talk to you about two main things. I want to talk to you about your book, The Road to Character, which I loved. And then I think we will inevitably talk a little about a very different road, the road that one man took to the White House. I know my audience is sick to death of Trump, as I am. I think there's a God. He probably is sick of Trump, too, at this point. But I can't have you on this podcast without getting your take on what's going on in Washington. So I think we

will arrive there, but we will first go toward topics that I know are dear to your heart and mine, which is really the nature of our moral lives or lack thereof. So let's start with how you came to write this book and what you mean by character, because character is a, like many of the words you use in this book, is not a word that tends to roll off the tongue without any self-consciousness at this point. How did you come to this? And what is character in your view? Yeah, it's not a great word. It's not a word I like. And I'm not even sure how often it's in the book. But when I came to have a title

that could, in one word or at least in a couple words, summarize sort of moral development, that would seem to be the word that at least people sort of got the gist of what you're talking about. Whereas moral development itself, as a phrase, sounds clunky. I started to write a book about humility. And at first, it was just going to be about epistemological humility, really building off work that Danny Kahneman and a lot of other people have done about shortcomings, our own thinking processes. But then as I got into it, I guess my tableau expanded. And I started thinking about moral humility and all different kinds of humility. And basically, I mean, when you're sort of doing what I do, you sort of work out your own crap in public. And so I achieved way more career success than I ever thought I would.

But I never had, and still don't have the sort of joyous demeanor and radiating goodness that I see in other people. And so I just sort of wanted to figure out how do they get that. And so the book, I really took a bunch of characters, more or less randomly selected, who were pathetic at age 20 and kind of amazing at age 70. And I just wanted to know how did they grow into much better people, which they all did. Yeah. The story is really told through these different characters you profile and people like Dorothy Day and Montaigne and Dr. Johnson. And I guess as time is short, I don't want to go into many of them, but one jumped out at me, the profile of George Marshall, the general who is not as famous

as he should be, perhaps, though the Marshall Plan is named after him. In writing about character and writing about virtues that are, again, that we don't really have the moral language anymore to talk about without really straining, and we'll get into the significance of words like sin and wisdom and other words that people don't use so readily anymore. But in the character of Marshall, I was struck by the fact that so much of what you describe about him is clearly noble and deserving of really nothing but praise. I mean, his level of self-sacrifice and self-abnegation and his willingness seemingly at every turn to put country before self, to put the needs of, in this case, the

President of the United States before his own career goals. But it was hard to actually envy him. If I could teach my children to be good, I'm not sure I would give them that particular piece of software he was running. So why don't you just summarize briefly the story you tell about Marshall and in particular about the way in which he didn't make the moves when his career was really reaching its apogee to become the far more famous and influential general that he might have been. Yeah, he grew up in Pennsylvania and he was a very shy boy and a very poor student. And his older brother went to VMI, Virginia Military Institute, and Marshall wanted to go too. And his older brother said, you know, George is kind of pathetic. Let's not let him go there

because he'll ruin the family name. And so he was not an impressive young man, but he ended up going to VMI and he ended up really loving military life. And military life really was the making of him. He joined the institution. It gave him discipline. It turned out he had a habit of command. He was never a great student, but he had a habit of leadership. People wanted to follow him. And he had a spirit of rectitude. And so he rose through the army, sometimes seeming on the outside extremely conservative and staid, even as he was revolutionizing a lot of things within the army about fighting with tanks and how they did train future soldiers. So he was a bit of a quiet rebel within the army. And then my favorite Marshall

story happens. He's already head of the army in 1943, and he really wants to run Operation Overlord, which is the D-Day invasion. And Churchill and Stalin had both told him he was going to get the job, and Harry Hopkins had told him the same. But he had a code that he would never campaign for himself because he feared his own ambition. And when Roosevelt called him into the Oval Office, Roosevelt said, would you like to run Operation Overlord? And instead of just saying yes, Marshall said, my own personal ambitions should have no bearing on your decision. Do what's best for you. And Roosevelt asked him four times and four times Marshall said, it's not about me,

it's about you. And Roosevelt took the chance to give the job to Eisenhower, and Marshall was crushed. And it was the one day he went home early in the whole course of the war. And so it hurt him, and he would have been a much more famous person if he'd run the D-Day invasion, but he wouldn't be Marshall. And he was someone who was not only admired by history, but he's admired by those around him, which isn't always the case. The people who knew him best really admired him the most. But I sort of get the chilliness about him. He had a quality that we associate with Greek and Roman times of magnanimity, which Pericles had, and I think George Washington had.

