So it took some courage for David Brooks to produce in 2015 a book entitled “The Road to Character” consisting of profiles of 8 people whose life demonstrates “character” including Dwight Eisenhower, Samuel Johnson (!), George Marshall (of Marshall Fund fame), St Augustine (!), the american woman behind Roosevelt’s New Deal (Francis Perkins), the charity worker behind “The Catholic Worker” (Dorothy Day) and George Eliot, the British writer.
It’s an interesting format – there’s something a bit forbidding about the
700 page full Biography, warts and all, which assails us these days…..There
is, of course, a danger that you just get the highlights – what they call a “hagiography”
– which happened in 2007 when Gordon Brown published his “Courage – eight portraits”
profiling Mandela, Bonhoeffer, Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Cicely Saunders,
Aung Ky, Edith Cavell and Raoul Wallenburg.
But Brooks’ book manages to give us rounded profiles. It starts by contrasting two sets of values –
-
what it calls “CV values”, the achievements with which we regale potential
employers on our CVs
-
the “eulogy
values”, the human qualities for which we would like to be remembered at
our funeral (Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Really Effective People” makes a
powerful start with this point.
Five of the individuals chosen by Brooks are from my parents’
generation to which I paid due tribute many
posts ago
My generation, undoubtedly, had it too easy… Recent posts have
recognised just how far we have fallen from decent moral standards… I have no
real memory of Eisenhower but
use these amazingly prescient words of his 1960 farewell Presidential address on
the very first page of my Dispatches
to the Next Generation
We . . . must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
Brooks’ book includes this passage – as well as an important page in
the Marshall section about the importance of institutions which took me back to
a post of a couple of years ago about the
importance of thinking institutionally.
All in all, it made me realise that Robert Greene’s otherwise excellent
Laws of Human
Nature focus exclusively on the negative aspects – and need to be rerun
through a more positive lens….Wikipedia, for example, tells me that
“the Character
Strengths and Virtues (CSV) handbook of human strengths and virtues
by Christopher Peterson and Martin
Seligman, represents the first attempt on the part of the psychological
research community to identify and classify the positive psychological traits
of human beings. The CSV identifies six
classes of virtue (i.e., “core virtues”), made up of twenty-four measurable
character strengths.”
The six core virtues are -
Strengths
of Wisdom and Knowledge: Cognitive
strengths that entail the acquisition and skilful use of knowledge
Strengths
of Courage: Emotional strengths
that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of
opposition, external and internal
Strengths
of Humanity: interpersonal
strengths that involve supporting and befriending others
Strengths
of Justice: that underlie
healthy and harmonious community life
Strengths
of Temperance: that protect
against unhealthy excess and egotism
Strengths
of Transcendence: that forge
connections to the larger universe and provide meaning in life
No comments:
Post a Comment