#89 — On Becoming a Better Person
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Summary
David Brooks joins me to talk about his new book, The Road to Character, and how he came to write it. We also talk about the Trump administration, and why he thinks it s a good thing that Donald Trump is the president of the United States. And we talk about what it means to be a good human being, and what it really means to have a good moral life. We also discuss the difference between self-gratification and self-overcoming on some basic level, and the importance of keeping promises and the ethics of honesty, and related matters. And we get to Trump, too, because, well, why not? We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, it s made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. If you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a subscriber. You ll get access to all kinds of premium features, including ad-free versions of the Making Sense Podcast, as well as access to our most popular quizzes, questions and quizzes. Subscribe to our newest episodes every Monday morning, to learn more about what s going on in the world, and how to be included in the making sense of it all. Thanks for listening, and remember to leave us a rating and reviewing the podcast! Sam Harris - your rating and review this podcast is really really helps us spread the word out there about what we're doing here. - Thank you, and I hope you re having a good day! - Yours truly, too much of it's a good one, good day, Cheers, Maureen McCarthy, Cheer, Thank You, Rachel Raldrigo, etc., etc., - MURCHES AND KELLY AND A CHEERIE AND A PODCAST AND KEEPS QUEERQUEER AND POTTER AND A PLASTORTER AND GOT A PEDCAST AND A MAGIC AND A QEER AND A FOTOGROUP AND A BED AND A THOTIE AND AN APPEARANCE AND A MONTH AND A PRIEPCIE AND G AND A SPOTIE Q AND A AND A ME AND A COURTEY AND AN AMCAST AND AN ETS AND A RAP AND A SECRETRY AND A VOTET CHIEFER AND A LOT OF CHEET AND A LOT AND A NECK AND A M CHEOTHE AND A HEARING THAT S NOT Q AND AN ACTUAL THIEPRONE AND A COR COR COR AND A CITY AND A TOT AND AN ESTING THAT AND A SQE AND A CEDOR AND A NA CHIEVEL AND A FEED AND AN EPISODE AND A RELIEPRION AND A DCASTLE AND A MA CHIEVE AND A SCOTCH AND A THANKED ME AND AN FALLY AND A SUPPORTER AND AN EARR AND A CRY TO A PLIEBER AND A GRYER AND AN AND A BUTTER AND APEC AND A HEAD AND A RETREEEE AND A FACE AND A BETTER THIEVINE AND A FINALLY A CHEEOTHE HEARD AND A TREMENT AND A FRY'S AND A CHRISTIE AND FALLY AN EGG AND A YELL AND A SOCIECE AND AN ANCOTE AND A BAD THIE COR CORLINE AND A GLOW AND A BLOT HEAR AND A THRODY AND A PAIRD AND A GREY THIRD THING AND A COL AND A KET AND AN ORTHING AND A NOT A THIEMENT AND AN AN EGY AND A LEASET AND THOT TO A THOTE AND AN INCLISE AND A FOR THAT AND AN OCASTING THAT THRONE AND AN A FALLY THIEFER TO A BODY AND AN AQ AND A ... ...)
Transcript
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David is one of the nation's leading writers and commentators.
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He's an op-ed columnist for the New York Times.
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And he appears regularly on PBS's NewsHour and Meet the Press.
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And he's the best-selling author of several books, The Social Animal, Bobo's in Paradise,
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and most recently, and the book under discussion, The Road to Character.
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And in this episode, we talk about that book, The Road to Character.
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And it was a very interesting book, where David goes into the difference between self-gratification
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So we talk about things like sin and self-esteem versus self-overcoming, and the significance of
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keeping promises, and the ethics of honesty and related matters.
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There was no way I could let David Brooks escape without telling me something about his
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But that does not dominate the podcast, for those of you who are sick to death of the topic.
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It's interesting that an hour on this podcast feels quite short.
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But David had another interview to get to, so enjoy it while it lasts.
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I'm trying to rack my brains to find another time.
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But we met at a meeting organized by the great John Brockman at one point.
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John Brockman is the zealot of modern American culture, global culture.