And it's a great man doing great service to his country, but at the same time, he's detached and he's emotionally cold. And so he gives himself a certain grandeur, but he loses familiarity and friendliness. Marshall could be very friendly and very intimate, but only in the tightest circle of trusted friends. With everyone else, he was a bit standoffish. And so during the war, he wouldn't call Eisenhower Ike the way everyone else did because it was too familiar. He was aloof. And I do think that does make him a little hard to love.

Yeah. And it's not so much hard to love. That's probably another point. But I noticed that many of these things that we immediately recognize as virtues, in this case his willingness to be self-effacing even when he in some basic sense deserves all the praise that is coming his way and the advancement that is being offered, certain virtues are in tension with other virtues. And it's hard to actually want to emulate him in that moment, given that you could also tell a probably equally ennobling story about doing what is appropriate to actualize your gifts in the service of others. His rectitude was in tension with just kind of an honest acknowledgement of perhaps who's the best man for the job. And many of our moral considerations seem to have this structure where it's not really a matter of good versus evil or sin versus virtue, but it's sometimes a matter of prioritizing various values

that are all values that we actually hold and can endorse, but there is a zero-sum conflict between some of them, some of the time. Do you feel that that's the way the landscape looks to you, or do you see it mostly a matter of always seeing clearly what is right versus wrong? Yeah, I'm on your side. I think the values are incommensurate, as Isaiah Berlin would say, that things don't fit together neatly, are incommensurate, as Isaiah Berlin would say, that things don't fit together neatly. And sometimes things are intention and they create paradoxes. And so a lot of the characters I write about in the book, more so if I had to do the book over, I wouldn't include so much of this. They had a virtue of reticence. And Marshall had that. Francis Perkins, another person from that era, had that. But it also

gave them the vice of coldness, or the virtue of reticence took away from the virtue of friendliness. And so one of the features in the book that's informed my thinking a lot is Augustine's ladder of loves theory. He says we all love a lot of things, but we know instinctively that some loves are higher than others and that you should love honesty more than you love money, for example. You shouldn't lie in order to get money. Or if a friend tells you a secret and then you blab at a dinner party, you're putting your love of popularity above your love of friendship.

And we all know that's wrong. And those are cases where we love two different things. And it's pretty obvious which one's higher. But there are other times where it's not obvious and that the two different loves are in tension. And sometimes you have to pick one or sometimes your personality more or less inclines you in one direction or another. Yeah, well, in your discussion of this, you oppose various things. You talk about the resume virtues versus the eulogy virtues. You talk about moral realism versus moral romanticism, and there are many more. So maybe we can track through some of these because it's a very useful structure.

What are the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues? I should say one of my mental weaknesses is I have a weakness for dualisms. I see them everywhere and I'm persuaded by all of them. In this case, it's a strength, but I take your point. The eulogy virtues and the resume virtues are things I more or less took from a guy named Joseph Soloveitchik, who was a rabbi in the mid-20th century. And he said we have two sides of our nature. One side, which is about conquering the world and being majestic in it. And those are the resume virtues and things that make us good at our job, whether it's a good teacher or a good nurse or doctor or whatever. And then the eulogy virtues are the internal side of ourselves, the things they say about us after we're dead, whether it's being courageous or honest or capable of great love.

And my argument in the book is that we live in a culture that knows the eulogy virtues are more important. We'd rather be remembered for our character traits rather than our career. But we live in a culture that emphasizes the form, the career parts, not the latter. And we're just a lot more articulate about how to build a good career and how to build a good person. And our universities in particular are much more confident in talking about professional rise than a moral or spiritual rise for a lot of different reasons. One of them, my colleague at Yale, Tony Cronman, who's at the law school, says specialization causes us to look

at the narrow focus of different subjects, but never step back and look at the whole person. And so his argument is that specialization causes us to abstract from the whole quality of our conduct and makes us focus on how we're doing as potential lawyers or academics or whatever. Yeah. Well, there's another opposition that is relevant to what you just said. You talk at one point about talent versus character, to view a person as a collection of talents that need to be maximized. There's a kind of utilitarian and transactional way we think about ourselves and our interface with the world. And it's not the same thing as developing a truly moral character and seeing that as an ongoing struggle against limitations that are not a matter of

your jumping through the kinds of hoops that your talents or your specialization would dictate. And my shorthand way to say that is that if you're going to pick out a career, then go with your strengths, go with the things that you're naturally talented at or want to be talented at. But if you're thinking about your internal growth, pay a lot of attention to your weaknesses. And one of the things that pretty much all the characters in the book do is they identified what was their core sin, their core problem. For Marshall, it was his ambition. For Eisenhower, another character in the book, it was his anger. He had a terrible temper.

