A quest is not a social media post. A quest is also not a trip through the drive-thru for fast food. No, a quest is, quite literally, a long or arduous search for something.

So, consider the second half of author and political commentator David Brooks’ life to be a quest running on parallel rails: one through his personal life, the other through his public life.

In both, he told The Daily Memphian in a recent interview, he is seeking to “be a better person, to be more decent to people around me.”

MIFA event featuring columnist and author David Brooks sold out

If uncommon courtesy is part of this, he is doing well. He was in the midst of a walk in Washington, D.C., where he lives, when a reporter called him. The wind created enough noise to make conversation a bit difficult. So he retreated inside and never tried to hurry the conversation along, apologizing for the wind along the way.

Recent books he has written, “The Road to Character,” published in 2015, and “The Second Mountain,” published in 2019, have brought his quest to the fore. They’ve also provided a platform to suggest that American society has an unhealthy obsession with meritocracy.

In fact, Brooks, 62, considers meritocracy an obstacle to relationships on a personal level, and community on a broader level. It is with that in mind that the Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association selected Brooks to be part of its “Our City, Our Story” speaker series. Brooks will be featured at the Sept. 21 sold-out luncheon event at the Memphis Hilton.

As Rev. Dorothy S. Wells of St. George’s Episcopal Church has said: “MIFA is that bridge, building community through service and helping us all find that second mountain where ‘our ultimate loyalty is to others’ and not solely to ourselves and our achievements.”

Then at 6 p.m. on Sept. 21, Brooks will also appear at Rhodes College as part of its 175th anniversary celebration. Brooks will speak on American Politics and Society at McNeill Concert Hall. Professor of Philosophy Daniel Cullen will conduct a wide-ranging interview with Brooks followed by questions from the audience. This event is open to the public and free, but an admission ticket is required and can be obtained from Rhodes.

For his part, Brooks says he was a dedicated First Mountain climber through school and during his journalistic ascent. It paid off: Once a New York Times staffer, today he writes an opinion column for NYT.

A Jackson Senior Fellow at Yale University, Brooks is also a former writer, editor or columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek and The Weekly Standard, among other major publications. His voice is also regularly heard on PBS “NewsHour” and NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

He says he didn’t envision any of it.

“I got hired to work at The Times,” he says, “and was way more successful than I thought I’d be.”

But that wasn’t the end of his achievement story. Rather, it was the beginning of realizing the view from atop the First Mountain wasn’t as satisfying as he thought it would be.

In the journey he is on now, he says is seeking to live with “deeper obedience to faith and community.”

But even as he speaks often and openly about his quest to live a more moral life, he laughs as he figuratively enters the published author’s confessional:

“I still check my Amazon ranking every hour.”

An observant boy

Many a life has fallen off the First Mountain on the way up or after reaching the pinnacle of accomplishment. In the case of celebrities, the crashes sometimes have been spectacular.

Brooks doesn’t say he devoted himself to scaling the First Mountain without incurring a cost. Rather, “It wasn’t so much about what I lost as what I didn’t develop.”

Namely, a means for engaging with his fellow man and, by extension, his community.

The signs were there early, with a nursery school teacher telling his parents: “David doesn’t always play with the other kids, he just stands off and observes.”

If little David was packing a micro recorder or a pen and notebook, he doesn’t say. But he was showing the symptoms of a future journalist with his aloofness. Journalists, after all, are taught to never make themselves the story. The other side of that instruction is implied permission to go through life at a safe distance and never getting your hands dirty trying to help someone, or a community, clean up a messy problem.

This September, hear from David Brooks at Our City, Our Story

But life inherently gets messy.

Brooks divorced and remarried six years ago. It was at the point that his quest had become a prevailing theme in his work and his life.

“Since then, I’m a better friend and a better spouse,” he says, adding that he also has good relationships with his adult children.

He also went through a conversion.

“I was an atheist, and I came to faith 10 years ago and discovered a world of Christianity I did not know existed,” Brooks says.

“I was an atheist, and I came to faith 10 years ago and discovered a world of Christianity I did not know existed.”

David Brooks
New York Times columnist

His Christianity, however, has not converted his writing.

“I write for a secular audience. I’m a secular writer,” he says, adding that without formal theological training he does not believe himself qualified to write from a Christian point of view.

A friend who is a Christian writer even advised him not to go public with his conversion for fear that Brooks would lose audience.

