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The hard part of this confrontation, I’d add, is that Adams I and II live by different logics. Adam I—the creating, building, and discovering Adam—lives by a straightforward utilitarian logic. It’s the logic of economics. Input leads to output. Effort leads to reward. Practice makes perfect. Pursue self-interest. Maximize your utility. Impress the world. Adam II lives by an inverse logic. It’s a moral logic, not an economic one. You have to give to receive. You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself. You have to conquer your desire to get what you
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If you are only Adam I, you turn into a shrewd animal, a crafty, self-preserving creature who is adept at playing the game and who turns everything into a game. If that’s all you have, you spend a lot of time cultivating professional skills, but you don’t have a clear idea of the sources of meaning in life, so you don’t know where you should devote your skills, which career path will be highest and best. Years pass and the deepest parts of yourself go unexplored and unstructured. You are busy, but you have a vague anxiety that your life has not achieved its ultimate meaning and significance.
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They radiate a sort of moral joy. They answer softly when challenged harshly. They are silent when unfairly abused. They are dignified when others try to humiliate them, restrained when others try to provoke them. But they get things done. They perform acts of sacrificial service with the same modest everyday spirit they would display if they were just getting the groceries. They are not thinking about what impressive work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all. They just seem delighted by the flawed people around them.
They just recognize what needs doing and they do it.
They make you feel funnier and smarter when you speak with them. They move through different social classes not even aware, it seems, that they are doing so. After you’ve known them for a while it occurs to you that you’ve never heard them boast, you’ve never seen them self-righteous or doggedly certain. Th...
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The self-effacing person is soothing and gracious, while the self-promoting person is fragile and jarring. Humility is freedom from the need to prove you are superior all the time, but egotism is a ravenous hunger in a small space—self-concerned, competitive, and distinction-hungry. Humility is infused with lovely emotions like admiration, companionship, and gratitude. “Thankfulness,” the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, said, “is a soil in which pride does not easily
Montaigne once wrote, “We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.” That’s because wisdom isn’t a body of information. It’s the moral quality of knowing what you don’t know and figuring out a way to handle your ignorance, uncertainty, and limitation.
This self-centeredness leads in several unfortunate directions. It leads to selfishness, the desire to use other people as means to get things for yourself. It also leads to pride, the desire to see yourself as superior to everybody else. It leads to a capacity to ignore and rationalize your own imperfections and inflate your virtues.
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” People in this “crooked-timber” school of humanity have an acute awareness of their own flaws and believe that character is built in the struggle against their own weaknesses.
“Souls are like athletes that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers.”
People who live this way believe that character is not innate or automatic. You have to build it with effort and artistry. You can’t be the good person you want to be unless you wage this campaign. You won’t even achieve enduring external success unless you build a solid moral core. If you don’t have some inner integrity, eventually your Watergate, your scandal, your betrayal, will happen. Adam I ultimately depends upon Adam II.
But character is built not only through austerity and hardship. It is also built sweetly through love and pleasure.
When you have deep friendships with good people, you copy and then absorb some of their best traits. When you love a person deeply, you want to serve them and earn their regard. When you experience great art, you widen your repertoire of emotions. Through devotion to some cause, you elevate your desires and organize your energies.
There are heroes and schmucks in all worlds. The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in moral struggle against yourself. The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage this struggle well—joyfully and compassionately.
Adam I achieves success by winning victories over others. But Adam II builds character by winning victories over the weaknesses in himself.
They had to descend into the valley of humility to climb to the heights of character.
Alice had to be small to enter Wonderland. Or, as Kierkegaard put it, “Only the one who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved.”
It is earned by being better than you used to be, by being dependable in times of testing, straight in times of temptation.
The central fallacy of modern life is the belief that accomplishments of the Adam I realm can produce deep satisfaction. That’s false. Adam I’s desires are infinite and always leap out ahead of whatever has just been achieved. Only Adam II can experience deep satisfaction. Adam I aims for happiness, but Adam II knows that happiness is insufficient. The ultimate joys are moral joys.
As Nietzsche observed, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
“To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals, that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.”