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Many people don't know this, but he controls much of our intellectual life.
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So I want to talk to you about two main things.
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I want to talk to you about your book, The Road to Character, which I loved.
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And then I think we will inevitably talk a little about a very different road, the road that
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I know my audience is sick to death of Trump as I am.
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I think if there's a God, he probably is sick of Trump too at this point.
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But I can't have you on this podcast without getting your take on what's going on in Washington.
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But we will first go toward topics that I know are dear to your heart and mine, which
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is really the nature of our moral lives or lack thereof.
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So let's start with how you came to write this book and what you mean by character, because
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character is a, like many of the words you use in this book, is not a word that tends
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to roll off the tongue without any self-consciousness at this point.
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How did you come to this and what is character in your view?
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It's not a word I like, and I'm not even sure how often it's in the book.
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But when I came to have a title that could, in one word or at least in a couple words, summarize
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sort of moral development, that would seem to be the word that at least people sort of
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Whereas moral development itself, as a phrase, sounds clunky.
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And at first it was just going to be about epistemological humility, really building off
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work that Danny Kahneman and a lot of other people have done about shortcomings, our own
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But then as I got into it, I guess my tableau expanded and I started thinking about moral
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And basically, I mean, when you're sort of doing what I do, you sort of work out your own
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And so I achieved way more career success than I ever thought I would, but I never had
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and still don't have the sort of joyous demeanor and radiating goodness that I see in other
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And so I just sort of wanted to figure out how do they get that?
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And so the book, I really took a bunch of characters more or less randomly selected who
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were pathetic at age 20 and kind of amazing at age 70.
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And I just wanted to know how do they grow into much better people, which they all did.
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Yeah, the story is really told through these different characters you profile and people
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like Dorothy Day and Montaigne and Dr. Johnson.
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And I guess as time is short, I don't want to go into many of them, but one jumped out at
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The profile of George Marshall, the general who is not as famous as he should be, perhaps,
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In writing about character and writing about virtues that are, again, that we don't really
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have the moral language anymore to talk about without really straining.
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And we'll get into the significance of words like sin and wisdom and other words that people
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But in the character of Marshall, I was struck by the fact that so much of what you describe
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about him is clearly noble and deserving of really nothing but praise.
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I mean, his level of self-sacrifice and self-abnegation and his willingness seemingly at every turn to
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put country before self, to put the needs of, in this case, the President of the United States
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If I could teach my children to be good, I'm not sure I would give them that particular
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So why don't you just summarize briefly the story you tell about Marshall and in particular
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about the way in which he didn't make the moves when his career was really reaching its
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apogee to become the far more famous and influential general that he might have been?
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Yeah, he grew up in Pennsylvania, and he was a very shy boy and a very poor student.
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And his older brother went to VMI, Virginia Military Institute.
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And his older brother said, you know, George is kind of pathetic.
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Let's not let him go there because he'll ruin the family name.
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And so he was not an impressive young man, but he ended up going to VMI, and he ended
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And military life really was the making of him.
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He was never a great student, but he had a habit of leadership.
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And so he rose through the army, sometimes seeming on the outside extremely conservative
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and stayed, even as he was revolutionizing a lot of things within the army about fighting
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with tanks and how they did train future soldiers.
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So he was a bit of a quiet rebel within the army.
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And he really wants to run Operation Overlord, which is the D-Day invasion.
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And Churchill and Stalin had both told him he was going to get the job.
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But he had a code that he would never campaign for himself because he feared his own ambition.
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And when Roosevelt called him into the Oval Office, Roosevelt said, would you like to run
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And instead of just saying yes, Marshall said, my own personal ambitions should have no bearing
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And four times, Marshall said, it's not about me.
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And Roosevelt took the chance to give the job to Eisenhower.
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And it was the one day he went home early in the whole course of the war.
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And he would have been a much more famous person if he'd run the D-Day invasion.
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And he was someone who was not only admired by history, but he's admired by those around
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The people who knew him best really admired him the most.
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He had a quality that we associate with Greek and Roman times of magnanimity, which Pericles
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And it's a great man doing great service to his country.
