Agreed - you do feel dirty after reading this. Also waiting for the other shoe to drop and here it is in the byline: David Brooks is an Op-Ed columnist and

Agreed - you do feel dirty after reading this. Also waiting for the other shoe to drop and here it is in the byline: David Brooks is an Op-Ed columnist and the author, most recently, of The Road to Character, from which this essay is adapted. I love the stern paternalism of an OpEd piece designed to sell a book - a book that I suspect has no more thought content than the OpEd piece. I hate the NYT as much as I used to love it - Brooks, Kristof, Dowd and the rest. The morally bankrupt schooling us on morals. Funny the focus on 'eulogy virtues' - reminds me of a (hopefully not misquoted) epigram of the philosopher Lukacs before he became a Stalinist... "Life is not Living" Preparing your life to make a good eulogy is exactly the problem. Dorothy Day did not live and act with one eye on what the NYT would write in her obit when she passed. Who speaks badly at someone's funeral? There is an old taboo or at least superstition against "speaking ill of the dead". Today it is at least considered bad form. And who really cares about your eulogy? Brecht 3-penny song "Ballad of the Pleasant Life" - MacHeath warns that if you live a virtuous life and you will be: "mingling with the greats - but you are dead" and goes on to add his preference: "The bulging pockets make an easy life" We are 'expendable' it is that insight that should be in front of us all the time. Morality like Brooks discusses it is a luxury to be savored with something overpriced and 80 proof and perhaps a cigar. It is not a living thing.