by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

David Brooks: Calling the Outer Life

     “I came to the conclusion that wonderful people are made, not born — that the people I admired had achieved an unfakeable inner virtue, built slowly from specific moral and spiritual accomplishments.”

That’s David Brooks, introducing what I take to be the main idea of a forthcoming book.   An idea he is calling –

“If we wanted to be gimmicky, we could say these accomplishments amounted to a moral bucket list, the experiences one should have on the way toward the richest possible inner life.”

Here’s hoping he comes up with a non-gimmicky name for the idea before the book is published – because the idea is an awfully good one.  It fact, it may be the oldest, best good idea there is: the idea that we can learn how to be good, and even can become a little better, by finding out how exceptionally good people came to be good and trying to do likewise.   

One of Brooks’ “deeply good people” is Dorothy Day, who, in this abridgment of his taxonomy of goodness, represents Energizing Love. 

Dorothy Day led a disorganized life when she was young: drinking, carousing, a suicide attempt or two, following her desires, unable to find direction. But the birth of her daughter changed her. She wrote of that birth, “If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.”
That kind of love decenters the self. It reminds you that your true riches are in another. Most of all, this love electrifies. It puts you in a state of need and makes it delightful to serve what you love. Day’s love for her daughter spilled outward and upward. As she wrote, “No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.
She made unshakable commitments in all directions. She became a Catholic, started a radical newspaper, opened settlement houses for the poor and lived among the poor, embracing shared poverty as a way to build community, to not only do good, but be good. This gift of love overcame, sometimes, the natural self-centeredness all of us feel.

The more I like a Brooks idea, the more niggly and correcting I am about it, and I like this one a whole lot.  So I have to ask: Is it really right to identify goodness with “inner virtue” and the “inner life”? In doing so, isn’t Brooks still captive to the self-focused categories he is trying to break out of with this project?  Isn’t a Dorothy Day – and isn’t this is what made her so radical – characterized by outer goodness, by the quality of her outer life?

The photograph is of a signpost indicating public footpaths in Marshlands, East Yorkshire.

David Brooks: A “Spiritual Recession”?

“Such is life in a spiritual recession,” David Brooks declared in a column earlier this week, and the term caught the eye – just as he’d hoped it would. Put that way, it feels like fact: a spiritual recession.

Now, nobody is better positioned to say so than Brooks, who is at work on a piece of writing about Dorothy Day and other “figures of depth.“  In fact, “spiritual recession” is just the sort of formulation that Day – an anarchist ever vigilant about wealth and poverty – might have used herself.

But there are real limits to the term – worth pointing out if only because it seems to me that this term is going to catch on.  

Working off an essay by Mark Lilla in The New Republic, Brooks traces the “spiritual recession” to our citizenry’s wariness of big ideas, and a consequence of this, which is that “Americans have lost faith in their own gospel.”

So far, fair enough.  But what seems easy to forget – or hard to say for a general audience – is that historically, there hasn’t been an American gospel.  Rather, the American project, such as it is, has been invigorated by gospels and other creeds (not big “ideas,” in the main; for most of the twentieth century, political organizers’ common complaint was that practical and commerce-minded America was resistant to big ideas) that have derived their power in America from the very fact that they aren’t American and can’t be traced back to American origins.  Religious beliefs; ethnic loyalties and traditions; sounds of music and styles of architecture – the best of these things, now familiar from sea to shining sea, weren’t American to begin with and never fully became so.  Even distinctly American strains of Christian belief traced their origins and loyalties to some other country –and so resisted being simplified into an “American gospel.”   As I recall, Reinhold Neibuhr, whose thought strongly informs Brooks’s writing on civic values in America, stressed these unsubjugatable aspects of our moral and religious traditions from the beginning of his career (when he gave homilies in German in Detroit) to the end (when he tilted against the Vietnam War).  

It’s worth pointing out, too, the term “spiritual recession” reflects the very circumstances it would describe.  It’s as if to say, “The only descriptive language that still has power is that of economics,” and in so saying it concedes the point and makes the prophecy self-fulfilling.   

I don’t think the point is worth conceding – not yet.