David Brooks addresses the 'inner life' at Claypool lecture

David Brooks weighed “resume virtues” versus “obituary virtues” as he addressed an audience at the Wright Center on Jan. 13.

The first is more external and economic-driven while the second a more internal, moral focus on love and redemption, he said.

“We focus on money, but we don’t focus on love and nurturing relationships that we all realize are important,” the New York Times columnist said as a part of Saint Luke’s Claypool Lecture Series.

For Brooks, character looks like consistency over time, connection with a broad range of attachments and how a core piece of us is malleable.

The primary focus of his talk centered on qualities that develop character. The first was being deeply in love, an experience that decenters us from ourselves and plows open the ground of our hearts in a way that leads to serving.  Additionally, suffering “drags you deeper into yourself and shows you that you are not the person you thought you are.”

“We aim for happiness, but we are formed by suffering,” Brooks said.

Character, he said, is also developed by learning to defeat what is weakest in ourselves through self-control and, penultimately, by commitment to an organization.

All of these experiences, according to Brooks, have a common theme: drifting down to humility and then rising up to serve. Humility, as he defined it, is honest self awareness from a distance.

For Brooks, developing character in the “inner life” is the key to making change that we so often to try to accomplish with money.

“The inner life matters and is at the core of helping people rise,” Brooks said.

A final key to character that Brooks articulated is acceptance, which comes with a combination of accepting gifts, being vulnerable and feeling a part of something. The religious term he used to define this idea was grace.

The talk ended with a time of questions and answers.