David Brooks on Responding to the Summons

           David Brooks (The Road to Character, 2015) refers to two different classes of virtues we write in the course of our lives. One class is the resume virtues. The resume is the career-oriented, ambitious side of our nature. We want to conquer. We want to build, create, produce, and discover things. We have high status and win victories. This resume focuses upon the external matters. We are creative and savor our accomplishments. We want to venture forth into the world and away from home. Brooks will opine that resume virtues in our culture suggests that our accomplishments can provide a deep sense of satisfaction. However, the desires of the resume virtues are infinite. We will never find genuine happiness and satisfaction focusing upon them. The second class of virtues is funeral virtues. They are the virtues we hope people might highlight at our funeral. We want to obey a calling to serve the world. These are the inner virtues, the moral qualities we want to develop. We want more than to do well. We want to be good. We want to love intimately, to sacrifice self in the service of others, to live in obedience to some transcendent truth, to have a cohesive inner soul that honors creation and our possibilities. We might renounce worldly success and status for the sake of some sacred purpose. A primary question we answer in the funeral virtues is why we are here. We often want to return home, savor our roots, and savor the warmth of a family meal.

The art of living is learning to balance the building resume virtues as they confront the funeral virtues. Confrontation is the proper word, for the resume logic is utilitarian. Effort leads to reward. Practice makes perfect. Pursue self-interest. Maximize your utility. Impress the world. Cultivate your strengths. The funeral virtue is a moral logic. You have to give to receive, surrender to something outside yourself, and conquer your desire to get what you crave. Success can lead to pride. Failure can lead to great success. In order to fulfill yourself, forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.  Confront your weaknesses.

The art of living will involve cultivating humility, a “going down” before you can “rise up.” This concern for pride going before the fall is part of the journey. Yet, the journey does not mean they receive healing of their weaknesses. One can find a vocation or calling. One can commit to some long obedience and dedicate oneself to something that gives life its purpose.

In Chapter 2, Brooks refers to the importance of responding to a summons. He refers to the idea of discovering your passion, trusting feelings, and finding purpose. The assumption in such language is that the answer is inside of us. Therefore, the first step in the business plan of your life is to take an inventory of your gifts and passions, set your goals, and adopt a strategy to accomplish the goals. As William Ernest Henley put it in his poem “Invictus,” 

I am the master of my fate

I am captain of my soul.

 

It appeals to our sense of individual autonomy and fascination with self. It answers the question, “What do I want from life?” In contrast, Brooks says, if we focus upon the funeral virtues, the question to which we respond is “What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do?” We respond to the summons of life. It begins with our embeddedness in a community of people, circumstances, and inter-relations. Frederick Buechner famously put it, “At what points do my talents and deep gladness meet the world’s deep need?” Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), said that it did not matter what we expected from life, but what life expected from us. We need to stop asking about the meaning of life and instead think of ourselves as those of whom life asks questions. He concluded that life had given him a moral and intellectual assignment. Such a calling or vocation feels like the person has no choice in the matter. In reality, of course, any of us can run away. We will usually do so with dire results. If one pursues it, however, one’s life becomes unrecognizable without the calling.