David Brooks and the moral purpose of self-help

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ICYMI

—How to Read Shakespeare
—Seventieth Anniversaries. 1954 in literature.
—How Mozart became Mozart

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David Brooks’ new book How to Know a Person is an interesting evolution of the self-help genre. Far from the modern obsession with productivity and efficiency, Brooks is drawing on an older tradition of moral improvement. To see this, let’s look at three seminal examples.

The Improvement of the Mind by Isaac Watts is a dense, readable book of practical advice about how to learn. Watts’ book combines syllabus, learning methods, and exhortation to take education seriously. Written in 1741, the Improvement has the marks of its time. Watts was a religious minister, hymn writer, and the author of a book about logic. The Improvement became a textbook of moral instruction. Samuel Johnson was a fan, and Johnson’s own essays are often forms of self-help based on classical and Christian wisdom. It also inspired Michael Faraday, who credited some of his abilities as a scientist to Watts’ advice. Above all, what stands out is Watts’ moral seriousness. Good learning is a question of good religion.

Next is Samuel Smiles, who wrote Self-Help. Published in 1859, the same year as On The Origin of Species and On Liberty, Smiles’s book was as quintessentially Victorian as Watts’s had been so thoroughly of the eighteenth century. Sitting in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Benjamin Franklin (who said that God helps those who help themselves), Self-Help was aimed at the growing mass audience. Far less austere than Watts, it is full of biographical examples and inspirations. Smiles had previously given a lecture, published as The Education of the Working Classes, where he said, “Adverse circumstances… cannot repress the human intellect and character, if it be determined to rise.” This lecture grew into Self-Help, which sold a quarter of a million copies by the end of the century.

Then, in 1936, self-help morphed once more, into a scientific, managerial phenomena. In typical mid-twentieth-century style, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People gives direct instruction, with the emphatic certainty not of a priest, but a psychologist, gleaned from mounds of research into psychology and biography. Carnegie offered ways to achieve self-confidence. His influence on the genre of self-help books is still felt today. Headings like “Twelve things this book will do for you” and “Six ways to make people like you” captured a love of lists and rules that still preoccupies us. (And why not, that’s how they wrote the Ten Commandments…) This book is the basis of the genre that contains Deep Work and The Power of Habit.

Self-help has been in a boom ever since: common-sense is never out of fashion. Stoicism is constantly repackaged, in books that are longer and less valuable than the originals. We cannot get enough of inspirational life-stories and revelatory anecdotes. Affirmations are sold on everything from cushions and kitchen tiles to three-day conferences. From bestselling authors of books about habits and mindsets to online advice about how to succeed in business, there is nothing new in self-help. From Tony Robbins to Jordon Peterson, the old tradition is constantly being made new. The most successful MOOC in the world, Learning How to Learn, is very Wattsian. Peterson himself has probably reached more people via YouTube than through his book, like Smiles and his lectures. And using inspirational biographical stories is a staple of podcasts about greatness and leadership.

You might ask, does all of this actually help anybody?

Jordan Peterson started out exposing in stark terms what had always been at the heart of self-help. Self-help is hard work. His rules look simple, but they aren’t easy to follow. Peterson used to talk a lot about the importance of lifting the heaviest weight you can; but audience capture morphed him into something simpler and darker—he now sounds more reassuring than affirming, to the right people. Yes, he seems to say to his audience, you are right. The world has gone wrong. The shallow end of self-help has long been like this, pretending that you aren’t the problem, telling you that a new morning routine and some life-hacks can make you rich or wise. All Peterson’s followers need to do now is bemoan the woke. The dragon within is left to slumber.

So often, modern self-help is either reassuring, inspirational, or pragmatic—it promises to make you feel better or make you rich. What is so often missing is Isaac Watts’ emphasis on moral purpose. In contrast, David Brook’s new book How to Know a Person, is a blend of Smiles, Carnegie, and Watts. Like Smiles, Brooks uses biographical inspirations. Like Carnegie, he works with rules and affirmations. Like Watts, he endorses practicality. But this is practicality with a strong moral purpose. Brooks’s isn’t trying to improve your income; he wants to enrich your soul.

A good deal of what we think of as “Smart Thinking” is a form of self-improvement. In so many of these books you will find: anecdotal stories about people’s lives used to illustrate a bigger idea; a summary of the psychology or other research that fleshes out the idea; a set of rules you can implement in your life; an earnest argument about how this idea will help us make sense of the present moment, heal the trauma of modern living, or bring us resilience in times of trouble—but as we saw with Peterson, the most fungible aspect of self-help today is moral seriousness.

Brooks has it all: How to Know a Person is about his own journey of personal development and full of stories about people he has met during his research. He summarises personality research and material from other disciplines, all condensed to helpful lists of practical advice. But Brooks does all of this, because he wants us to solve social-level problems by improving ourselves. He uses his personal story to illustrate that self-help is demanding, likely to yield imperfect results, and morally important. Like John Stuart Mill, he believes that institutional reform cannot be achieved without personal reform.

Your actions are making a moral contribution to the world, and Brooks wants to make sure you are making the best contribution you can, both for your sake, and for the benefit of the rest of us. It is in this way that Brooks is making his biggest contribution. This is self-help that refuses to make moral compromises in the name of efficiency or productivity.

It could have been called The Improvement of the Soul.