“In its most complete meaning, intellectual humility is accurate self-awareness from a distance.”
David Brooks The Road to Character
Temperament is innate. Just as we are determined to be short or tall, we are calm or reactive by nature. The qualities we bring into the world shapes personality and character because they affect how we react to the world, how the world treats us and thus determine how the world occurs to us: our model of who we are and what to expect.
Brooks, in The Road to Character
Brooks, I think is just further participating in the elevation of the self by promoting “character” as another elite pursuit. Of course we want to be rich, but we also want to have a beautiful, heartfelt elegy at our funeral.
From his purely secular viewpoint, Brooks wants to appropriate religious ideals like gratitude and humility, but apparently doesn’t see that the abandonment of these religious and spiritual tradition themselves serves to promote a worship of self above all. If there is something bigger, we are dwarfed and humbled automatically. If not, we are alone as ourselves.
For example, his chapter on vocation is in contradiction to my view that a job is a job. We need to work to live. Some few do work that they are called to or do work more important than just making a living. But most of us sell things or make things, that’s all and its how it has to be. It’s not a moral failure to need to make a buck.
No, it’s how we do the work before us and how we spend our allotted time that we must strive to make better. Maybe it is not ourselves we must improve but rather improve what we do and say. It’s the integration of self and the mental models we possess that allow deciding better in the moment.
“I suspect it is for one’s self-interest that one looks at one’s surroundings and one’s self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs. The camera is not merely a reflecting pool and the photographs are not exactly the mirror, mirror on the wall that speaks with a twisted tongue. Witness is borne and puzzles come together at the photographic moment which is very simple and complete. The mind-finger presses the release on the silly machine and it stops time and holds what its jaws can encompass and what the light will stain.”
