Movie critic and later oped journalist of the wall street journal. He has served as contributing editor for the atlantic and newsweek. A bestselling author, brooks books include bobos in paradise, on Paradise Drive and is third look the social animal that hidden sources of love character and achievement became a New York Times bestseller number one bestseller and of course the work that he is discussing tonight is already number one on the amazon hardcover bestsellers list. In addition to all of this though. [applause] david teaches at Yale University and is a member of the American Academy of arts and sciences. Responding to david tonight is mike sub vibe nationally syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in the Washington Post and author of heroic conservatism as well is coauthor with pete wainer of city of man. In addition he served as a Senior Adviser of a Bipartisan Organization dedicated to the fight to end extreme poverty and preventable diseases as well as a pastor to fellow at the Denny Hastert center for economics and government policy at wheaton pretty. As they service a senior fellow at the council on Foreign Relations and a Senior Editor at the u. S. News and world report as well as a top aide for president george w. Bush for policy and Strategic Planning and the chief speechwriter. At the conclusion of davids remarks mike will provide a response and then we will go to audience questions. David, welcome. [applause] thank you. About 10 years ago i was driving home from work from the news hour and it was the summer afternoon or evening about 7 00. I pulled over to my house in bethesda and we had a driveway that one row beside and i pull in and i can see the backyard. My kids were then 12, nine and five had gotten a hold of the ball one of those cheap brown and they were kicking it up in the air. They were chasing it across the yard and they were laughing and giggling in the ball was arching to the air and the sun was coming down through the trees with the grass that was strangely green. [laughter] so i pulled into the driveway and iran rolled up after day of work and an unexpected beautiful site that i just stared at them and it was one of those moments when life and time are suspended and when reality spills outside of its bounds and you just get a sense of feeling of overwhelm regret. What did i do to deserve this . And i feel subsumed by it a duty you have not earned. That sense of getting subsumed by beauty you have not earned creates a strange desire, a strange stirring. Everyday life gives you a glimpse of a higher joy than you ever get and exposes something deep inside of you and you want to be worthy of what you have been given. So we all know the word, that undeserved gift. You can get it around different people. I had it at that moment looking at my kids. I remember seeing people that have an inner light. I was at the American Enterprises last summer seated next to the dalai lama at lunch and he is a guy who radiates inner light. He laughs at unusual moments so he just starts laughing and he wants to be polite so you laugh back. You feel comfortable with the guy and i remember i asked him he had the dalai lama bag and i said you have any candy in there . He basically its everything you get in the firstclass cabin of an airliner, a blindfold, little razor and a big bar. When youre around someone like that with an inner light you want to feel worthy of them because there is joy there. I was in Frederick Maryland with my friend Charles Murray at your gun i read into some women who helped immigrants learn to read. It can take years to do this process. When i walked in to the rome the women ages 50 to 80 you just felt the wave of goodness come the globe loving care musical voices or were settled and rooted. It made you feel valued and important and again a sense of quietness of an inner life. You want to feel worthy of them and if you have the career success i have had its okay but what they have i dont have. You want to be worthy of that. When i come to the Trinity Forum i experience a different sort of undeserved love. I have so many friends in this room who have not only exemplified certain ways of being in the world but who have actively, and helped me in times of need, in times of vulnerability, who leads the organization pete wainer Michael Cromartie have come forward in times of struggle with supporting council. Cecilia macalpine hosted me in their home. April lawson and Kristin Collins collins, younger in years, wiser and age. And our Close Friends with their son out there. Jenny who invited us to many of their in way over there so this is to me a bit of a coming home but also a bit of feeling that these people have helped me more than i deserved. When you are surrounded by that you do feel like in the book is really a product of five years of that kind of searching. The book starts with this distinction which sharia mentioned between the resume and the eulogy virtues. The eulogies are the things they say afterwards and death whether we are brave courageous the kinds of relationships we build them whether we have are capable of deep love. We know the eulogy is more important in the daily life especially in washington where we place more emphasis on the resume we are more clear about our career than how to serve with intuition and that was true of me. A book that helped me think about was that luck written in 1965 called a lonely man of faith. He looked at genesis and said there were two accounts of genesis that stand for the two sides of her nature which he he called adam one and add called adam one and add them to. Wants is basically a resume adam that wants to build and create and build things. It is a noble adam. Adam two is the internal adam that wants to embolden qualities have a strong third in the creation of ones possibilities a solid sense of right and wrong not only to do good but to be good. Adam juan wants to conquer the world and add them to wants to