David Brooks, respected political and cultural commentator, teaches about the importance of character and persevering through life's challenges.

This forum was given on October 22, 2019.

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I am going to talk a little about some of the things I have learned in life about how to lead a good, moral life and then talk about what kind of citizens I think we all need to be to have a good democratic culture and a healthy democratic character.

My life started out in unpredictable form. I grew up in Greenwich Village in the 1960s to somewhat left-wing parents. When I was five, they took me to a Be-In, where hippies would just go to be. One of the things they did at the Be-In was set a garbage can on fire and throw their wallets into it to demonstrate their liberation from money and material things. I saw a $5 bill on fire in the garbage can, so I broke from the crowd, reached into the fire, grabbed the money, and ran away. That was my first step over to the right.

When I was seven, I read a book about Paddington Bear and decided I wanted to become a writer. I remember that in high school I was already deeply into writing. I wanted to date a woman named Bernice. She didn’t want to date me; she wanted to date some other guy. And I remember thinking, “What is she thinking? I write way better than that guy.” But those were her values.

Then, when I was eighteen, the admissions officers at Columbia University, Brown, and Wesleyan decided I should go to the University of Chicago. The saying about the University of Chicago being a very heavy, cerebral place is “It’s a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students St. Thomas Aquinas.” They have T-shirts they wear that say, “Sure it works in practice, but does it work in theory?” So the university was super intellectual. And I was pretty cerebral in those days. I did a double major in history and celibacy while I was at Chicago.

But the big break of my life did happen there, which was that William F. Buckley, a ­prominent columnist, came to campus. I wrote a very mean parody of him for being a name-dropping blowhard, which he apparently found funny, because at the end of his speech, he said to the student body, “David Brooks, if you’re in the audience, I want to give you a job.” Now, sadly, I was not in the audience. But I called him up three years later, and the job was still there and I was set.

My career has had a pretty steady and very boring trajectory. I am a conservative columnist at the New York Times, which is a job I liken to being the chief rabbi at Mecca. I do a show on PBS called The News Hour, which is a very great show that was formerly hosted by Jim Lehrer. It is a show that I think has a lot of civility and great values. But it is for a certain seasoned audience. So if a ninety-three-year-old lady comes up to me in the airport, I know what she is going to say: “I don’t watch your show, but my mother loves it.” We are very big in the hospice community.

And then I started writing books and reading books. And as I have written more books and read more books as I have gotten older, I have gotten a little more sensitive, a little more feminine. I am the only American man who has finished the book Eat, Pray, Love,1 if you remember that thing. By page 123 I was actually lactating, which was surprising to me.

Four years ago I wrote a book called The Road to Character2; it is a book on character. And I learned that writing a book on character doesn’t give you good character and that even reading a book on character doesn’t communicate good character. But buying a book on character does give you good character, so I recommend doing that.

The Lies of the Meritocracy
When you walk through life—the career side of life—you walk with a certain set of values. We take kids who start with the intensity of life and feed them into the college admissions process, which teaches them that status and achievement are at the core of life. Then they get out and lead the kind of life that I led, which was a life in the meritocracy, trying to make it, trying to achieve, trying to contribute, and trying to build up an identity.

This meritocracy does give us a lot of achievement. On the drive here from Salt Lake City, all these great companies line the highway.

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