“I began to see what the great teachers of religion meant when they said that humility is the greatest of virtues,” she later wrote, “and if you can’t learn it, God will teach it to you by humiliation. Only so can a man be really great, and it was in those accommodations to necessity that Franklin Roosevelt began to approach the stature of humility and inner integrity which made him truly great.”
Overshadowing all Roosevelt’s decisions, Perkins wrote, “was his feeling that nothing in human judgment is final. One may courageously take the step that seems right today because it can be modified tomorrow if it does not work well.”
when social disaster strikes, “all are to act as though nothing had happened.”
When a person gives a poor man shoes, does he do it for the poor man or for God? He should do it for God, she decided. The poor will often be ungrateful, and you will lose heart if you rely on immediate emotional rewards for your work. But if you do it for God, you will never grow discouraged. A person with a deep vocation is not dependent on constant positive reinforcement. The job doesn’t have to pay off every month, or every year. The person thus called is performing a task because it is intrinsically good, not for what it produces.
She gave them copies of Baltasar Gracian’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom, a seventeenth-century guidebook by a Spanish Jesuit priest on how to retain one’s integrity while navigating the halls of power.
Reinhold Niebuhr put it in 1952: Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is
“He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city.”
responsibility and moral choice: whether to be brave or cowardly, honest or deceitful, compassionate or callous, faithful or disloyal.
Sin is also a necessary piece of our mental furniture because sin is communal, while error is individual. You make a mistake, but we are all plagued by sins like selfishness and thoughtlessness. Sin is baked into our nature and is handed down through the generations. We are all sinners together. To be aware of sin is to feel intense sympathy toward others who sin. It is to be reminded that as the plight of sin is communal, so the solutions are communal. We fight sin together, as communities and families, fighting our own individual sins by helping others fight theirs.
We really do have dappled souls. The same ambition that drives us to build a new company also drives us to be materialistic and to exploit. The same lust that leads to children leads to adultery. The same confidence that can lead to daring and creativity can lead to self-worship and arrogance.
Sin is not some demonic thing. It’s just our perverse tendency to fuck things up, to favor the short term over the long term, the lower over the higher. Sin, when it is committed over and over again, hardens into loyalty to a lower love.
The person involved in the struggle against sin understands that each day is filled with moral occasions. I once met an employer who asks each job applicant, “Describe a time when you told the truth and it hurt you.” He is essentially asking those people if they have their loves in the right order, if they would put love of truth above love of career.
The tender character-building strategy is based on the idea that we can’t always resist our desires, but we can change and reorder our desires by focusing on our higher loves. Focus on your love for your children. Focus on your love of country. Focus on your love for the poor and downtrodden. Focus on your love of your hometown or alma mater. To sacrifice for such things is sweet. It feels good to serve your beloved. Giving becomes cheerful giving because you are so eager to see the things you love prosper and thrive.
Ida demonstrated that it is possible to be strict and kind, disciplined and loving, to be aware of sin and also aware of the possibility of forgiveness, charity, and mercy.
It’s how you do the jobs you do, whether it’s a prestigious job or not.
I firmly determined that my mannerisms and speech in public would always reflect the cheerful certainty of victory—that any pessimism and discouragement I might ever feel would be reserved for my pillow. To
Eisenhower was not an authentic man. He was a passionate man who lived, as much as his mother did, under a system of artificial restraints.
“Always try to associate yourself closely and learn as much as you can from those who know more than you, who do better than you, who see more clearly than you.” He was a fanatic about both preparation and then adaptation: “The plans are nothing, but the planning is everything,” he would say. Or, “Rely on planning, but never trust plans.”
Take a bucket, fill it with water, Put your hand in—clear up to the wrist. Now pull it out; the hole that remains Is a measure of how much you’ll be missed…. The moral of this quaint example: To do just the best that you can, Be proud of yourself, but remember, There is no Indispensible Man!
“Always take your job seriously, never yourself.”
A personality is a product of cultivation. The true self is what you have built from your nature, not just what your nature started out with.
He looked simple and straightforward, but his simplicity was a work of art.
A moderate person can start out hot on both ends, both fervent in a capacity for rage and fervent in a desire for order, both Apollonian at work and Dionysian at play, both strong in faith and deeply doubtful, both Adam I and Adam II.
Therefore caution is the proper attitude, an awareness of the limits the foundation of wisdom.