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Marshall could be very friendly and very intimate, but only in the tightest circle of trusted
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And so during the war, he wouldn't call Eisenhower Ike the way everyone else did, because it was
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And I do think that's that does make him a little hard to hard to love.
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But I noticed that many of these things that we immediately recognize as virtues, in this
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case, his willingness to be self-effacing, even when he, in some basic sense, deserves all
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the praise that is coming his way and the advancement that is being offered.
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Certain virtues are in tension with other virtues.
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And it's hard to actually want to emulate him in that moment, given that you could also tell
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a probably equally ennobling story about doing what is appropriate to actualize your gifts in the
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His rectitude was in tension with just kind of an honest acknowledgement of perhaps who's the best
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And many of our moral considerations seem to have this structure where it's not really a matter of
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But it's sometimes a matter of prioritizing various values that are all values that we
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But there is a zero sum conflict between some of them, some of the time.
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Do you feel that that's the way the landscape looks to you?
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Or do you see it mostly a matter of always seeing clearly what is what is right versus wrong?
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I think the values are incommensurate, as Isaiah Berlin would say, that things don't fit together
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And sometimes things are in tension and they create paradoxes.
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And so a lot of the characters I write about in the book, more so if I had to do the book
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Francis Perkins, another person from that era, had that.
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But it also gave them the vice of coldness or it the virtue of reticence took away from
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And so one of the features in the book that and that's informed my thinking a lot is Augustine's
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He says we all love a lot of things, but we know instinctively that some loves are higher
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than others and that you should love honesty more than you love money, for example.
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Or if you if a friend tells you a secret and then you blab it at a dinner party, you're putting
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your love of popularity above your love of friendship.
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And those are cases where we love two different things and it's pretty obvious which one's
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But there are other times where it's not obvious and that the two different loves are
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And sometimes you have to pick one or sometimes your personality more or less inclines you
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Yeah, well, in your discussion of this, you oppose various things.
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You talk about the resume virtues versus the eulogy virtues.
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You talk about moral realism versus moral romanticism.
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So maybe we can track through some of these because it is a very useful structure.
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What are the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues?
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You know, I should say I have one of my mental weaknesses is I have a weakness for dualisms.
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And I see I see them everywhere and I'm persuaded by all of them.
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In this case, it's a strength, but I take your point.
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And so the the eulogy virtues and the resume virtues are things I more or less took from a guy
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named Joseph Soloveitchik, who was a rabbi in the mid 20th century.
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And he he said we have two sides of our nature, one side, which is about conquering the world
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And those are the resume virtues, the things that make us good at our job, whether it's a good
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And then the eulogy virtues are the internal side of ourselves, the things they say about us
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after we're dead, whether it's being courageous or honest or capable of great love.
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And my argument in the book is that we live in a culture that knows the eulogy virtues
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We'd all rather be remembered for our character traits rather than our career.
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But we live in a culture that emphasizes the form, the career parts, not the latter.
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And we're just a lot more articulate about how to build a good career and how to build a good
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And our universities in particular are much more confident in talking about professional
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rise than a moral or spiritual rise for a lot of different reasons.
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One of them, my colleague at Yale, Tony Cronman, who's at the law school, says specialization
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causes us to look at the narrow focus of different subjects, but never step back and look at the
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And so his argument is that specialization causes us to abstract from the whole quality
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of our conduct and makes us focus on how we're doing as potential lawyers or academics or
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Yeah, well, there's another opposition that is relevant to what you just said.
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You talk at one point about talent versus character.
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To view a person as a collection of talents that need to be maximized, there's a kind of
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utilitarian and transactional way we think about ourselves and our interface with the world.
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And it's not the same thing as developing a truly moral character and seeing that as an
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ongoing struggle against limitations that are not a matter of your jumping through the kinds
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of hoops that your talents or your specialization would dictate.
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Yeah, my shorthand way to say that is that if you're going to pick out a career, then go with
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Go with the things that you're naturally talented at or want to be talented at.
