by David Brooks
Sandberg motioned to those inducted before him, “These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you and to the game of baseball that we all played growing up.
“Respect. A lot of people say this honor validates my career, but I didn’t work hard for validation. I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do, play it right and with respect.… If this validates anything, it’s that guys who taught me the game … did what they were supposed to do, and I did what I was supposed to do.”
Responsibility
The intuitionist view emphasizes the moral action that takes place deep in the unconscious, but it is not a determinist view. Amid the tangled jostle of unconscious forces, the intuitionist still leaves room for reason and reflection. He still leaves room for individual responsibility.
It’s true this new version of individual responsibility is not the same as it appeared in the old rationalist conceptions of morality, with their strong reliance on logic and will. Instead, responsibility in this view is best illustrated by two metaphors. The first is the muscle metaphor. We are born with certain muscles that we can develop by going to the gym every day. In a similar way, we are born with moral muscles that we can build with the steady exercise of good habits.
The second is the camera metaphor. Joshua Greene of Harvard notes that his camera has automatic settings (“portrait,” “action,” “landscape”), which adjust the shutter speed and the focus. These automatic settings are fast and efficient. But they are not very flexible. So sometimes, Greene overrides the automatic setting by switching to manual—setting the shutter speed and focusing himself. The manual mode is slower, but allows him to do things he might not be able to achieve automatically. In the same way as the camera, Greene argues, the mind has automatic moral concerns. But in crucial moments, they can be overridden by the slower process of conscious reflection.
In other words, even with automatic reactions playing such a large role, we have choices. We can choose to put ourselves in environments where the moral faculties will be strengthened. A person who chooses to spend time in the military or in church will react differently to the world than a person who spends his time in nightclubs or a street gang.
We can choose to practice those small acts of service that condition the mind for the moments when the big acts of sacrifice are required.
We can choose the narrative we tell about our lives. We’re born into cultures, nations, and languages that we didn’t choose. We’re born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can’t control. We’re sometimes thrust into social conditions that we detest. But among all the things we don’t control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to organize perceptions.
We have the power to tell stories that deny another’s full humanity, or stories that extend it. Renee Lindenberg was a little Jewish girl in Poland during World War II. One day a group of villagers grabbed her and set off to throw her down a well. But one peasant woman, who happened to overhear them, went up to them and said, “She’s not a dog after all.” The villagers immediately stopped what they were doing. Lindenberg’s life was saved. This wasn’t a moral argument about the virtue of killing or not killing a human being or a Jew. The woman simply got the villagers to see Lindenberg in a new way.
We have the power to choose narratives in which we absolve ourselves of guilt and blame everything on conspiracies or others. On the other hand, we have the power to choose narratives in which we use even the worst circumstances to achieve spiritual growth. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” a young dying woman told Viktor Frankl during their confinement in a Nazi concentration camp. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously,” she said. She pointed to a branch of a tree, which she could see from her bunk window and described what it said to her in her misery. “It said to me, ‘I am here—I am here—I am life, eternal life.’ ” This is a narrative of turning worldly defeat into spiritual victory. It’s a different narrative than others might choose in that circumstance.
As Jonathan Haidt has put it, unconscious emotions have supremacy but not dictatorship. Reason cannot do the dance on its own, but it can nudge, with a steady and subtle influence. As some people joke, we may not possess free will, but we possess free won’t. We can’t generate moral reactions, but we can discourage some impulses and even overrule others. The intuitionist view starts with the optimistic belief that people have an innate drive to do good. It is balanced with the pessimistic belief that these moral sentiments are in conflict with one another and in competition with more selfish drives.
But the intuitionist view is completed by the sense that moral sentiments are subject to conscious review and improvement. The philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain recalls that when she was a little girl in Sunday school she and her classmates sang a little hymn: “Jesus loves the little children/All the children of the world/Be they yellow, black or white/they are precious in his sight/Jesus loves the little children of the world.” The song is not the sort of sophisticated philosophy that Elshtain now practices at the University of Chicago, but it is a lesson in seeing humanity, planted early and with reverberating force.
Redemption
Erica’s family was not perfect. Her mother was haunted by demons. Her relatives were pains in the ass much of the time. But they had engraved upon her a sense that family was sacred, that country was sacred, that work was sacred. These ideas were crystallized by emotion.
But as Erica got older, she entered a different world. Some of her old ways of being went dormant—sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. Day by day, she became slightly different, often in superficial ways—how she dressed and talked—but also in profound ways.
If you had asked her about the old values, she would have told you that of course she still embraced them. But in fact, they had become less consecrated in her mind. A certain strategic and calculating mentality had weakened the sentiments that her relatives had tried in their messy way to instill in her.
