David Brooks looks with nostalgia to a time when surgery was done without anaesthesia and draws some important lessons.
Burney’s struggle reminds one that character is not only moral, it is also mental. Heroism exists not only on the battlefield or in public but also inside the head, in the ability to face unpleasant thoughts.
She lived at a time when people were more conscious of the fallen nature of men and women. People were held to be inherently sinful, and to be a decent person one had to struggle against one’s weakness.
Character has always been mental. But anyway, Brooks wants to draw an analogy between remembering something painful that happened to you and facing up to facts that do not correlate with your general political orientation. These I think are completely different things. It's one thing to remember a terrible experience and quite another to be self-critical in your beliefs about the world. You're not morally wrong for having suffered a painful experience, and you're not morally obligated to remember the pain of surgery. Unless, of course, you're the doctor.
Good point. As usual with Brooks, it's to set up false equivalencies and questionable assertions later in the same column (calling Obama a Muslim is as the same questioning the "the surge," thinking "the surge" was a great success). My comment on a few other blogs was that, given the opening story, I'm sure Brooks will now finally, unflinchingly, cover the Bush regime's horrific torture program. (Hell, covering any aspect of the Bush administration unflinchingly would be quite a step for Brooks.)