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But if you're thinking about your internal growth, pay a lot of attention to your weaknesses.
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And one of the things that pretty much all the characters in the book do is they identify
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For Eisenhower, another character in the book, it was his anger.
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For others, Dorothy Day, she was sort of over-emotional and fragmented.
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And they waged a daily drama against their weakness.
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And so I would say if you want to be a good person and if you don't work on your weaknesses,
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you'll end up like Richard Nixon being swallowed up by them.
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I think there was someone in the book, it might have been Dorothy Day, who was urged to major
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in an academic subject that was her weakness just to overcome that, to not take your career
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Was that Dorothy Day or was that someone else in the book?
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And Mount Holyoke then, as now, is quite a remarkable place.
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And they really did think, we're training people to be really good people.
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And it was a women's college, so there was some sexism in that.
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But they said, listen, if you can major in the field you're weakest in, that will build
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your character and you'll be able to conquer anything.
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And to that school's credit, they sent out young women, Perkins was class of 1903, they
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sent them out to Pakistan, across Africa, across Asia on these service trips, and they would
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And somebody did a census of all the missionaries abroad, I think in around 1920, and some ridiculous
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percentage, like 20% of them were Mount Holyoke grads.
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So they were armed with a sense of mission and a sense of toughness on how to conquer
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So you think we lose something important when we lose concepts like sin and evil and virtue
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and wisdom and humility, that we lose a moral language that not only affects how we talk about
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these things, it actually affects whether or not we recognize a kind of inner landscape and
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lead a kind of examined life that really becomes impossible unless you have the concepts, unless
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you have the landmarks you can even acknowledge exist and to shoot for.
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Some of these words I find myself using and I can do so without any kind of self-consciousness,
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but sin isn't one of them because of its association with Christianity in particular and because of
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some of the liabilities of the way in which it's interpreted.
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This is something you point out in the book, sin can be and has been so often invoked against
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I mean, it really is set in opposition to what most of us would consider a healthy sex
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Yeah, I do think we need to recover a lot of these words because it is the vocabulary of
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And we happen to have a culture, say, in Western civilization that for, you know, 2,000 years
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And so a lot of the best thinking about these concepts comes from people who come from that
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And whether we're believers or not now, I think a lot of their thinking is still useful and
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still helpful in thinking about how to have a good life.
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Now, the word sin was, as you say, ruined by people who used it to punish sex or used it
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to crack down on being a kid a lot of the time.
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But I think it's useful because it points to the fact that there's sometimes just screw-ups
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in our nature, that there are bugs in the machine and that some of them are characteristics
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of just the way we're wired and that we should be aware of them.
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And I think, you know, we all have a tendency to be selfish and to see the world from our
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David Foster Wallace in that famous Kenyan address said, we don't even think about it,
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but we see the world as before us, behind us, beside us, but it's all revolving around
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And I do think that's just a screw-up in our nature, that we're too self-oriented.
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And I don't, I think it's possible to have a concept of sin that doesn't rely on, you
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know, the original sin and even something explicitly religious.
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What I talked about earlier about having your loves out of order, I think that's a good way
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to describe how sin happens, that sometimes we just have a tendency to get our loves out
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of order and we go for some short-term pleasure, like popularity, over a long-term virtue, like
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And I think it's useful to revive that word just to remind ourselves how sort of broken
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we are, even while we're splendidly endowed in other ways.
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Another word I think is worth reviving, which has explicitly religious connotations, is the
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Sometimes, and the way I would say it in non-religious terms, is sometimes you get sick or you have
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a trauma, and people you really are close to somehow disappear, they don't show up for
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But then there are other people you barely know, and they completely show up for you, and they
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And I think it's, you know, as it's important to recognize that sometimes we have these flaws in
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our nature, it's also important to recognize that as people and as a race or as a humanity,
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sometimes we just get unmerited benefits that we don't deserve, and sometimes the universe
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is much kinder to us than we merit, and that's grace.
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And so I think all these qualities are useful for thinking about our place in the world and
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How do you think about the self as the center of this project?
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One way to talk about the road to character is in opposition.
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