David Brooks’s Search for Meaning
He argues that, from Biblical times right up until the mid-nineteen-forties, a culture of what he calls “moral realism” prevailed. According to Brooks, our elders emphasized the dangers of sin and the limitations of the individual, and they constructed useful religious and social institutions in an effort to encourage virtuous self-circumscription. In the eighteenth century, he goes on, moral realism was challenged by the new ideas of moral Romanticism, whereby the self was exalted rather than distrusted. He suggests that these two moral modes coexisted until the aftermath of the Second World War—an upheaval so cataclysmic that anyone who came out the other end of it was desperate for fun and pleasure.
.. But Eliot’s unvisited tombs, in their quiet, solemn modesty, present an image that is the very opposite of a what is implied by a eulogy—which is, after all, a very public affirmation and celebration of a life. Brooks hopes that readers of his book will find themselves inspired to pursue the so-called eulogy virtues with all the intensity with which they once sought the résumé virtues, as he says he has been inspired to do himself. But the avowed cultivator of eulogy virtues may still be hoping that, when he’s gone, others will sing his praises. A hidden life is a much more demanding prospect to accept, or to recommend.