Resenhas - The Road to Character

nenos 12/09/2023

As Augustine put it, “Where there’s humility, there’s majesty”.
To maintain subtlety: Our moral straight jacket, tasked with cultivating trustworthiness, constancy, necessity and with the ability to forge social contracts carries quite an intense journey. Some often explain nature only by deterministic brain chemistry or universe’s blueprint, which to be very honest provided me with some answers. But there’s another answer to make amends with: Life is also moral affair. Whether to be brave or cowardly, honest or deceitful, compassionate or callous, faithful or disloyal, life’s choice rest on individual responsibility and moral choice.
To ensure coherence: A life of inner confrontation can lead to an impressive inner cohesion. Inner cohesion with a set of dispositions, desires and habits slowly engraved for integration. In our moral ecology, we occasionally come across people with such integrity, calm people who don’t crumble in adversity, people who are able to love through a thousand small acts of self-control, people with refined enjoyment who have learned from joy and pain. A truly rare coherent character who, in Fitzgerald words: is able to keep the whole equation of picture in his head.
And to be truthful: We can easily make selfish, cruel and disorganized choices. We have perversity in our nature, our tendency is to give up and we very easily, dive into self-centeredness. Self-centeredness to live a fragmented and scattershot life which provides nothing more than ignoble thoughts, even though you are obviously not harming anyone else. Suddenly, the core turns into something degraded, life fall into pieces sooner or later and Kant’s words prove to be true once more: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
Culture, character and morals are the essential drama of life. And to turn this essential drama into a very interesting coalescing multidisciplinary structure, Journalist and Writer, Mr. David Brooks. We often attribute character to a byproduct of what our nature started with, but it goes beyond such meaning, far beyond whereas many philosophers believe in building, exploring and structuring the deepest parts of the self above all professional skills.
Something has changed in our moral ecology, and it’s not an easy job to understand this fundamental shift in our everyday consciousness. Some of us can. Some of us, in Nietzsche’s words: who has a why to live, can bear anyhow. For those who can’t, we have great books about, such as this one written by Mr. David Brooks. Each chapter covers distinct subjects. And for each subject, different stories from people who led diverse lives, exemplifying the activities and patterns that lead to character.
If you look at defining aspects of the multi-faceted older moral ecology, there’s both equally honorable and despisable ones. On one side, the culture was racist, sexist, antisemitic and emotionally cold. Think about Fathers in particular, who frequently were unable to express their love for their own children. Or Husbands who were unable to see depth in their own wives. We’ve evolved so much, and yet…
The moral ecosystem of yesteryears was far from perfect, but it undeniably possessed strength. Professors sought out to their students’ moral weaknesses rather than solely focusing on their intellectual strengths; parents confronted kids with honesty rather than constantly telling how wonderful their kids were; children were encouraged to be more skeptical of desires, more aware of weaknesses, more committed to overcoming their innate flaws. People didn’t need constant positive reinforcement, and those who faced profound indignations, often channeled their weaknesses into deep vocations.
Nowadays, we have an inflated sense of our importance. This new moral ecology, in Mr. Brooks’ words: obscured the inescapable moral core of life with shallow language, with excessive self-love, individualism, constant approval-seeking creatures making semi commitments and defined by external abilities and achievements. Are we seeing things exactly the way they are? We’re experiencing a very unique epoch, which character has room to be built not only through austerity and hardship, but with sweet love and pleasure.

Link to my highlights: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BKulVY8VX0pKISX8Gct4TazUto3wE1gC/view?usp=sharing
Transcript from the 5 levels of character: