David Brooks

Humanism is based on the idea that we're partially sinful, partially wonderful, but we can be cultivated to repress our selfish sides.

and to strengthen our more altruistic desires, our desire for love, for respect, and for other things.

And so the way you do that is first you hold up exemplars.

You read about Pericles, you read about Shakespeare, you read about Martin Luther King, you read about, you know, Francis Perkins or

George Marshall.

And you think, okay, I can be a little like that.

There was an educator in ancient Sparta who said, my job is to make excellence admirable to young people.

And so exemplars are powerful.

What I got in my college, the University of Chicago, was I said, hey, you're a peon, probably not capable of coming up with a moral philosophy, which was accurate.

But I

You are the lucky inheritor of a whole series of moral systems, moral traditions.

And so we're going to teach you about those moral traditions and you see what fits you.

And those are things like stoicism, Epicureanism, Christianity, Confucianism, Buddhism, rationalism.

And so find the sort of leaders you want to, the sort of moral philosophers you want to follow.

and then the basic skill building, and then the cultivation of the heart.

I think one of the things that's happened in our society is we have become so rationalist that we short people by IQ at age 15 to 17,

And really even sooner, the young people, an eight-year-old who's been tested in third grade either knows the system thinks I'm smart or the system thinks I'm dumb.

And the system thinks I'm smart.

They go off into the crazy stratosphere.

I listened to your interview with Ted Dentrist the other day.