For others, Dorothy Day, she was sort of over-emotional and fragmented. For others, Dorothy Day, she was sort of over-emotional and fragmented. And they waged a daily drama against their weakness. And so I would say if you want to be a good person and if you don't work on your weaknesses, you'll end up like Richard Nixon being swallowed up by them. I think there was someone in the book, it might have been Dorothy Day, who was urged to major in an academic subject that was her weakness just to overcome that, to not take your career advice here and focus on your actual talents. Was that Dorothy Day or was that someone else in the book? That was Frances Perkins.

She was at Mount Holyoke. And Mount Holyoke then, as now, is quite a remarkable place. And they really did think we're not, we're training people to be really good people. We're not worrying about their careers. And it was a women's college. So there was some sexism in that, but they said, listen, if you can major in the field, you're weakest in that will build your character and you'll be able to, you'll be able to conquer anything. And to that school's credit, they sent out young women. Perkins was class of 1903. They sent them out to Pakistan, across Africa, across Asia on these service trips,

and they would spend years abroad. And somebody did a census of all the missionaries abroad, I think in around 1920, and some ridiculous percentage, like 20% of them were Mount Holyoke grads. So they were armed with a sense of mission and a sense of toughness on how to conquer life's challenges. It was quite a remarkable place. So you think we lose something important when we lose concepts like sin and evil and virtue and wisdom and humility, that we lose a moral language that not only affects how we talk about these things, it actually affects whether or not we recognize a kind of inner

landscape and lead a kind of examined life that really becomes impossible unless you have the concepts, unless you have the landmarks you can even acknowledge exist and to shoot for. Some of these words I find myself using and I can do so without any kind of self-consciousness, but sin isn't one of them because of its association with Christianity in particular and because of some of the liabilities of the way in which it's interpreted. This is something you point out in the book. Sin can be and has been so often invoked against genuinely healthy pleasures. I mean, it really is set in opposition

to what most of us would consider a healthy sex life, for instance. How do you think about sin? Yeah, I do think we need to recover a lot of these words because it is the vocabulary of the internal landscape. And we happen to have a culture, say in Western civilization, that for 2,000 years has been Christian or Judeo-Christian. And so a lot of the best thinking about these concepts comes from people who come from that tradition. And whether we're believers or not now, I think a lot of their thinking is still useful and still helpful in thinking about how to have a good life. Now, the word sin was, as you say, ruined by people who used it to punish sex or used it to crack down on being a kid a lot of the time. But I think it's useful because it points to the fact that there's sometimes just screw-ups in our

nature, that there are bugs in the machine, and that some of them are characteristics of just the way we're wired, and that we should be aware of them. I think, you know, we all have a tendency to be selfish and to see the world from our own vantage point. David Foster Wallace in that famous Kenyan address said, we don't even think about it, but we see the world from our own vantage point. David Foster Wallace in that famous Kenyan address said, we don't even think about it, but we see the world as before us, behind us, beside us, but it's all revolving around us. And I do think that's just a screw up in our nature, that we're too self-oriented. And I think it's possible to have a concept of sin that doesn't rely on the original sin and even something explicitly

religious. What I talked about earlier about having your loves out of order, I think that's a good way to describe how sin happens, that sometimes we just have a tendency to get our loves out of order and we go for some short-term pleasure, like popularity, over a long-term virtue, like being faithful to our friends. And I think it's useful to revive that word just to remind ourselves how sort of broken we are, even while we're splendidly endowed in other ways. Another word I think is worth reviving, which has explicitly religious connotations, is the word grace. is worth reviving, which has explicitly religious connotations, is the word grace. Sometimes, and the way I would say it in non-religious terms, is sometimes you get sick or you have a trauma, and people you really are close to somehow disappear. They don't show up

for you. But then there are other people you barely know, and they completely show up for you, and they're very great friends to you at that moment. And that's unmerited love, that's undeserved. And I think it's as, you know, as it's important to recognize that sometimes we have these flaws in our nature, it's also important to recognize that as people and as a race or as a humanity, sometimes we just get unmerited benefits that we don't deserve. And sometimes the universe is much kinder to us than we merit. And that's grace. And so I think all these qualities are useful for thinking about our place in the world and our spiritual development.

How do you think about the self as the center of this project? One way to talk about the road to character is in opposition to the self. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus

episodes, NAMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.