The Road to Character

In a final comparison of Adam I to Adam II, Brooks returns to the image of the triumphant football quarterback on television and discusses the differences between Joe Namath and Johnny Unitas. While both were raised in impoverished circumstances in the coal and steel towns of Western Pennsylvania, the two men could not have been more different in their approaches to life and athleticism. Where Unitas was humble and self-effacing, a team player, and devoted to his perpetually losing team, Namath was proud, individualistic, and often promoted himself at the expense of his team. Brooks then looks the decade in which both players were at their height, the 1960s, and works backward to trace the cultural shift from “crooked timber,” community-minded moral ecology to our present-day focus on the “Big Me.”

Brooks argues that this culture of self-centeredness and self-promotion did not originate with the Baby Boomers in the 1960s and 1970s, but with the Greatest Generation in the 1940sand 1950s. Parenting trends shifted toward achievement-based models of conditional love; parents no longer reprimanded children strongly for mistakes, but children are expected to achieve as highly as their parents believe necessary. Being raised with the insistence that we’re special and destined for greatness has remade our society-level moral ecology such that it prioritizes individual success over community success.