33 pages • 1 hour read
The Moral Bucket List
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Background
Sociocultural Context: American Capitalism and Consumerism
Capitalism is an economic system in which private entities (individuals and corporations) own the means of production and resources, and consumerism is the theory that consumer spending drives economic growth. Together, capitalism and consumerism propel 21st-century economies through consumer choices, market forces, and the profit motive. On one hand, capitalism and consumerism have created prosperity. According to the US Department of Agriculture, 89.5% of US households experienced food security in 2020 (US Department of Agriculture. Household Food Security in the United States in 2020, 2021). On the other hand, critics argue that capitalism and consumerism lead to wealth disparities, environmental degradation, worker exploitation, and the overvaluation of material goods. Juliet Schor’s book The Overspent American (1998), for example, investigates the negative effect of the American culture of consumption on personal well-being and social values.
This economic system provides the context for Brooks’s essay. One of his primary themes is the tension between the external achievement celebrated by modern American culture and the internal achievement of moral development. He sets up an opposition between the marketplace and character and then argues that American culture fosters an imbalance between them—with too much time focused on the former and not enough on the latter. Brooks’s solution is for people to pursue moral development, specifically by seeking out the experiences enumerated on his moral bucket list. By strengthening their inner character, people can equalize their drives for internal development and external success and thereby live rich, meaningful lives punctuated by moments of joy.
Literary Context: The Autobiographical Essay
“The Moral Bucket List” combines self-reflection with commentary on sociocultural conditions and philosophical themes. The autobiographical essay creates a close connection between the reader and writer, and it encourages the reader to think about broad questions through the lens of everyday life.
The autobiographical essay has roots in the work of Michel de Montaigne, a 16th-century French. Montaigne’s Essais (1588) is a collection of short, first-person pieces exploring aspects of life such as emotion, marriage, and education. Ralph Waldo Emerson is a more recent American author who wrote in the same genre. His Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844) explore the individual’s relationship to society and nature. He meditates on such topics as self-reliance, freedom, and the soul. More recently, Joan Didion delved into American life in the 1960s in self-reflective, autobiographical essays in her collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), where she reflects on gender, identity, the loss of innocence, and the American dream.
Brooks’s essay is also in the tradition of works of moral philosophy beginning with those of the ancient Greek thinker Plato, whose Symposium was the first known Western text to investigate how to live the best life. Through the figure of Socrates, Plato concludes that the search for wisdom leads to the best life. Also in this line of literary history are Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which delineates and then examines the specific virtues necessary to be morally good, and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which espouses the Stoic idea that virtue is grounded in self-discipline, reason, and rationality. More recently, the topics of morality and the search for meaning are considered in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) and The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt (2006).
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