By the time she found herself in that hotel room with Mr. Make-Believe, she had become a different person without realizing it. The decision to sleep with him was not the real moment of moral failing. That moment didn’t even feel like a decision. It was just the culmination of a long unconscious shift. She had never consciously rejected her old values. She would have fiercely denied it if you’d asked. But those old ways of being had gained less prominence in the unconscious jockeying for supremacy inside. Erica had become a shallower person, disconnected from the deepest potential of her own nature.
In the weeks after, when she thought about the episode, she became newly aware that it really was possible to become a stranger to yourself, that you always have to be on the lookout, and to find some vantage point from which you can try to observe yourself from the outside.
She told herself a story about herself. It was the story of drift and redemption—of a woman who’d slid off her path inadvertently and who needed anchors to connect her to what was true and admirable. She needed to change her life, to find a church, to find some community group and a cause, and above all, to improve her marriage, to tether herself to a set of moral commitments.
She had always seen herself as a hustling young Horatio Alger girl. But she’d been through a period in which she was consumed by her quest. She would now right herself and sail on to better shores.
The redemption narrative helped Erica organize her view of herself. It helped her build integrity—integrating inner ideals with automatic action. It helped her attain maturity. Maturity means understanding, as much as possible, the different characters and modules that are active inside your own head. The mature person is like a river guide who goes over r
apids and says, “Yes, I have been over these spots before.”
In the following months, Erica rediscovered her love for Harold, and couldn’t imagine what she’d been thinking before. He would never be an earthshaking titan like Mr. Make-Believe. But he was humble and good and curious. And with his disparate curiosities and research frenzies, he was engaged in the most important search, the search to find meaning in life. People like that are worth staying close to. In any case, he was hers. Over the course of many years they had become intertwined, and their relationship might not be inspiring or exciting and dynamic all the time, but it was her life, and the answer to any malaise consisted in going deeper into it and not trying to escape into some mythical land of make-believe.
CHAPTER 19
THE LEADER
THEY FIRST MET THE MAN WHO WOULD BE PRESIDENT BACKSTAGE before a campaign rally. He was still campaigning for the party nomination at that point and had been calling Erica for weeks to “bring her on the team.” His staff had spent weeks looking for women, minorities, and people with business experience to bring into senior positions, and Erica was a trifecta. Grace called to talk for about forty-five seconds nearly every day—wooing, begging, laying it on thick with his instant intimacy and flattering persistence. “How’s it going, sister? Have you made a decision?” And so she found herself in a high-school classroom next to a packed gym, with Harold in tow. They were supposed to meet him now, watch a rally, and then talk in the van on the way to the next event.
About thirty people milled about timidly in the classroom, none touching the cookies or cans of Coke. Suddenly there was a rhythm of rushing steps, and in he burst, somehow bathed in his own illumination. Erica was so used to seeing him on television that now she had the disorienting sensation that she was watching him on some super HDTV, not actually seeing him in the flesh.
Richard Grace was the projection of a great national fantasy—tall, flat stomach, gleaming white shirt, perfectly creased slacks, historically important hair, Gregory Peck face. He was followed by his famously wild daughter—the promiscuous beauty whose behavior was the product of a childhood marked mostly by paternal neglect. Behind them, there was a bevy of ugly-duckling aides. The aides had the same interests as Grace, the same secret ambitions as he, but they had paunches, thinning hair, a slouch, so they were destined to play the role of whispering tacticians, while he was Political Adonis. Because of these minor genetic differences, they’d spent their lives as hall monitors and he’d spent his life getting away with things.
Grace swept the room with a glance and saw immediately it was used to teach health class, with anatomical posters of the male and female reproductive systems on one wall. There wasn’t even a conscious disturbance across his mind; just the vaguest ripple of knowledge that he couldn’t allow himself to get photographed with a uterus and a dick splayed out behind his shoulders. He slid to the other side of the room.
He hadn’t been alone in six months. He’d been the center of attention in every room he entered for the past six years. He had cast off from normal reality and lived now only off the fumes of the campaign, feeding off human contact the way other people survive on food and sleep.
He was all energy and adrenaline as he moved around the classroom. In rapid succession, he gave his Man-of-Destiny smile to a quartet of World War II vets, to two overawed honor students, six local donors, and a county commissioner. Like a running back, he knew how to keep his legs moving. Talk, laugh, hug, but never stop moving. A thousand intimate encounters a day.
People told him the most amazing things. “I love you.” … “I love you, too.” … “Hit him harder!” … “I’d trust you with my son’s life.” … “Can I have just five minutes?” … “Can I have a job?” They told him about the most awful health-care tragedies. They wanted to give him things—books, artwork, letters. Some just grabbed his arm and melted.