obey a calling and serve the world. Adam juan asked how things exist exist and adam too asks why things exist and what ultimately we are here for. Adam juan wants to venture forth and add them to wants to be anchored. These two atoms sometimes are in confrontation with each other and we do live in a culture that supports adam juan and sometimes ignores adam too. I would add adam juan and to operate by different logic. Everett leads to reward. Adam to lose by an inverse logic which is a moral logic and not an economic one and its filled with diversions. You have to give to receive and surrender something outside of yourself to gain strength within yourself and conquer your desire to get what you crave which can lead to the greatest failure which is pride and failure which can lead to the greatest success which is humility and running. You have to forget yourself in order to find yourself you have to lose yourself. You have to balance these two things. We live in a culture where its so competitive, where the noise of communication silences and drowns out the still silent voice inside. The meritocracy wants to promote yourself with the next job opportunity. Social media wants you to be broadcasting yourself creating highlight reels of your life. We have a philosophy that is prominent today that we are naturally good and we need to trust that golden tree. Follow your passion and be true to yourself and trust yourself. And 201950 the Gallup Organization had a poll question question. In 1950 12 of the students said yes im a very important person. Ask the same question again in 2005 and it wasnt 12 , it was 80 . [laughter] they have a thing called sources on in marxism test prevails people a bunch of statements does this apply to you and their statements like i like to be the center of attention that i find it easy to manipulate people because im so extraordinary. [laughter] and the median marxism score has gone up 30 of the last 20 years but along with that the increased desire for fame. High School Students were asked would you rather be bored junior high School Students were asked would you rather be a celebrities personal assistant or president and three when they would be justin b. Versus system. I asked barbara and she would rather be Justin Biebers assistant. [laughter] asked if they would like to lead a life with a lot of fame or a life of and to the one they set a life of fame. Eyes say im kind of famous go with the sex. [laughter] its better. I didnt know whether to tell that one. But if you are only adam one you turn into a shrewd animal. If thats all you have the lack quality of inner depth. You arent able to speak with a sophisticated language. You live not attached to things that are the most important in life and that is certainly venture at times in my life. You receive the gifts that life can offer but to settle for a moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve figure people seem to like me. Im not obviously hurting anybody but a core piece of yourself is a little listening that originally hope. The gap opens up between actual self and your desired cells. So i spent four years trying to figure out that inner life that sense of being unworthy of the kids one has received. How do you get that . How do you become a little more worthy . A book in only give you so much. Reading and writing a book cant get you there but it can hopefully provide a roadmap. I got an email from a guy named dave jolly who is a veterinarian who are minded me that only so much can be achieved in words. He wrote when a wise person teaches is the smallest part of what they give. The totality of their life and the way they go about it in her smallest detail is what is transmitted. Never forget that the message is the person. Perfect over lifetimes of effort that were set in motion by yet another wise person hidden from the recipient in time. Life is much bigger than we think. Cause and effect intertwined in a fast moral structure that keeps pushing us to do better become better even when we dwell in the most painful and confuse darkness. The message of 101 wisemen says is the least of what he gives. So i was looking for people. I was looking for friends. I was looking for dead friends who left us a legacy of their lives to Service Examples on how to be better. One of those friends was a woman named ida eisenhower. She was born in 1862 in shenandoah virginia. Her mom died when she was five. Her father died when she was 11 and she became an indentured servant and when a family was out for pick it one day she split. She got her cell phone to high school got into a caravan train to kansas guard or so per university married named David Eisenhower and gave birth to six sons one of whom was named Dwight Eisenhower. When Dwight Eisenhower was nine he wanted to go trickortreating. I decide you are too young. Dwight eisenhower had a temper tantrum in the front yard and punch the tree and a punch is so bad he rubbed the skin off with his knuckles. I dissent into his room had them cry for an hour and came up to bind his wounds and recited a verse. He that conquers his own soul is greater than he who takes the city. Many decades later eisenhower said that was the most important conversation of his life because it taught him that he had a weakness of sin himself that he needed to be. If we think of him as this garrulous country club kind of guy, he was a man of angering impetuousness but he addressed his own sin and defeated a sin. At night he would lie awake insomnia drinking Throat Infection spiking Blood Pressure 37 i cannot let temper beat me and he developed a series of strategies to defeat this sin. Some of them were stupid. He would take people he hated and write the name on a piece of paper rip it up and throw it in the garbage can. Thomas burton wrote to souls are like athletes. They make opponents worthy of them if they are to be tried in extended in push to the full limits of their power. Wide eyed and we teach us