"Who would Plutarch write about today?"

The Greek historian and philosopher Plutarch lived from around AD 46 to AD 119.  He is perhaps most famous for his Parallel Lives, a series of 48 biographies of famous men written in pairs - one Greek and one Roman.  These men were the exemplars of Greek and Roman society, and throughout history, the rationale for reading Plutarch has been to read, study, learn, and model our lives on these men so that we too can be exemplars in society.  While the book is a must read for anyone interested in ancient Greece or Rome, Plutarch's Parallel Lives also has a lot to tell us about leadership and character, even in today's society.  

I recently started reading Leaders: Myth and Reality by retired General Stanley McChrystal.  In the prologue, General McChrystal references Plutarch and a lecture by The New York Times columnist and writer David Brooks delivered at a Jackson Institute Senior Fellows Lecture at Yale in 2013 entitled "Who would Plutarch write about today?"  I was very curious and recently listened to the lecture.  While he does provide some brief highlights on who he believes are today's exemplars, he certainly describes each individual in less detail than he does in his book, The Road to Character.  He mentions the following leaders in the book (I've bolded the ones that he talked about in the lecture), all of which were leaders from the 20th Century: Dwight Eisenhower and his mother, Ida Stover Eisenhower; Frances Perkins; Franklin Roosevelt; Viktor Frankl; Dorothy Day; George Marshall; A. Philip Randolph; Bayard Rustin; Martin Luther King, Jr; Mary Anne Evans / George Eliot and her mate George Lewes; Augustine and his mother Monica; Samuel Johnson and Michael de Montaigne; Johnny Unitas; Joe Namath. Brooks provides a character sketch and describes the personal weaknesses that each of his exemplars overcame.

During the lecture and throughout The Road to Character, Brooks focuses upon the shift in moral culture that has taken place since the 1940's.  He begins by talking about the popular beliefs that determined culture in the 1940's (notably many of the exemplars mentioned come from this era), when humility was a prime virtue.  Brooks actually taught a an undergraduate course at Yale in the 2010's on humility.  In a review published in The Guardian, Brooks says that he wrote the book "to save my own soul."  He goes on to say that he discovered that he was spending "too much time cultivating what he calls 'the résumé virtues' – racking up impressive accomplishments – and too little on 'the eulogy virtues', the character strengths for which we’d like to be remembered."

Brooks argues we've shifted from a culture of self-effacement, humility, and dedication to others to one of self-advancement, conceit, and expression.  Importantly, he does not suggest that we should go back to the 1940's (which had its own share of problems), but rather that perhaps the pendulum has swung too far to one side of the continuum from self-effacement to self-expression.  He mentions a book that I've not read by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik entitled The Lonely Man of Faith, a philosophical text based upon the biblical story of Adam and Eve, in which Soloveitchik describes two contradictory sides of human nature that he calls Adam I and Adam II.  Adam I is the external, career-driven, ambitious side (which Brooks calls the "résumé self"), while Adam II  is internal and humble (which Brooks calls the "eulogy self").  Building upon the themes he discussed in both the lecture and the book, Brooks would argue that leaders today spend more time as Adam I and not enough time as Adam II.

I thoroughly enjoyed both the lecture as well as the book.  Brooks makes some great points in both. I have been reflecting more about his question ("Who would Plutarch write about today?"), which is a topic that I would like to explore in more depth in future posts.