34 pages • 1 hour read
David BrooksThe Road to Character
David BrooksNonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Big Me”
In a final comparison of Adam I to Adam II, Brooks returns to the image of the triumphant football quarterback on television and discusses the differences between Joe Namath and Johnny Unitas. While both were raised in impoverished circumstances in the coal and steel towns of Western Pennsylvania, the two men could not have been more different in their approaches to life and athleticism. Where Unitas was humble and self-effacing, a team player, and devoted to his perpetually losing team, Namath was proud, individualistic, and often promoted himself at the expense of his team. Brooks then looks the decade in which both players were at their height, the 1960s, and works backward to trace the cultural shift from “crooked timber,” community-minded moral ecology to our present-day focus on the “Big Me.”
Brooks argues that this culture of self-centeredness and self-promotion did not originate with the Baby Boomers in the 1960s and 1970s, but with the Greatest Generation in the 1940sand 1950s. Parenting trends shifted toward achievement-based models of conditional love; parents no longer reprimanded children strongly for mistakes, but children are expected to achieve as highly as their parents believe necessary. Being raised with the insistence that we’re special and destined for greatness has remade our society-level moral ecology such that it prioritizes individual success over community success. Brooks presents a 15-point moral code that draws on themes and examples used earlier in the book, reiterating the importance of qualities like honesty, humility, integrity, and self-sacrifice. He argues that if we can create a counterculture focused around this earlier, more compassionate communal moral ecology, then we will also live with greater authenticity and joy.
Chapter 10 Analysis
Thematically, Brooks summarizes and synthesizes all previous characteristic-based lessons into a single code of moral reform. Reaching back into the stories he relates earlier in the book, he uses aspects of those real-life stories to shape proactive methods of reforming our present moral ecology. Brooks’ suggested moral code is one of community-mindedness, self-sacrifice, and constant introspection. Adam II nature dominates the discussion in this final chapter, as it is the triumph of Adam II in each historical figure’s life that Brooks uses to draw his conclusion. We can return to this lost moral ecology, provided we’re willing to learn and change. As we must be willing to support each other, we must also be willing to seek assistance—even if that help comes from lives that have long since ended. As Brooks puts it, “People do get better at living, at least if they are willing to humble themselves and learn. Over time they stumble less, and eventually they achieve moments of catharsis when outer ambition comes into balance with inner aspiration […] when moral nature and external skills are united in one defining effort” (269-70).
While there isn’t a clear setting to this closing section, character-wise, Namath and Unitas make for an effective recapitulation of the Adam I/Adam II dichotomy. The nameless football quarterback from Brooks’ introduction takes individual shape, the two quarterbacks’ contrasting personalities melding into a metaphorical duality. After revisiting Adam I/Adam II in the form of these contrasting athletic contemporaries, Brooks shifts the focus, centering himself and the reader as the predominant characters for the remainder of the book. As we read Brooks’ 15-point moral code made up of the lessons presented in previous chapters, we are meant to place ourselves at the center of the plot. We are meant to imagine ourselves as protagonists adhering to suggested values and taking suggested actions.
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