is the importance of locating your core person in identifying the activities to which it leads to the things you are ashamed of and defending and beating it and understanding first but you do have it. The second friend i acquired died longer before samuel johnson. He was born in 17 on line in england and barely survived his birth. He was handed over to a wet nurse whose milk infected and lets virtuosos. He was blinded in one eye and deaf in one ear and smallpox left him scarred. They perform surgery on his jaw which left scars on his face. He opened his arms and left the want open for six years. He develops system and ocd. He was rolling about and failed businesses student, failed as a teacher. His life at age 30 was what he called radically wretched. Suicide attempts was a very unsuccessful life. Out of that suffering come he turned up suffering into something. The first thing suffering doesnt it should be said theres nothing intrinsically noble about suffering but as paul tillich wrote suffering makes you look deeper into yourself beneath the daily cares of life and remind to you are not who you thought you were. Suffering carves into the basement of your soul and carved to the floor revealing a cavity below and that floor revealing a cavity below. What suffering created in johnson was a radical self honesty. We think of humility is thinking lowly of yourself that my favorite definition of humility is radical selfawareness from a position of other centeredness. Radical selfawareness and johnson achieved that. He walks to london and he started writing treatises whats tree form does. He wrote his way to goodness. He developed a Firm Understanding the world by taking each of these weaknesses and writing about them. He couldnt control his own body but he needed to control his own mind by anchoring it in the reality of the truth. So he wrote about sloth, he wrote about envy. He had a radical curiosity. If someone someone told him there was a river in oxford where people were drowning he jumped into the river to see what it was like. Somebody told him that if you stick to and a musket and chewed it will explode so he stuck seven and and shot it against the wall. The subjects of his essays were there things that plague him sloth and the guilt boredom sorrow and he grabbed them each by the hand and over the course of that is one biographer wrote the iron entered his soul. He became from ace debt scattered person to a very stabilizing giving one. He created an amazing work ethic. The French Academy took 50 years to write the first french dictionary. Johnson did a bond with six quirks in eight years. A friend of his was given a lectureship at oxford called the blackstone lectureship. His friends knew no law so johnson said i will write the lectures for you. He wrote 1600 pages for free for his friend. Between 60 to 72 he wrote the lives of the poet 52 biographies containing 378,000 words. This hunger to express, he had a great social club Edmund Burke Adam smith but he also had his home. Former prostitutes, slaves doctor with no money and 13 People Living with him at a time. There was the largest to him a generosity of spirit. That was all created out of intellectual honesty. When he died one of his colleagues wrote he has made a chasm which not only nothing can fill up that which nothing is a tendency to fill it. Johnson is dead let us go the next best. There is nobody. No man can be said to be quicker of mind and johnson. So from johnson we learned how to turn suffering into selfunderstanding and the importance of radical curiosity and intellectual effort and the way intellectual effort can lead to moral goodness. The third friend i met was a woman named dorothy day. Dorothy day as many of you know was the person who could not just read a novel she inhabited the novel became the characters of the novel. Unfortunately she read a lot of this so she took to drinking carousing living in poverty sleeping around a couple of abortions, one or two suicide attempts a very disorganized life richie was arrested wrongfully arrested but she took her rest is an indictment as a judgment on her own disorganized life. Amazing capacity for selfcriticism. She couldnt get out of it though. She had a child out of wedlock and she decided all the accounts of childbirth she had read were written by men so she decided she would write one. She wrote 140 minutes after giving birth and its very dramatic by the climaxes with a beautiful scene. She wrote if i had written the greatest book to compose the greatest symphony painted the most beautiful painting or carve the most exquisite figure i could not have felt the more exalted creator that when i place my child in my arms. No creature can contain the best all of enjoys i felt after the birth of my child and with this came the need to worship and adore. And again unmerited love. That worship that adoration. My friend Christian Women says love is always in motion. It went to a child but then it spread outward. She formed the catholic worker she formed communes, homeless shelters not only serving the poor but living with the poor and embracing poverty. It was the love that led out into the community. Her example teaches us the value of selfcriticism and also the value of love and the service of community. So these are all some of the friends that you learn from. The fourth one i would mention is the great novelist george elliott. Like the others she had a very bad childhood. She was the sort of christian who didnt get much love from her mother and therefore she was emotionally needy. She fell in love with every guy she encountered, married or not, available or not, 70 years old 15 years old. She just needed love. She fell in love eventually with Herbert Spencer was her intellectual equal. In 19 1852 at age 32 she wrote him a letter which was a bit of a turning point. The letter, the pathetic or what she is begging him to marry her. Dont worry you wanted to notice me, i wont even be around