“People can be turned off,” Brooks says. “Maybe not in Tennessee, but in the northeast for sure.”

The potential for unity

Barriers to attaining genuine community can happen at the most basic level.

“If people are too busy,” Brooks says, “they’re not going to have great community.”

In large cities, and certainly in Memphis, there are other well-established barricades: racial, geographical and socio-economic.

“Shared loves,” he says, can unify communities. The Grizzlies would be an example, with FedExForum a venue for a more diverse audience than would be found in the typical church or school.

But problems also can be unifying.

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Brooks was in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he says the community was trying to solve its education problems. He recalls being in a room where just about every statistical measurement imaginable was on display.

But even more telling, he says, was that the room included everyone from the town’s mayor to parents to the police chief, to a Chamber of Commerce representative to principals and clergy.

“They were super data-focused, and they were able to bring all the stakeholders in town together.”

Yes, Memphis has an education challenge. But the crime crisis is front and center at a time when more than a dozen people are running for Memphis mayor. Michelle McKissack is one of those candidates and she recently suggested to The Daily Memphian that trying to solve the crime problem could be a community unifier.

“Perhaps for the first time, the community as a whole is moving lockstep,” she said. “Crime has always more adversely affected people in communities that don’t have the means to move out to the suburbs. Now, it’s going beyond those borders. Everybody’s feeling the brunt of all of this.”

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Says Brooks: “There are places with wide inequalities. … Memphis has that.”

Brooks founded “Weave: The Social Fabric Project” at the Aspen Institute, and as part of that spent many days with people working for nonprofits dedicated to, for just two examples, helping the homeless and trying to get kids out of gangs.

“It was all very inspiring,” he says.

But then at night, he would have dinner with 15 or 20 of those same “inspiring” people, who were tired and sometimes discouraged after a tough day.

“The anger in the room was sulfuric,” Brooks recalls. “And usually over racial injustice.”

Faith in the face of politics

After the first GOP debate, Brooks wrote an opinion piece for The Times about the Republican party’s need to find “an antidote to Donald Trump and who can win a general election.”

More than a year away from that day at the polls, Brooks stopped short of providing a definitive answer.

But he did conclude that the first part of the mission is to find a candidate who doesn’t just view politics as entertainment, and Trump and GOP Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy both check that box as candidates that do, Brooks says.

The debate, Brooks wrote, also pointed toward a potential antidote: former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, though he added that more proving ground awaits.

Still, Brooks wrote: “… time and again, Haley seemed to look at the Trump/Ramaswamy wing and implicitly say: You children need to stop preening and deal with the reality.”

“There are places with wide inequalities. … Memphis has that.”

David Brooks
New York Times columnist

After decades of covering government, Brooks is more than entitled to have lost patience with the “actors” appearing on any political stage.

He even says he is less interested in politics now because Congress is “less interested in passing laws and more interested in getting on TV.”

Entirely fair.

But do not believe that David Brooks is devoid of hope or has lost his faith.

He is not and has not.

A good conversation is a start

Young people, especially on a college campus, are a fountain of hope, Brooks says. As are the courageous people working with victims of domestic violence and veterans suffering from PTSD.

So, yes, there is a lot of good out there.

And despite the steady flow of negativity about America — spawned by sound-bite-hungry networks and websites, and the political self-promoters masquerading as servants of the people — Brooks uses a longer lens for comparison.

America, he says, has experienced times much tougher than what we face today, adding, “We’re surprisingly economically resilient.”

At some level, then, Brooks is simultaneously advocating for staying the course — let’s not throw away what works — and for altering the course by being open to new approaches that might make impactful change at the community level.

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The latter, he believes, starts with personal change. His most recent book, “How to Know a Person,” takes a deep dive into personal communication. And Brooks concedes as much energy as can be found on college campuses, it is not unusual to find young people lacking basic social skills: “They don’t even know how to end a conversation gracefully.”

To that end, “How to Know a Person” is something of a self-help book.

“We all say we want relationships and community, but how do you do that?” Brooks says. “How do you become a good listener? How do you have a good conversation? How do you sit with a person suffering from depression?”

As for the next book — and there’s always a next book — he may very well return to meritocracy as a false scorecard of a human being’s intrinsic worth.

“We need a broader definition of how we evaluate people,” says the author who can’t stop checking his Amazon ranking.