 |
| The phantom hatrack, or, Ronald Colman has had too many, From Sidney Franklin, Her Night of Romance, 1924, via Fritzi. |
Today, another mini-chapter outtake from David Brooks's The Road to Character, his study of how we should all adopt the moral style of the eminent liberals of the past, from Michel de Montaigne to Bayard Rustin, while abjuring their dangerously individualistic views on politics. Today, it's the central Victorian philosopher, John Stuart Mill ("John Stuart Mill Showed Democracy as a Way of Life").
This year we’ve been so besieged by Donald Trump’s shriveled nature that we sometimes forget what full and courageous human life looks like. And so today I’d like to hold up John Stuart Mill...
Brooks doesn't care much for the materialist, pragmatic, liberal, deeply egalitarian philosophy of course, so he denies it—
He staged a lifelong gentle revolt against his father’s shallow intellectual utilitarianism
—without noting that he did this by creating his own deep intellectual utilitarianism, or even using the word elsewhere in the column, leaving a casual reader with the impression that J.S. Mill wasn't a utilitarian at all himself.He tells us the familiar story of Mills's weird upbringing, from the "shallow intellectual utilitarian" father's teaching him Greek from the age of three to his nervous breakdown at 20, and comments on how he was clearly unlike Donald Trump in important ways, just in case you were tempted to think they resembled each other:
