I have great admiration for the New York Times columnist, David Brooks. I think his column appears in the Times twice a week. A few years ago, I persuaded him to attend a meeting of a priests’ discussion group that I was moderating. It was an especially interesting and stimulating meeting. I cannot recall a column written by Brooks that I did not like. Often, I find them both challenging and even inspiring. I have read two of his books.
One column he wrote, which appeared in the June 14, 2018, edition of The Times, was very special to me. The column was entitled “Personalism: The Philosophy We Need.” Personalism is the philosophy I present to students at St. John’s University. Brooks wrote the following:
“Our culture does a pretty good job of ignoring the uniqueness of each person. Pollsters see in terms of broad demographic groups. Big data counts people as if it were counting apples. At the extreme, evolutionary psychology reduces people to biological drives, capitalism reduces people to economic self-interest, modern Marxism to their class position, and multiculturalism to their racial one. Consumerism treats people as mere selves — as shallow creatures concerned merely with the experience of pleasure and the acquisition of stuff.
“Back in 1968, Karol Wojtyla wrote, ‘The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverization of the fundamental uniqueness of each human.’ That’s still true.
“So this might be a perfect time for a revival of personalism.”
I think it is, and that is one of the reasons I teach that philosophy to students at St. John’s University, especially to students who are just beginning their study of philosophy. Stressing that personalism encourages us to try to be gift-givers, people who are willing and ready to enter into I-Thou relationships with others, Brooks admits that this is not easy to do. The philosophy of personalism is beautiful, but I agree with Brooks that it is not easy to live by the insights personalism offers. I don’t think it is easy to incorporate its insights into our daily lives.
Mentioning several thinkers whom he thinks qualify as personalists, Brooks offers a quotation from philosopher Jacques Maritain that I find especially attractive. Brooks writes the following:
“The reason for life, Jacques Maritain wrote, is ‘self-mastery for the purpose of self-giving.’ It’s a way to give yourself as a gift to people and causes you to love and to receive such gifts for others. It is through this love that each person brings unity to his or her fragmented personality. Through this love, people touch the full personhood in others and purify the full personhood in themselves.”
I recall the first time I encountered Maritain’s personalism and his insight that loving others requires self-mastery. We tend to be selfish and find it difficult to be loving and open to meeting others as gifts from God. One of the ideas I took from reading Maritain and his insights, which emphasize that we are called to self-mastery, is that we are called to be like sacraments to one another.
I found, and still find, the insight that we must allow ourselves to be open and receptive to the mystery that each person is a wonderful Idea and ideal. We are called to live our lives as self-gifts and persons ready to receive the self-gift of others. In class, I stress that this is not easy. If a student suggests that it is easy, I know that I have not done a good job of explaining personalism. Somehow, I have not communicated the depth of personalism or the challenge that it presents to us.
Brooks ended his column with the following two paragraphs:
“Personalism demands that we change the way that we structure our institutions. A company that treats people as units to simply maximize shareholder return is showing a contempt for its own workers. Schools that treat students as brains on a stick are not preparing them to lead whole lives.
“The big point is that today’s social fragmentation didn’t spring from shallow roots. It sprang from worldviews that amputated people from their own depths and divided them into simplistic, flattened identities. That has to change. As Charles Peguy said, ‘The revolution is moral or not at all.’ ”
That Brooks ended his column with a quote from poet Charles Peguy offers me the opportunity to suggest to readers of my column a book of poetry by Peguy entitled “God Speaks.”
Peguy imagines God speaking, and in one of the poems, God says that once God has experienced the love from free human beings, a slavish, unfree obedience has no appeal to God. I think personalists would love the poem.
Father Lauder is a philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica. His new book, “The Cosmic Love Story: God and Us,” is available on Amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.