David Brooks
The concept of the book is something I could easily relate to. In fact, it reminded me of a favourite concept from the Mahabharata – Jaya and Vijaya. Vijaya is victory over others, and Jaya is victory over self. In this book, the author writes about two sides of our nature – one that is ambitious and career oriented, and another that is more concerned with the moral battles within.
He calls the former the ‘Big Me’ culture, where the focus is on the individual – be it consumption, or self actualisation. The alternate is where the individual has the humility to understand that he is part of a much bigger picture and through what the author calls ‘eulogy virtues’ builds relationships and moral standards. Using examples across history, walks of life, gender and race, he illustrates how some people have built themselves a moral fibre slowly but surely. He then uses the lessons from these as a contrast to the excesses of our age – from contexts that range from parenthood to social media.
The journeys of the individuals are in themselves fantastic reads. The chapter titles are a clue to the thrust of the arguments within – self conquest, struggle, self mastery etc – and the author does a great job of tracing the tribulations, and the moral ascent of the people involved. My favourite would be George Eliot. Across the vast stretches of time that separates us, her words spoke to me.
However, one of the things that I didn’t like in the book was (in many cases) the usage of divinity as the driving force. The author could have been merely chronicling the lives of the personalities and their motivations, but many a time I found the usage of ‘God’, ‘grace’ etc quite putting off. This, of course, is a personal bias, and the book manages to rise above that for the most part.
To me, the book had something meta about it. It somehow embodied what it was writing about. A flawed-but-finally-successful people who were flawed, but who through sheer persistence rose above their deficiencies, and made their life their statement. Despite some of the things that I found arguable, at a broad level, I think it helps us envision a counter movement – one that goes against the workings of the modern world and the infinite wants of the human mind, and seeks to build a moral vocabulary and ecology that can help make better humans of us! It gave me many things to think about and articulated well, some of the thoughts that were already brewing in my mind. To quote Eliot, “Adventure is not outside man; it is within”