He surrendered himself to fifteen-second bursts of contact, detecting and reflecting, with that razor sense of his, the play of movement around each person’s lips and the expression in their eyes. Everyone got sympathy and everyone got a touch; he’d touch arms, shoulders, and hips. He’d send out these momentary pulsar beams of bonhomie or compassion, and he never showed impatience with the celebrity drill. A camera would appear. He’d drape his arm around each person as they posed with him. Over the years, he’d developed a mastery of every instant camera manufactured on earth, and if the photographer stumbled, he could throw out patient advice on which button to push and how long to hold it down, and he could do it like a ventriloquist without altering his smile. He could take attention and turn it into energy.
Finally, he came over to where Erica and Harold were standing. He gave her a hug, offered Harold the sly conspiratorial grin he reserved for trailing spouses, and then brought them into the envelope of his greatness. With the others in the room he’d been ebullient and loud. With them, he was insiderish, quiet, and confidential. “We’ll visit later,” he whispered in Erica’s ear. “I’m so glad you could come … so glad.” He gave her a serious, knowing look, then clapped his hand behind Harold’s head while staring into his eyes as if they were partners in some conspiracy. Then he was gone.
They heard a rapturous roar from the gym and hustled over to watch the show. It was a thousand people smiling at their hero, waving at him, bouncing on their sneakers, screaming their heads off, and pointing their camera phones. He flung off his jacket and basked there in the rush of support.
The stump speech had a simple structure: twelve minutes of “you” and twelve minutes of “me.” For the first half, he talked about his audience’s common sense, about their fine values, about the wonderful way they had united to build this great cause. He wasn’t there to teach them anything, or argue for something. He was there to give voice to their feelings, to express back to them their hopes, fears, and desires, to show them that he was just like them, could possibly be a friend or a family member, even though he was so much prettier.
So for twelve minutes he told them about their lives. He’d said all this hundreds of times, but he still paused at crucial moments, as if a sentiment had just popped into mind. He gave them a chance to applaud their own ideas. “This movement is about you and what you are doing for this country.”
Grace, like most first-class minds in his business, tried to find a compromise between what his voters wanted to hear and what he felt they needed to hear. They were normal people who paid only sporadic attention to policy, and he tried to respect their views and passions. At the same time he thought of himself as a real policy wonk, who loved nothing more than to dive down into an issue with a crowd of experts. He tried to keep these two conversations within shouting distance of each other in his head. Occasionally he’d give himself permission to flat out pander, and say the crude half-truth that got the big applause. He was a mass-market brand, after all, and had to win the votes of millions. But he also tried to keep his own real views in his head, too, for the sake of his self-respect. Fed by adulation, the former was always threatening to smother the latter.
In the final half of the speech, Grace turned to the “Me” section. He tried to show his audience that he possessed the traits the country needed at that moment in history. He talked about his parents—he was the son of a truck driver and a librarian. He talked about his dad’s membership in the union. He made it clear, as all candidates must, that his character was formed before he ever thought about politics—in his case by his military service and the death of his sister. He told all the facts of his life, and they were all sort of true but he had repeated them so many times he’d lost contact with the actual reality of the events. His childhood and early manhood was just the script he had been campaigning on all his life.
Self-definition is the essence of every campaign, and Grace stuck to his narrative, which, as one consultant had put it, was “Tom Sawyer grows up.” He described his small-town Midwestern upbringing, his charming pranks, the lessons he learned about the wider wor
ld and the injustice contained in it. He showed his wholesome manners, which came from a simpler time, his innocent virtue and his common sense.
The final passage of the speech was “You and I Together.” He told an anecdote about a meeting with a wise old lady who told him stories that just happened to confirm every plank in his campaign platform. He told them about the acres of diamonds they would seize together, the garden of plenty they would find at the end of the road, the place where inner conflict would be replaced by peace and joy. Nobody in the audience really thought a political campaign could produce such utopia, but for the moment the vision of it swept them away and erased all tension from their lives. They loved Grace for giving them that. As he finished his speech, shouting over their cheers and applause, the gym went wild.
The Private Campaign Speech
An aide appeared and swept Erica and Harold into the van—Erica in the middle row and Harold in the rear. Grace appeared cool and matter-of-fact, as if he had just come from a dull meeting on quarterly-earnings reports. He made a few scheduling consultations with an aide, did a three-minute cell-phone interview with a radio station, and then turned his laser beam on Erica, who was sitting next to him.
“First I want to make my offer,” he said. “I have political people and I have policy people, but I don’t have anybody first-rate who will make this organization run. That’s what I’m hoping you’ll do, be the chief operating officer of the campaign and then do the same thing in the White House after I win.”
Erica wouldn’t have been in the van unless she was prepared to say yes to his offer, which she did.
“That’s fantastic. Now that you’ve committed, I want to tell you both about the world you two are about to enter. I especially want to tell you, Harold, because I’ve read your work, and I think you’re going to find yourself in a strange new place.